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All I have to share is that everybody could be happy with a bigger heart and smaller hands. Life could be effortless. Open your mouth to the falling fruit, fill a cup from the sparkling stream, everything else is trouble we get ourselves into. The sunny green world grows its own food, scrubs its air, flushes its waste, charts its course, all despite help from us. What grows on the trees is ours to enjoy until somebody lays down the harvest ladder, nails it to a post, and creates Fence. We should be along for the ride, not living off of tolls. Collect enough food from the trees to survive should be our one commandment. If necessary, kill something delicious. And don’t waste. And don’t steal. Trouble is, seeing two trees together, we imagine an orchard, and seeing an orchard, we imagine it ours, and seeing others in our orchard, we imagine it fenced, and the others expelled. Having spent two nights with the girl of my dreams, eyes as green as spring, he absorbed her and imagined his rivals murdered. In theory, he was the fitter lover; in practice, he was a better fencebuilder than a husbander of trees or girls. He built my sweetheart a house in a tree and ringed it with post and rail. I blamed her for not flying from a window, and turned my back, and spat. His fruit trees choked on worms. His well coughed buckets of ash. His hostage shuttered the windows and doors and turned her sunniness inward. But the fence took root and flourished and fed on the generous earth and overgrew the orchard and the house they had shuttered and barred, the girl so green and sunny and the man who took inventory: One, Two, Everything and Everyone.
Original Copyright © February 11, 2007
Revised Copyright © February 06, 2026
I hate whoever my dog hates, not just the mailman, though he’s a fine example. And not by arrangement. We naturally agree on who’s despicable. Who we love is a different story. I’ve watched Baxter gaze at other men we meet, men who don’t resemble me, as if he were thinking: If I had to be human, I’d be a standup guy, a good earner, and a generous lover, like you. For all their supposed loyalty, my dogs have always hedged their bets. Baxter loves my ex-wife, perhaps for the same reasons I do, but he also flirts with her new boyfriend, the lawyer in our endless divorce case. That’s them pulling into the driveway now. Baxter bounds to the door, knocks over the umbrella stand, whimpers, squeals. He wants them both, in his house, for a threeway. Umbrellas be damned. It’s my fault. I’ve been avoiding the mail, again, so the statute of limitations on their willingness to unmolest me has expired, again. They’ve come for signatures. Ink must be spilled, clauses initialed. We’re sitting without refreshment at a shaky card table on shakier chairs. My formerly betrothed signs papers her boyfriend wrote that codify terms he negotiated to unrelate and nullify us to her benefit. With her other hand, her fingers are making promises to Baxter’s favorite scratchy spots. How well I know those spots, fingers, promises! The boyfriend witnesses everything and embosses the stack of lies with his notary seal, press, thing. Is there nothing the law prohibits him from being? She’s gazing at him like Baxter does. I bare my fangs each time his little seal squeaks. And though he knows better than to speak now, he speaks. And when he says the words “sole custody of the pet,” I lunge, they’ll say without warning.
Original Copyright © January 19, 2007
Revised Copyright © January 25, 2026
Very Short Novels 