Trench Warfare

This Micro Fiction piece resulted from a prompt asking us to write for a solid twenty minutes. I took what bare vestiges of story I had from that, and expanded it in a prompt which asked for a scene with a single character.

Trench Warfare

It took Steven thirty years to realize that he wasn’t a brave man. He lived in Providence, Rhode Island, and owned a bakery, and every once in a while he found himself wondering if he possessed enough courage to ever matter. The night that he found out was the night he woke drenched in sweat, woke wide-eyed, woke alert yet filled with growing terror. It was the night when a brick was put through his window by a gang of teenagers. Steven didn’t know this, never would know who had done this. All he knew was the crash that snapped his eyes awake at three in the morning, his whole body quivering.

Steven quickly swung his legs over the edge of the bed, alone in his tiny bedroom, the door shut. He went no further. He sat there, straining to hear anything more, still not sure if the crash he had heard had been a dream, but knowing - on the same level that the terror rose from - that it had not been, that there might be someone going through his apartment at that very moment, touching everything in the dark, looking for things that belonged to Steven, things to take.

The power had gone out at some point. His digital alarm clicked blinked red at him. He frowned at it, rubbed his face. His hands came away slick, and he realized that he was drenched. Beads of salty sweat ran down his thin back and his long arms. They dripped off the ends of his fingers. His short beard was matted oddly. His skin didn’t feel real. The sweat and the fear he felt still welling up inside of him rooted him to the bed. His sheets clung to his bare skin.

Steven sat, and watched the door. He waited. He tried to tell himself to move, and couldn’t. He felt like a British soldier eighty years ago, squatting in a trench somewhere in Flanders, huddling in the cold mud, fingers shaking as they held a rifle, his ill-fitting boots filling up with water, waiting as the air began to brighten - to go from strange dark night to the grey haze of dawn – waiting for the whistle and the yelling voice which would tell him he must go scrambling over the top, shoving his fingers into the packed walls and nearly loosing his boots to the sucking squelch of the mud, coming out of the pit screaming, his rifle held before him, firing from the hip at nothing, into driving rain and the winking German machine guns, reaching for him with their countless whining arms.

There was no noise from the rest of his ground-floor apartment. Steven sat, his hands clenched on the bedspread. The sweat began to cool on his body, and Steven trembled, cold and scared. He stared at the door. He told himself to get up, to lock the bedroom door at least, if he was too scared to go out. He sat on the edge of the bed. His feet were cold against the cheap hardwood floor.

The trembling began to subside, but Steven didn’t move. Every muscle in his body felt sore. His back ached, and he rubbed at his eyes. He stared at the orange glow from the streetlight which came through the only window and covered the bedroom door. Get up, he told himself. Get up and go out there and fix this. It was the last thought he had before his eyes closed and he fell asleep, sitting on the edge of his bed, his head sagging forward into his bony chest.

It began to rain at seven in the morning. The April air was grey and Steven woke up to the sound of the rain beating against the walls. He looked up, confused, his brain fuzzy with sleep. He saw that the orange glow had disappeared from the door. Steven stood.

He swept up the waves of glass in his living room, a scarecrow in a stained white t-shirt and boxers. He wore thick brown leather loafers to keep the glass out of his feet. Steven swept, any sound he made drowned in the roar of the rain, wishing he had a hawk in his heart.

A Re-Imagining Of the End of Death of a Salesman

So here's a piece I had to put together for my script analysis final last semester. I feel absurd posting this, but I enjoyed the way it turned out. All apologies to Arthur Miller.

This re-imagining of the end of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman begins in the final pages of the original Act II. Biff’s first line, which opens the following text, is the original line. The breaking point from the original text is Willy’s “Nothing? My son, nothing?” This is in replacement of the original line “What’re you doing? What’re you doing? Why is he crying?” My re-imagining continues from there.

