AGENDA:
Morning Reflection:
EQ: What qualities of plot, character, and structure make these stories
strong examples of flash fiction? How do writers achieve compression
in short short stories (aka flash fiction)?
Please complete and turn in any missing work!
FLASH FICTION: 3 EXEMPLARS (MODELS)
Read Margaret Atwood's "My Life as a Bat"
http://www.sweetdave.com/moon_safari.htm.
Ron Carlson's "Bigfoot Stole My Wife"
Bigfoot Stole My Wife
By Ron Carlson
The problem is credibility.
The problem, as I'm finding
out over the last few weeks, is basic credibility. A lot of people look at me
and say, sure Rick, Bigfoot stole your wife. It makes me sad to see it, the
look of disbelief in each person's eye. Trudy's disappearance makes me sad,
too, and I'm sick in my heart about where she may be and how he's treating her,
what they do all day, if she's getting enough to eat. I believe he's beeing
good to her -- I mean I feel it -- and I'm going to keep hoping to see her
again, but it is my belief that I probably won't.
In the two and a half years
we were married, I often had the feeling that I would come home from the track
and something would be funny. Oh, she'd say things: One of these days I'm not
going to be here when you get home, things like that, things like everybody
says. How stupid of me not to see them as omens. When I'd get out of bed in the
early afternoon, I'd stand right here at this sink and I could see her working
in her garden in her cut-off Levis
and bikini top, weeding, planting, watering. I mean it was obvious. I was too
busy thinking about the races, weighing the odds, checking the jockey roster to
see what I now know: he was watching her too. He'd probably been watching her
all summer.
So, in a way it was my fault.
But what could I have done? Bigfoot steals your wife. I mean: even if you're
home, it's going to be a mess. He's big and not well trained.
When I came home it was about
eleven-thirty. The lights were on, which really wasn't anything new, but in the
ordinary mess of the place, there was a little difference, signs of a struggle.
There was a spilled Dr. Pepper on the counter and the fridge was open. But
there was something else, something that made me sick. The smell. The smell of
Bigfoot. It was hideous. It was . . . the guy is not clean.
Half of Trudy's clothes are
gone, not all of them, and there is no note. Well, I know what it is. It's just
about midnight there in the kitchen which smells like some part of hell. I
close the fridge door. It's the saddest thing I've ever done. There's a picture
of Trudy and me leaning against her Toyota
taped to the fridge door. It was taken last summer. There's Trudy in her bikini
top, her belly brown as a bean. She looks like a kid. She was a kid I guess,
twenty-six. The two times she went to the track with me everybody looked at me
like how'd I rate her. But she didn't really care for the races. She cared
about her garden and Chinese cooking and Buster, her collie, who I guess
Bigfoot stole too. Or ate. Buster isn't in the picture, he was nagging my
nephew Chuck who took the photo. Anyway I close the fridge door and it's like
part of my life closed. Bigfoot steals your wife and you're in for some
changes.
You come home from the track
having missed the Daily Double by a neck, and when you enter the home you are
paying for and in which you and your wife and your wife's collie live, and your
wife and her collie are gone as is some of her clothing, there is nothing to
believe. Bigfoot stole her. It's a fact. What should I do, ignore it? Chuck
came down and said something like well if Bigfoot stole her why'd he take the
Celica? Christ, what a cynic! Have you ever read anything about Bigfoot not
being able to drive? He'd be cramped in there, but I'm sure he could manage.
I don't really care if people
believe me or not. Would that change anything? Would that bring Trudy back
here? Pull the weeds in her garden?
As I think about it, no one
believes anything anymore. Give me one example of someone believing one thing.
No one believes me. I myself can't believe all the suspicion and cynicism there
is in today's world. Even at the races, some character next to me will poke
over at my tip sheet and ask me if I believe that stuff. If I believe? What is
there to believe? The horse's name? What he did the last time out? And I look
back at this guy, too cheap to go two bucks on the program, and I say: its
history. It is historical fact here. Believe. Huh. Here's a fact: I believe
everything.
Credibility.
When I was thirteen years
old, my mother's trailor was washed away in the flooding waters of the Harley River
and swept thirty-one miles, ending right side up and neary dead level just
outside Mercy, in fact in the old weed-eaten parking lot for the abandoned
potash plant. I know this to be true because I was inside the trailor the whole
time with my pal, Nuggy Reinecker, who found the experience more life-changing
than I did.
Now who's going to believe
this story? I mean, besides me, because I was there. People are going to say,
come on, thirty-one miles? Don't you mean thirty-one feet?
We had gone in out of the
rain after school to check out a magazine that belonged to my mother's
boyfriend. It was a copy of Dude, and there was a fold-out page I will never
forget of a girl lying on a beach on her back. It was a color photograph. The
girl was a little pale, I mean, this was probably her first day out in the sun,
and she had no clothing on. So it was good, but what made it great was that
they had made her a little bathing suit out of sand. Somebody had spilled a
little sand just right, here and there, and the sane was this incredible gold
color, and it made her look so absolutly naked you wanted to put your eyes out.
