Story #46

Dear Readers,

This is the forty-sixth in a series of fifty-two weekly very short stories I’m posting. Today’s story honors March Madness. Thank you for reading.

Yours sincerely,

Matthew Sharpe

Story #46

Mick found a well-played game of basketball to be about the most profound and beautiful thing he knew in this life, but because he was nearsighted, slow, clumsy, easily winded, and five feet four inches tall, the only way for him to participate in the game in its fully realized and sublime form was to bet on the performance of professional teams. Only then did the degree of Mick’s personal investment in each moment of the game and in its outcome approach that of an actual player. This same degree of investment caused him to bet on the teams with which he felt a bond of similarity, and so he bet repeatedly on a certain Eastern Conference team that played with the most heart. Mick’s current indebtedness to his bookie was upward of two hundred times the amount of money he possessed or was likely to soon possess. One of the reasons he had moved—temporarily, he hoped—from his two-bedroom ranch home into the inexpensive motel room on the warped mattress of whose double bed he now lay staring at the ceiling, was not to hear his home phone ring when his bookie called, since Mick lived more vividly through his senses than through concepts. On this winter afternoon, the frigid air blew into Mick’s motel room under its unevenly hung door. As he wrapped the polyester blanket around his shoulders, his alarm clock rang, signaling the start of a game between his favorite team and their most formidable adversary. He turned on the TV to watch it and heard a sharp knock at the door. He sat on the foot of the bed for the tip-off, and just as the opposing team scored its first basket he heard a second, sharper knock. Mick went to the door, looked through the peephole. Standing outside in the cold was Yuri, an oversized employee of Mick’s bookie. Mick opened the door and invited him in. “The game just started.” Yuri glanced at the TV and frowned. “You shouldn’t be watching that.” “I’m not betting on it.” “I know you’re not. Do you have anything for me today?” “Seventy dollars.” “Seventy dollars is less than one percent of your debt. He needs at least ten percent.” “I don’t have it, Yuri.” Yuri frowned and looked again at the TV, where the game that had brought him together with Mick was being played with fury and grace. Mick said, “Sit and watch it with me for a bit.” Yuri shrugged, walked slowly to the only chair in the room, and lowered his significant bulk into it. Mick sat back down on the bed, and they watched the game they both loved. Mick said, “Have you ever played?” “Tried, but I’ve broken so many of my fingers that my ball handling is crude. I’m going to have to hurt you today.” A guard for Mick’s team threw a bounce pass to the other guard. A quick and long-armed forward for the other team intercepted it, dribbled the ball down to his team’s end of the court, and scored an easy layup. It had been a beautiful pass, if not in the execution then in the intention.

  

Story #45

Dear Readers,

Warm equinoctial greetings to you. This is the forty-fifth in a series of fifty-two weekly stories I’m publishing on this site. Thanks for reading.

Matthew Sharpe

Story #45

Mayo, mustard, cheese, lettuce, turkey, bacon, rye bread, whole wheat, pumpernickel, kaiser roll, rye, there was no way Connie was going to make it to the kitchen with all this information organized sandwich by sandwich in her head. Not allowing waitresses to write down the customers’ orders while standing at the table was on a par with waterboarding enemy combatants to extract actionable information from them. She reached the window between the kitchen and the restaurant proper. The cook stared at her through it from the kitchen side. She stared back at him defiantly. The noise of the fourteen conversations behind her gathered in her ears. The cook rolled his eyes and turned back to his stove. Connie looked down at her shiny purple uniform to stabilize herself but instead the color and texture of it nauseated her. “All right,” she said, out on the street on a blustery late autumn day after having quit, “so restaurant work is not for me. What does that leave?” “You could go back in. I’m going to, as soon as I have my surgery,” said a young woman in a dark blue uniform who wrote on a bright orange piece of paper and slid it under the windshield wiper of a parked car. Connie said, “Go back into the restaurant?” “No, stupid, go back into the military.” “How do you know I was in the military?” “Let’s see, you’re about 28 years old, you just quit a low-wage job probably not for the first time, you’re standing on the street without a proper coat, you’re talking to yourself, and you have that look like bombs went off near your head.” “What’s your surgery?” “Hip. Humvee crash.” “You look to me like you’re walking okay.” “That’s because I’m a Marine.” “Army,” Connie said, “but if you’re going back in you should join the Air Force. Better accommodations.” The meter maid who was also a Marine sneered. “Anyway,” Connie said, “what, you’d get a desk job?” “Sure.” “And be ordered around by people who haven’t even been over there but think they know more than you because of the patch on their uniform?” “Better than being ordered around by a traffic cop. At least if I go back in I’d be serving my country.” “You’re serving your country now.” “Punishing some sucker who forgot to move his car? Where’s the honor?” Connie said, “Where’s the honor in punishing 100,000 suckers who didn’t even turn out to have WMDs?” Connie could tell the Marine was deciding whether to punch her in the face. Luckily this woman seemed to value even her no-honor job more than Connie had valued hers. “Have a nice day,” the meter maid said and moved on to the next car. A motorcycle came roaring down the street and Connie dove for the sidewalk. She lay there face-down and pictured the colonel who’d de-briefed her battalion when they returned, warning them this might happen. He’d put his right hand up to the left side of his chest and slapped his ribs a bunch of times fast to mime a racing heart. Marcel fucking Marceau saying “Hey, that just means your body’s working the way it’s supposed to after you’ve been in a combat zone. That just means you’re normal.” She stood up again and looked around for the Marine to see how she’d handled the blast of noise. Didn’t see her. There was a bar a few doors down from the restaurant. No, no bar today. It was two in the afternoon. Her mother was at work till six so Connie would have the house to herself for a while. She’d go lie on her bed and do the breathing exercises the colonel had taught them. Not even her bed was safe, but it was reasonably comfortable.

