Posts Tagged Flash Fiction
The Decent Man, Part I
Posted by Carl in Fiction, Finding Purpose on April 10, 2014
The black on the coal grey screen said 9:08, confirming ugliness in the truth of being. Failure drips down, seemingly from hair follicles that have tremors. She was smiling in the room with glass corner until she glanced at him as he sailed the hallway, and he knew the screen on the phone on his desk would show bad news. He had been hoping for 9:03 or 9:04 after seeing her violent eyes. As it is, there is no defense. He had promised her that he would arrive by 9 AM each morning, agreeing that this was entirely reasonable. He failed, failed, failed, and today there was clarity to the failure. Even the most simple parts of life squeeze and expand the pulpy mind of consistent failure. This is not a decent man, so it may be a terrible way to start our fictional dig into psychological essay about what it is to be a decent man. We will find out despite his failures.
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The Beginning of My Story
On that day, the weather was sporadic as it might be in the midst of the vacant, listless September, the clouds like a giant casino, filling and emptying with the winners and the losers, but Mother hoisted a natural cheer so I had been left out in the modern rabbit cage, hanging above the dark oily alley with strewn garbage and broken bottles, braced to the window (my cage), centered by the breakfast table. At the fateful moment, the winds having begun to stir without Mother noticing, some sort of vigorous weather event having snuck up from behind and from within the crevices of the Brooklyn tenements, it was then that one torrent of furious air swept the ash-can-like planter filled with mildewed soil with the outgrowth of a blusterous and half-dead, lost-red, filtered to colorlessness, mini rose-bush off of the ledge of the patio on the outside of Ms. Stilldinger’s unit, 8B, two floors up, one over to the left. With a tremendous twirling velocity, it nailed my cage, blasting the fasteners, bouncing me out of the back of the cage, as then I felt myself tumbling in an unnervingly slow motion, bouncing rather than ripping the canopy above the cook’s entrance (the bounce attributable to my nearly-perfect mass of 22.5 pounds having flown from 6 floors up), the canopy covering the cook, Freddy, who having heard the pot blast my cage had moved out to look up beyond the canopy in time to catch me in an athletic manner after I had bounced diagonally on the third bounce. This certainly puzzled me on the tentative value of baby cages.
Some babies come to the world as new creatures, new creations, but some come from another life. Some are from another world. My mind is aware of the future world I am from where cars fly instead of rolling. I’ve come back here as punishment after hanging myself, as if I had not punished myself enough all the way through to my last day.
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Conversation in a Steady Car
He awakened to a piercing honesty while driving his battlefield sedan. He spoke in stilted and jumbled syllables with buckets of um’s, speaking to one whom he loved and one who was highly critical of people who don’t speak the King’s English.
Maybe the listener wasn’t critical today, but it made the speaker’s tormented soul regretful of his honest exploration.
“I hurt, and I know I shouldn’t hurt, but regardless of my solid rationality, I can’t remove the hurt, and it sticks and sticks.”
“It takes skill.”
The road was rough. It was flying by in terrible grays and all of the light-colored automobiles were trying to strike dead our floundering speaker and his tormented soul.
“I’m working on it. I am learning that it is not always all my fault.”
The hotels and the commercial buildings rose from the high vegetation which had started to slow with the heat of June and the mop head of river waters hanging in the air.
Perhaps the honesty was worthwhile.
I’m human, kind of, he thought.
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The Stranger Damaged George’s Soul Violently
George Torndawg walked into the heavy, melting bands of crosswalk. He was bedeviled by a sun that was hanging on to his nose with claws and punching him in the eyes and the forehead, regardless of which direction he slung his abdication. George Torndawg is rooting for a car, any car, to slam into him and malign him deeply down into the muckiest soup, the soup like his mother when she was sauced and watching fuzzies on television, but the traffic is far too slow. Furthermore, there’s no traffic today.
The reflective glass of the first floor curves with the plagued monster of a human creation in concert with the circle drive where the most hopeless patients might be dumped, and all of this first floor glass is shadowed by the overhang of the ethically-superior floors.
The glass is a hall of mirrors, blades and blades of sharp planes meant to shatter the ego, and then there is the man in the wheelchair with a ratty blue dog blanky with all sorts of holes, the blanky with holes. He, the man with the ratty blue dog blanky and slinky, oily, thin hair, is wearing slippers that should be retired, and when George Torndawg made a short glance at the man, the ropes of George Torndawg’s intestines plummet deeply, and he is suddenly longing for a gun that he could hold with two hands and point properly with the fullest of competence and the intensity of god. He is presently tasting the blue metal as it rests in his mouth.
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Light Poles for Death
Buses feel faster than their true velocity.
I stare at the driver’s black boots, boots with multiple soft and white scruffs but no crinkles or wrinkles, boots that will last forever. I love the fat gas pedals on buses. I imagine the encounter with the platform-like pedal as a fuzzy, electric boost to the ego.
Presently, the man’s foot is down almost all of the way, so we must be doing as best as we can.
The short light poles with antique lanterns, in charcoal gray move by quickly and steadily, and it strikes me dead-frozen that the only people who really get to enjoy these poles are all of the suicides who jump into the dirty Missouri River.
