She holds her smoke. She’s swallowed the sun. Tendrils drift blue from her nose, a curtain obscuring the year. Cars weave through the lot. She stands among leaves, refusing to flinch at the sound of tires rolling over gravel like fragile bones. Her resistance radiates through the trees’ bare branches and out to space with the smoke from her lungs as the light between her fingers fades. She flicks the butt to the sidewalk, a comet to inspire the prophesies and curses of the ants. She runs her hands through her long and tired hair, pushes open the door surprising herself by humming snatches of a tune she thought she’d forgotten. The ants gather to celebrate this thing, this fire, they believe is theirs.

—

Prose poem or flash fiction? Who knows. This is based on this old post from 2009.

I still remember the day my grandpa took me to the zoo to see all the animals. We started in the aviary. He opened drawer after drawer, pulling withered birds from thin glass formaldehyde-filled tombs. I stared in wonder at their soggy bodies and imagined them flying through the air singing their forgotten songs while he read the tags attached to their legs by thin pieces of wire.

Aren’t they beautiful, he whispered, holding them out for me to admire one-by-one. Here in his wizened old hands were the passenger pigeon, the Carolina parakeet, the dusky seaside sparrow, the Bachman’s warbler, the Eskimo curlew, the great auk, the Labrador duck, the ivory-billed woodpecker. He told me how someday their DNA would be used to bring them back, but he didn’t believe it any more than I did; it was only rote justification recited like a verbal ghost dance, a spell to ward away despair.

In another drawer, he showed me the tufted titmouse, northern cardinal, turkey vulture, house sparrow and common grackle. I marveled at the play of light in the grackle’s iridescent feathers, moving my head back-and-forth to find the place where purple became black, all the while wondering at the beauty the thing must have once possessed. I’m sorry, Grandpa said over and over again, looking away from dead eyes and knowing that these birds would only ever fly again in the memories of his generation, a generation soon to be consigned to its own silent aviaries.

I’m sorry, he kept repeating as his shaky hands placed the bird back with the rest of its flock. I’m so sorry. I couldn’t bear to see him this way so I just asked him if we could go see the tigers and bears next. Maybe get a hot dog.

After days on the road, Robbie ran out of numbers for counting road signs and clouds, which was fine since he’d already counted all of them anyway. He switched to counting things that weren’t there and ticked imaginary numbers off in his head whenever he didn’t see something.

He thought he didn’t see a motorcycle but the absence was only a mirage, he realized when a black-clad biker gang rumbled past, stirring the desert to thunderous life before returning to the kind of silence that inspired Robby to consider counting things he didn’t hear as well as things unseen.

He thought he didn’t hear a coyote, so he eased his pickup off the highway to make sure the animal wasn’t there before adding it to his tally. Robby was scrupulously honest with himself about all things and wanted to ensure the accuracy of his count especially since the coyote, if it wasn’t there, would be the 500i^th item on his list.

When he stepped out of his truck, the wind tore at his hair and clawed his jacket. He looked around trying to see if there was nothing there to count, but the desert, much to Robby’s disappointment, was full of things and besides he wanted that coyote to be the 500i^th thing that wasn’t there. Nearly i⁰ hours from the road, he didn’t see the coyote, which wasn’t sitting in a three-legged chair. He resisted the urge to count the chair’s missing leg.

He approached iCoyote slowly and knelt before his absence, staring up at the thin clouds in the sky where iCoyote’s head would have been.

“I thought I’d be able to see you,” Robbie whispered, his voice nearly lost in the wind as he added iCoyote to his tally.

“Divide out the i’s,” iCoyote didn’t say.

Robbie thought back to half-remembered math classes, wondered if i worked like a variable, could be solved like x. “I’d have to do that to both sides of the equation, wouldn’t I?” Robby asked and noticed that he’d lifted his hands like an equal sign between them. “To balance it out, right?”

iCoyote didn’t say, “You’ll get your proof.”

Robbie divided out the i and saw the coyote grinning at him from the chair. The coyote hopped down, walked through Robbie as if he were a mere fraction reduced to the lowest terms of what he had been, and trotted off in the direction of Robbie’s truck.