Biff: (At the peak of his fury) Pop, I’m nothing! I’m nothing, Pop. Can’t you understand that? There’s no spite in it any more. I’m just what I am, that’s all.

(Biff’s fury has spent itself, and he breaks down, sobbing, holding on to Willy, who dumbly fumbles for Biff’s face.)

Willy: (astonished) Nothing? My son, nothing?

Biff: (crying, broken) We’re nothing! It’s us, it’s all of us. We’re nothing. We’re broken.

(Willy puts his arms around Biff – they are both on their knees at the foot of their stairs. Biff has broken down, and Willy holds him, seemingly dumbfounded. A moment passes in shocked silence except for Biff sobbing.)

Happy: (Indignant, breaking the silence) No! I’m more than you. I’ve got promise! You might be nothing, but you’ll never keep me down. I won’t let you.

Biff: (Breaking away from Willy.) More than me? (He stands up, slowly.)

Happy: (Hesitant) Yeah, yeah that’s right. (Happy paces away briefly, avoiding looking at either Biff or Willy) I’m going to be the one who finishes what Pop started.

Biff: (staring him down, incredulous) Have you even been paying attention?

Happy: (defiant) I’m going to beat this racket. I’m gonna prove –

Biff: (cutting him off) Prove what? That you’re a big man? That you’ve got what it takes to be something? Good luck, big man! Good luck!

Happy: (Angry) I’m gonna prove that Pop was right!

Biff: Haven’t you listened to anything! He’s wrong! He’s always been wrong!

Happy: (On the brink) I won’t believe that!

Biff: Wake up, Happy! It’s been a lie! You’re a lie! What have you done that’ll be remembered? What part of you matters to anyone?

Happy: I matter more than you do! I’m somebody right now, I’m the assistant –

(Happy stops short. Everyone stares at him. Ben appears in the light just outside the kitchen.)

Biff: (quietly) Go on, big man. What are you the assistant of?

(Happy shouts, and jumps at Biff. The two wrestle, shouting, neither gaining an upper hand.

(Willy watches, dismay turning to disbelief and growing anger. Ben comes into the kitchen, stands next to Willy.)

Ben: It does take a great kind of man to crack the jungle.

Willy: (quietly) He cried. He cried to me. I made him cry.

Ben: A great kind of man…

(Willy comes to his feet with more surety than we have seen from him before. Biff and Willy are still wrestling.)

Willy: (thunderous) Stop this!

(Biff stops his struggle, trying to detach from Happy. Happy doesn’t – it seems like he wants to choke the life from Biff)

Willy: I said stop! Happy! Get off of him! (Lurches over to Happy, pulls him off of Biff) What do you think you’re doing? This is your brother! Your own!

Happy: (furious, crying) Don’t you see what he’s doing to you, Pop? He’s a failure, he’s worth nothing, and he’s just trying to throw it back on you!

Willy: No, no, Hap. (pauses, hesitating, everything drawn up inside of him)

Ben: A great kind of man, Willy.

Willy: He’s right. He’s right, he’s right – I’m the failure, I’m the wreck. My boy, my son, I’ve lead you so wrong.

Happy: (Confused) Pop?

(Willy collapses into the kitchen chair next to him. The rubber hose is lying in his eyesight. He picks it up.)

Willy: I was so sure that I could do it, so sure. Twenty thousand, paid in full for Biff – his inheritance.

Biff: (Shocked in sudden realization) Willy, why?

Willy: So sure. But every time, I stopped myself, couldn’t push myself, couldn’t do it – (looks at Biff) You were going to be magnificent.

Biff: I’ve never been magnificent, boss. Not once.

Willy: You’re my son. I’m supposed to give you a chance. You’re supposed to make it where I couldn’t.

Biff: And I need more than this. I’m not made to be a salesman’s son, Willy. I’m what you’ve made me, fighting with what I really am. We’ve had the wrong dreams, Willy. You had the wrong dream. That’s what I know. I’m going to try where you couldn’t, Willy. I’m going to try and be me, in every way you never could. The door to my life closed a long time ago, and you’re the one who slammed it shut. I’m just groping in the dark now. That’s what I know.

