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Holes in the Sand
December 7, 2006 in 299 Words, Books, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Literature, novels, Poetry, reading, Short stories, Stories, Very Short Novels, Writing | Tags: Kill, Politics, Terror, War | by davidbdale | 14 comments
The brain has a fuse. After years of threat and terror, the fuse blows, leaving a scar behind, a charred little plug of once-animated tissue. It can turn a person mean. The bombs hover over our heads, almost within view. They cast their shadow over all our choices, smart bombs in search of a policy. From the rooftops, we make out, just beyond the harbor, smudges on the horizon, the ships that would deliver the missiles that would deliver us. Where we live, with our heads inside the cannon, the outlook is dark. Every year or so we hear the rumble of guns massing against us. When the international cameras arrive, the ambassador vaults the secretary-general and tramples the prime minister to be first to the podium to denounce us. Just before the elections (everyone else’s; we don’t believe in elections), surgical strikes cripple our ability to make spermicidal jelly. Meanwhile, the blockades turn back dangerous baby formula from our ports. There are more of us every year, and we’re sicker and tireder. Yes, we see the guns. We hear the planes in the no-fly zone. We thumb our noses at the guns. They move closer, they move away, they blast holes in the sand. Meanwhile another generation blows its fuse. Our children don’t know what it is to live without the threat of instant annihilation. On the other hand, they’re not tormented by nostalgia. There’s no going back for us. We would sooner give our wives what they really want than capitulate to the demands of the world. The world can take what we offer or it can kill us. We don’t divorce, and the threat of the big strike no longer means anything. You can kill us, you may have to, but you’d better kill us all.
Copyright © 1999
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 