FAST FICTIONS ———————————————————— a short-short story everyday

  I’ve been writing these blogs everyday for the past four months in order to lure out any weirdoes on-line. If you’re not a weirdo and you’re reading this I apologize profusely. You – the non-weirdoes- are what makes this country tick and talk to the rest of the world with kindness and confidence. I’ve been trying to attract the kind of strange people who think they know a thing or two that the rest of us don’t. The kinds of weirdoes that would find it funny to abduct a child and train him to play the Beatles’ music. It is cute but come on! can a child understand the depth and profundity of those lyrics?  Would John have wanted it that way? Let a child learn to enjoy the Beatles slowly and gradually at a natural rate. There are so many videos of children doing unnatural things – like explaining the Star Wars trilogy, etc- that I’m convinced there’s a ring of kidnappers abducting children and making them learn these strange tricks of amusement.

   Anyway I’m trying to find my boy, Bonobo Samuel Kingston the 3rd, and that kid in the video sure looks a lot like my adopted child from a country with extremely lax adoption laws. Could anyone confirm this? 

  And so here’s a story about another child that I’ve written from the grief in my heart over the disappearance of my boy, Bonobo.

Who Cares about the King ? Not I

     The King’s officially sanctioned shoelace tier has taken the day off sick (pancreatic problems?) and failed to provide a suitable substitute. Well, a child of four can hardly be considered a stand in for an expert, can he? Even if he is the son of the fastest and most graceful shoelace tier in all the land. Fortunately, our current King is progressive, he swings with the times and so no one need worry about being beheaded,drawn and quartered or iron maidened. Our current King cares(his slogan).

     The King stares down at his unlaced shoes. So far down. He remembers the time he toured the Dominion of Canada and went on an official trip up the CN Tower. At the time, he thought he’d been transferred to another world and he tried to reach down through the glass to crush the ants dressed as people. The King’s handlers sledge hammered the glass to allow him to reach down but his reach took him nowhere. Looking down at his laces, the King wonders if there is some trick of optics at work, some glass in the way, some as of yet undiscovered challenge in getting his fingers down. 

     Try.

     The King stands by the door of his chamber where few are admitted. The shoelace tier’s son jumps on the bed but the King concentrates on his untied laces. Once my fingers are down there, how will I distinguish them from my laces, the King wonders. He looks at his fingers and he looks down at his white laces. They seem different from this distance but side-by-side who knows what confounding similarities will emerge? The King’s neck is getting sore.

     He turns his head slightly to look at the other show but there is no lace. Confound it! The day is already a disaster. The King looks up at the large wooden door (which he may not be able to exit from on this day) and lets out a sigh of discombobulation. He looks over to the bed to see the tip of what appears to be a shoelace sticking out from the bouncing boy’s mouth. 

     In response to the King’s rage, the boy starts to sing a cutesy, childish rendition of the Beatles’ Hey Jude.

     The King is appeased.

    And this bloggy-thing seemed like a good idea at the time of its inception, but I’m starting to harbour second thoughts, third thoughts, etc. Initially, I assumed that creating a character everyday and writing a flash fiction from their point of view would take me somewhere unique, take me into lyrics from a different road. In fact, I have broken down some of the flash fictions on this blog and turned them into words which will more than likely appear on our next album but the rest is rubbish. A lot of sound and fury for fuck’s sake.

Branches with Leaves Insist Upon Nothing

    Strom sits at the back of the northbound 320 surrounded by (in his estimation) igits and douchebags. There are two women from Sweden or Finland broadcasting their conversation for everyone to hear and no one to understand. At the next stop the bus becomes bloated to capacity and a man’s crotch faces Strom who’s squeezed off his seat by the Swede/Finn on his right and a chav with a Burberry handbag worn as a hat on his head. In all seriousness.

   Strom tries to take refuge in a memory, something from his life previous to getting on the 320 but his mind is empty. Worse still, his mind is nowhere to be found. Strom is simply a seat that’s half sat upon and he’s starting to ache. The crotch in front of him starts to make a musical jingle, a Kylie Minogue number that came and went seven or eight years ago but is now making a comeback in this man’s pants. Strom looks up but the man is tilting his head back and forth to another tune between his ipod buds. The cell in his pants continues to sing its na-na-na ring. The Finn/Swede is on a rant of a roll and continues raising the pitch of her voice at the end of every sentence. The chord from the man’s ipod dangles in front of Strom’s face and he considers giving it a serious pull so the man’s ears can be alerted to his cell. But he does nothing.

