Some attempts at fiction

Scene 1
In the morning, my father awoke, and he drove me to the sea. I stood at the edge of the tanker and waved goodbye. I got a strange feeling in the pit of my stomach, like maybe I’d never see him again. Like one of those strange times when something comes over you and it strikes you that we are all going to end up dead some day. And if I told you that I was crying for him, I’d be lying. I was crying for me. I was crying for the bones that I would one day become, for all the things I have gathered that I will one day leave behind, for the earth that will become my skin. I was crying because this story ends.

Scene 2

They were sitting in the dark and holding hands. She was explaining to him that he wasn’t much of a husband. The word inattentive was used on four separate occasions. The conversation had started when the sun was setting. On the ride home, he had read his book occasionally, then watched the sun drift below the long black telephone wires and start to bury itself behind the low grey buildings.
He was sitting cross-legged, and reading a magazine. He was pretending to be engrossed in a story about the third world. He was fairly certain that it wasn’t called the third world anymore, but he hadn’t yet learned the correction. The driver of the metro was inexpert. Each time they stopped, the train jerked, giving him a case of mild motion sickness.


Scene 3:
“That’s a pretty damn fine dinner you’ve made Lucy,” he said.
Lucy blushed. She pushed a stray lock of hair from her slightly decaying cheek. The gesture was almost natural. It was a warm summer evening, and they were eating on the back patio. The cicadas were making a hell of a lot of noise. Gary had this habit, that his wife used to hate, of tapping the tines of his fork on the front of his porcelain teeth between bites.

“What the hell are you making all that racket for?” she’d ask. She was a no good goddamn shrew. He was whatever the male equivalent was. A muskrat perhaps?

Gary supposed that that was how you got after sixteen years or so of marriage. But here was Lucy, married some fourteen years herself before she showed up on his doorstep, blushing like a teenage girl. Lucy finished her salad, and poured herself a glass of wine. She twirled the glass in her hand with a flick of her wrist, bent to it, and breathed in.

“Blackberries.” She paused, while Gary nodded. “A hint of sorgum.” Gary had no clue what sorgum was. He was mesmorized by the small dimple in the middle of her forehead that she got when she was thinking. Gary had no clue where all the food was going, what happened to your digestive tract when you were dead, if it was all just piling up and she was going to explode or what.

She sipped from the glass. Her lips were purple when she pulled it away. “Gary,” she said, this reminds me of that cruise we took down to Cape Caneverale years ago.” Gary smiled and assured her that it reminded him of that exact same trip. He didn’t think that Lucy and John had ever been to Cape Caneverale either. This Lucy was a liar. He loved her. “Remember how blond we got that week Gary?” Her hair was beginning to fall out. Gary had poured a solid fifth of liquid plumber down the drain this morning.