Nuggy and I knew there was
flood danger in Griggs; we'd had a flood every year almost and it had been
raining for five days on and off, but when the trailor bucked the first time,
we thought it was my mother come home to catch us in the dirty book. Nuggy
shoved the magazine under his bed and I ran out to check the door. It only took
me a second and I holldered back Hey no sweat, no one's here, but by the time
Ireturned to see what other poses they'd had this beautiful woman commit, Nuggy
already had his pants to his ankles and was involved in what we knew was a sin.
It if hadn't been the timing
of the first wave with this act of his, Nuggy might have gone on to live what
the rest of us call a normal life. But the Harley had crested and the head
wave, which they estimated to be three feet minimum, unmoored the trailer with
a push that knocked me over the sofa, and threw Nuggy, already entangled in his
trousers, clear across the bedroom.
I watched the village of Griggs as we sailed through. Some of the
village, the Exxon Station, part of it at least, and the carwash, which folded
up right away, tried to come along with us, and I saw the front of Painters'
Mercantile, the old porch and signboard, on and off all day.
You can believe this: it was
not a smooth ride. We'd rip along for ten seconds, dropping and growling over
rocks, and rumbling over tree stumps, and then wham! the front end of the
trailer would lodge against a rock or something that could stop it, and whoa!
we'd wheel around sharp as a carnival ride, worse really, because the furniture
would be thrown against the far side and us with it, sometimes we'd end up in a
chair and sometimes the chair would sit on us. My mother had about four
thousand knickknacks in five big box shelves, and they gave us trouble for the
first two or three miles, flying by like artillery, left, right, some small
glass snail hits you in the face, later in the back, but that stuff all finally
settled in the foot and then two feet of water which we took on.
We only slowed down once and
it was the worst. In the railroad flats I thought we had stopped and I let go
of the door I was hugging and tried to stand up and then swish, another rush
sent us right along. We rammed along all day it seemed, but when we finally
washed up in Mercy and the sheriff's cousin pulled open the door and got swept
back to his car by water and quite a few of those knickknacks, just over an
hour had passed. We had averaged, they figured later, about thirty-two miles an
hour, reaching speeds of up to fifty at Lime Falls
and the Willows. I was okay and walked out bruised and well washed, but when
the sheriff's cousin pulled Nuggy out, he looked genuinely hurt.
"For godsakes," I
remember the sheriff's cousin saying, "The damn flood knocked this boy's
pants off!" But Nuggy wasn't talking. In fact, he never hardly talked to
me again in the two years he stayed at Regional School.
I heard later, and I believe it, that he joined the monastery over in Malcolm County.
My mother, because she didn't
have the funds to haul our rig back to Griggs, worried for a while, but then
the mayor arranged to let us stay out where we were. So after my long ride in a
trailer down the flooded Harley River with my friend Nuggy Reinbecker, I grew
up in a parking lot outside of Mercy, and to tell you the truth, it wasn't too
bad, even though our trailer never did smell straight again.
Now you can believe all that.
People are always saying: don't believe everything you read, or everything you
hear. And I'm here to tell you. Believe it. Everything. Everything you read.
Everything you hear. Believe your eyes. Your ears. Believe the small hairs on the
back of your neck. Believe all of history, and all of the versions of history,
and all the predictions for the future. Believe every weather forecast. Believe
in God, the afterlife, unicorns, showers on Tuesday. Everything has happened.
Everything is possible.
I came home from the track to
find the cupboard bare. Trudy is not home. The place smells funny: hairy. It's
a fact and I know it as a fact: Bigfoot has been in my house.
Bigfoot stole my wife.
She's gone.
Believe it.
I gotta believe it.
Bruce Holland Rogers "Murder, Mystery"
http://flashfictiononline.com/author_bruce_holland_rogers.html
The Dead Boy at Your Window
This story is an illustration of a
fixed form as described in Bruce’s column for November 2008. It’s a little
long for flash — about 1,300 words — but it illustrates his points nicely and
it’s a multiple-award winner: the Bram Stoker in 1998 and the Pushcart Prize in
1999.
In a distant country where the towns
had improbable names, a woman looked upon the unmoving form of her newborn baby
and refused to see what the midwife saw. This was her son. She had brought him
forth in agony, and now he must suck. She pressed his lips to her breast.
“But he is dead!” said the midwife.
“No,” his mother lied. “I felt him
suck just now.” Her lie was as milk to the baby, who really was dead but who
now opened his dead eyes and began to kick his dead legs. “There, do you see?”
And she made the midwife call the father in to know his son.
The dead boy never did suck at his
mother’s breast. He sipped no water, never took food of any kind, so of course
he never grew. But his father, who was handy with all things mechanical, built
a rack for stretching him so that, year by year, he could be as tall as the
other children.
When he had seen six winters, his
parents sent him to school. Though he was as tall as the other students, the
dead boy was strange to look upon. His bald head was almost the right size, but
the rest of him was thin as a piece of leather and dry as a stick. He tried to
make up for his ugliness with diligence, and every night he was up late
practicing his letters and numbers.