Story #44

Dear Readers,

This is the forty-fourth story in the weekly series of one-page stories I’ve been publishing here since last May. Thank you for reading.

Yours sincerely,

Matthew Sharpe

Story #44

Things rarely went well for Ralph and he often got into trouble. He was up in the treehouse sniffing glue one day when his twelve-year-old daughter climbed in with two of her friends. “Dad, are you kidding me?” What were she and her friends doing up there in the middle of winter, anyway? He climbed down and walked out across the frozen river and fell in through a hole in the ice. The current carried him away from the hole. He was under the ice somewhere, freezing and suffocating. He found a little air pocket and breathed. From the left, he heard his mother’s voice. “Fuck off, Ralph,” it said, just as his mother had done when she was alive, having been an alcoholic and in a rage much of the time. He went toward her voice, as he did so often in childhood, like one of those sad baby monkeys in the psychology experiment that clings to a cold metal stick if it’s all the mother that’s available. He saw a hole in the ice and moved toward it. The hole was the wound in his mother’s soul, which she now offered to him as an escape hatch from icy death. He knew that when he climbed through it he would be healing both himself and, posthumously, her, leaving behind the terrible life he’d led thus far. He emerged from the hole freezing, aching, panting, in pain, barely able to move. His wife, Cynthia, stood there, looking at him mournfully. She was not an alcoholic or addict, and was kinder than his mother had been. “I’m divorcing you, Ralph,” she said. “Oh please don’t, Cynthia my love,” he said, “I’ve changed.” “Oh,” she said, and wept. In intense pain, he put his arm around her and walked her back to the house, comforting her and leaning on her for support. He didn’t know what her response meant or whether she still intended to divorce him.

Story #43

Dear Readers,

Thanks for coming here. This is the forty-third in a weekly series of fifty-two stories I am publishing in this space, wherever it may be.

Best wishes,

Matthew Sharpe

Story #43

At the party, a technology reporter for a major newspaper spoke to Gene excitedly about a new app he was using. “Look at this,” he said, and Gene looked down at the bright two-by-four-inch rectangle in the man’s clean, manicured hand. So this is what the hand of a successful person looks like, Gene thought. The reporter, Norwood, was rapidly touching one image after another on the little screen, telling Gene how useful and time saving and well made this app was. Gene used technology too. He input things and word processed things for a law firm. He wondered if anything about his life would improve if in his free time he were to use the app Norwood was showing him, and he could not account for what he did in his free time. He wondered why Norwood had chosen someone of a lower importance level than himself to show his new app to, and with so much enthusiasm. He also wondered why it was not he who was talking without interruption to Norwood and why he did not ever talk without interruption to anyone about anything. Norwood’s wife approached, said, “Norrie, there’s someone at this party you should meet, come on,” and pulled him away without glancing at Gene. She was bigger than Norwood. He understood that Norwood would need that much surface area and volume over which and through which to distribute his energy. She was taking him, Gene saw, to meet an older man whose photograph he’d seen on the internet, a kingmaker in the publishing business. This would be an important introduction for Norwood that his wife was brokering. Gene moved to the window and looked out at the dark shapes of the buildings across the street in this formerly industrial part of the city, and at the dirty pink urban fog, lit from below and superimposed upon the black night sky. People walked slowly past him near the window and he did not try to start a conversation with any of them. A long time went by. Norwood returned, drunk, his face red and sweating. “That went terribly,” he said, “I humiliated myself. It happens about 80 percent of the time my wife introduces me to powerful people, and she gets furious at me. I’ve been hospitalized for depression.” “Let me show you something,” Gene heard himself say to Norwood, and pointed out the window at the barely visible buildings across the street and the muddy pink sky above them. “What are you showing me?” Norwood asked. “I don’t know,” Gene said. “Come on, I’m very vulnerable right now, don’t just show me some garbage that isn’t anything.” “Everything is something and everyone is someone,” Gene said and realized. Norwood looked at him almost in tears. “So you’re saying I should just look at… whatever.” “Sure.” Norwood looked, and after ten seconds he said, “This is some kind of joke and I resent it.” He turned abruptly away from Gene, saw his wife, and moved hastily toward her. She nodded severely at him and held out her large arm. He took it in his smaller one, and they strolled into another room of the party, maybe to meet another powerful person. Gene stood by the window, through which he had lost the heart to look. He didn’t know what to look at now, or what to do.

