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Borrow a Bassoon
March 21, 2026 in 299 Words, Bassoon, Biography, Birthday, Childhood, Community, Education, Entertainment, Flash Fiction, Holiday, Humor, Life Story, Memory, Monkey, Music, Parade, Piano, School, Short stories, Very Short Novels | Tags: celebration, clever-animals, holiday-parade, Life, Life Story, Love, mental-health, Poetry, veryshortnovels, Writing | by davidbdale | 3 comments
How I love the world in all its ripe green beauty and all the people on its skin who cheer me with their effortless kindness! The sun pours down like pancake syrup. The grass grows just like grass but in a dream. Today is my birthday, again; I may never get older. I’m marking the day with a boisterous parade as far as my legs will take me and no plan for stopping. March with me, neighbors, and lift your knees high as we wave to the crowds on the boulevard of my youth, just a street with pretentions, and whistle if you can or borrow a bassoon! I want to make music that sounds like a theme for the rest of my life. Whichever way we turn is the Parade Route: this was the driveway that scraped my knees. This was my yard, where I lay on my back in a shower of stars and wondered if I would be missed. Left is the school where they taught me that God made the day and the night; right is the school where I heard He was dead. Here is the boss who taught me that labor is labor and in no way its own reward. There is the house of the girl who said yes. And her sister. We’ve gathered a jubilant crowd: marching bands and dogs on stilts and a monkey at the piano. Shopkeepers rejoice when they see us approach. The bells on their registers ring as we usher our elephants in through their doors and everyone sings:
I hope to be remembered when I’m gone!
The town we all grew up in has been gone so long!
We never thought its undertow could be so strong.
Something is terribly, terribly wrong.
Something’s gone horribly wrong.
Original Copyright © May 17, 2007
Revised Copyright © March 21, 2026
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
Very Short Novels 