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A runaway trolley car is racing downhill, and I alone see the danger. If I hurry, I can switch the car to the parallel track, maybe, if the juncture is outfitted with such a switch, and if I understand switches. Sunlight brightens the shop windows along the steep avenue under a fresh spring sky as blue as painters tape, and I and my philosophical girl friend, with nothing on our agenda but coffee and petits fours and late-day lovemaking and teleological nothingness, had been strolling arm in arm to the cafe, but now this! As if I weren’t already pre-occupied with a personal ethical dilemma! If no one diverts it, the trolley will surely crash into a vanload of already blind and misguided gospel singers, but if diverted won’t it mow down the crew of work release inmates on the parallel track? Similarly, and more urgently, should I continue to deceive my girl friend about how I spend my Thursday nights, or would the consequences of coming clean dangerously disauthenticate her? In any event, I’m not sure I could reach the switch in time. The anguished pungency of deeply distressed coffee beans beckons us to the café, but what’s this I hear? The mournful strains of Motherless Child…from the felons on the parallel track! Something must be done. A fat man, startlingly fat (Is he fat enough to derail the trolley completely?) is tilting heavily forward from the curb toward the tracks. With a nudge he might save everyone. Except himself of course and whoever pushed him. For no one nudges the fat man and sleeps well afterwards. I will tell her, but probably not today. Maybe Friday. She deserves to be happy with her pastry. I bend down to loosen my too-tight laces and listen for the crash.
Original Copyright © March 15, 2007
Revised Copyright © March 17, 2026
I once wept onto bound blank pages and called the result The Book of Tears. I strangled and drowned that soggy volume and titled it Mercy, but this actual knife, here in her daughter’s bed where it was planted by god-knows-who, tells a more urgent story than any on paper. Only a book with a pulse, a temperature, a heft for leverage, and a handle for wielding as a weapon could compete with a butcher’s blade lurking in the bed of a child I don’t dislike. She and her mother had just begun to feel safe after weeks of squatting on a wornout mattress in a corner of Auntie Panty’s studio between a noisy radiator and a litter box. Before that, they’d spent two nights fidgeting in a rented bed at an unaffordable local hotel. Before that, they’d come home from mercy errands to a home that had been their refuge. The bastards hadn’t stolen much, but they’d splintered the front door and run their bleeding hands over everything that was hers, then crapped in the hallway and turned her home against her. She politely informed the police, enlisted me in the reclamation, fled with her daughter to anyplace safe, and languished in exile while I cleaned up. We’re staring now at what stabbed her beneath the covers as she was putting her daughter into bed, as sinister as a turd on the floor but more pointed. I touch her lightly. What chance does language have to blunt such objects or sheathe them, and how can we live without intimacy when items out of place can make the world and not the objects seem so reckless? She extends her arms; I anticipate an embrace, but she’s showing me her wounds. She’s starting a sentence with Since you moved out
Original Copyright © March 08, 2007
Revised Copyright © March 12, 2026
Very Short Novels 