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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
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 itching 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 we always find ourselves in 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 as a single dad buying game cartridges with his son. When they smile, if it’s at him, 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 be with him when we ran into a barricade that was meant to stay put and did. We saved no one, Dad and I. We flew through the moon roof like dollar-store superheroes with the wrong set of skills. 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. But if he has to brake suddenly, which happens a lot, he reaches back to restrain Junior, while I’m the one 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
Very Short Novels 
Thank you so much, anhinga, but I wouldn't want to try it without the other 199. —David
Why, thank you, brother. It's wonderful to see you here. :) —David
All you need is 100 words to make an emotional impact. Touching.
Brilliant, brother. Just simply brilliant.
This Very Short Novel has a strong resemblance to Simple Lessons of War from almost 20 years ago, but is…