Robbie looked around and saw all the things that weren’t there. He subtracted frantically, his list cratering before his open eyes. In the distance, he didn’t hear his engine start and he didn’t hear it drive down the highway without him.

—

This is a response to Read Write Poem prompt #111, a picture of a guy kneeling in front of an empty three-legged chair. It’s a remarkable photo.

I never know what to label stuff like this. Short story? Flash fiction? Prose poem? Prose poem feels right since that’s the intention I started with.

I have no idea if I got the math right. As with Robbie, my math classes were a long time ago.

Be sure to read what others did with this prompt.

My short prose piece “The Man Who Spoke the Law” is up over at qarrtsiluni. It’s part of the “Words of Power” issue, which is running through December. There’s lots of great stuff over there so check it out.

It’s hot here.
I don’t mind.

Was it in Memphis?
Hot?

No. You know. Where it happened.
Not Memphis. No.

Where? If you don’t mind.
Tucumcari.

Tucumcari?
Yes.

You thought it would be somewhere else,
but things can happen anywhere.

You left there and came here?
Pretty much.

Is it true you won the lottery?
Just a scratch-off.

But you did win.
It was cursed.

Don’t laugh at me.

Sorry. Cursed how?
I see people as they really are. Their true faces.

What do you see when you look at me?

What?

Please.
Is that really what you want?
You’ll understand what… happened…
better than you might really want to.

Tell me.
Can I tell you a secret first?

—

This was inspired by the latest image prompt at Read Write Poem (prompt #81). To see the photo (“XX” by nwolc), which is really cool, follow the link to the prompt or go straight to its Flickr page.

When I was teaching at a junior high, I once had a kid ask, “What does e=mc² mean?” Clearly, whatever point of sentence construction I was elaborating on wasn’t sinking in with this kid.

“Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared,” I said as I underlined a predicate.

He squinted his eyes a bit, probably wondering whether or not he could trust an English teacher on this, but then nodded and jotted something down in his notebook. He looked up again. “Okay, what’s the speed of light?”

I stopped and looked at him. “186,000 miles per second.”

He nodded and scribbled the equation in his spiral, his number two pencil working madly. “Whoooaa,” he said, looking up.

“What?”

“That’s a lot of energy. Even if the mass is just 1.”

I nodded. “Yes, it is.”

He stared at his notebook, trying to make sense of the enormity of those numbers. “I mean, you could probably blow up a whole city with that kind of energy, right?”

I think the next few sentences we analyzed were about nuclear bombs.

A few months ago, my wife and I were on our way to a party her company was hosting at a downtown club. We had had dinner and had some time to kill so we stopped for a pint at Bull McCabe’s on Red River. We sat at a rickety table on the porch, enjoying the springtime weather and watched people walk up and down the street, drifting from club to club.

The homeless shelter is right around the corner so along with music lovers, there tends to be an abundance of homeless people mingling about the area, often indistinguishable from the music fans until they ask for a handout.

One guy, probably in his mid-thirties, came shuffling onto the porch. He wore a few extra sweaters under a grimy red coat out of which a white cable grew like a vine that terminated in his ears. I wondered if he actually had an ipod under there somewhere.

“Hey,” he said, walking up to our table. “You got any cash?”

My wife and I shook our heads. “Sorry, no.”

He stared at our beers and looked back at us. “What about them?”

I shrugged. “No cash.”

“Can you charge me a beer then?”

“No.”

“Aw, come on, man, you can just get me a beer. I won’t bother you. You can afford another one.”

I didn’t say, yes, I could afford more, and had he asked, I might have bought him a burger, but he just stared at us, clearly annoyed, small muscles ticking beneath his face. “What do you do for a living?” he asked, his voice challenging, likely trying to prove to us that we made enough to buy him a beer.

“I’m a teacher,” I said.

His body language changed with that last word. He relaxed, making me realize for the first time just how wound up and intense he was under all those used-up old clothes. He took a polite step back. “Aw, man, I’m sorry. I won’t bother you. You have a good night. You’re good people.”

He backed out of the bar and smiled at us again as he shuffled down the street, leaving us to wonder what teacher he had had that made such an impression on him that he refused to bother a teacher. I also wondered what would have happened had I been an investment banker.