Story #42

Dear Readers,

This is story number forty-two in a weekly series of fifty-two one-page stories that I have posted and will post to this site. Thanks for reading.

Yours sincerely,

Matthew Sharpe

Story #42

Chet disliked his guru. He’d been visiting the man once a week for six and a half years and paying him a hundred dollars per visit. Another more senior guru had referred Chet to this guru in a phone call that lasted three minutes. Chet had known nothing about the senior guru except that a few friends who were into this sort of thing had said, “Oh, Sheldon’s definitely the one to go to, he’ll set you up with one of his disciples, they’re all amazing.” Chet felt people overused the word amazing. Chet’s guru, Joel, was not amazing. He seemed uptight. His white robes would have looked more natural on a tuna fish. His remarks and pronouncements had a tinny, pre-fabricated sound. “Whenever you’re ready.” “Whenever you feel comfortable.” “Take your time.” “Breathe into that.” “Breathe and just allow that.” “How does that make you feel?” “Where in your body do you feel that?” “Can you see your father as wounded and trying to love, just as you are wounded and trying to love?” Chet began their 293rd session by saying, “Most of what you’ve said to me is a lie. Your whole system is a lie. Your white robes are a lie. The groovy woven cushion you’re sitting on is a lie. Why is it so much nicer than the cushion I’m sitting on? What kind of message does that send? How can you afford this huge loft space anyway? Do you have family money? You don’t seem to have any other disciples than me. Have you ever worked a day in your life? This is my last session. I won’t even stay for the whole hour. I’ll pay you for today even though I don’t want to and can’t afford it. I’ve spent more than twenty-nine thousand dollars on you. Do you want to say anything to me before I go?” Joel looked miserable—Chet could smell the acrid odor of his fear sweat. “It’s very hard to hear all this,” Joel said. “I didn’t really think we were making much progress but I’ve been hopeful that we would. You should come back at least one more time so we can have closure.” “Do you have any disciples other than me?” “I’m going to breathe into my distress. Breathe with me.” “I’m getting out of here.” Chet stood up from his cushion and Joel stood up from his. Joel held out his hand for a shake. Chet reluctantly took it. It was wet. “My parting advice to you is—” “Let go of my hand.” “—is to walk around the city every day and let it affect you. Don’t be so closed off.” “I am not closed off.” “Just so.” “Just so” was Joel’s go-to pronouncement. Chet was stuck with it going down in the elevator, “Just so,” “Just so,” “Just so,” “Just so,” once per floor for eighteen floors. As Chet raced through the lobby the doorman called after him, “Got a plane to catch?” The pleasantries of strangers often contained an implied criticism. He stood on the sidewalk in front of Joel’s building trying to figure out where to go and what to do. A downtown bus was arriving across the street. “I am not walking around the city,” Chet said, and stepped off the curb to cross the street and catch the bus. His foot landed at the edge of a pothole and he twisted his ankle and fell down. He stood up and tried to walk but fell down again, his ankle hurting like hell. He sat down on the curb. “I was worried about you so I followed you out,” Joel said behind him. “Let me help you up.” Chet allowed himself to be helped to his feet by Joel and could smell Joel’s b.o. combined with his lightly perfumed laundry detergent. “Hold onto my shoulder and hop,” Joel said. He helped Chet back into the elevator. In his loft, he eased Chet down onto the second-rate disciple cushion and sat down across from him on the deluxe guru cushion. “I’ll call 911,” he said, removing his phone from a pocket of his robes, “and we’ll have some time to talk about this before the paramedics arrive. I’m glad you’ve come back.” Chet saw the happiness on Joel’s face. He sank into a familiar depression.