Micro Stories

I was riding the train through the darkness, reading a portion of Swann’s Way. A teacher once told me that you only needed to read a few pages to understand what Proust was getting at. And yet, here I was riding on a train in the darkness away from a woman that I’d loved. In the dark, the countryside all looks the same. The hedges, trees and mountains are all imaginary. As, I see now, were you. All the women I have loved look the same in the dark. The train rolls through the mountains, taking me farther or further away. I never know which one I’m supposed to use. I never know when things have reached an end. I suspect that the dark, and the cold window pressed against my cheek are telling me something profound. I suspect they are telling me that you are gone.

End

You said something funny about birding to a friend, threw back your head and laughed. I was watching the children play a game of freeze tag in the park, three and four. My oldest was cheating, randomly unfreezing whenever it suited her. The day was warm, and the recycled tires on the playground were hot. I was watching them play, and watching you, remembering what it was like to be young. It always looks so exhausting, all that laughter and joy.

End

I would like to go fishing this morning. Rise before dawn, put on galoshes and drive to the nearest gas station for bait. I want to drive up to the dam and fish where it’s the easiest, on a small boat, with one of my best friends. I want to tie a blue bottle to the edge of a line and flip it expertly into the water. I do not have an aptitude for such things. So instead, I am sitting on the couch, just after dawn, watching other people fish on the television. They do not look peaceful. Someone is weighing  a fish and shaking his head. I suspect, as with many other things in my life, much is being lost in translation.

End

The word that I failed on was encyclopedia. And I’ve dwelled on it for years since, e n c y c l o p e d I a. I was seven or so, and I, silly person that I am, have never forgotten the failure of that day. What silliness to pretend that there weren’t a thousand other words on which I would have failed:onomonopea, interstices, hypertrophied. The next year the word was column, which has always stung less. Who decided to place that “n” there, as if the word needed any other help standing up?

End

On the evening after the storm all of the clocks in our offices and homes were out. And yet, we ate breakfast in the same silence. Kissed our kids on the forehead between 7:53 and 7:57 and drove to work in the same flows of traffic. We worked well into the afternoon, taking breaks at noon or one as planned. Nothing changed the day the clocks went out in our city. We, in some nightmare of technicity, had become the machines. We were happy to be in such regular places.

End

Some nights, all I want is someone to stand over me in bed and whisper that everything is going to be all right. Mind you, I don’t expect that to change anything. The world will never be all right. I just want someone to stand over me, and tell me that it will be so.

End

We had the chance to play one last game of chess before the cold took us. Earlier in the evening the captain had stepped outside for a smoke and disappeared. It was an intense game, played slowly, because our hands were frostbitten and our minds slowed by lack of food and water. In the distance, you could hear the dogs calling, or the moon howling. We’d already eaten the dogs. It must have been the moon. I lost my rooks rather easily, to a pair of knights, and my bishops were practically left for dead. By the time you’d crossed the board and placed your pawn on my side, saying, “long live the queen.” I’d been dead for twenty minutes, watching you study the board and waiting for you to join me on the other side.

End

At the end of the semester, after I’d moved out of my host parent’s home, I slept in the street. In the morning, a woman came by, sweeping the streets, sweeping the last cob webs of darkness from the sky. She was brisk. I was lying there, cold and alone, trying to stitch together the series of moments I’d had into something coherent, something that resembled a life rather than a collage. She spoke to me, and I could have sworn that she said that she loved me that the universe put her on the earth to appear at this very moment, in the guise of a street cleaning woman to preach the doctrine of love. I did not speak her language. Later, when I am telling the story to my friends, I realize that I did understand her. She was asking me to move. The advice was still just as sound.