Ben: (from behind Biff, to Willy) The jungle is dark, but full of diamonds. (Puts his hand on Biff’s shoulder) And it does take a great kind of man to crack the jungle.

(Ben’s music plays, and he leaves the house, whistling.)

Happy: (to Willy) You goddamned coward. You were going to do that to mom, to me? For him? I can’t believe you.

Biff: I think that’s the first completely honest thing you’ve said in years.

Happy: And you. You’re just leaving, again, then? Leaving him like this, for nothing.

Biff: I’m leaving for me. Because there’s nothing here. Why don’t you come with me, Happy?

Happy: (shaking his head) Hell with that. I won’t be licked that easily. I’m staying right in this city, and I’m gonna beat this racket. Like you should have.

Biff: I know who I am, big man.

Happy: (Ready to storm out the door) I’m gonna show you and everybody else that Willy Loman’s dream is the only one you can have. The only one that’ll get you anywhere – to come out number-one man. (Exits out the front door. Silence falls.)

Linda: He’ll come back.

Biff: Oh yeah, he’ll come back. He’ll be back when his resolve breaks, or when that game breaks him. Or he won’t.

Willy: Son?

Biff: (Moving to him) What is it, boss?

Willy: I feel so tired.

Linda: Alright, Willy. Come to bed.

(She takes him by the arm, and leads him to the stairs and up, offstage. Biff helps until they reach the stairs. He stands at the bottom of the stairs, staring out the window at the sky. Biff goes up the stairs to the bedroom that used to be his. Puts on his jacket solemnly, picks up a duffle bag. He looks around the room, tucks Happy’s bedsheet in, making the bed neat. He walks downstairs, leaving. The flute plays, Willy’s theme, escorting his son out into the night.)

Requiem

(We see Biff front stage, working. We get the impression that he is working in a stable, maybe lifting hay or brushing down a horse. He looks healthier. He stands straighter, his shoulders not so slumped and heavy. He whistles Willy’s flute theme. Behind him, Happy enters, his bearing crushed. He looks defeated, he looks exhausted. Happy watches Biff working, not saying a word. Biff finished his chore and stands up, turning around. He sees Happy, and smiles.)

Biff: Happy.

Happy: Heya, Biff. Your boss said you’d be out here.

(There is a pause, both wanting to say something)

Biff: Three years, and here you are.

Happy: (frankly) I’m so tired of baring my teeth when I smile. (He stops, not wanting to say it.) Biff, I had to come tell you, I had to –

Biff: (nodding) Willy?

Happy: (Bowing his head.) He was tired. Mom said he just, went to sleep one night, and when she woke up in the morning, he was smiling, cold. He’s, the boss is dead, Biff.

Biff (moves to Happy, putting a steady hand on his shoulder.) He was a broken man, Happy, for so long. We all were. (Happy looks up at him) Now, now we are something else.

Happy (confused) What are we now, Biff?

Biff (smiling gently) We’re his sons, that hasn’t changed. But now we’re free. We’re free.

CURTAIN

A Plaid Scarf

Another of the 500 word exercises. Interpreted liberally, this is the result of a prompt which asked for a story written about the first thing you see upon opening a random book.

A Plaid Scarf

When I met April, we were drunk. She offered me a cigarette, and we smoked together on the back porch of a friend of mine from college. She told me she was a poet. I told her I’d read a poem once.

It was a cold September night. In between drags, our breath hung in the air. April was draped in grey and white – her dress colored the shadows around her lighter. A green and black plaid scarf was wrapped around her. It swallowed her hair.

The metallic taste of cheap beer cementing itself into the back of my throat, I listened to her talk.

“We’re all looking for the countries we wish we were from,” she said.

