This Human Condition: A Collection of Flash and Micro Fiction
Page 4
Never have I wanted anything more in my life than those secret moments I get to share with you, and never have I feared anything quite so much. I have hope in my heart that you won’t walk away from me yet, though I know that it’s only a matter of time. I wish I could be a selfless as you, could be as good as you. But I’m not. I want you and need you and so I’ll take every moment of time I can have with you and hold it close until the day that the guilt you feel overrides the love you have for me. The sad irony is that the one thing that I respect the most about you is the one thing that will keep you from me in the end. Your love for your family, your sense of honor and of duty…all of those traits which make a man noble… those are the same things which will eventually make you hate me - and I fear, yourself - for giving in to me.
For that reason, and that alone, I dread the day you realize that I am your one flaw. That I alone am the one thing that’s bad about you. It’s because of this that some odd and horribly twisted part of me wishes that she would come around, fall in love with you again…give you the support and desire you so desperately need and deserve. I want this for you because I know that it will make you happy and above all else your happiness is what I want.
I’m going to try to get some rest, and dream of you.
* * * * *
DISAPPOINTMENT
It is generally known,
that he who expects much will be often disappointed; yet disappointment seldom cures us of expectation,
or has any effect other than that of producing
a moral sentence or peevish exclamation
Samuel Johnson
* * * * *
Destined to be…Disappointed – Rachel Wall
She wondered if the truth were there in front of her and she was merely struck blind by pride and folly. Was she destined to fade out of his life, like a star no longer of any use to anyone - especially to him? Worse was wondering why she should care so much when the reality of his life was obvious. He wasn’t free to be with her, he wasn’t free to want her and he’d never once made any suggestion otherwise. ‘Stupid, stupid girl’ she said to herself with a sigh.
Was it possible he loved two women or was it more likely that his love lay elsewhere while his lust lay with her? She couldn’t eradicate the sneaking suspicion that she was a panacea for his wounded heart, nothing more. For to be a man unwanted by his spouse - a man with a tender and loving heart such as his - it was indeed a wound.
Unfortunately she didn’t have the courage it took to ask him those questions. The thought of his answer being something other than what she so wanted to hear made her stomach clench tight and her heart race. Perhaps it was better, this not knowing. Better than knowing that she was nothing more than a fool, and absolutely destined to fade.
In her silence she closed her eyes and whispered the into the air; ‘I’m destined to be disappointed… aren’t I?’
To which the wind replied a quiet and subtle ‘yes’.
* * * * *
Desire to Indifference – Gabrielle Mitchell-Marell
1.
At a party in Brooklyn, a blond-haired man with metal-framed glasses, probably six years my junior lingers where I stand by the window in my friend’s friend’s apartment. He smiles and flashes his eyes at mine when they catch, until I think, this is no accident. He argues with me about city politics and after I get fired up, he retreats and nods his head. “You’re right,” he says. At first I assume he is being sarcastic, because I’m not used to being told this by young men at parties. I let the dawning knowledge of his interest defrost like a frozen treat I’m not sure I want. Later, at a bar we’ve all moved to, he climbs onto a bar stool next to me. I scan my mind for small talk. I consider how, when I feel something for someone, I retreat from my usual band of questions, like what do you do or where do you live? Polite curiosity is replaced by coy survival. I don’t recall having asked this guy those questions and I take this as a good sign. I let my calf rub up against his and pretend not to notice. This gesture feels large, like a confession, even though I’m concerned it’s the least I will have to do. I am still thinking: what happens when we are alone in the sharp light of day and I cannot call it up, the desire. This is what holds me back. What pushes me forward is the thought that he could be the kind of man whose plain mouth changes into something I see when I close my eyes at work. At the end of the night, when he asks for my number I stand over his shoulder as he taps it into his phone. “It’s my real one,” I say because this ritual embarrasses me. He puts away the phone and turns, and then just like I always want–– he leans in to kiss me. I am only thinking though of who is watching. My lips are dry and I receive the kiss like a doll. I want to tell him, a warning would have helped; I wouldn’t have refused. As he turns to the door, I call, “Do you know my name?” He looks back, nods and is gone. The next day stretches out long and satisfying in its leisure. I am alarmed by my own excitement. As daylight fades into new night, I picture him wooing me on our first date. “You’re too young,” I’ll say, as I lean in to kiss him. I picture sex that is silly and then one time serious. I imagine his stranger-ness growing into my best comfort. When I hear nothing, I pass on a message through my friend to his. If this were a small town, I’d run into him again and things might happen naturally, the way I’ve heard they do in some places. The air changes. Warm autumn turns to early winter.
