Five Very Short Shorts

In the Light

It is morning and a warm mist has descended upon the farm. A soft hazy glow filters through the dense, heavy air. Water droplets from a maple tree sprinkle the shed as I walk past, making me wonder if maybe it were raining. The ground lies dry beneath my feet, so I surmise it to be a heavy dew. Entering the house I am greeted by the usual sight -- Marilyn at the end of the kitchen table in her woolly-thick, faded orange terrycloth robe.

"You're early!" Marilyn booms.

"Not really that early," I snap back.

"Coffee?" she offers.

"No thanks."

I sit reading the paper a little and come upstairs after that.

There's a fly now buzzing round this little upper room, zooming about madly, caroming off ceiling and walls, landing only to be still but a moment and abruptly buzzing off again. He's one of those big house flies that I've been slaughtering without reprieve during the regular intervals in which they make their distracting dramatic appearances.

At this moment, and I can't tell for sure, I believe he's in the light.

A Moment's Reflection

He woke with the pain stronger, not sharp but throbbing dully the length of his lower jaw to where it meets the hinge. His head ached slightly, from the pressure on his inner ear, the nerve hurting all the way up alongside his skull. He was aware also of the persistent ache in his lower back where he had pinched a nerve two summers before while moving a table in the basement.

But for the moment he was happy. Piano music rolled over him in trills, a ginger introduction to the new day.

The girl finished three Chopin Etudes and then put her hands into her lap, folding them together within the folds of her dress. She bowed her head slightly, waiting for his response.

"Beautiful. Really beautiful, dear," he said, stepping toward her and placing a glass of icewater onto a small trivet on the corner of the piano. He threw his head back and laughed.

"What," she said.

"This is such a pleasant surprise, this is. Having you home with us again is such a lovely surprise for all of us."

"Oh, go on." She lifted her hands and stretched her fingers, then made two fists and put them back in her lap.

"Play Mozart."

"Of course. Of course." She stood up, pushing the stool away with the backs of her legs. "You play."

He turned and inadvertently caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror. He was not intending to see himself at that moment and was surprised at how much older he looked. How grey he had become, and so stupidly stooped.

"What is it, Father? Are you in pain?"

The Spit

It's just one of those things, they say. However, presidents do not have the luxury of such misfortunes of fate, and the undecorous event began a chain reaction which could never have been anticipated, though in retrospect it is plainly evident that the result was inevitable. It happened like this.

At the end of a brief ceremony, the president was stepping down from the podium when he was overtaken with an urge to spit. He had been salivating heavily and, intending to swallow, he gagged slightly, from which he recovered himself, deftly pulling a white hankerchief -- embroidered with a presidential seal -- from his pocket to expel the liquid from his puckered mouth.

As he removed the hanky from his face, a stringer of salivation clung tenaciously to his lip, stretching threadlike the length of his arm. The event would have gone without notice had it not been an outdoor ceremony and had it not been for a gust of wind, which at that very moment seized the thread of spit from its moorings and delivered it unceremoniously into the very face of a black journalist who had just then asked the president his opinion of the current state of race relations in America.

The rest is history.

The Death Star

There weren't many of us left after the death star came. It was no one's fault. In the truest sense we were victims.

They aren't kidding when they say, "The rain falls on the just and the unjust." Only this time it was raining fire.

They say the death star had been hurtling toward the earth for centuries at an unbelievable speed, careening through the galaxies. Scientists saw it coming all too late. How quickly it all happened. First day of spring the scientists noticed a large, new star. Second day, the large star is declared a supernova. Third day, the star is expanding so rapidly that no one who sees it dares sleep as its all-powerful glowing iridescence fills more and more space with its light and there was no more night.

The populations of the earth adopted two reactions. First, there were those whose eyes were wide with awe at the coming glory. Then there were the rest of us, whose futile efforts to find refuge caused us to cry out in hysterical terror, "Rocks, hills, fall on us!"

There weren't many of us left after the death star came. In the truest sense we were victims.

Harry Gold

The rule of "nothing unessential" is the first condition of great art. --Andre Gide

After dinner Harry Gold reads us the last two chapters of his La Nuit. The next to last especially seems excellent to us, and Gold reads it very well. Being rich is an occupation in itself, particularly for people who arrive at it via parachute in middle life.

We go out for a walk -- William Williams, Gold and myself. Never has it seemed such a long way to the top of this hill. The road with its tossing broken stones stretches on forever into the distance like a life of agony. It is hot as a furnace on the street and we sweat profusely.

I bring up the question of ownership. "Who owns language? Can a man words? Sentences? The turn of a phrase?"

Gold's face becomes agitated, defiant. "It's mine now. No matter what they say, it's mine."

It occurs to me that Williams doesn't like this reply, but there are no others to turn to and we are forced to accept it. Gold feels guilty because his work is heavy with borrowing. Ideas, phrases, sentences, even whole paragraphs have been shamelessly appropriated, pilfered without attribution, plagiarized.

Harry adds, in a low voice, "The will of man is unconquerable. Even God cannot conquer it."

I can not bear to see him like this. To myself I think, Why do you do these things? In human affairs every solution only serves to sharpen the problem, to show us more clearly what we are up against. I consider how sages of the future will describe this historic day.

On The Late John Brockman

He passed away and left us his legacy: a finely crafted volume designed to relate the truth. He called it The Late John Brockman. Since all our experiences of the Present come through the senses, and this delays our direct experience of them by a fraction of a moment, then by the time we experience the present, it is past. Since the past does not exist (because it is gone), so are we.

He wrote the book before he was dead, but said that we are all dead because we live in the past and the past is gone, does not exist. He explained it like this. There is a time delay between the thing perceived outside our bodies and the actual reception in our brain of that perception. While it is infinitesimally small it is, nevertheless, a delay. Sight, sound, taste, smell, and the tactile senses -- all undergo the same phenomenon, a space of time is required for transmission from fingertip to brain acknolwedgement, from retina to inward scene. The external world is past. He took a whole book to scientifically demonstrate what I have here reiterated twice.

In the end, John Brockman pronounced his death.

Unfortunately, the tome failed to produce an income and his parents pressured him to secure a job to pay his bills. (He had borrowed three thousand dollars to produce the six hundred hardbound originals that were offered to a disinterested public.) He refused to take employment, and his father refused to feed him.

There were other disagreements. He told them they were dead and that it did not matter whether they loved him or not because everything is meaningless once it is part of the irrelevant past. The oceans of time are too salty to drink for one who is so fully persuaded of their brininess. His mother became ill over her son's hardheartedness. His father and mother fought much and regretted many things they said to each other.

On a cold December night he left the house barefoot and without a coat. The next morning his blue body was found in the forest behind his home where he had nailed his hand to a tree.

I don't know why I am writing all this. Perhaps because his book made an impression on me once, though I never stopped paying my bills. Nor did I forget that there are consequences for behavior.

PERMISSION TO REPRINT GRANTED if attribution is cited
and you send me a note telling where it appeared in print.

ennyman@cp.duluth.mn.us
an original story by ed newman

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