“The problem is that no one has any understanding for anyone. We’re devoid of empathy.” Her mantra spun out into the air around us, hanging as heavy as our smoke. I watched the way her throat moved when she talked, how she cupped her hand around her cigarette, the way she exhaled smoke out of the far corner of her mouth. Her eyes, dark with practice, stuck on mine.

“We’re all following our own paths,” I said. “Conflict is inherent. You can’t avoid that.”

April grinned her way through a grimace.

“That’s what should be changed,” she said.

Two months later I stood in the doorway to the kitchen, watching her dance to nineties songs in the living room of the apartment we’d made ours. I grinned at the way she moved. Even when being ridiculous, she was a breeze made flesh.

When I started conversations, it was with an idea for the future. She started conversations with ideas for that moment. She wrote late into the night. I would pretend to be asleep, listening to the staccato flash of her typing. We spent weekend mornings naked, drinking coffee in bed. It was always cold, and I would trace with light fingertips the goose bumps prickling her arms and shoulders.

April danced, and I watched.

She told me when it was over, of course. All of her dissatisfaction built up and spilled over, she said.

I can’t be contained, she said.

I can’t be held here, she said.

I can’t just be kept, she said.

“I’m like a butterfly, and you’re trying to pin my wings down,” she said.

I laughed in her face after that one. She said a lot of things, and I didn’t have much to say.

When I woke up the next morning, the apartment was quiet. It was a Saturday morning. I walked into the living room, naked. I stood in front of the one window and looked at all of the other buildings. They looked dusty in the grey morning light.

April had only left one thing. The green and black plaid scarf lay on my desk. It was draped over a stack of bills and notes. I lifted it, reverent, and pressed it to my face. I inhaled. It smelled like women’s shampoo and cigarettes.

An Aggravatingly Vague Micro Fiction Exercise

So this is a 500-word story which was produced out of the prompt to "write something you've always wanted to write, have planned to write about, or utterly failed at writing." Surprisingly, with that broad of a scope, I put together a story I'm pretty proud of. Tell me what you think.

180 Links

When my father left to sit under the ocean for six months, my mother made a paper chain. Each link, she said, represented one day that he was gone. She hung the chain in the kitchen. It draped from hooks along the tops of the walls, stretching around the room twice, a kaleidoscope of pink and orange and white. Every night, before she put my sister and me to bed, my mother cut off one link. One less day, she would tell me, and then fold the piece of construction paper neatly. She kept all of them in a manila folder.

When there were twenty links gone, we got a picture from him, and a letter. The letter was for my mother, the picture for us. In it, my father stood in uniform, standing with two other men. All of them were grinning at the camera. He was growing a moustache. The night that we clipped off the fifty-ninth link, my sister accidentally ripped off a corner of the picture. My mother looked at it, holding the orange piece of paper. She didn’t say anything.

We broke the ninetieth link on a Saturday night; we celebrated with a trip to the movies and McDonald’s food. That night, I fell asleep to the sound of my mother crying to herself in the kitchen.

I got into a fight with another boy when there were fifty-five links left. He had laughed at me for putting my father’s picture in my back pocket and looking at it on the playground during recess. The boy tried to pull the picture out of my hands. He looked surprised, for some reason, when I punched him in the mouth.

When there were twenty links left, my father called us. He was in Japan, he said. The food was strange, and the city beautiful. He told us he missed us very much. He said some other things, but they were buried in static. His voice sounded strange, an echo down a long pipe.

My father’s submarine pulled back into port in Groton on July 10th. My grandparents and my aunt came to Connecticut to welcome my father back. Our family was there to meet the ship three hours early. We stood out on the pier in the summer heat, watching the river for the tugboats guiding my father’s ship down the river. Throngs of people waited in the parking lot and by the entrance to the pier. We all baked on the concrete, grinning.

They let the enlisted men off first, my mother said. My father was an officer, we’d have to wait just a bit longer.

