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To calculate my age since breaking my wrist requires weighting the days of the week on a sliding scale and doing a little algebra. All days but Fridays weigh one day each, though lately the off-days have grown heavier, more decrepitating. Saturdays in particular want to murder and bury me. Thursdays last an age, but I get through them, then Fridays I take my pill. They gave me dilaudid when I broke my wrist and accidentally decimaled the prescription, then refilled it twice the first week. I knew before the first tablet fully dissolved I would not die without knowing true love. I open my mouth and place her on my tongue each seventh day, I close my eyes and swallow, fill with warmth and feel my blood, and emerge to beauty and the wonder of being. She does everything I could possibly want a pill to do except negate the six days a week I don’t take her. I close the medicine cabinet door and pledge to the mirror, “Only on Fridays,” and the second commandment, “Until I run out.” My eyesight is better on Fridays. I see and comprehend the pores of my skin and the veins that run through it. The band of grass, the darker trees, the band of sky above them resolve into flag stripes. My family is more accomplished and more dear. Watching them prepare their meals, I regret that they can’t join me here; their food has no appeal for me and what I live on they wouldn’t appreciate either. It may be that my wife does not feel pain the way I do, or maybe her illness is not like mine. What they’re giving her doesn’t have the same effect, and they don’t seem to be giving her enough of them.

Copyright © March 30, 2007

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Let’s all have a laugh at humanity, while we still have a sense of humor about us. It’s getting dark out there, my friends, where we make what we call our livings, but here in the room, where our private movies are staged and we are stars, it’s blindingly brightly lighted by design, mirrored and multiply-reflected, white on pink on stark white sheets and shadows flee before us. Still. We’re funny. Could we be naked and not be funny? Seen in our entirety, with back-story and motives, we’re charming and slightly ridiculous. Our mismatched genes, those cross-wired brains, these farcical downward story arcs make us sympathetic supporting characters if not small heroes, certainly not villains, but from an individual angle, directly overhead from a distance of, say, here to the mirror on the ceiling, we look exactly like the funny animals we are, pink and poignant, poking one another. In the mirror to the side of the bed, I catch a glimpse of a creature that has no business in my fantasy. He’s not at all how I pictured myself just now with my eyes closed playing for romance and yet, he’s doing exactly what I think I’m doing to this gorgeous reflection of you, and yes, you look indisputably fantastic, identical and fine, here and in the mirror, so who’s that stand-in with my haircut, doing such an unconvincing impression of me? Tomorrow we take down all this diminishing glass. We’ll do what we’ve always done. My eyes will be your only mirror, yours mine. We’ll look at each other and find ourselves. And just before we start to laugh, we’ll catch a glimmer of how we’re loved and get a sense of why. Then when we laugh, we’ll laugh until we cry like no animal we know.

Copyright © March 24, 2007

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299-WORD NOVELS

Character, conflict, emotional impact. And sentences! Everything you want in a novel, without one extra syllable.
  1. davidbdale's avatar

    Thank you so much, anhinga, but I wouldn't want to try it without the other 199. —David

  2. davidbdale's avatar
  3. anhinga's avatar

    All you need is 100 words to make an emotional impact. Touching.

  4. Unknown's avatar

    Brilliant, brother. Just simply brilliant.

  5. davidbdale's avatar

    This Very Short Novel has a strong resemblance to Simple Lessons of War from almost 20 years ago, but is…

Behind the Pseudonym

The pen name davidbdale honors my mother Beatrice (Bea) and my father Dale

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