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A runaway trolley car is racing downhill, and I alone see the danger. If I hurry, I can switch the car to the parallel track, maybe, if the juncture is outfitted with such a switch, and if I understand switches. Sunlight brightens the shop windows along the steep avenue under a fresh spring sky as blue as painters tape, and I and my philosophical girl friend, with nothing on our agenda but coffee and petits fours and late-day lovemaking and teleological nothingness, had been strolling arm in arm to the cafe, but now this! As if I weren’t already pre-occupied with a personal ethical dilemma! If no one diverts it, the trolley will surely crash into a vanload of already blind and misguided gospel singers, but if diverted won’t it mow down the crew of work release inmates on the parallel track? Similarly, and more urgently, should I continue to deceive my girl friend about how I spend my Thursday nights, or would the consequences of coming clean dangerously disauthenticate her? In any event, I’m not sure I could reach the switch in time. The anguished pungency of deeply distressed coffee beans beckons us to the café, but what’s this I hear? The mournful strains of Motherless Child…from the felons on the parallel track! Something must be done. A fat man, startlingly fat (Is he fat enough to derail the trolley completely?) is tilting heavily forward from the curb toward the tracks. With a nudge he might save everyone. Except himself of course and whoever pushed him. For no one nudges the fat man and sleeps well afterwards. I will tell her, but probably not today. Maybe Friday. She deserves to be happy with her pastry. I bend down to loosen my too-tight laces and listen for the crash.
Original Copyright © March 15, 2007
Revised Copyright © March 17, 2026
Very Short Novels 