2.
At a summer work conference, a curly-haired man just my height is taken in by my charms. We take walks to a lake and I try to find the place in me that wants to find a place in him. He is patient and curious, always wondering what I’ve been up to. I am kind and walk a certain line that I know must confuse him. One day when sunlight slants down through fluttering green leaves and my hair is freshly washed, I feel his longing like a guardian. I try to picture us kissing and think: I already know the moves his mouth will make. I bide my time because I know how this goes. I’ve seen a man’s hope turn corner, the desire to indifference, and indulgence to impatience. Each day I think, today he will catch on. Then soon it happens. He wanders off when I approach; averts his eyes when I leave a room. I lose this thing I never asked for and the loss is real.
3.
During dinner at this artist’s residency where I will live all month, Russell from rural Texas strips the half-ripe banana and in the clean sound I hear him taking off his clothes. Fuck, not again, I think. I am now the age where there is a good chance that a man I meet-- even if he still looks like a college boy wearing a thermal under a tee shirt and eyes as open as daisies-- is married. Later, I watch his muscles roll under cotton as he mixes plaster with his hands. I cannot bear this information. Judge me. I am not happy with myself, but it is never easy to be told no. No after consideration hurts, but this no before the start line brings on madness in me. Sure, there are other ways for us to know each other, but this friendship will never work. Here I learn to avoid the one I most connect with, make do with the rest.
* * * * *
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
There is more pleasure to building castles in the air than on the ground.
Edward Gibbon
Gabrielle Mitchell-Marell
gabriellemm@gmail.com
Gabrielle Mitchell-Marell’s fiction has been published on Anderbo.com. Her articles, reviews and interviews have appeared in Variety, BlackBook, Publishers Weekly and online in New York Magazine, Pen American Center, The L Magazine and elsewhere. She has been a fiction fellow at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Vermont Studio Center and attended the 2008 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She has also been a judge for Amazon’s Breakthrough Novelist Competition and taught writing at Fordham University and Yeshiva University. She received a BS in English Literature from Skidmore College and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence.
Bridgid Gallagher
bridgid@bridgidgallagher.com
https://bridgidgallagher.com/
Bridgid Gallagher is a
freelance writer and the founder of InkyFreshPress.com, a blog collaboration for new writers seeking to hone their craft and achieve publication. As a freelance writer, she writes articles for publications and provides written content for small businesses. Bridgid and her husband recently launched their web design studio with the goal of helping writers and artists polish their web presence. When she isn’t at the computer, Bridgid enjoys rock climbing, running and cooking healthy meals.
Virginia Farrington Hinchey
hincheyv@gmail.com
I am a 61 year old wife and mother of six children; five boys and one girl, all grown. Born in Chicago (raised in the suburbs), married in Berkeley, California, where my first son was born and lived in Sacramento for 10 years where the remaining five of my children were born. Our family migrated back East to Athol, MA, a true factory town, when my youngest was three months old. We have lived here for 26 years. I was a stay-at-home mom (17 years) until all the children were in school. I then went to work. For five years, I was a columnist and journalist for the local daily, The Athol Daily News. My column was called North Quabbin Upbeat and covered events, politics and famous persons in the nine-town area of the North Quabbin. I also covered town meetings in the town of Athol. I have just returned to school after a 40-year hiatus where I took my first English class in an eon. I am now interested in creating a popular blog much like my column but not necessarily tied down to hometown news. My current motto is “A writer writes always.”
Tamara Dourney
tdourney@gmail.com
https://actsofcreativity.com/
A native of Florida, Tamara still lives there with her family and their pets. She’s been writing as long as she can remember, starting with poetry and working her way up to more journalistic endeavors. Like most authors, she is also an avid reader with eclectic taste in books, devouring everything from ponderous tomes on quantum physics to romance novels.
Stacy Reckard
stacy.reckard@gmail.com
Stacy Reckard is a professional cook, part time globe trotter and ameture photographer. She lives in the Midwest, where she shares her life with her dog, Max. When not slaving away at the restaurant where she works, you can find her chasing her dreams- either through furthering her education or in front of her
computer, pouring out the stories which fill her imagination.
