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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
Killer Ending
November 24, 2006 in 299 Words, Books, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Literature, novels, Poetry, reading, Short stories, Stories, Very Short Novels, Writing | Tags: Brother, Death, Grave, Horror, Kill, Killer, Murder, Mystery, Novel, Sibling, Violence | by davidbdale | 16 comments
If ghosts could kill themselves, they would. They long to be either here or there. Bodiless but not yet dimensionless light, they darken like shadows the houses they lived in. My dead twin brother finds ways to tell me he’s still half-with us, and I more than half believe him. Ghost stories have it all wrong. Rattling chains aren’t threats or warnings; they’re diplomatic feelers from the nearly departed. So far, he’s dropped hints about the gun I helped him buy, about his accidental death, and about the novel he was writing, but not enough to pull it all together. With my clean record, my legitimate ID, and a photo of the face we share, I secured a license to arm ourselves against what I never knew, but it helped him sleep, and so it helped me, too. He’d gotten it in his head that his foot was diseased, or menacing in a way that his chapter drafts don’t specify. In the garden at dusk, he aimed down the barrel with single-eyed intensity, fired one shot, and severed the pinkie toe, then laughed at what he called my much ado. He got it in his head that we were triplets next and aimed at me in turn, calling me the one in the middle before he fired. Lonely as Adam, I dug a hole that seeped a bit and laid him in damp earth, then filled it alone. I meant to write that it pains the ghost to haunt the living, but it doesn’t ring true. This note I found in his own hand, which looks so much like mine, bears no hint of anguish or remorse. There is no twin, it says, the novel has always been mine, and who will bury you now that you’ve killed me?
Copyright © November 24, 2006
Very Short Novels 