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New World Order
November 13, 2006 in 299 Words, Books, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Literature, novels, Poetry, Short stories, Stories, Very Short Novels, Writing | Tags: Business, Child, Father, Office, Son, Work | by davidbdale | 4 comments
I took my son to work today and they gave him my job. He looked so executive-ready in his Rocky and Bullwinkle tie, so stakeholder-inspiring, so regional vice-presidential, in fact, that he apparently defined a paradigm shift in leaderliness. As for me, I’ve been remaindered for sixty days to transition him, at partial pay, beneath a crap-colored parachute. From the first day of his pregnancy (yes she called it his pregnancy, not hers) his mother coddled him. Survival of the Fittest does not apply in the New World Order, she told me, so now he’s fit for nothing at all, but I’m the odd man out. He’s nine! What does he know about differentiating brand attributes? Nothing, the bosses tell me, but brands are passe. Concentrate his training instead on making him less derivative, by which they mean: Less. Like. Me. He sees me as one of those cavemen in the diorama at the Museum of Natural History, where, by the way, he peed his pants riding my shoulders and I changed him and bought him an ice cream cone and a second when he dropped it and he looked at me with admiration. I would kill the District Vice President of Corporate Indiscretion to see that look again, but he’s had no use for me since Bring Your Child To Work Day, when he shook the hand of the Chairman of the Board, who cannot remember my name, and cast his indifferent gaze on office items of fleeting interest and asked the Chairman, in a voice as cool as water, How much do you make? while simultaneously, with the back of his free hand, fondling the curvy bottom of the woman who will be his right-hand man. I was lying. I never changed his pants, or anything else.
Copyright © 1999
The Childhood He Never Had
November 8, 2006 in 299 Words, Books, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Literature, novels, Poetry, Short stories, Stories, Very Short Novels, Writing | Tags: Abuse, Child, Childhood, Forgive, Memory, Regret, Son, Therapy | by davidbdale | 3 comments
At 26, with the assistance of a team of highly-motivated psychological facilitators spending down a healthy post-doctoral research grant, he began to retrieve repressed memories of abuse he had suffered as a five-year-old child. In truth, his age at the time of the abominations is a conjecture, derived from a guess at the height from which he recalls having cowered before his tormentors. Any detailing of the boy’s humiliations would be prurient beyond the scope of our purposes here and likely would violate the rights of his publisher, but on the basis of just one batch of unsubstantiated accusations, which the team felt obligated to report to authorities, the boy’s parents were investigated, ostracized by family and lifelong friends, driven from their jobs, home and neighborhood. Their son’s retrieved memories were vivid, compelling, utterly incontrovertible. Regrettably, we can say no more about them here than that they featured a basement location, both parents, masked or hooded strangers with sharp objects, and a donkey or a drawing of a donkey. A second, more resourceful team of therapists helped resolve these memories to closely coincide with the actual layout of the split-level home of the boy’s childhood. To no avail did the parents insist they never had a basement. The “subterranean” abominations are now understood to have been suffered in the rumpus room with its below-ground aspect. Though he has not returned home since commencing his therapy, the son professes a willingness to forgive or at least indulge the hubris that compels even the most unfit parents to reproduce. A book-length memoir of his earliest memories, which also details the love affair that blossomed, bloomed, attracted pests and ultimately withered between the young man and the therapist who championed his cause, will appear in bookstores in time for the gift-buying season.
Copyright © 1999
Very Short Novels 
This is a close relative of a Very Short Novel titled Short for Family from 20 years ago. The revisions…