Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories (4 page)

From time to time I tried to explain to people why I bought the lampshade. After a while, I moved the lamp next to my bed and shut the bedroom door.

R
OSEVILLE

K
aren Dunkle had been browsing Paradise Mall’s annual antique show and sale. She’d been looking carefully at a piece of Roseville pottery she was thinking of buying—a small blue bowl in the white rose pattern from the ’40s, an object you could turn in your hands to feel the cyclic pattern of roses and vines in their imperishable frieze—but was that a chip in its base or just a natural kiln-fleck of some kind that wouldn’t affect its value?—she’d been browsing and concentrating on white roses when Konrad Glimmerman, walking past her, slipped on a spot of mustard and knocked her forward against three tiers of glassware and pottery while he himself fell not on his back with his feet thrown up in front of him as is usually depicted in slapstick cartoons, but, somehow, as we’ve observed, to Karen’s side, his left leg striking her in the back of her knees so that she seemed, as the antique glassware and pottery swept over them in a wave of shards and slivers, to be planning to sit on Konrad, which she did. By the time the smashing and tinkling of breakage had stopped, when the last carnival glass tumbler had rolled to a still-point and the last cut-glass ashtray had stopped cracking and spinning, Karen—the Roseville bowl that Konrad would later buy for her intact in her hands—looked down at Konrad, who was afraid to move, and said, “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.”

To make a long story short, it is a week later. By now, Karen and Konrad have exhausted all jokes about their first meeting, have told and retold those few seconds to both circles of their friends in such slow motion and with so many variations that it seemed only natural to them that Karen should end up sitting on Konrad’s buttocks in Paradise Mall in the way she had, bits of amethyst glass sequinned on her bouffant—miraculously, however uncomfortable such fleeting notoriety might have made them, neither had been even slightly hurt during this adventure—while Konrad could think only of the dog ordure into which he must, he thought, have stepped, could only hope that said dreck was not beneath him at that very moment. After three dates, Karen and Konrad have worn the story out. In fact, they swear to one another that they will never again tell this story to themselves or anyone else, that it will remain their own silent secret, that if they ever argue or find themselves glum or heartbroken they will look at one another and smirk, knowing what the other is remembering.

To make a very long story much shorter, however, we now see them on their golden anniversary. As life would have it, it is after dinner and frail Karen is standing at a microphone behind a three-tiered wedding cake at the Senior Center, which their children and friends have rented for the celebration. Just tall enough to see over the cake, she is looking out at this congregation and beginning to say a few words. Konrad, who broke his left hip a few months before, forgetful now and beginning to lose track of things, prone to wandering aimlessly about, stands up from his chair at the head table and begins walking behind Karen. A curve of blue begins to form in the back of his mind. He is thinking of telling a story.

P
ENDERGAST’S
D
AUGHTER

L
eann and I were driving to her father’s new A-frame on Lake Nacogdoches, and I was nervous about meeting her folks for the first time.

Relax, Leann said. Drink a few Old Mils with Dad, maybe catch a large mouth or two off the dock Saturday. When I got the nerve Sunday, she said, I could spring the news on the old man about wanting to marry his little girl. Then the two of us could get the hell out, head on back to Dallas. Lighten up, she kept saying.

When we got there her kid brother ran to my car, flinging his arms all around. An acre lot across a little inlet was being cleared, flat red clay and loblollies tied with red ribbons. A bulldozer was ramming one of the pines without much luck. Hurry, Leann’s brother said.

The lake house was all glass in front so from the gravel drive we could see Mrs. Pendergast inside, slapping the old man’s face. Once, twice, then again. She shouted something about him not having any goddamn imagination, about some girl, twenty-six years old, young enough to be his goddamn daughter. He took her flat palms rigid-faced, just stood there blinking at her. Then his face fell all apart, and he hit her in the sternum with his fist. She staggered back through the open door and up to the balcony rail as he hit her over and over again.

Do something, Leann shouted at me. But I just stood there. I just watched till the old man pushed his wife over the rail.

At the hospital in Lufkin I told Leann, I don’t know what the hell happened to me. But then an intern came into the waiting room and said her mom would be all right, just some stitches, some bruised ribs.

