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How to Live and Why
January 7, 2007 in 299 Words, Books, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Literature, Poetry, reading, Short stories, Stories, Very Short Novels, Writing | by davidbdale | 8 comments
I’m in a car and I’ve been shot. The car has a spongy suspension and a Scorpio air freshener that smells like Mexican hair products. Did I mention it’s in motion across a scabbed landscape headed for the sun. I feel every bump in my chest where bullet fragments sizzle in blood. Unless the pink cartoon hand of salvation plucks me from the back seat and drops me into last Tuesday before I took this job, I won’t be alive much longer. At least I saved the child this time; it felt personal; I knew the family. I dropped my bloody calling card into every countertop fishbowl when the girl was taken. I found the women who took her hostage and killed the man they called Baggage Handler. It might mean something else in Spanish. Without a handler, this bad man is driving me off the grid to where I’ll want to die. I have it coming. I drugged his partner and installed explosives inside him. He begged me for more time when I showed him the countdown, but he couldn’t describe what he’d do with it. I hope you didn’t come for answers. “How to Live and Why” was more of a question. Personally, I’ve lived enough. She’s back with her mother now, but it was costly. “We’re businessmen,” the kidnappers keep telling me. I don’t like thinking what the product is and whether I’m buying or selling. The girl was taken on my watch; I went into action. I got her back for zero in the end, but coming back alive was never my plan this time. Someone has cranked the color wheel on me. Cabbage purple mountains crouch below a sky as red as Santa. What am I clinging to? More of this? Good luck world.
Copyright © January 07, 2007
The Dive
January 4, 2007 in 299 Words, Books, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Literature, novels, Poetry, reading, Short stories, Stories, Suicide, Very Short Novels, Writing | Tags: Accident, Crime, Epiphany, Guilt, Justice, Performance | by davidbdale | 8 comments
It was an admirable dive, technically haphazard but stylish, like good slam verse, and confident, despite daunting conditions, including absence-of-a-swimming-pool. The diver who launched himself from the concrete median was not in olympic shape. In a formless black coat and boots, he crafted a smooth arc of surprising fluency (and at the top of this architectural wonder he was scribing with his body—is that the apogee?—he caught my eye with a look so direct it lashed me to the mast of my inadequacy like a judgment) but slammed headlong into the tangential but irrefutable momentum of my not theoretical car. He hadn’t stumbled; he had dived. He hit my car hard. What had I done? I had observed. Because, really, what truth is served by saying I hit him? My safe path was predetermined to collide with his suicidal one, is all. The inevitable occurred. It’s ironic. You spend your life gaming the language and one day you realize—all right, it rear-ends you—that your game is not the essential game. The court calls celebratory toasts intoxicants. Juvenile follies cluster into constellations cops call Priors. The sketch on the police report shows the intersection of our fates, but the district attorney is using bigger paper in all directions. Her diagram includes neighborhoods of my youth, a shot grouping of misdemeanors and minor felonies, and marginal warnings of mayhem should I return to the highways undeterred. I asked about character witnesses, but my lawyer says Forget it, nobody’s witnessed any character. She’s hilarious. Of course I don’t blame the diver; once he launched his body carward, only I had brakes. I failed to undo the future before it could happen. That’s on me. But I ask you, didn’t destiny make two victims when it suicided us both?
Copyright © January 04, 2007
Very Short Novels 