All in Fiction
A dead bear was sprawled on the floor between the sofa and the fireplace. Standing outside in the garden, Philip could see it through the sliding glass doors. He wondered whether the bear was dead or quietly sleeping, stretched out drunkenly, with one of its paws draped over an ottoman.
Mom took off on Fridays. Left behind twenty bucks, enough white bread, ham and cheese, and chips to last the weekend. Sometimes she left enough money to buy a new game for the Nintendo.
Mark started his day with exactly what he hadn’t been hoping to start with. For the past ten months most of his mornings had started his way, with medication, a newspaper, breakfast, and two avian voices that he was equally fond and sick of hearing, because they had always given him the same excuses and reasons for coming back without the letters. He had started the mail service with these birds years ago, but age hadn’t served them well and they came home day after day with complaints or letters they forgot to actually leave at the door.
The executive headquarters of Deities Limited, as far as science goes, doesn’t exist. It has no discernible mass or energy and doesn’t interact with anything, so, to our less-than-perfect powers of observation, it’s not there. At least, not in any “there” we can perceive. The only way to imagine it, even though its physical nature is nothing like this, is to picture a quadrillion-story office building.
Linda always got the aisle seat. She liked having easy access to the bathroom and to the flight attendants.
Frank always took the window seat. He liked not talking to anyone and watching the world go on below as if he weren’t a part of it.
Herbert and Marilyn walked into the newest diner in town, The Brown Bag. A yellow GRAND OPENING banner hung the length of the wall behind the hostess stand and a greasy smell of overdone French fries lingered in the air. Herbert trudged to the front and put his name on the list. The hostess said it would be a few minutes. He headed back to the door and plopped down on a bench next to Marilyn.
Upstairs in late afternoon, in the advancing dark of November, Clora resets the timer on her desk lamp. It should click on at five, switch off at one until the setting begins to drift again like other things she once supposed exact. She wonders how soon it will start to wander, if she’ll still be waiting for light at six or surprised by it at three. Will she be turning a page when it shuts off? She shrugs, but that question is relevant.
At 18,000 miles, when my hair was still blondish, Dad flung me the keys to the ’53 DeSoto Powermaster. It was a voluptuous sedan, with a heavy chrome grille, painted in a deep red color that Dad called “Sophia Loren’s lipstick.” I was fifteen. It was a Sunday, and we were still wearing our suits from church. I didn’t know why he’d done it since the car was only a few years old, but it was my first ride, and I worked that beast all over Peoria—up and down the same streets—counting how many green lights I could rush through without finding a red one.
It was snowing out that night. The wind whipped through the crisp air, stirring the movements of the car. He drove at speeds over seventy miles per hour. He didn't care. He had been crying. He was working on his book again for the first time in months. The one about her. He kept erasing lines and starting over, never understanding why he chose to suffer.
Racial. Barrier. Falls.
The words like a meditative mantra for Violet, a promise renewed in each breath, deep and expanding, as strong and sure and filled with hope as the sweet smell of autumn in New York. It was November 4, 2008. The news—world-historical news—flashed across every television-computer-cell phone-smartphone-website-newsstand all over the country, all over the world, each headline a slightly varied version of the one she liked most, the one from her very own hometown paper, the good ol’ New York Times, which ran the banner: “Obama Elected President as Racial Barrier Falls.”
“Are you willing to accept spiritual warfare?”
“Yes”
“Mental warfare?”
“Yes”
“Moral degradation?”
“Yes”
“Cognitive dissonance?”
“Yes”
“And finally, death?”
The heat from the stove had warmed the small kitchen from inviting through cosy to where it sat now at uncomfortable. Abyan knew it wouldn’t be long before it became unbearable, but she had to finish all of the cooking before then anyway; their guests would arrive somewhere between uncomfortable and plain hot so the kitchen would be left to its final stages of heating up and cooling down again without her. She would be in the lounge room serving light refreshments of sambuus while Ramaas poured the hot, spiced tea by then. Her nerves made her impatient and she resisted the pointless urge to remove the lid from the cubed chicken and prod it into cooking faster.
Boys, this is what I have wanted to say, what I want to say, all I can say about my folks. It will have to do. You connect the dots. I don't want to or don't know how.
The boy climbed the steps two at a time, emerged into the blinding sun on 59th Street, then hurried to the corner squinting at a scrap of cream colored note paper upon which his father had sketched a map with directions. Stopping in the middle of the street, sweat seeping through his jacket, he got jostled a few times from behind. No one said excuse me, or if they did he couldn’t hear them above the blare of raging car horns. He shaded his eyes, looked across to Central Park South, realized he’d walked the wrong way, then turned around and located the skyscraper with its shiny bluish mirror-like windows.
1. When lifting heavy objects such as art history anthologies or potted ferns, always hinge at your lower back and focus on your groin for energy. These are main components of your “core” and generally the strongest muscles in your body. As you lift your Norton reader it’s recommended you release deep guttural yowls—for self-motivation.
Since before we moved houses, that old Polaroid has been sitting there, beside my mother’s bed, for as long as I can remember. I try not to look at it when I walk into her room, the walls yellow with cigarette smoke. And even after she has shown it to me, I can never seem to remember his face.
Mike’s great-grandmother and great-aunt decided to go to the cemetery on a Friday, and forced him to come along. He dawdled, playing in the sandbox with his orange plastic alien action figures, then pretended he could not hear when his great grandmother called. Finally, she came after him and asked him to go get a switch. “I’m gonna get a hold of ya. Get a big switch. You get a small one and it’ll be worse,” Milly, his great-grandmother, said, hands on her broad hips. At seventy she was plump, dark-tanned, wrinkled and strong. Mike remembered yesterday’s beating, after he had drunk her last Mellow Yellow. It had been hard, but short.
“Welcome to the abode,” John boomed.
Mark found John in his usual state: The will-o’-wisp floating in the centre of the room. His naked form perched on a mountain top of rug and fur. His feet rummaging endlessly in a shag pile beneath his toes. His right and left hands fingering the invisible strings of a most exquisite instrument, while a large vein protruded from his abdomen and bulged in syncopation with his silent symphony; throbbing, it traced upwards past his thorax, found his neck and disappeared into his gaunt face, which surveyed his gaudy kingdom.
When Kate was twelve years old, she started to shrink.
Her parents didn’t notice for several months, until she stood against the kitchen doorpost and the crayon balanced on top of her head created a line that was an inch below the one from six months earlier. “Maybe we marked it wrong last time,” her mother said. “Maybe you were wearing shoes last time,” her father said, looking down at her sternly. “I think my feet are getting smaller,” Kate said.
And then Gaddafi came in, totally in drag. Not just eye shadow, which he was famous for, but a full evening dress, pearl necklace, and hose. Rouge on his cheeks. Four burly female bodyguards tailed him, holstering guns. Besides the slight dip in volume of conversation, no one at the party acted like anything was askance. Gaddafi’s were lips the red, it occurred to me, of that "Say goodbye a little longer" chewing gum, and it was that commercial jingle that played in my head as I watched him walking in heels like he practiced it.