Micro fiction <300 words

An Apology

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There was a time when I regularly posted a piece of original Jane Stansfeld creative writing every week. Then I began to dry up and suddenly the Covid -19 pandemic came and changed everything. Don’t worry I and all my closest family are fine. It has taken me over a year to become re-energized to write. I greatly admire those who didn’t let a nasty little virus upset their creativity.

When I began to write this post I was prepared to apologize that ALL my creativity died. Then I remembered the Covid-19 chair seat cover that I made in 2020. I post an image of it ready to be upholstered onto a dining room chair.

Let me decode the image. The grey thing in the center represents the virus itself as we a led to believe that it looks under a microscope. Below the virus is a “standard” face mask. Around the edge is a chain to represent the lock downs, Two golden keys float at the top and three padlocks hold the chain together at the bottom. The locks represent the holds exerted by federal, state and local jurisdictions. On either side, inside the lock-down are medical symbols pointing at the virus as they seek ways to immobilize or kill it. The eight blue flowers are forget-me-nots to remind us to remember those who lost their lives to this virus. You will see that the forget-me-not buds are pink – they turn brilliant blue with yellow centers when they open. I sign and date all my tapestries at the bottom. It took about eight months to design and implement this one.

Now that we are into 2021 I pledge to myself that I’ll engage in additional writing creativity and possible more painting. I’ve done one tapestry a year starting with 2015 and now intend a break to encourage other avenues.

DON’T STEP ON MY TIGER

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I recently wanted to add a comment to a blog which responded by asking me to identify myself. The comment box asked for a little known unusual fact about me. I responded with a 118 word narrative to find that this became my comment on the blog submission . It was completely off base, but I rather liked it so I post it here.

DON’T STEP ON MY TIGER.
When I was very young, I had a pet tiger. He did everything with me. I was fond and protective of him and annoyed when people stepped into his space. That’s until my parents banished him. They said that it was unhealthy for a child to have an imaginary friend. A little later I remember their look of horror and behind-door whispering when I brought home my first art class creation. It was, of course, a clay model of a tiger. He sat with his tail sticking straight up into the air. I treasured him but when we moved houses he disappeared. Now, an old lady with Parkinson’s, I can hallucinate him back into my presence. No-one complains.

CHAT WALKS a memoir

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Today I post “Chat Walks” which is a short personal memoir. It is offered as a quick read to atone for my last two long “Bobby Shafto” posts.

Every summer we visited my maternal grandparents who lived in a small village south of London. Probably to get us out of the house, my grandmother frequently insisted that we accompany my Grandfather on his daily walk. This consisted of a ramble around the village green taken at a slow pace for he stopped to greet everyone we encountered. He was on first name basis with them all. Each exchange, true to the English, began with the weather and went on to hold his attention for several minutes. I named his walks his “Chat Walks.” The name stuck! Soon my grandmother took to rising from the breakfast table with the words, “Jimmy, time for your Chat Walk, take the grandchildren!”

 

THE CAMPING TRIP

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This one is under 300 words, and  so I classify it as  flash fiction.

Amanda listened, wide-eyed, to her elder brother’s report about his Boy Scout’s camping trip. He spoke of s’mores, ghost stories, flickering flames, camp-fire cooking, the aroma of wood smoke and the beauty of the stars. His discourse gave Amanda and her younger sister images of a cozy home-from-home, little wonder that Amanda begged her parents to give her a tent for her tenth birthday. 

When the tent arrived, Amanda requested a camping trip. Her parents weren’t excited by the thought of an out-of-town excursion, and hit on the idea of a camping trip in their premises. The weather forecast was good, no rain predicted.

Their father arrived home on the day of their camp to find that his daughters had already managed to erect their tent. They were blissfully playing house with an assortment of dolls and stuffed animals. He and their brother set up an adjacent tent. They cooked hot dogs on a portable BBQ and roasted marshmallows before a chimaera.

When it was time to sleep their mother kissed the children and told them that she was going inside to her very own comfortable bed. She invited anyone who wished to follow her indoors. An hour later, her son joined her. He explained that night sounds of coyotes, and distant traffic was eclipsed by his loud snoring father.

“Two fifths,” said his mother “Three to go.”

At midnight, the girls woke up with a shock for it was raining and wet inside their tent. They gathered up their wet toys and ran into the house.

“Four fifths,’ said their mother, “One to go.”

Before joining the family inside, their father, woken by the kafuffle, ran to the garage to turn off the irrigation system for the girls had pitched their tent on top of a lawn sprinkler.

 

Uninvited

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This piece, at almost 500 words doesn’t classify as a 300 word ‘flash’ fiction but I don’t want to cut 40% so I’m calling it a short, short story.

