Story #41

Dear Readers,

Hello and welcome—or welcome back—to ‘Very short stories r us,’ where I am posting one one-page story a week for a year. Following is story number forty-one. Thank you for reading.

Best wishes,

Matthew Sharpe

Story #41

The cat, Parsley, disappeared in the spring. Polly and her daughter, Rachel, assumed she’d been felled by a raccoon or a car. Then one afternoon in midsummer, thin and matted and glassy-eyed, Parsley walked in through her cat door, lay down in her customary rectangle of sunlight on the kitchen floor, and died. Rachel caught this on her phone. She caught everything on her phone. She showed the video of Parsley dying to her mother while videoing her mother’s reaction, and then asked Polly to share her feelings. Polly wondered why Rachel requested, during the feelings-sharing, that Polly not refer to Parsley by name but call her only “our cat.” Turned out it was because Rachel had changed Parsley’s name in the video to The Rock. Upon seeing the video for the first time, before Rachel uploaded it, Polly did her best to find things to praise, like Rachel’s unsparing vision of life and death, and then said, “But honey, why couldn’t you let her be Parsley?” “Because, Mom, Parsley sounds too much like Polly, and Polly is too much like the way you want things to be all the time, and insist that they are even when they’re not. If I’m ‘unsparing’ it’s because you’re, you know, sparing.” This was more or less the same argument her daughter had made for legally changing her own name from Polly to Rachel a year ago. There was something else about the video that upset Polly even more than Rachel’s changing the name of the cat, but she didn’t have the heart to bring it up. In the first few weeks after Rachel uploaded it, millions of people watched, and then Rachel began getting interview requests from major websites. Polly was uneasy. This was not a heartwarming story about a cat. It was a story about a cat featuring cruelty, betrayal, loss, and death. After the studio audience at Rachel’s first TV interview laughed at a certain part of the video that featured Polly, Polly drove Rachel home gripping the steering wheel tight so her hands wouldn’t shake. Rachel was walking straight back to her bedroom, head down, thumbs pouncing repeatedly on the screen of her phone as she responded to congratulatory texts from friends and family, when Polly shouted, “Stop!” Rachel swung around, unused to being addressed this way by her mother. “They laughed at me!” “So?” “‘So?’? I’m your mother and you humiliated me.” “You humiliated yourself.” The part of the video the audience had laughed at was a seven-second freeze-frame of Polly’s face as she watched her daughter’s footage of their cat’s death for the first time. Polly’s look was not one of sadness, but one of disgust—a scowl, an ugly face that was amusing to an auditorium full of people. “Why did you do it, Rachel?” Polly asked her daughter in the carpeted hallway between the kitchen and their two bedrooms. “Because, Mom, underneath ‘Polly,’ that’s who you really are.” “That is not who I am, that is something you manipulated me into feeling in response to one creepy and disgusting video you made so you could capture me feeling it for another.” “You think my video is disgusting. I think your disgust is hilarious, and this morning 300 people agreed with me.” Polly slapped Rachel in the face hard and for the first time ever. Rachel stared at her in shock and then started moving toward her, face red and contorted. She balled her right hand into a fist and wound up to punch Polly. The little twerp was a terrible fighter—she telegraphed her punch and was neither fast nor strong. Polly grabbed Rachel’s punching hand and then the other one, pinned her arms to her sides, and hugged her tight enough that Rachel couldn’t get in a body jab. Rachel’s struggling and grunting soon turned to sobbing. “I’m sorry, Mom, I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I miss her so much, she’s dead-uh-haaaaaah!” Polly checked in with her own chest and throat to see if there was any Pollylike sobbing developing. There was not. She wondered, as she’d been doing since the spring, if Rachel had acted in some way to drive Parsley out of their home, before she came back to die. No matter. When Rachel’s crying subsided, Polly released her. “Honey, may I have your phone?” Rachel handed it to her. Polly walked to the kitchen, threw it down on the linoleum tiles, and stomped on it seven or eight times. She picked up the phone’s remains and threw them in the garbage. “Now come on out back with me, dear, and let’s say hi to Parsley.” They walked out the kitchen door into their back yard, first the mother and then, head hanging down, the daughter. They stood at the fresh grave and paid their respects to the dead.

Story #40

Dear Readers,

Here is weekly very short story number forty in a series of fifty-two. Thank you for reading.