I remember looking up at the submarine’s periscopes when she said that - the white spires jutting abruptly out of the huge black conning tower. One of them moved, scanning back and forth. I wondered if my father was controlling it – if he was watching us, smiling at the sight of our faces until it was his turn to leave.

Wear in Your Shoes, or, A Mantra for A Winter Day, or, A January Dream

Wear down pens.
Run out of ink.
Smash coffee cups in frustration, ceramic
shattering in a wave over cheap hardwood.
Tear holes in shirts –
in shoes.
Leave burn marks on jeans, on countertops,
on your body.
Bite.
Scrape.
Break the cracked winter ski of dry hands,
crush the shape of a pen into them.
Breathe,
and smoke.
Blink in the wind
and wipe away sudden tears.
Pick up brown dead leaves and crunch them to dust
to smell the last bit of September.
Tie your shoes the wrong way, forever.
Write in dusk, gathering dawn –
Write drunk.
Drink, and smile.
Drink, and regret it.
Breathe hope in with the sharp air of another January.
Wait, and worry, and be selfless for a friend who will need you,
because one day you’ll need her shoulders
to heft your own load.
Lie, and hate it.
Lie and say that you don’t.
Lie, and say that you don’t lie.
Decide to stop lying.
Worry that you won’t keep that promise.
Keep every promise, because you don’t make them often, and
they are only for the ones you love.
Love, always.
Love carefully.
Love honestly.
Smile, because you love.
Smile and drink coffee.
Smile at every sunset and dawn.
Smile, and read good books.
Read worse poetry.
Smile when you’re walking down the sidewalks of your city,
wearing in your shoes.

How to Dismantle a Library

How to Dismantle a Library

First, spend two years working as a library page. It’s an easy job, but hate it anyway. Hate being the only male employee, the only one who is still fifty years away from retirement. Hate how the library smells like them, like cracked, wrinkled skin, and perfume which is supposed to smell like strawberries and doesn’t and the way you suppose a shadow smells. Take your breaks outside, just to smell something else. Even if it’s raining. Know in your gut that anything is better than the smell of all that paper and dust and dying.
Work for two years, and get fed up. Put in your two weeks notice, and then go to work for real.
Right beneath their noses, swap everything. Reverse the alphabet. Make the Dewey Decimal system count from 0 to 499.99 and then reverse. Hide 500-600 in the Children’s section. 900 should end up next to Q. Put the travel books in backwards, except for the third world countries. Do all of this while you aren’t on the clock. Sacrifice free time. This is special.
Take a screencap of every computer’s desktop. Hide all of the program shortcuts. The set the picture as the background. Watch ancient women click relentlessly at nothing, and re-boot twenty times in a row. Enjoy your revenge. Don’t feel bad about it, when you leave. They never pay you even minimum wage, anyway.

Inheritance

Inheritance

In Finland, they don’t use the flag like we do in America. They don’t fly from front porches every morning. You’ll never see little plastic Finnish flags flying from toothpicks taped to a convenience store register. The Finnish National Flag only flies in all of its glory from the front of state buildings on national holidays.
My mother learned all of this when she spent her junior year abroad in Finland. I can see her perfectly, drunk on vodka, bored, wandering around through grey ice streets and searing her lungs with a cigarette, listening to her friend Anna prattle on. I can see them stopping to look, two girls in shapeless black pea coats, watching that flag hang limp, stark blue and white against the darkening grey infinity sky. I can see her drop the butt into dirty snow, reaching for another, saying, “I want that.”
Deciding. Ignoring Anna’s annoying yammering, walking straight for the flag pole, not looking around – because if you look like you don’t belong, you don’t – stripping off her thick gloves, coffin nail hanging forgotten on her lips, taking down this flag. Only, it’s bigger than she realized, and as it drops, it billows out, wrapping around her and Anna, cracking in the sudden wind. The latch sticks, and for a moment my mother is afraid, but she folds the flag carefully, reverent in the cold, her head wreathed in smoke. She shoves the flag under her coat, and walks away with her trophy, to hang it on a wall, and then put it away in a trunk, where one day I will find it, and after that, I’ll pass it on to my son. Maybe I’ll tell him the story.