Running on the Tiny Inundations of Waves
Double-zero-three is a smooth ride. I like the suspension, making it feel like a boat over tiny inundations of waves.
The lady in maroon calms as I show her my face of compassion which is after all composed from the very center of the core of a beautiful diamond in truth, but it is also true that now, I am far more worried about the stolen baby and how I might continue to save the baby from the fate of living in a house where the meth lab blew up five years ago and melted the baby’s mother’s face, even after which she continues to this day to cook and consume with glorious ferocity, watching her face that looks more like a squid out of water made of plastic, from the fate of being beaten and smashed by a father who is always so drunk, whose last date with his wife ended as they sat inside their car beside the shore of a lake that was strewn with rocks, he promising to leave her blood on every piece of rock on that “beach,” she so high on heroin that she walked home which took over four days and nearly caused death by starvation.
My mind continues with these disgusting memories, they continue to rattle my senses seemingly, glaringly, to support my actions, stealing their baby and then, in furious stupidity, stealing the bus. My life is over, but I’ve done at least one good thing.
Thursday’s Escape from Sour Cakes
I stole the bus. The number on top was giant, but I could not get comfortable with why it had that incredibly simple number, double-zero-three.
I would get lost in a police helicopter.
That boy in the horrid, knit, rainbow hat couldn’t carry himself in a simple walking process. He stumbled all the way down a long city block. I thought about heroin.
Nobody missed the stolen bus. I wanted to drive it into the big river, but I drove North instead at which point, the riders started to look questioningly at me. The lady in the smooth, maroon dress with black stockings and incredibly classy shoes seemed to be ready to have an emotional breakdown.
I stole a baby, and I needed to focus on the next right step. I was not entirely comfortable with the impulsive idea of stealing the bus.
Watch Out, Little Bunnies – A NaNo Excerpt
Freddy sees black and maroon rabbits running around in circles, figure 8’s, frantic but organized, fluffing in the wind as bunnies are wont to do, on Walnut, maybe 70 or 80 bunny rabbits. He feels the drowning sadness as he perceives this state of affairs and he prays and prods for the rabbits to climb the tall buildings so that they can grab and mangle the sun from the rooftops and avoid the malaise of drivers who feel they have a mission to keep, but as Freddy rubs his eyes, he realizes that these are merely bits of the discolorations of pavement gathering together in melting storms of gray colors, conspiring to make him believe that something beautiful lives in these streets when he has known for years that this is a sick sort of unfulfilled fantasy with little if any inspirational source.
How the Sewer Ruins Christmas – NaNo Excerpt
The cement slithers in the coolness of the creepy blue air and Freddy’s feet feel the grind through the Florsheims. He’s been wanting new shoes for weeks, but he hates shopping, and reflection on this reminds of him of the thickness of Christmas that is approaching too quickly. The neighbors put out their Halloween lights in September and this is his signal to run from the evils of the season, not of Halloween but of nature’s darkness that places mold inside of Freddy’s brain cells and makes them smell so that other people can see this seeping gas coming from Freddy’s head and he prays every morning for a little light in the season of fall. It never comes, but all of man’s false lights blast his head with and fuse the mold, growing it fast, allowing it to steal any sense of worth. This is true for Freddy, this effect of man’s outdoor lights. The lights wash his brain cells. His mind feels power leaving as the water runs down his body, down the driveway and into that sewer that has trillions of pieces of clay from 60 years ago, clay that man thought would last forever but that now barely holds the slick green, moldy water. Freddy thinks that the water comes back up in the lawns, in through the electrical systems and then into the outdoor lights. He walks down the sidewalk and watches these lights in a broad overview, looking down the street at perhaps 9 houses, all with lights that seem to be fused with evil, they seem to be seeping a green that makes the light some sort of power that evaporates the good that only occasionally floats in the air of the neighborhood.
NaNo Etude 7 – The Dead Rise in a Vacuum
Lunchtime in the city, in the park, with the angular and furry winds, holding tightly to my loose baggie with jelly goo-goo blobbing itself everywhere, regretting that I forgot my napkins, but here I go again, licking my hands like a fiend and not giving a shit about what people think about me licking like a dog licks a puncture wound.
Friday and streets are so empty, but I’m not stupid. I feel the dead crawling beneath me in the jungles, the tangles of sandy sewers. When the living leave the city to do the shit that they think makes their lives worthwhile, such as water skiing from the dock at the lake house or traveling up the road to hang out with old buddies to drink and perhaps get drunk, this is when the dead start to get serious and start to move about like a storm, more furiously active than all of the scurrying rats on which they dance.
And when the dead are buzzing about below, that is when I feel the roots of all of my diseases, perhaps not so alone because when the fear subsides, I rest my body and focus my eyes, moving them slowly across the page, feeling a rich chocolate silk overcome my brains, sparkled by the arrangement of all of the words, but still alone with all of those diseases and all of the unfair artistic yearnings, watching my sharp object of architectural genius steam into the end of the sky and wonder why its massive American flag never seems to move despite all of the stirrings and blasty blooms of the wind here on the ground just above the nasty hurricanes of the dead who rise and blow gassy fires which grow my diseases up like big hot air balloons.
I resolve to go back to work and not hate myself as much as the dead require.
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