Yours sincerely,

Matthew Sharpe

Story #40

One day Derek was walking in the Amazon jungle and got lost. He was scared, and something bit him on the thigh, an insect, yellow and red, with wings as wide as Derek’s hand and a mouth big enough that you could see it open and close. He sat down on a log. He and his dad were unusually close for a father and son. They’d taken this South America trip together and his father had had a series of mini-strokes the previous night. He was resting in their cabin and being cared for by a local shaman while Derek made today’s hike alone. The insect’s venom merged with Derek’s blood. Derek saw the inside of the cabin where his father reclined on a straw pallet. He saw his father’s face moving up and down and side to side, and realized that it was not his father’s face moving but Derek himself, or rather, the shaman’s hand, which now held him. And he wasn’t “him,” wasn’t Derek. He was the venom of the insect that had bitten him, mixed with water and several plants, a concoction that his father now drank. Derek was absorbed into his father’s blood stream. On a red log flume ride minus the log, he entered and was expelled from his father’s heart. He was in his father’s mind, thinking about Derek, wishing his son would come back to the cabin, wondering why his damn fool son had to take that hike in the jungle today, sticking to the itinerary even though I had a stroke last night. Oh, son, there you are, I’m so relieved you’re back, please don’t ever leave me again, I’m in my declining years and I need you. Well, Dad, I also need to live my life, you shouldn’t have come on this trip with me, I told you not to. Derek, please don’t be angry with me, I feel so bad, I think I’m going to die. It’s okay, Dad, I’m here, I’m here.

Story #39

Dear Readers,

This is the thirty-ninth in a series of fifty-two very short stories I am publishing on this site, in a year-long experiment in internet self-publishing. Thank you for reading.

Best wishes,

Matthew Sharpe

Story #39

Johann was walking through the forest to his mother’s house. He’d been on the move since dawn, it was now noon, and he was exhausted, sweating in the summer heat. She had no phone, no internet, and no postal worker would traverse the 25 miles of rocky trails to deliver a letter to her. She’d been out here for years. He rounded a bend and there she was, standing on the porch of her cabin, shotgun raised toward him. She looked healthy, lean and strong, her hair graying. “I told you to start calling my name before you get to that last bend, otherwise I’m liable to shoot you.” “Have you ever shot anyone?” She smiled and said, “You’re drenched. Go out back, have a shower, and I’ll fix us some lunch. I love when you visit me.” Twenty minutes later Johann came into the cabin. His mother, Alma, had prepared a venison salad. “How’s Dad?” she asked. “Still drunk, last I checked.” “Oh, honey, you have to take care of him, you know I can’t.” Johann stood up and shouted, “This is why I don’t come here more than once a year!” “You’re right, I’m sorry. I ran off and left you with a lot of burdens.” There was a knock on the door. “Come in,” Alma said. A tall bearded man not much older than Johann walked into the cabin. “Oh, sorry, didn’t know you had company,” the man said. “This is Dirk,” Alma said. “Dirk, this is my son, Johann.” Dirk tipped his greasy baseball cap. “Why didn’t you try to shoot him?” Johann asked. “I know his footsteps.” Dirk said, “I’ll come back another time. I left you a deer on the porch.” He tipped his hat once more to Johann and walked out the door. “What’s the story with that character?” Johann asked, sitting down again. “We’re intimate.” “Oh gross, Mom, couldn’t you have just said he’s your boyfriend?” “He protects me from the riff-raff around here, I enjoy his company, and he leaves me deer meat, so I guess he is my boyfriend. But there’s also Lars.” “Lars?” “He helps me with home repairs but he gets drunk like your father. And there are Don and Bo.” “Who are they?” “The riff-raff I mentioned.” “So you moved out to the forest to have one continuous orgy?” “No, honey, I moved here because I couldn’t handle civilization anymore, the social niceties, all that smiling and apologizing. I like my men though. Sorry, I know I probably shouldn’t be saying this to my son. Let’s change the subject. How’s your love life?” “Same as usual, I’ve got three cuties fighting to get into my bed, but I don’t want to settle down with any of them.” “You always were a devil,” she said. They laughed and took another bite of salad.

Story #38

Dear Readers,

Very short stories r us r pleased to present to you number thirty-eight in a weekly series. Thank you for reading.