His voice was like the rasping of
dry leaves. Because it was so hard to hear him, the teacher made all the other
students hold their breaths when he gave an answer. She called on him often,
and he was always right.
Naturally, the other children
despised him. The bullies sometimes waited for him after school, but beating
him, even with sticks, did him no harm. He wouldn’t even cry out.
One windy day, the bullies stole a
ball of twine from their teacher’s desk, and after school, they held the dead
boy on the ground with his arms out so that he took the shape of a cross. They
ran a stick in through his left shirt sleeve and out through the right. They
stretched his shirt tails down to his ankles, tied everything in place,
fastened the ball of twine to a buttonhole, and launched him. To their delight,
the dead boy made an excellent kite. It only added to their pleasure to see
that owing to the weight of his head, he flew upside down.
When they were bored with watching
the dead boy fly, they let go of the string. The dead boy did not drift back to
earth, as any ordinary kite would do. He glided. He could steer a little,
though he was mostly at the mercy of the winds. And he could not come down.
Indeed, the wind blew him higher and higher.
The sun set, and still the dead boy
rode the wind. The moon rose and by its glow he saw the fields and forests
drifting by. He saw mountain ranges pass beneath him, and oceans and
continents. At last the winds gentled, then ceased, and he glided down to the
ground in a strange country. The ground was bare. The moon and stars had
vanished from the sky. The air seemed gray and shrouded. The dead boy leaned to
one side and shook himself until the stick fell from his shirt. He wound up the
twine that had trailed behind him and waited for the sun to rise. Hour after
long hour, there was only the same grayness. So he began to wander.
He encountered a man who looked much
like himself, a bald head atop leathery limbs. “Where am I?” the dead boy
asked.
The man looked at the grayness all
around. “Where?” the man said. His voice, like the dead boy’s, sounded like the
whisper of dead leaves stirring.
A woman emerged from the grayness.
Her head was bald, too, and her body dried out. “This!” she rasped, touching
the dead boy’s shirt. “I remember this!” She tugged on the dead boy’s sleeve.
“I had a thing like this!”
“Clothes?” said the dead boy.
“Clothes!” the woman cried. “That’s
what it is called!”
More shriveled people came out of
the grayness. They crowded close to see the strange dead boy who wore clothes.
Now the dead boy knew where he was. “This is the land of the dead.”
“Why do you have clothes?” asked the
dead woman. “We came here with nothing! Why do you have clothes?”
“I have always been dead,” said the
dead boy, “but I spent six years among the living.”
“Six years!” said one of the dead.
“And you have only just now come to us?”
“Did you know my wife?” asked a dead
man. “Is she still among the living?”
“Give me news of my son!”
“What about my sister?”
The dead people crowded closer.
The dead boy said, “What is your
sister’s name?” But the dead could not remember the names of their loved ones.
They did not even remember their own names. Likewise, the names of the places
where they had lived, the numbers given to their years, the manners or fashions
of their times, all of these they had forgotten.
“Well,” said the dead boy, “in the
town where I was born, there was a widow. Maybe she was your wife. I knew a boy
whose mother had died, and an old woman who might have been your sister.”
“Are you going back?”
“Of course not,” said another dead
person. “No one ever goes back.”
“I think I might,” the dead boy
said. He explained about his flying. “When next the wind blows....”
“The wind never blows here,” said a
man so newly dead that he remembered wind.
“Then you could run with my string.”
“Would that work?”
“Take a message to my husband!” said
a dead woman.
“Tell my wife that I miss her!” said
a dead man.
“Let my sister know I haven’t
forgotten her!”
“Say to my lover that I love him
still!”
They gave him their messages, not
knowing whether or not their loved ones were themselves long dead. Indeed, dead
lovers might well be standing next to one another in the land of the dead, giving
messages for each other to the dead boy. Still, he memorized them all. Then the
dead put the stick back inside his shirt sleeves, tied everything in place, and
unwound his string. Running as fast as their leathery legs could manage, they
pulled the dead boy back into the sky, let go of the string, and watched with
their dead eyes as he glided away.
He glided a long time over the gray
stillness of death until at last a puff of wind blew him higher, until a breath
of wind took him higher still, until a gust of wind carried him up above the
grayness to where he could see the moon and the stars. Below he saw moonlight
reflected in the ocean. In the distance rose mountain peaks. The dead boy came
to earth in a little village. He knew no one here, but he went to the first
house he came to and rapped on the bedroom shutters. To the woman who answered,
he said, “A message from the land of the dead,” and gave her one of the
messages. The woman wept, and gave him a message in return.
House by house, he delivered the
messages. House by house, he collected messages for the dead. In the morning,
he found some boys to fly him, to give him back to the wind’s mercy so he could
carry these new messages back to the land of the dead.
So it has
been ever since. On any night, head full of messages, he may rap upon any
window to remind someone — to remind you, perhaps — of love that outlives
memory, of love that needs no names.
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