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Background Figures
November 16, 2006 in 299 Words, Books, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Literature, novels, Poetry, reading, Short stories, Stories, Very Short Novels, Writing | Tags: Art, Boss, Child, Convict, Dream, Museum, Work | by davidbdale | 7 comments
Artists dream, but not as we do. They live in the disassembled mosaic we escape to only in sleep. When they say: I had a dream, they might mean: the teapot told me or: I imagined. When we say: I’ve been dreaming about you, it’s because we’re too timid to say: My fantasy self penetrates and partially devours your fantasy self. Try it. Once should be enough. So I wonder: is this a dream I can share? I was at the office, right, but not the office? More like a gallery? And my boss was a painting? Not the whole painting, just one of the background figures you might not notice if you were listening to those headphones and the audio-guide told you to move along? Which I was? Because it was my boss’s voice over the headphones? And then I realized it was your voice? And that you were my boss? And learning that I tried to quit, but you said I hadn’t begun to do the job you had hired me to do so I couldn’t quit, because quitting implied that the job had failed me whereas it was me who had failed? That the job would have to quit me? So I cut you out of the painting and devoured you? And the guard had me arrested because you can misunderstand the paintings but you can’t eat them, but the judge didn’t want to convict me because his son hadn’t done his job either, the son’s job that is, but the jury was background people from other paintings, and they were unsympathetic because a lot of people had failed to notice them? So I’ve been sentenced to be in a painting where you’ll never find me? And all I want is for you to find me?
Copyright © November 16, 2006
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
Very Short Novels 
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