Best wishes,

Matthew Sharpe

Story #38

Arthur was late to meet his father and his car was stuck in an unmoving line of cars on the thruway extending to the horizon. The woman in the car directly to the right of Arthur’s was smoking a cigarette with full lips and long, languid fingers. She had her windows open despite the frigid March air. Arthur’s windows were closed. Her face was not quite gaunt, but gaunt enough to reveal her as someone who suffered. Her facial skin was stretched taut except for the skin of her lips, which was relaxed. Despite his extreme distaste for smoking, Arthur would tolerate it in this woman in the life with her that he imagined, and by successfully consoling her for her suffering he would himself be consoled. This he imagined despite being 43, but he could not open his passenger side window without it being obvious why he was doing so, and the sheer number of details he had already ascribed to their future life together would prevent him from knowing what to say or how to move his body once the window was down. She turned her head to look at him and blew smoke out her window. She flicked her smoked cigarette toward his car with a quick arch of an eyebrow. The man in the car behind him honked and Arthur turned his head abruptly forward to see that the car ahead of him was twenty yards away, and that the whole line of cars was breaking up and moving on. He put his foot on the accelerator and looked back over at the woman. Her car was accelerating in tandem with his. She glanced at him again and she did not smile but simply made a visual presentation to him of her lips in their natural relaxed state. She lifted her left hand and gave him one of those flirty waves in which each finger moves in succession starting with the pinkie, and then he could not continue to look at her without crashing his car. Besides, he had to call his father to tell him he’d be late. His father grunted in response, not because he was gruff, which he was, but because he’d had a stroke. The home care aide who had the 8 to 4 shift answered the door of Arthur’s father’s large suburban house in her faded polyester smock on which were printed many frolicking cartoon cats, part of a bewildering design trend Arthur had noticed on the female healthcare workers who had been a part of his father’s life since the stroke. “I’m just going to tell you right now that I’m not paid to clean, because when you walk in there I promise you’re going to wonder, and you should convince him to hire someone for that,” she said. She was probably about Arthur’s age but looked older, and, in fairness, he imagined his life with her too. She, too, was a smoker, he knew from the smell of her smock, and with her he would find the habit a source of great frustration, not to mention anxiety—about her health and his own. He would dislike her and she him. They would develop chronic coughs of increasing severity. They would contract emphysema and die slowly together. In the physically painful end of their unhappy years as a couple, a strong camaraderie would develop between them that he would have to recognize as love, dissoluble only by death, first hers and then, three exquisitely sad months later, his. He found his father, Arthur Senior, in his den, a hellhole of food crumbs, cat hair, cat litter stink, and actual cats with month-old clumps in their fur. He sat on a cushioned chair across from the old man, who sat in a luxury wheelchair that cost more than Arthur’s car. No TV was playing, no book or magazine was in his father’s hands, no chessboard lay before him or any condescending geriatric brain teaser to extend what remained of his cognition. Arthur had not seen his dad in six months. The skin hung off his face in folds, the eyes were viscous and red. “So, Dad, I’m sorry I haven’t—” Arthur Senior made a stop sign with his left hand, the one that still functioned. “Anyway, you invited me here, so…?” “Muh,” Senior croaked, his post-stroke version of speaking, and looked down at his lap, on which Arthur now saw a folder thick with papers. “Muh!” he croaked again, meaning, “Take it and look through it.” Arthur came to his father and removed the folder from his lap. The man grabbed Arthur’s wrist with his working hand and whispered, “Muh,” implying this was a solemn ceremonial occasion between father and son. Arthur returned to his chair. A cat leapt onto Senior’s lap in place of the folder and he shoved it violently off. Arthur opened the folder. On top of the stack of papers was a one-page will leaving ninety percent of his wealth to the Animal Welfare Society and ten percent to his son. Arthur tried to let this fact sink in but it wouldn’t, he was numb and wanted to leave. He closed the folder and was standing up when his father said, “Muh,” meaning, “Look at the remaining papers.” Arthur did, over the next ten minutes. The papers detailed Senior’s holdings, amounting to about ninety million dollars, nine million of which would belong to Arthur upon his father’s death, minus taxes. “Dad, I… wow, I’m—” Senior stopped him again with his hand, with which he then pointed to his lap. Arthur put the folder back. Senior held out his left hand for Arthur to shake. Arthur’s heart was overflowing with tenderness and he tried to transmit as much of it as he could to his father in the brief clasping of hands. Senior nodded to acknowledge receipt of it. As Arthur crossed the threshold on his way out of the den, his father said, “Muh, nuh,” meaning “Use it wisely” or “I love you” or maybe “Money.” “I’ll hire a cleaning person,” he said to the home care aide in the kitchen as he took in her tired face, on which a default look of annoyance resided. As he walked across the gravel driveway to his car in the late afternoon, the first snow of spring began to fall. He was sorry not to be one of those men who would have known how to make love to the home care aide on the kitchen table and leave within forty-five minutes to the complete satisfaction of both parties. He was sure such men existed.