   What else can he do? He belts out his favorite Humphrey Lyttelton tune.

   And the bus is silent save for Strom’s rendition of a jazz trumpet through his mouth. 

Goofy on the Brain

   This is convoluted but true. I’m a 15-year old hacker from Trollhattan, Sweden with a secret. This  should come as no surprise as I spend the greater part of each day trying to sneak into places I’m not supposed to go. That’s kind of my job as a hacker. I try to get into government or corporate databases or sites restricted to only a small group of people. But last year I hacked my way into a site that was too weird to be true. I was going deep into the Disney site which has some obvious tricks to getting into but once I’d cleared the initial walls there was another super secure area buried in this cluster of code that looked like a virus. That was its cover.  I spent three hours solid trying to break through and when I left my room to take a whiz I passed my dad who was all zombified from two hours of doing his income taxes. I totally laughed out loud inside. He thinks he has it tough. By the time I got back into my room, I figured out the algorithm they were basing their code on and I was in.

    At first I was seriously disappointed. It was nothing but a community hub with a list of super-ordinary topics that people were talking about. When I explored a little further, however, I saw that everyone was named Goofy, Donald, Mickey Mouse, etc. and their conversations were kind of on the weird side: “Did you get to the dentist on time, Mickey?”  “None of your business, Donald, none of your goddamn beeswax, nosewax or mousewax!!” “Why so hostile?” “Don’t patronize me with feigned ignorance.”  I nosed through other conversations and they were all hostile, paranoid, sexual or the characters were blissed out, talking about how they were flying or remembering something innocent and pure. Basically, all the conversations were totally cracker.  

    After a couple of weeks of following the conversations and snooping around the hidden hub, I found out what it was really all about. I was staring directly into Walt Disney’s mind. You know how he was cryogenically frozen after he croaked? Well, turns out they’re trying to thaw him out and this hub is like a direct link to his consciousness and Disney Scientists are trying to communicate with him by posing as characters. They’re communicating with his unconscious mind. At times he’s Goofy, Mickey or Donald and then the Disney Scientists type away as other characters, trying to calm him down or help him out. 

   My parents want to go to Euro-Disney this year and I’m worried about my safety. That’s why I’ve finally come out with this secret. I figure that if I go public with what I know, they won’t be able to whack me without raising some eyebrows.

Trailer Park Set

    Behind the thin cover of morning cloud, the sun looked like a dandelion gone to seed. “Fuckin’ poetic, I’m gonna weep,” Alice’s husband, Bill, replied in mock heroic response. She shut the trailer park door on the morning and went back to his unfinished bologna sandwich. “That’s going to be in a poem for my class,” she said and plunged the butter knife into the jar of mayonnaise. “You still wasting my money on those classes?”  Bill said from the table. Alice flinched at the sharp sound of a beer opening but she held back the words that were so close to forming on her lips. She remembered something: “Did you use my toothbrush this morning?”  “Is there someone else living here?” “ She walked over to him with the butter knife bearing a glob of mayonnaise. Bill leaned back in his chair and propped up his cowboy boots on the white table for two. “See, we’re saving money by using one toothbrush, that way I can afford to take the class.” Bill tilted back the beer to an angle equal to his reclining self but his eyes stayed close on her. She walked around the table, dodged the half-empty can of beer and plunged the butter knife into his side. An ending to her poem entitled: Her toothbrush. His toothbrush. That evening, the police would interrupt the class of eight during their discussion on metaphor.

  Over the past four months on this blog I’ve been writing a short-short story everyday while claiming to be somebody different on each of those days as an experiment in multidisciplinary design. For those of you who don’t know me from breathewords or scene360, I’m interested in poetry, prose and all manner of visual art. For each of the stories that I’ve written on this blog, I’ve also made an accompanying painting, short film and choreographed dance routine with blind children under the age of six. These will be up tomorrow next to each of the 83 short-short stories I’ve written.