A Warm Day in November

A Warm Day in November

Matthew rinsed his hands under the sink. He was thirty-two. He was washing away the blood that kept welling up from the long shallow cut which snaked across the back of his left hand. He was rinsing with soap, rubbing his hands dry. These were the things he could think about.

* * * * *

Before that, Matthew watched as trails of red ran down the back of his hand, each one never moving the same way as the last. They all fell onto the steering wheel. The car’s heat was on full blast, and Matthew’s windshield was beginning to fog over.

* * * * *

Before that, Matthew stood in the silence of New England winter trees. He opened a box of chocolate chip cookies, and dumped them out. The showered onto the ground, dirt brown. Matthew leaned down to touch one, and his hand brushed the tip of a thorn sprouting from a vine which had somehow managed to survive the frost. A thin, curving line opened on the back of his hand.

* * * * *

Before that, Matthew drove away from the church. The parking lot was filled and cars spilled onto the grass. Matthew’s car was the only thing moving. A box full of cookies sat on the seat next to him.

* * * * *

Before that, Matthew stood in the lobby of the church. He looked through a window. The room was full of dark suits. A group of high school boys were singing, Swing Low, Sweet Chariot. They were crying. Matthew clutched a box in his arms.

* * * * *

Before that, Matthew dressed himself in a dark blue shirt and black pants. He had no tie to wear, and this embarrassed him. He walked downstairs, his steps measured. His grey haired mother asked him to drop a box off for the wake.

* * * * *

Before that, Matthew held Samantha in his arms as she cried. It was three in the morning. They were the only ones in the hospital waiting room. It smelled like pine-sol and cheap carpeting. There was nothing he could say.

* * * * *

Before that, Matthew sat in a chair that was too small for him. Out the small window to his left, he could see the lights of Chicago falling away past the blinking red wing-light.

* * * * *

Before that, Matthew called his mother. He said things like, it will be ok. I love you. I know. I’m coming home.

* * * * *

Before that, Matthew answered the phone, and a friend from high school said things like, Samantha’s son was hit by a school bus today. An accident. A tragedy. He said things like, the funeral is Saturday. She needs you again.

* * * * *

Before that, Matthew sat in his apartment, trying to write a poem. He thought he was trying to write about winter in Chicago, but it was about loneliness.

* * * * *

Before that, a boy named George walked out of his front door. He was fifteen, and his mother always said he looked like one of her old friends. About how handsome he was. He decided he was going to ride his bike to school. It wasn’t far, and it was a strangely warm day for November in Connecticut.

Heritage

Heritage


The way she told it, you only had five minutes to eat your meals in Officers Candidate School. This was just one more way for the Navy to make you into the person they needed. The way she told it, you had to shovel in your food as fast as possible. Growing up a Navy brat, she was used to ridiculous things. Rebecca took it as a challenge, and never failed. Even when the young man sitting next to her started choking on a piece of iceberg lettuce, she stopped only to say to the sergeant, “Excuse me, but this boy is choking.” You had to eat, she told me. Still, she was the only one to say anything.
Later, he came and found her. His name was Glen, he said – and with all of the solid confidence he would instill in me, he asked if the next time they were off duty, he could take her out for a drink. You take care of the ones who save your life, Glen told her.
They eloped in Newport, Rhode Island – Rebecca didn’t tell anyone, Glen had no one to tell. After they were married in August with the sea at their backs, the Navy did its best to punish them for it. My mother withdrew. The way she told it, she’d found the stability she’d been looking for. My father stayed, standing both of their full-kit punishment watches. I can see him there, alone on the edge of a chain-link fence at three in the morning, somewhere in the middle of two consecutive six hour watches, holding both of them up with ease.