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Killer Ending
November 24, 2006 in 299 Words, Books, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Literature, novels, Poetry, reading, Short stories, Stories, Very Short Novels, Writing | Tags: Brother, Death, Grave, Horror, Kill, Killer, Murder, Mystery, Novel, Sibling, Violence | by davidbdale | 16 comments
If ghosts could kill themselves, they would. They long to be either here or there. Bodiless but not yet dimensionless light, they darken like shadows the houses they lived in. My dead twin brother finds ways to tell me he’s still half-with us, and I more than half believe him. Ghost stories have it all wrong. Rattling chains aren’t threats or warnings; they’re diplomatic feelers from the nearly departed. So far, he’s dropped hints about the gun I helped him buy, about his accidental death, and about the novel he was writing, but not enough to pull it all together. With my clean record, my legitimate ID, and a photo of the face we share, I secured a license to arm ourselves against what I never knew, but it helped him sleep, and so it helped me, too. He’d gotten it in his head that his foot was diseased, or menacing in a way that his chapter drafts don’t specify. In the garden at dusk, he aimed down the barrel with single-eyed intensity, fired one shot, and severed the pinkie toe, then laughed at what he called my much ado. He got it in his head that we were triplets next and aimed at me in turn, calling me the one in the middle before he fired. Lonely as Adam, I dug a hole that seeped a bit and laid him in damp earth, then filled it alone. I meant to write that it pains the ghost to haunt the living, but it doesn’t ring true. This note I found in his own hand, which looks so much like mine, bears no hint of anguish or remorse. There is no twin, it says, the novel has always been mine, and who will bury you now that you’ve killed me?
Copyright © November 24, 2006
Sun Comes Sidewise
November 20, 2006 in 299 Words, Books, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Literature, novels, Poetry, Short stories, Stories, Very Short Novels, Writing | Tags: Destiny, God, Son, Universe | by davidbdale | 4 comments
I am my own god, and when, on the eighth day, I wake to survey the universe I have wrought and baited to snare the helpless unsuspecting and extract from them their thanks, I find it sprung by circumstance. This offspring I have fashioned is falling short. This offspring I have fashioned from little more than a drop of viscous, inauspicious stuff, collected with care and warmed in my own body, then flung in my panic in what must have been the right direction and set upon his track toward a future brighter than his faculties dare predict, this same offspring has inexplicably deviated if only by degrees from the destiny which is his birthright and my gift. I am watching him sleep. He is not hirable. Even awake he doesn’t seem fully upright, but asleep he is deplorable. Tenuous rays of dawn through the blinds cast pale stripes of color across his eyelids and his downy cheek. Brown curls streaked with threads of sunlight frame his face. The day will catch him unawares. His slouchy posture cuts a sorry figure. How I love him. I will hire him myself, of course, to keep him always near me. He has his mother’s snore, or is that her I hear? What prospects he will squander! In the acrid final moments of his long day of striving to surpass the limitations of his ill-conceived engendering, when the sun comes once again sidewise into this room and he can smell his way to his own bed, the memory of these hours of fragrant sleep will seem so unattainable. Let him sleep now. Let him gather his strength for the challenges which will overpower him. In another minute the machinery of his elders’ making will tip the spring and grind out its alarm.
Copyright © November 20, 2006
Very Short Novels 