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Things Get Moved
October 14, 2006 in 299 Words, Books, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Literature, Poetry, Short stories, Stories, Very Short Novels, Writing | Tags: Destiny, Furniture, Loss, Possession, Separation | by davidbdale | 4 comments
Which is the tool is the question never asked. For the coffee mug, the eyeglass case, the dozen indispensable items in the wire basket with the foldable handles, we are a conveyance to the top of the stairs. When the forty thousand things we’ve accumulated depend on us to get anywhere, how can we be trivial? We knew what we were doing, but we couldn’t stop. The keys need us to get to the car; the car needs us to cross the bridge. Forty-six tons of lumber, shingles and glass found a ride to the jobsite and convinced the contractors to pile them into the shape of our new house. Every morning, the city’s best ideas catch a ride in the paperguy’s car and have themselves tossed onto our lawn, but we know all we need to know already. Did the chicken invent the egg as a way of making more chicken, or the egg the chicken to make more eggs? Applied to us the question would mean, were we just a way to make the protein our kids will pass along? It makes our holidays seem a little desperate. The European conifers invented Christmas to move their pinecones to the dump. A piano eventually finds its way to a house where someone’s children learn to play and take it with them. And my keyboard has no fingers, only keys that can be strike—make that: backspace backspace backspace struck. So, what shall I type about you, my love? I helped her get where she was going? I dragged her down to my level? I know what you did for me. I once thought the meaning of life was the distance we travel together, but from here I know I was furniture that got itself hauled to the curb.
Copyright © 2006
Baby Talk
October 11, 2006 in 299 Words, Books, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Literature, Poetry, Short stories, Stories, Very Short Novels, Writing | Tags: Baby, Eye Contact, Girl, Possession, Revelation, Wisdom, Youth | by davidbdale | 6 comments
It has happened only rarely in his perfectly healthy life. He has reasonable relations with his spouse, his children, his parents, siblings, associates and friends. He’s honest with others, frank with himself, friendly. He has an easy way. Deep sustained unabashed eye contact is not at all the ordinary coin among people he knows and loves, and yet he finds himself locked in a prolonged reciprocal stare with a newborn who will not let him go. There can’t be anything to this, he reasons, from the baby’s point of view, but still he holds the gaze of his brittle little girl as if her childhood were at stake. She can’t have anything to share with her father of two hours and twelve minutes, he understands, and yet he’s terrified of all he hasn’t learned about devotion and dependence, and something tells him he’s about to get a lesson. So he holds the stare. She will not let him go. She possesses him completely, as she inhabits her squeaky skin. So new is she and so complete, so vividly her own fresh entity, that she’s on the verge of speech despite her youth, and what she has to tell her dad will stun him to a dreadful awareness of his own inauthenticity. For twenty years his nature has slipped away. He’s watched it go and suppressed what little was left. There are people from his past he wouldn’t like to see today, though he denies it, people he would disappoint, and he knows it. With slippery little lips, she has formed the first syllable of this message to her dear dad. When he blinks, she spares him. She keeps her peace. He escapes without revelation, and his daughter, out of generosity, takes baby’s first step toward a diminished human life.
Copyright ©1997
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