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All I have to share is that everybody could be happy with a bigger heart and smaller hands. Life could be effortless. Open your mouth to the falling fruit, fill a cup from the sparkling stream, everything else is trouble we get ourselves into. The sunny green world grows its own food, scrubs its air, flushes its waste, charts its course, all despite help from us. What grows on the trees is ours to enjoy until somebody lays down the harvest ladder, nails it to a post, and creates Fence. We should be along for the ride, not living off of tolls. Collect enough food from the trees to survive should be our one commandment. If necessary, kill something delicious. And don’t waste. And don’t steal. Trouble is, seeing two trees together, we imagine an orchard, and seeing an orchard, we imagine it ours, and seeing others in our orchard, we imagine it fenced, and the others expelled. Having spent two nights with the girl of my dreams, eyes as green as spring, he absorbed her and imagined his rivals murdered. In theory, he was the fitter lover; in practice, he was a better fencebuilder than a husbander of trees or girls. He built my sweetheart a house in a tree and ringed it with post and rail. I blamed her for not flying from a window, and turned my back, and spat. His fruit trees choked on worms. His well coughed buckets of ash. His hostage shuttered the windows and doors and turned her sunniness inward. But the fence took root and flourished and fed on the generous earth and overgrew the orchard and the house they had shuttered and barred, the girl so green and sunny and the man who took inventory: One, Two, Everything and Everyone.
Original Copyright © February 11, 2007
Revised Copyright © February 06, 2026
I’m sitting at a red light falling in love with the passenger in the next car. She’s cute and small and irrepressible, but mostly hidden by the headrest, and dark and coy and mysterious and of completely indeterminate age, and smart! When she turns her head just so, contemplating her driver, I can see enough, through the tinted glass and the relentless glare of the bird-stained windshield, to know she’s curious and contemplative. A brilliant browline crowns a clear and deepset eye of sparkling darkness. I feel you judging me. Love at one car distance is every bit as legitimate as love at a distance of one breath mingling with another, near enough for our tongues to snap like wit. I’ve had the skin-on-skin sort. The varsity variety. I’m not sure it was any better. I’ll catch her eye when I pass alongside, if this maddening gridlock doesn’t unhinge me. I want to tell her this traffic is the worst since cops invented red lights to raise ticket revenues, right? I know. Observations like that should win her heart unless my heart is lying. She’ll be mine to amuse and disappoint in a minute or a mile. But first, eliminate the other driver, who doesn’t deserve or appreciate her. How’s his traffic material? Green light, finally. As our cars pull even, her driver’s head blocks her from offering me her face. To pledge in my direction. With her eyes. That I am not alone in love. Her driver will concede our love is destiny, or regret it. He moves aside, I believe, in surrender; I see her; she is stunning. The most magnificent springer spaniel, dark of brow and bright of eye, purebred of champions clearly, this one, raised from greatness for greatness, vivacious and irrepressible, age approximately three.
Original Copyright © February 10, 2000
Revised Copyright © February 06, 2026
Very Short Novels 