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The Contract
December 28, 2006 in 299 Words, Books, Family, Fiction, Flash Fiction, novels, Poetry, reading, Short stories, Stories, Very Short Novels, Writing | Tags: Child, Mystery, Neglect, Suspicion | by davidbdale | 7 comments
When my child was born healthy, I didn’t ask “Why me?” I cherished her. A hundred days I coddled her, produced the milk, and she woke up alive. That’s not a hundred little miracles; it’s the contract. The day she didn’t wake up, she breached that contract. I demanded answers from the doctors who’d delivered me a flaw. They handed me a made-up word to take back home and nurse. If my baby died of what they told me, then I’m dying too, we’re all dying, of Gradual Adult Death Syndrome. Last year, again, I held the future to my breast, a little animal he was, with slick black hair, a beastly cry and vacant, needful look. He didn’t live three weeks, cause of death undetermined. The coroner doesn’t know what to think when a second infant dies without symptoms in the same crib to the same parents. For my part, I don’t suspect the mother, but what must my husband be thinking? The cops have theories; they cover for the doctors. The prosecutor is probing our family dynamic. The father, he puts his foot into the belly of a file cabinet. What do they mean by dynamic? There’s just the husband and me. If he suspected me, I’d understand. My sister has a baby, too, just two days older than ours would be, who sleeps on her back and wakes up gargling and farting. My husband holds her in his lap. She nestles in the furrow between his thighs and blinks as he blows soft silent whistles across her eyes. A tear slides down to the tip of his nose. He is dear. I want so much to share with him this multitude I carry. But I am dying, gradually, and he has too much faith in me.
Copyright © December 28, 2006
The Mural Project
December 4, 2006 in 299 Words, Books, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Literature, novels, Poetry, reading, Short stories, Stories, Very Short Novels, Writing | Tags: Art, Child, Death, Society | by davidbdale | 5 comments
Rain gathers along the edges of flat rooftops, pooling in the depressions, sheeting along the slick flashing until it overfills the bead along the bottom edge and trickles onto the building face, seeping down the freshly-painted surface like a slow waterfall, like time running down, like the red pool spreading on the pavement around another accident. Memorial murals of our departed children, fifty feet, a hundred feet tall, dwarf us. Their stuccoed walls and dedicated lighting are the only new construction here for years. Our children, made famous by bits of quick metal, gaze to the left or right of us, no matter where we stand, at something just beyond us that we never saw coming and could not have prevented. The local way to put it is it serves the kids right for being born here. And it’s surely criminal to live like this. They have no business being here, and nobody can make a case for wanting to. In their memorial poses, the new celebrities are rendered with doomed but hopeful looks like the faces of martyrs. Mural artists compete for the top commissions, not just big walls with clear views but the best stories, too, the subjects who were most vulnerable and haunted, like the children selected for milk cartons. What serious child of these streets could see those serene images lit from above and not think they might be the best shot at a legacy. We tell our children to make their own opportunities, but they know exactly what they have coming. They only hope to be worthy of their walls. In my nightmare they make deals to audition for them. Behind the drugstore, broken streetlight, wear your black cap backwards. My brother will do you after you do me. They’ll paint us a city block.
Copyright © December 4, 2006
Very Short Novels 