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The Widower Colonel
March 14, 2026 in 299 Words, Bereavement, Child, Delusion, Family, Home, Isolation, Longing, Love, Nuclear Family, Parent, Romance, Separation, Sex, Sexual Desire, Short stories, Siblings, Very Short Novels | Tags: Books, Fantasy, Fiction, short-story, Writing | by davidbdale | 1 comment
My Only Darling B—
You can’t imagine how a woman of substance has changed this ranch and all your boys, me included. Our Dulce. Billy brought her, thinking she was his, but all your sons have found reasons to cherish her: soft voice, sharp eye, curves in certain light, each one a feature of you that they must be reminiscing. They think their affection is genuine, but they’ve fallen in love with their mother, or parts of you. Merciful God, I’m sorry, B! I should never have dragged you to a pitiless frontier expecting shelter from this omniscient sky. A man in love has given away half his brain and all of his decency! When I watch the boys looking at Dulce, I understand where I went wrong. I was defeated by your eyes. Yes, I mean your ass. There, I’ve made you laugh. Since I saw you at that table alone in the café near your school, with my bag of blueprints for building a future far from home and nothing but bankruptcies behind me, any confidence I needed I took from those eyes of yours that did me in. Again, I mean that ass. You ridiculed my pickup line without mercy. But when I called your face expressive, I meant it as a warning that I could tell you would follow me anywhere I wandered to. I should have left you sheltered in a town full of friends, married to whoever you wanted. You could have had anyone, been anyone, instead of disintegrating here on acres of powdered grief, raising boys like livestock, and being The Colonel’s wife. I wish you were here to see her, B—. The boys will have a hard time keeping her from me. I see it in her eyes.
Love, Your Colonel.
Original Copyright © March 13, 2007
Revised Copyright © March 13, 2026
A Very Good Photo
February 27, 2026 in 299 Words, Deception, Disrespect, Entitlement, Fantasy, Longing, Online, Secrecy, Seduction, Social Class | Tags: Books, Fantasy, Fiction, short-story, veryshortnovels, Writing | by davidbdale | Leave a comment
She’s staying at the only good hotel in town, a place I’ve never been, and giving a paper, whatever that means, and wants to see me while she’s here. We’ve never met, but I know things about her I would never ask anyone else. Not sexual, not all of them. She knows me from a very good photo of me and I know her from a photo of her, how good I don’t know yet. On the drive over I try to decide whatever I can say to her. We don’t want to change our lives, either of us, at least not as involves the other. And some of the words we use online I never say out loud. I wish I could email her instead. It gives me time to be someone. I’d say: How dangerous is it not to choose to love the life we’re given! Or: These glimpses of you make me want not you, but to be worthy of you. And wait an endless day for her reply. My car is not to the valet’s liking. He calls me sir with a tone. How long will I be, sir? I look at him, his cap, the brass buttons, the torn ticket he’s offering me in return for my woeful car, the weight of those granite walls behind us, doors revolving with an endless flow of people who know where they’re going, and I’m undone by the machinery of the whole business, by rooms with fresh linens and mini-bars, stacked into towers for other peoples’ husbands and wives to close the doors and work out their identities. Sir? Do you know where you are, sir? I hand him back his ticket stub and drive away from the hotel thinking, I can play this right. She’ll understand.
Original Copyright © February 24, 2007
Revised Copyright © February 27, 2026
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