Mona Lisa the Clown

   Well it’s a long story but suffice it to say that my mother had an in-depth interview (out of respect for everyone – including my cherished readers – I won’t say “probing”) with the famous brainiac and one thing lead to another and then once or twice more. (Yes, that part still operates believe it or not!) Obviously, I’ve grown up with literary ambitions as evidenced by the past four months of daily stories on this blog but I’m also equally obsessed with numbers. Each of the previous stories that I’ve written is a kind of mathematical puzzle. I start with a “fake” author whose name I’ve chosen based on the number of consonants in their name. If you subtract the total number of consonants in their name from the total number of sentences in the story, you’ll arrive at a series of sums which points us in the direction of a grand unified theory combining quantum physics with Newtonian mechanics. I wanted to couch all this number crunching in language in order to get others interested and also stick it to the math community who’ve been disparaging the arts for too long.

   Today’s story is simple. It’s written in six sentences which just happens to be a number I really like.

A Connoisseur of the Self at the Door

    “Mom, there’s a guy at the door selling something,” the lanky, blond boy shouts up the tower of stairs but the fedora-topped man at the door corrects him. “He says that he’s not selling a thing per se but he’s offering a whole new outlook on the world and our place within it and really he just wants to give us a tip or two on how to fall asleep or wake up or even just talk to each other with our unique selves intact,” the blond boy shouts, takes a deep breath and then looks back at the man for a quick appraisal. The tall man pushes his hat back to scratch his forehead and then nods yes, well done. There are weighty footsteps upstairs in a world suspended high above everyday interactions. The blond boy cocks his head to catch the words shouted from above. “Sorry, we’re not home,” he says with deflated-blue eyes and he shuts the door.

   And now for the moment you’ve all been waiting for… the revelation of the real author behind the past four months of daily fast fictions… the one and only… me. My name is Lyle Smutts and I’m a visual artist from Chicago and everyday I’ve not only been writing a bizarre burst of prose but I’ve also shaved that microfiction into my beard. In order to replicate the daily blog in its entirety I’ll also wear a cap that announces my identity for the day. Yesterday, I wore a hat that said, “I gave Charlton Heston a homosexual blowjob” and last week I wore a hat that announced, “I’m the Olympic Torch.”  

A Fine Frame After All

     Andy sits in the back seat while Sam yells at her in the rear view mirror. She skooches from side to side and he adjusts the position of the mirror to follow her face. “You could have told me sooner, you know,” Sam shouts. “I can get a job in New York I just need time to research my options.” 

    You always need time, she thinks to herself but says nothing as she’s vowed to let him vent a little but before anything is resolved they’re at Eric and Dawn’s place. Andy gets out of the car with three presents held up to her chin. Sam runs behind her offering to help in an angry tone.

    “Oh my you shouldn’t have,” Dawn says at the front door as she takes over the tower of gifts. 

    “We didn’t know what you needed so we got a couple different…” Sam struggles for the last word.

    “Things,” Andy concludes and laughs. “So can we see her?”

     “She’s sleeping right now but…” Dawn looks at Eric who doesn’t think she’s sleeping at all and he motions their two friends into the newly decorated room. “But just to be on the safe side…” and he puts his index finger to his hushed lips. They quietly file into the room.

    Andy and Sam look deep into the crib and see nothing.

    “Yeah, we need a new blanket. It’s hard to spot Janice with this one,” Eric says and points to the middle of the blanket to a dot that looks slightly larger than the others. 

     “Oh wow…” Andy says,” she definitely looks… premature.”

     “Eight months early.”

     Andy and Sam debate over who little Janice takes after. They talk about upcoming highlights in the stages of her development. Sam waxes philosophic on how she resembles the Big Bang. “I mean how I imagine it looked. The start of a lot of potential.” Andy regrets not getting a smaller knit cap. “In two months it’ll be a perfect fit.” Sam continues along his abstract train of thought: “What a way to mark the moment. I mean you’ll always have this time in your life…With a baby. She’ll…”

     “Have arms and legs in about three weeks,” Eric concludes.

     As they step outside her room, Sam comments on the quality of a frame used to contain a large photo of Janice on her blanket. While he studies the frame, he gathers elements of his argument to use against Andy when they’re back in the car. He will convince her that he can join her in New York. 

     Their future.