And while I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the blogability of my name, I do want people to know I’m a persistent mo-fo of the literary variety. I’ve been writing  poetry and prose since the 70’s and with the advent of this interweb thingy a couple years back I got to thinking, why not expand my ambitions into the digital realms. Hence, this blog where I’ve been writing a story (almost) everyday for the past six months. To make things a little more interesting (and potentially litigatious and therefore fun) I’ve been writing under a different assumed name everyday. 

    Don’t believe everything that you read, might serve as the subheading to this blog. Or perhaps: Fiction is the only fact. Something along those lines.

   Enjoy today’s short-short story…

 

On this Tip of his Something

 

     At six o’clock on the nose, he wakes up with an enormous amount of pep, as if each limb and organ in his body came equipped with its own built in alarm clock. From head to toe, ringing with energy, he shuffles in his bare feet to his bathroom in the cold Montreal apartment. He is sixty-two years old but you wouldn’t know it from his heartbeat. He does, however, have a problem.

     It’s somebody’s birthday today.

     He inspects his face and neck in the mirror, searching for cancer spots, new wrinkles, the increased puffiness of morning-eyes. His face is a calendar for decades past. He turns the X-shaped faucet for cold and gives his face a splash. It is the 14th of October, he reminds himself, the 14th letter of the Phoenician alphabet stands for this day. Alphabet. He wonders why he thought “alphabet.” Technically, the Phoenician script was an abjad, the term to describe a system of consonants. Vowels were too slippery and protean to waste letters on three thousand years ago. He muses while he scrubs his face vigorously. The harder he thinks, the fiercer the scrubbing. In his previous life he was a professor of ancient languages. 

   Who’s birthday is it, he wonders as he looks at himself in the mirror. He’ll meet some colleagues for lunch. Is it one of theirs? If he can remember whose birthday it is he’ll be able to buy them something appropriate. Has he bought something already? He’ll check the living room but by the time he shuffles through the living room he’s forgotten that thought. He clings to this lapse in his memory the way an overboard sailor holds to a piece of wood in the wide ocean. 

    When he looks at the calendar in the kitchen, his wrinkles zig-zag with sudden tears. It’s his birthday. He can’t deny any longer the onslaught of the disease.

    This too he will forget.