The front door bell rang when Silvia was in the bathroom. She ignored it. She was alone while her husband was out buying groceries, and they were not expecting visitors. She rationalized that it was probably a delivery which she could retrieve on her own time. When the bell rang a second time accompanied by knocking Silvia was annoyed. She told herself that there was no way that she was going to answer the summons for she now deduced that the person or persons on her porch were sales-people or worse Jehovah Witnesses. The radio in the den was playing Mozart. She listened to the music and hummed along with the Clarinet Concerto letting the familiarity of the music help to soothe her annoyance. How she loved the Clarinet! She smiled as she thought of her husband’s reference to his high-school band playing days when the brass derogatorily referred to the clarinet as a “liquorish stick”. She moussed her hair and began to blow it dry

She was about to go into the den when she thought that she heard hushed voices inside the house, Mozart was still playing so she knew that it wasn’t a radio announcer. She shivered. Hadn’t she just read the neighborhood newsletter in which they reported a spate of daylight robberies with instructions to residents to call 911 to report any suspicious activities. The article had gone on to warn residents not to approach the thieves who were described as “armed and dangerous”. Silvia’s earlier annoyance morphed into fear.

She thought that she might be able to hide in the closet to mask her voice so that she could make a 911 call, or better silently text her alarm, but then she realized that her mobile phone was in the den. She strained and heard the voices coming closer. In no time they would be in her bedroom and she had nowhere to hide.

On the spur of the moment Silvia decided that the only weapon she had was an element of surprise. She walked slowly to her bedroom door, took a deep breath, and opened it. She saw her two uninvited intruders standing in front of the television. They both carried bags. The morning sun streamed in through the den windows casting bright patches of light across the room. Silvia stood with the sun behind her. She hoped that the shadow would disguise the fear on her face. She waved her arms dismissively,

“Gentlemen,” she said, “you found the key, that’s good; but we weren’t expecting you today. You’ve got the wrong day! We agreed on Wednesday, that’s tomorrow. You have to leave now, and come back tomorrow!”

Nose

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At a cocktail party, a middle-aged gentleman told his fishing story. It was about a snake; not about the colossus that got away. He said that the incident had happened years ago but was one of those life moments, which haunts forever. Apparently, he was doing some deep-water wading when he felt a long slimy body slither between his legs. He instinctively knew that this was not a fish. Then, his eyes agog, he told of his subsequent horror when a six-foot-long water snake reared out of the water to stare at him with cold unblinking eyes. Its head was a few inches from his nose. Thoughts flashed through his mind, “If it bites me on the nose, and I survive will I have a deformed face with no nose?” and “What should I do to survive even if I do lose my nose?”

The man paused to take a sip, and I looked at him skeptically. His nose was intact. I wondered whether he was exaggerating the size of the snake, for most do in an attempt to validate fear. A snake enthusiast in our group commented this was probably a benign water snake; easily distinguished, he said, because the poisonous Cottonmouths are aggressive and have fatter bodies. The gentleman looked at us, gauging our disbelief and went on to tell how he managed to keep his cool demeanor and slowly raise his hand to cover his vulnerable nose while he gently blew in the snake’s face. To his relief, the snake took his suggestion. It backed off and swam away almost as though it were as scared as he. As for the type, he said that he was too frightened to be able to distinguish what kind of snake it was. I don’t blame him.

Jane Stansfeld 296 words

GRIM REAPER

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Aimee was with Peter the whole time. She sat by the hospital window and watched while the doctors administered to him. They explained that they hoped to prevent his minor TIA from morphing into a deadly stroke. When they kept him overnight  she moved beside his bed and held his hand. By 2:00 am, she was exhausted and let her eyes close to catch a brief nap.

Peter moaned; Aimee opened her eyes to see a dark figure looming over the bed. She recognized him and tried to thrust him away.

“Go.” she ordered, “It is not time.”

“You are wrong.” countered the figure.

“You don’t understand.” she replied, “We two are soul mates. We found each other late in life, we haven’t been married long. We must have more time together.”

“Time together?”

“Yes, we are together. You must not separate us!”

The figure nodded and disappeared.

By 4:00 am the ward was humming with action. The man in the adjacent room had died. Aimee knew that this was a result of her conversation.  She did not discuss her suspicions. The the next morning she was delighted when the doctor told her that Peter could go home. She brought her car round to the door of the hospital and watched the nurse wheel Peter out. He climbed into the passenger seat with ease. She loosened her seat belt and leaned over to kiss him on the lips. She turned on the radio and they laughed as she drove away. The dog appeared at the first intersection. She swerved to avoid it. In that prolonged awful second that they slammed, out of control, toward a concrete wall she saw the nocturnal visitor again.

“Wish granted,” he said “You are together!”

The Puppy

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I’ve been reading the recently published book “New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction”. The forward informs me that “a good micro hangs in the air of the mind like an image made of smoke,” and that it needs to be under 300 words. The following is my first attempt at this literary form. I hope that my readers enjoy it!

