You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘299 Words’ category.
This car is too big for our abbreviated family. Dad drives, and I sit in the back where he can see me, as if I would budge, just the two of us since the accident that reduced us by half. Beside him is empty. Beside me too. He has a metaphorical way of holding the wheel at twelve o’clock with his left hand backwards like he’s prepping for a hard right or fighting a skid, like he’s shaking his fist at whatever’s ahead, ready to flip the bird. Equally newsworthy, his favorite parking space is alongside any unattended female, and every time we somehow get the checkout line with the cutest cashier. I learn what I observe, not what I’m told. It’s clever for a man his age to tell them what we’re up to, to frame himself a single dad buying game cartridges with his son. When they smile, at him, not me, he appreciates me with gum and batteries. Just once he should tell them why he’s single and who was driving if not drunk then nearly, and who was climbing over the seat to get to the front when we ran into a barricade that was meant to stay put and did. We’re survivors, Dad and I. We flew through the moon roof like superheroes side by side and into the night. I would have been belted in, like now, like Mom and Junior were. Dad never believed in them. The belts, I mean. He doesn’t look at the passenger seat. He doesn’t look at me either. But if he has to brake suddenly, which happens a lot, he reaches back to restrain Junior, when I’m the one who’s sitting here. I don’t get it. The living were always better off without Dad’s kind of protection.
Original Copyright © February 21, 2007
Revised Copyright © February 23, 2026
He shows his hands as bidden. Across each palm, and flecking the edges also of his bare soles, doily patterns of lesion and wart: the arsenic array. His hands outstretched toward the inspector, palms up, thumbs east and west, elbows extended from his deflated torso, his fingers cupped to receive whatever is freely given or falls from the sky, he doesn’t beg, he isn’t grateful, doesn’t wish or want, has no questions, gives from his poverty, can’t be helped. His cupped hands are as likely offering as asking. They seem empty, but in their lines they trace the journey of the king’s advisers to this desiccated village with its wells tapped deep into poison. The women are too weak to walk to clean water. The children wither inward from the fingertips and toes. In the land of flood and drought, too much water kills what too little water doesn’t. For the ancestors, pests that mutated in water that pooled when the floods receded took off the weak and weary. Longevity disfavored the thirsty. Then workers, sent by the king to tap the artesia, planted pumps within steps of the huts, so the villagers weaned themselves from the pools, and drank and bathed and boiled their grains with pump water whenever they wished. Now those wells are poison, too, and workers have painted the handles red but not dismantled the old pumps. Healthful water has been tapped a short walk away, to no avail. He denies the old well was better than the pond, and anyway wanting better is striving and striving is shameful. He was content to have no king, have no pump, to drink pond water, drink red water, or do without. If the well outside his door goes dry, he’ll cup his hands and accept the dew.
Original Copyright © 1997
Revised Copyright © February 15, 2026
Very Short Novels 
This is a close relative of a Very Short Novel titled Short for Family from 20 years ago. The revisions…