I’ve heard it repeated quite a bit that we typically remember about 5% of what we hear, which if true really brings home the futility of lecturing to kids.

Then I think back to my first year of teaching. Seventh grade English.

It was after Thanksgiving, because it was after the point in the year when they tell first year teachers that it’s okay to smile. One of my kids was griping about the weight of his textbooks. The giant lit book, the mighty math tome, the science stack, the gargantuan grammar stone. With hunched shoulders and a lifetime of back pain ahead of him, he groaned, “They should outlaw big heavy books.”

I shook my head and told him that big heavy books can be pretty useful. I took his lit book and hefted it as if testing the balance of a sword, feeling its weight in my hand. The class stared at me skeptically and I smiled as I stared at the book. “Let me tell you a story,” I said…

When I was about your age we lived in Italy in a big old house with marble stairs. One night I heard commotion downstairs and crept to the top of the staircase to see what was up. I could hear my parents yelling and a bunch of banging around. Then my mom, hollered up the stairs, ‘We’re being robbed!’

I had no idea what to do, but it wasn’t long before my parents laughed and things settled down. Here’s what happened.

My dad had gone down to get a snack and he saw a man in the house. The man had my mom’s purse or maybe the computer or something and he stared at my dad and my dad stared back at him. Then, my dad reached for the nearest object he could find… a cookbook… and he chunked it at the robber.

At this point I threw the lit book at the wall as hard as I could. It hit with a crack that woke up all the kids who weren’t paying attention.

Then he grabbed another and another and he and my mom threw cookbooks and dictionaries at him until he ran out of the house.

The kids loved the story. Maybe it’s something about the appeal to middle school kids of objects that shouldn’t be thrown flying through the air, but it made them laugh, and the books, now that their potential as weapons had been realized, didn’t seem quite so heavy.

Years later, I taught at a high school in the same district. I had many of those same kids in my 11th grade English class. The first day of school, after reviewing the syllabus and talking about expectations, I asked if there were any questions.

A hand went up.

“Yes,” I asked.

The girl grinned. “Mr. B, will you tell us the story about how your parents chased the robber out of your house by throwing books at him.”

The kids who had been in that class perked up and nodded assent. One boy asked, “And will you throw a book?”

Fortunately, I was to find out that that wasn’t all they learned back in 7th grade, but I realized then that when we tell stories, the people we’re talking to will remember a whole lot more than 5% of what we say.

I realize it’s been nearly a year since I posted one of my old short stories. Strangely, “This Thing of Darkness” is one of the first I ever posted, back during an older incarnation of this site. It was originally published on a now-defunct online literary journal called TheSoundOfWhat?

I wrote it in 1997 when I was living in south Austin, and it’s a south Austin kind of tale about bad neighbors, roommates and a giant mushroom.

Like many stories, “This Thing of Darkness” contains elements that are based on my own experiences. In this case, the more fantastic elements are the ones I didn’t make up. Everything about the fungus is true.

You can find “This Thing of Darkness”on the Sories & Poems page or link directly from here.

He could not so much see the fish as he knew they were there, surrounding him by the millions. He could not touch them, yet he knew they were as real as the sun behind them. As he fell deeper, the fish began to disappear and he saw stranger and more unsettling things that he could recall no more once they faded from his sight.

He knew he was an intruder in a place he did not belong. So long as no one found out and he was careful, he knew he would make it back to the other side, but for now he was gone. Missing in action and high in love with the nuances of every strange new sensation that gripped him.

Sticking to the dive plan was impossible. He couldn’t remember it anyway. Who knows where a moment will take one in a time of free-fall, when the body and mind wonder at a separate pace, abstractions real and reality a distraction. The only thing that mattered was resurfacing correctly when the time came. Come up slow, he remembered the dive master saying.

His mind raced sluggishly along the bottom. He watched as the blurry tornado of tropical fish was replaced by one of raw motion swimming to and fro in distinct packets for which he could find no name.

When he looked up through the clear water he saw every star ever recorded shimmering above the watery ceiling, and he alone beneath them. He released more air, negating his bouancy, and dropped again ever farther into the unfathomable deep, searching for the bottom.

It amazed him how much there was to see, how much he had not known.