The eighty-year-old man’s hands trembled. He gripped his chair making his veins stand out against his aging thin skin. He turned to his wife, his eyes tearing, “They shoot a horse with a broken leg, don’t they?” he asked. She heard his question as she had heard it before, and nodded in affirmation. She watched him cast his thoughts back to his childhood.

He went back over seventy years to himself as an eight-year-old boy on a farm in South Dakota. He stood and looked north the flatness stretched seemingly unending through Canada to the north pole, or south to the Rio Grande and beyond into Mexico. East and west were the same thing from sea to shining sea even though logic told of the Black Hills three hundred miles to the west. He remembered how you knew that a vehicle was approaching on the dirt road by the cloud of dust seen above the standing corn. You heard the engine about the time that the dogs on the adjacent farm started barking, then it passed and the whole sequence occurred in reverse.

He was doing his chores and being responsible, feeding chickens, gathering eggs, slopping the pigs; while his parents worked in a distant field. He could hear their voices, mingled with the sound of a nearby yelping puppy. He found it in the dairy limping miserably on three legs. He picked it up and stroked its soft fur. As he did so he reminded himself of the sentence for a farm animal with broken leg. He fetched a pail of water and a gunny sack. Then, he knelt beside the bucket. He didn’t cry through the ordeal even as he realized that doing the right thing carries a heavy burden.

294 words

The Funniest Joke

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At a recent Christmas party, our host commented that you are the funniest person he knows. On our way home I told you that I didn’t find you to be unusually funny. You responded,

“It’s a dry humor. Perhaps it is mundane to you because you’re British.”

“Hmm,” I said, “now your brother has the dry part down pat. Do you remember…”

I didn’t have to say any more as we chorused his punchline of some five years ago and we both laughed. I laughed so hard that tears rolled down my cheeks.

Afterwards I wondered why we found the memory of this innocuous, not very funny, punch-line so hilarious. I postulate that, like all good humor, it was timing and delivery. To this day I recall the set-up. It was the weekend after Thanksgiving when both our brothers were visiting.  As the day was balmy as Austin, Texas can be in November, you three men had taken up residence on my sister’s patio. Ostensively, you were slow-cooking a brisket on the BBQ although I recall that large quantities of beer were being imbibed. Your brother sat on the right, mine in the middle, draped rather than sitting, with his feet upon the wrought-iron patio table. You sat on the left, rising from time to time to baste the brisket or to get more beer. We, women, were inside chatting and preparing accompaniments for the brisket.

Then my brother began to laugh. A good rich belly rumble of a laugh. His feet came off the table and he rocked back and forth in his mirth. You echoed his laughter and your brother, who looked somewhat surprised at the reaction to his joke, joined in. It was at least half an hour before we, women, could get one of you to stop laughing long enough to share the cause of your mirth. My brother pointed at yours,

“Out of the blue he asks, ‘What did the mother turkey say to her disobedient children?’ No warning, nothing.” At this point you all three took up laughing again. We wondered what that punch line could be, and waited for you to regain composure.  At last you spoke to your brother,

“Go on tell them!”

Your brother, in his dead pan voice gave us the line “If your father could see you now, he’d turn over in his gravy!”

Of course, the mirth resumed again and, we, the women, joined in, chuckling, not at the joke, but at our men-folk.

The sulk syndrome

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Recently, the AFP (American Family Physician) carried an article submitted by Dr. K.. The doctor’s full name is withheld at this time at Dr. K.’s request. The article reports findings gathered by Dr. K. over thirty years. If the doctor’s facts and analysis prove accurate, they may change medicine’s approach to many treatments and cures, particularly those in which the patient requires pain medication. Given the recent spate of celebrity deaths associated with painkillers this discovery should be heaped with accolades.

Dr. K.’s S.U.L.K. stands for Stiff Upper Lip as discovered by, himself, Dr. K. He reports it to be a condition most often associated with persons of English heritage, particularly those born and raised in England. The sulk is manifested by a paralyzed upper lip. The reader can experience a similar paralysis by placing a thumb firmly upon their upper lip; thereafter, it will be found that, any attempt to smile, frown, or experience emotion, associated with facial expression, is thwarted. As an aside, the irony that a person who is sulking has a like facial expression may, or may not, have been Dr. K.’s intent when he coined the acronym.

According to Dr. K.’s research results, persons with sulk syndrome report pain and discomfort on a reduced, completely different scale from the public at large. Where most patients might rank pain as a seven or eight on a scale of one to ten the sulk syndrome patient generally says, “I’m fine.” When pressed to use the pain schedule those with sulk report a two, or maximum three on the same scale.

In summary, Dr. K. finds that sulk syndrome persons tend to suffer less and recover faster from bacterial ailments and surgeries than their counterparts with normal upper lip function. He, therefore, postulates that the upper lip has a unique role in contributing to recovery and proposes that all patients experiencing chronic pain, undergoing surgery, taking courses of antibiotics or undergoing cancer treatment, first be given a facial Botox injection to induce sulk syndrome upper lip paralysis.