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Baby Talk
October 11, 2006 in 299 Words, Books, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Literature, Poetry, Short stories, Stories, Very Short Novels, Writing | Tags: Baby, Eye Contact, Girl, Possession, Revelation, Wisdom, Youth | by davidbdale | 6 comments
It has happened only rarely in his perfectly healthy life. He has reasonable relations with his spouse, his children, his parents, siblings, associates and friends. He’s honest with others, frank with himself, friendly. He has an easy way. Deep sustained unabashed eye contact is not at all the ordinary coin among people he knows and loves, and yet he finds himself locked in a prolonged reciprocal stare with a newborn who will not let him go. There can’t be anything to this, he reasons, from the baby’s point of view, but still he holds the gaze of his brittle little girl as if her childhood were at stake. She can’t have anything to share with her father of two hours and twelve minutes, he understands, and yet he’s terrified of all he hasn’t learned about devotion and dependence, and something tells him he’s about to get a lesson. So he holds the stare. She will not let him go. She possesses him completely, as she inhabits her squeaky skin. So new is she and so complete, so vividly her own fresh entity, that she’s on the verge of speech despite her youth, and what she has to tell her dad will stun him to a dreadful awareness of his own inauthenticity. For twenty years his nature has slipped away. He’s watched it go and suppressed what little was left. There are people from his past he wouldn’t like to see today, though he denies it, people he would disappoint, and he knows it. With slippery little lips, she has formed the first syllable of this message to her dear dad. When he blinks, she spares him. She keeps her peace. He escapes without revelation, and his daughter, out of generosity, takes baby’s first step toward a diminished human life.
Copyright ©1997
Light The Stars
October 5, 2006 in 299 Words, Books, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Literature, Poetry, Short stories, Stories, Very Short Novels, Writing | Tags: Destiny, Love, Marriage, Philosophy, Wisdom, World | by davidbdale | 14 comments
In slanting sunlight, we find ourselves amidst porch furniture, in the pregnant hour of a marriage as familiar as the air, thoughtless, lightly rocking the globe from its orbit with every shift of our chairs. Her sneeze unseats a dynasty a world away; she moves across the porch three steps toward me and straightens the pin on which our planet turns. And I in my loopy ellipse have orbited her always, turning toward her always the same blasted landscape of a face through solstice and equinox, through deaths and divorces, births, engagements, weddings, the variably fruitful lives and always pointless deaths of other people’s children. Is there a distance more electric than that inch of atmosphere vibrating between her fingers and mine, so rich it propagates the world? The fireflies light and fade and light again, illuminating only themselves. The stars too squander their light on nothing but the arc of time, that black unintelligible other globe. With every twinkle a virus takes hold, a village is torched, a leader surrenders his way. With every heartbeat, a planet is extinguished, cools to ice, and plummets toward its sun. In a rainy republic the name of which we’ll never know, a bored uncertain cynical smalltime hoodlum in a beard, to galvanize a ragged contingent of lifelong rebels, offers a prisoner a deal: to save his own life he can torture his prisoner friends. We can’t afford to love each other less. When called upon, we lend a shovel to unbury survivors, or send our check to the pagan peoples everywhere, like a tip for leaving us alone, and chart a tiny orbit from our lamppost. And on a cool night, with the lightest touch, she traces the arc of a single life across my skin and mends the unmendable world.
Copyright ©1997
Very Short Novels 