You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Fiction’ category.
Video versions of Very Short Novels are coming to your screens (one at a time and slowly). Trade Rumors is the first to be posted to our affiliated Must See Theater channel on YouTube. Life Line has been shot and is in post-production. And Eat the Air is on the schedule next. Check in often.
The Video Version in 299 words
The Print Version in 299 words:
—Dad, are you trying to trade me?
—What would make you say that?
—Mister Moyer said you offered me for his daughter.
—Not just his daughter, son. That was a package deal.
—Why would you want to do that?
—Do you mean why or do you mean why now?
—
—I don’t think you’ll ever be worth more.
—But I’m nothing but potential!
—
—What if I go somewhere else and thrive?
—That’s what I’m hoping.
—Oh, so you’re doing me a favor.
—
—Is it my grades?
—You think I care about your grades?
—I don’t know, but you can’t just trade your family!
—No? Your mother managed it pretty well.
—Is this something I can veto?
—You can beg. You know I like that.
—What if I’m not happy where you send me?
—I didn’t think you were happy here.
—I’m very happy here.
—You don’t act it.
—This is how a happy teenager acts, Dad.
—
—At least let me stay in the same school.
—With those grades?
—
—Anyway relax, there’s not much out there.
—Maybe your standards are too high.
—Why, because I won’t take on someone else’s liability?
—Dad, just admit you don’t like me and let’s move on.
—I couldn’t do that, son.
—You think it’s better not to say it?
—
—This isn’t fair.
—What, fathers and sons? It’s inevitable.
—If that were true, your dad would have traded you.
—Yeah, well. I might have been better off.
—Oh, Dad, is that what this is about?
—
—You think I won’t get enough chances living with you?
—
—Look. Grandpa was an asshole.
—Yeah?
—Yeah.
—Yeah?
—Yeah. You don’t have to be.
—So, what do you think of the Moyer girl?
—She’s cute, but she’ll never tell you the truth.
—Yeah.
—Yeah.
—Play some ball?
—Let’s play some ball.
print version Copyright © July 31, 2009
video version Copyright © September 2025
This precious house—my house!—this room, these walls, this bed, are all familiar, but I’m not. I’m the stranger who makes everyone uncomfortable. Three months in the hospital and a precisely but savagely excised brain have tweaked my personality the way a potion tweaked Jeckyll into Hyde. I’m clothed in the same skin as my healthy former self and fit the same clothes, but I’m no fit for this place, my house, not yet. I eat, I breathe, digest, pass food, none of them without help, none without humiliation. Whatever I used to be proud of, . . . . My wife resembles her photos by the bed except in the eyes, which used to say For better! and which now wonder, Could this get worse? But she’s the same. My children too. They enter the room like scolded pets and finger the bedclothes and stare at the muted TV, not at their dad. They tell me what I want to hear: I’ve turned them into liars. Except for giving in, or giving up, there’s no remedy for outliving an illness. But Melissa didn’t know me as I was. She sees what is. She knows just what to make of clients like me and forgives me. The intimacies she performs are out of reach for those who have always loved me, services that would break their hearts. The genius of Melissa is to make my care appear like washing the dishes. She doesn’t love me, I think, except in that way that good souls think pain is noble and rage is prayer, which is to say, she loves the trouble I’m taking to get back to my self. And with her help, if I survive, I’ll own this house again and be the parent and husband I was.
Very Short Novels 
This is a close relative of a Very Short Novel titled Short for Family from 20 years ago. The revisions…