Next week I must have left a hundred messages on Leann’s answering machine. I’m sorry, they said, you got to believe me.

I remember we used to shower together every morning I stayed at her garage apartment in University Park. I’d slick her taut brown shoulders with Zest and I’d think, Jesus, this is good.

P
ONDEROSA

J
immy’s father said to come by the church, they should have a talk. Everybody knows what that means. But what his father said was that he had been out to the Ponderosa Restaurant on Saturday and there were all of Jimmy’s classmates from Bible college with their wives and children and they were all happy, why wasn’t he? He wanted Jimmy to get down on his knees and pray right there and Jimmy wouldn’t and his father accused him of betraying his wife Linda and running around with that other woman—were these rumors true or untrue? They were untrue, said Jimmy. So his father said: do you have doubts? And Jimmy said he did, and then agreed to pray with his father. He decided to take the church at Mount Hebron and renounce the other woman—about whom he had lied to his father.

But then Linda came to his father the very next week to complain that Jimmy was cruel to her—he ignored her, and said cutting things to her, mocked her—was that any way to treat a Christian wife? Jimmy’s father threw up his hands in despair. Was he expected to deal with everything? Were not his troubles with his own congregation enough?

He went over to see Jimmy with a shotgun in his hand, said it was only a symbol of God’s potential wrath, he had no intention of using it, no, but it went off accidentally. Blew off half of Jimmy’s jaw. It was only God’s mercy that Jimmy didn’t die—and afterwards Jimmy was a man possessed by the spirit of God. He and his father are on the road now with the Tabernacle Tent, bringing God’s message as a team. His father tells the story and Jimmy, who can’t talk anymore, sings—a melodious mourning sound which brings the sinners from the back rows to the front to be saved. God be praised!

G
OLD
C
OAST

T
hey wake simultaneously in a hotel room on the thirty-seventh floor, neither of them sure of the time, both still a little drunk, a little numb from the silence that has grown between them.

“Look at the sky! Look at the light!” she exclaims.

He’s already seen it—how could he not have? The enormous bed faces a wall of windows. They’ve left the drapes open. The wall of windows now seems like a wall of sky, almost indigo, shot with iridescence as if veins of a newly discovered precious mineral have been exposed. It isn’t dawn yet. It’s still a gradation of night, but night with tomorrow already luminous behind it like the silver behind the glass of a cobalt mirror.

He can see the sky reflected in the windows of all the surrounding buildings that tower up to form the glass cliffs of the gold coast they’ve drifted to. He knows that every city has such strips, and he distrusts them. No matter how authentically elegant they might appear, he thinks of them as illusory, removed from the real life of cities, as places that are really no place, reflections floating like illuminated scum on the surface of a river. He remembers how, as teenagers, he and a buddy spent their nights exploring the gold coast of the city they’d grown up in, and the mixture of awe and contempt they’d felt toward it.

He no longer feels superior to gold coasts. He wonders how many of his fellow sleepers are sitting up as he is, silently peering out of high-rise rooms in which the drapes have been drawn open on tremendous windows, windows for giants, scaled to span the winking horizon of the city. He both envies those still sleeping peacefully and pities them for missing these nameless few moments of sky which he knows already will be unforgettable. He wonders which of those two emotions the future will reveal as the more accurate. Once, shortly after they’d become lovers, she told him, “I’m not sure if meeting you has been the most lucky or unlucky thing that’s ever happened to me.”

He had laughed.

“I wasn’t kidding,” she said.

“I know,” he said, “I’m only laughing because that’s exactly what I was thinking about meeting you.”

“See. Maybe that’s what happens when it’s fate. One always feels what the other is feeling, at the same time, together.” She laughed too.

“Kind of emotional telepathy, eh?”

“That makes it sound too glandular,” she said in the teasing way she had that made for private jokes between them. “I’m not talking about something in the
glands
; I’m talking about something in the stars.”

Now, beside him in bed, she whispers, “Why did we have to see this together?” It’s not said cruelly. He understands what she means. She means they’ve seen this sky only because of one another, that it’s something more between them to remember. And he knows that he doesn’t need to answer, that it’s as if he’s merely overheard her speaking to herself, almost as if he isn’t there any longer, as if she’s awakened alone, at an unknown hour, along a gold coast.