Everyone said he was a mistake waiting for someone like me to make. But everyone knows what everyone says is wrong, so I went for it. Perhaps “went for it” is overstating my initiative. I let it happen to me, kind of like tripping and falling off the side of a building. It wasn’t a planned suicide, just a stupid mishap. 

Having not posted in a while, and needing to work on something else today, I thought I'd dig through my old microfiction and post something I'd already written. You know, I was going to cheat. But when I opened up that dusty digital folder, I saw all the stories I'd started and then abandoned, like the above bit that starts out the story I'd tentatively titled Everybody Said. I have no idea what Everybody Said was going to be about, other than an affair gone awry. Other stories were more developed or were at least less generic in their intent. A sampling:

A Six-Gun Spiritual is about a broke recent graduate who breaks down in a Southwestern town dominated by polygamists and can't afford to leave. 

Not the Ashley Type is about—and, unfortunately, I'm not making this up—a man who thinks about how he wouldn't date somebody named Ashley. Didn't make it past the first paragraph. Can't figure out why I saved the file.

Under the Influence is a more-or-less finished story about how the search for the perfect hook leads to a first kiss. It's kind of sweet. It also introduced the first-person meta-commentary I've come to rely on:

You’ve read quite a way into this narrative and are probably starting to think that Steve and Kathy are horribly underdeveloped characters. Well, let me tell you that Steve is a greatly developed person in real life, but now that I’m older, I can see his pausing Mr. Wiseman-on-the-Mountain-Top act was as pretentious as hell and as one-dimensional as a dot. But at the time, I bought into it completely and was too much in awe of him to make him seem well-rounded in a real person kind of way. So shut up. As for Kathy, well, she’s completely one-dimensional because for all of this “love” I thought I was in, I didn’t have a clue about who she was and as an honest autobiographer (sounds a hell of a lot like masturbator, doesn’t it?), I can’t bring myself to just make shit up to make myself look like a great writer. So chill and get back to the story like I’m going to do.

I sincerely love that stuff. Maybe not that exact stuff. But the general break-the-third-wall first-person narrator addresses the audience for low-key humorous effect stuff.  

Hannah Gets Ted Laid is the mad-cap adventures of Ted, who decides that he needs a pet to help him meet women, then decides that dogs and cats won't cut it. Enter two monkeys, Bonono and Hannah Banana. About four pages in, the monkeys make Ted a fried egg sandwich. Unfortunately for Ted, I stopped writing before Hannah managed to lure a single woman his way. 

The Pedestrian was to be my novel that transformed "pedestrian" from connotating plain and ordinary into suggesting grand and wonderful, spitting on car culture. I didn't get more than five pages before I realized I didn't have a clue about any aspect of the project except for the grand concept.  

The Dancing Sky,  about Cowboy, who doesn't fit into the hipster scene swirling around the Metal Room. Based on a real bar I drank at once or twice. Not based on any misguided relationship I had with a rich woman in an abusive relationship with somebody else.

The Luminescence of Flesh. A screenplay about a woman who leaves the world behind to become a monastic. Intended to be Antonioni meets Dreyer on the Hudson Bay. Lots of images of ice, little narrative. If my current story ever makes it into a screenplay or graphic novel, it's intent will be to be something like Dreyer meets Hergé at Pixar to do an adaptation of Don Quiote. You'd be excused for thinking I have a Dreyer obsession. I will admit that Ordet is one of the only films that ever lead me to cry.

I thought The Luminescence of Flesh was my story—abandoned so long ago that I don't have digital files— about a journalist who travels deep into the Central American jungle to explore a Mayan doomsday cult. It was the ultimate snark fest. Which the real story is completely not. Both protagonists, however, were named Jane. 

The Paragon of Joy was just too creepy to finish. A dark noir about a man who abducts a woman and her daughter. Beyond Joy's name, there wasn't going to be any in this story:

I stood up and walked over to the shower, then pulled back the curtain. I watched her shower. She was at once hard and tough and broken and needy. She was so beautiful, too. But I knew that every time I touched her, it would hurt me more than her, because her hatred would come through her skin. She didn’t meet my eyes, but accepted my gaze. Maybe she digested it, thrived on it. Maybe the hatred was something that allowed her to keep going. I can’t read people very well. But I think that was what I saw. 

Mrs. Glist. Eventually, this story was re-written with a change in the protagonist's gender. Somehow, baseball, a sport I dislike, became an important element in it. It was first story I was paid for. Technically, it might be the only story I've been paid for. That point is less clear than it might seem that it would be. 

Car Crash Collaborators

Your best friend, just off the methadone program, asks you for a cigarette. You're out again. If only you hadn't smoked two on your lunch break. But she's got the shakes and you don't have any fags. If you had some. 

You go to the McDonalds. You joke about not being able to kick the Big Mac habit. It's starting to rain. If only you had an umbrella.

You're wet when you get to MickeyD's, the run-down one. You know they have a rat problem. But so does your apartment building. If you managed your money better. You've got three dollars and seventy-two cents. You order two burgers. She has six forty-three now. Cigarettes cost four-fifteen. But they don't sell them here. Even with the rats in the backroom.

The raindrops are those heavy bastards. They hit the sidewalk with a loud thump, but it's so hot they explode into steam. Your friend, she was upstate for a year, trying to go clean. You used to fuck her on summer days like this. That picture window on your old place wide open, rain coming through, soaking that novel you think will make you rich, if only you finished it. You didn't care, she was a great lay. Those plump nipples just worked for you. She wasn't so skinny then.

She needs a fix. You don't get paid for eight days. She has six forty-three. Smack, fuck. If only you had some cash. You know someone who'll set her up for a blowjob.

Your friend, she looks like a dime-bag whore. So you're on your knees for her fix.

After you leave, she's wobbly. There's a car coming down the road. It was just a hand on the small of her back. If only she’d kicked the habit. But she didn’t.

That was the microfiction I was looking for. It's exactly 300 words, which is why the last sentence of the first paragraph doesn't have "only" in it, like you'd expect. I stole the title from a Firewater song.