Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: flash fiction
here’s another little sample from a class assignment. to clue you in, I was asked to start with the last line and work backwards, writing a paragraph before the last line, and then the paragraph before, etc. as usual I had my own take on how to approach this.
What he really wanted was a steak. A nice big slab of steak to make him feel he was a human, master of beasts, chest beating savage of the long forgotten past. Unfortunately a suspicious rash of disease outbreaks had hit the herds of beef cattle being raised everywhere but in Japan, which meant that while the finest steak was technically available he’d have to spend more than a month’s pension in obtaining one. He was for a moment tempted to blow any savings he had on one extravagant gesture of gastronomical defiance, but knew it couldn’t happen. Steak dinner would have to wait until they caught the Japanese genetic engineer responsible for sickening the herds of western countries.
If not steak, well, what could he have? Most of the menu was consumed with a variety of pastas, tofu’s and other vegetarian monstrosities, but he rejected these on moral principles. A decent meal included some edible form of dead animal within it. Perhaps he was hopelessly old fashioned, but that was how he saw things. Pastas and rice dishes and pizzas were all well and good, so long as they had a bit of meat or fish or chicken on top of them. Here the menu segregated all the meat containing dishes into one small section at the bottom, as if the rest of the menu might catch the plague if they were allowed to mingle meatballs in spaghetti noodles.
Elk burgers were a novelty. He couldn’t remember ever having eaten Elk before. What was an Elk, exactly? Wasn’t it a flightless bird, something like an ostrich only from Australia? But there wasn’t an Australia anymore, not since the Indonesian incident in which the continent had been carved up, peeled off, and given to the colonies in return for re-settlement of all Australian citizens off planet. So if there was no more Australia he could hardly trust these Elk burgers to resemble ostrich, which he could remember having once in Madagascar, before the floods that devastated that country in ‘27.
Fish was dicey. Fish in the wild had previously achieved sentience, citizenship, and voting rights, which made the eating of a fish filet punishable by firing squad. Or was he thinking of a firing squid? Either way it meant you’d better be damned sure the fish you ordered came from a fully accredited fish farm. Ignorance was no defense when it came to the consumption of sentient animals.
He decided he’d be better off going with the chicken.
I guess I owe people some sort of update if anyone still reads, which I figure they didn’t which I guess is why I didn’t feel much obligation to keep current.
I’m really still feeling pretty low. My eating disorder is as bad as ever, but failed attempts at health have pushed my weight sky high. So high I want to hide and I just hate myself so much I don’t want to tell anybody anything about it. I’m so ashamed of myself I can’t bear talking about what a failure I am for having this weight gain.
On a more positive note. I’ve gotten some feedback from my professor about my actual fiction writing (as opposed to essay writing) and I feel encouraged. It’s hard to tell because this professor believes in being positive, so I feel like a detective, trying to separate actual enthusiasm or engagement from her professorly duty to say something nice.
I really want to start writing fiction on the blog again, though. The whole point of the class was supposed to be a jumpstart into regularly writing fiction, damnit! It’s just so hard to get back into the routine once I’ve lost it. But the writing I’ve done for class has been satisfying, and I’m feeling positive about writing longer stories and maybe trying to submit them for publication one of these days.
Scary thought. I’d expect to be rejected of course- at least to start. It’s all part of the process I think, submitting things and collecting a certain number of Nos before you get a yes. Still scary though.
hey guys, thought you might be interested in reading part of one of my class assignments. i’m still working on the dead fairy story, and if any of you would like to read it when i’m done it might be nice to have some feedback- it’s going to be more than 10 double spaced pages, though, so definitely only ask if you don’t mind reading a big chunk of something, as opposed to my usual little bites.
this next story is also longer than my usual, and i think its interesting the way the class has impacted my style. on the other hand, it still has space travel in it, even though the assignment was to write about an old widow looking out at a plain.
the old woman and the plain
As I looked out, away from the road, across the bright-green-under-bright-blue kindergarten colors of the local landscape I began to lose the feeling of freedom and new possibility I hadn’t quite admitted to myself I had. I’d stopped the car because I’d wanted to just look and marvel and take it all in. The ridiculous puffiness of clouds and their similarity to the foodstuff of my childhood, reminding me at once of comforting heaps of mashed potato and the special meringue cookies mother made for company. In the car I’d almost laughed aloud with delight and I’d stopped and wanted for a few moments to look at the familiar with new eyes.
Then the newness receded and the familiarity came crashing back. There was a grey line of pavement bisecting two stretches of tangled greenery with the occasional halfhearted tree or slab of granite trying valiantly to break up the monotony. These efforts seemed only to reinforce that monotony, to but a heavy black line underneath it. A bird flying overhead, too far up to be more than a speck of dark against a field of blue, too far up to be a living breathing member of god’s creation, was for me the exclamation point. The Same, capitalized, underlined, and exclaimed the way a teenage girl might write it in her diary.
I wanted Mars. I wanted red fields of dust and alien rock formations. I was 72 years old and that was “Not Old, Grandma” in the words of the irrepressible 13 year old grandbaby whose mama sent her over to help me hook up the computer. I told her I wanted to see the pictures from the Martian space probe. The ones Tom Brokaw or Dan Rather or somebody once told me could be found in my computer, if I could only figure out the way to make it give them up to me.
The Earth bound plain before my eyes, with its clichéd clouds overhead and its certainty of giving way to a strip mall if you just walked far enough, I guess it couldn’t hold a candle to the canyons and craters dwelling on the inner side of my bifurcated vision. 72 might not be old (ha ha) but it was likely to old to travel strapped to the top of a runaway explosion across the vacuum to another planet.
I got back in my car and felt the beaded mat give way beneath me, I checked the rearview by habit and got a chuckle from the cheery orange Garfield that same granddaughter had hung up from it, telling me she wanted me to remember her when I was driving. She was a good girl. Curious and smart as a button. After she helped me figure out the internet (ha) she’d stuck around for hours with me, looking at the pictures. She seemed especially enamored of the remote control beasties the scientists had gotten to explore the planet Mars for them. She thought the rovers “cute” and I coaxed her to imagine how robust they were to have flown all the way to Mars and then kept going years past their expiration date. Maybe she could be an engineer, when she grew up, I told her. Maybe she could make a machine that crossed between the stars, or even go herself. She shrugged, told me her mom thought she should go to nursing school. She thought maybe she could be a teacher, because she didn’t think she’d like having to wipe old people’s bottoms.
“Not like you, Grandma.” She added.
In the space shuttle they have a sort of vacuum cleaner attachment that helps to wipe your bottom for you. Otherwise the urine and fecal matter would float out into the cabin, which would be a considerable drawback to any sort of space travel. On Mars, though, the gravity would be just right. It’s smaller than the Earth, but not by much, so gravity would be just a little bitsy bit less than Earth normal. Enough to make you stronger and faster. Enough to take the weight off your bones and let you jump and run like someone half your age, while allowing fecal matter to do the decent thing and fall into the toilet unassisted.
I put the key in the ignition. The car started and began to drive me on, stuck firmly on to the surface of the Earth, as usual.
