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Stand and Burn
October 26, 2006 in 299 Words, Books, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Literature, Poetry, Short stories, Stories, Very Short Novels, Writing | Tags: Breath, Cry, Fire, Forget, Laugh, Memory, Mother, Panic | by davidbdale | 5 comments
My mother draws her breath like a bad cartoon. No doctor can tell us what’s wrong with her, so we don’t let them bother her. She was always busy living, proliferating. Now she’s making a career of her one death. Dad doesn’t exist. Dad never existed. She had us without him. The realtor’s office is a waking nightmare. We’re buying her last house, which means selling one. What if? she says, then loses the thread forever. Her breathing is erratic and shallow, noisy, ineffectual, disturbingly occasional. Her tissues are in panic, but in her eyes a generous urgent willingness to laugh off what is after all the very funny comic horror of her confusion if only I will signal her please signal her that I too find it funny. This is richer than fear. My hair is on fire and only she notices but no one will listen and maybe after all it’s just a style. The realtor says my mother won’t earn interest on her escrow and I say Of course, and she has to trust her son whose hair is on fire but who doesn’t seem to notice. The realtor will not meet her eye. He aims his casual agency at me. His days begin and end in conflagrations. Commissions are the warmth radiating from buyers with their heads ablaze. He shows me where to have her sign and hands me a flaming pen. Mother forgets. The world she believes to be changing so quickly is really only breathing, bellows in, ashes out. I show her again where to sign. She searches my face for a clue. She’ll cry before she signs, I know, but dammit, this time she’ll sign. If I can hold my breath and take the heat, she’ll sign. Together we stand and burn.
Copyright ©1997
Eat the Air
October 24, 2006 in 299 Words, Books, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Literature, Poetry, Short stories, Stories, Very Short Novels, Writing | Tags: Book, Dystopia, History, Holocaust, Memory, Rabbi, Song, War | by davidbdale | 7 comments
The rabbi is on radio, telling the story every generation tells about itself. It was war, he says, and the papers didn’t reach our little town. Those who found the odd edition and dared to read it, couldn’t risk sharing what they had read. The libraries lay in rubble. To own a radio was a capital offense. A man I knew, says the rabbi, was executed for pissing his name in the snow: publisher, they called him, publisher of seditious material. There was no news, except that we had no heat, no food. Instead of meals, we sang songs of plenty, songs of love and youth and of a good and forgiving god who always was, and always would be, this fruitful world. When we were bereft of everything, they took our maps and the books we had hidden, which were also maps. For all we knew, we were the only people of our kind left on earth. We told each other stories from the holy books. My father the rabbi, says the rabbi, knew many verses by heart; I remembered only songs, and only my personal versions. I sought others who knew the same songs, so we could reclaim and rewrite them on the air. It was not yet forbidden to converse. Some remembered parables, others prayers, lessons, pages of text once memorized and still intact. When memories were in conflict, a practical consensus informed us, and soon new books emerged, with an urgency missing from the old books. All the while, the world was writing chapters of its own, about places that had no names until we were taken there, whose names are now unspeakable. We understand history, who had to write our own while we were surviving it. Nothing written on paper can ever disprove us.
Copyright ©1997
Very Short Novels 