TS Harrington
tsharrington@gmail.com
https://tsharrington.com/
TS Harrington is a modern day Renaissance woman. Mother to four precocious kids who are a constant source of amusement and material for her as yet unwritten biography, she is also a professional firefighter and fashion photographer with a penchant for travel and meeting unusual people. More recently, TS Harrington took up welding with the intention of hopefully learning the skill of birthing something beautiful from metal and flame. A consummate bibliophile who has more than once promised her husband she would try to cull her collection of books stacked on various surfaces, she has also been a writer most of her life, completely absorbed in dissecting the human condition. Her prose is full of emotion and truths about Life, The Universe & Everything.
Jayme Whitfield
jaymewhitfield@gmail.com
https://www.jaymewhitfield.com
Jayme Whitfield grew up in the wilds of Florida, a region where epic tales from the past collide with the sun-drenched reality of the present. Immersed in stories of sunken treasures, rum runners, cowboys and Indians, juke-joints and promiscuous women, the small town where she lives has evolved into a duality of gang violence and oil-soaked tourists, drugs and the natural beauty of paradise. She wouldn’t trade it for the world, even if she does have to dodge the occasional hurricane.
At home, she loves to relax with a good book, but more often than not the stories are drowned out by a chorus of characters in her own head; a menagerie of voices waiting for their tale to be told. After trying to ignore those voices for years as she wrote for trade magazines and a local paper, Jayme finally gave in and turned to the spicier side of storytelling.
Maggie Caldwell
maggie@aptosmultimedia.com
https://lifeinaskillet.com/
Writer and photographer Maggie Daniel Caldwell thinks flash fiction is much like a photograph - a snapshot of a place and time that leaves room open for speculation and interpretation. She lives and works on the Central Coast of California and is happy to be a part of this anthology.
Cheryl M Tait
shabadoo2u@yahoo.com
Cheryl M Tait has seen the predictions of the Maya Tribes turn into a national scare of doomsday events as the gossip spread that the world would end in 2012. Contrary to popular interpretation, she believes concerned the higher conscious mind required for the future to fix the worlds problems. She hopes to offer an alternate view, a view that places significance on hope for the human race and leads the reader on a journey of a new beginning, a time of higher consciousness where minds will be open to the construction of a new world, the true prediction came from the Maya Indian Clan.
Christi Craig
cdhcraig@gmail.com
https://writingunderpressure.wordpress.com
A Native Texan, Christi Craig lives in Wisconsin with her husband and two children. Her published work appears in the 2009 Summer/Harvest issue of Alltopia Antholozine and in a collection of short fiction and nonfiction entitled On the Fly: Stories in Eight Minutes or Less. She is currently at work on her first novel. On her blog, Writing Under Pressure, you can read more of her flash fiction pieces and short essays, inspired by “Wednesday’s Word,” a self-induced writing challenge.
Mary Jo Schneider
mojoschneider@gmail.com
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?success=1&id=1577538255
An Adult Education teacher, Mary Jo Schneider provides program and teacher support for the Adults with Disabilities program in Oakland Adult and Career Education, Oakland, California. In her work, she is committed to providing professional growth that helps teachers take their students to new heights. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing from Mills College, Oakland. She has also earned a Masters in Liberal Arts with an emphasis in Sacred Cinema/Documentary Film Production from Naropa Institute, formerly located in Oakland, California.
Rebecca Coffey
rcoffey@rebeccacoffey.com
https://rebeccacoffey.com/
Rebecca Coffey’s short fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Rumpus, The Revolving Floor, and a large handful of other literary magazines. Her short nonfiction is regularly featured in Discover Magazine, where she is a frequent contributor to the “20 Things” column, mixing science and light humor, and where she is a new contributor to the magazine’s fun “Science Destinations” series. Coffey has a more serious side, as well. Her narrative nonfiction book UNSPEAKABLE TRUTHS AND HAPPY ENDINGS: Human Cruelty and the New Trauma Therapy (Sidran, 1998), a journalistic look at psychological trauma and its treatment, was cited as an Outstanding Academic Book by the American Library Association’s Choice magazine. Coffey is also a commentator on Vermont Public Radio.
Rachel Wall
rachelwall35@gmail.com
https://eroticintoxication.wordpress.com
Lyrical and Lustful. Describing myself has never been an easy feat for me. Often I’ve felt as if I were merely a shape-shifter of sorts, changing to fit the moment in time and circumstance I was currently in. Always running, always avoiding that long deep look into the mirror of Self. Yet, as the beat of time has kept pace with my ever increasing sense of self awareness, I’ve begun to feel overcome with two rather exquisite sensations; that life is too short to be ashamed of my lusty and carnal thoughts, and that my love of poetry and music should be channeled into my writing. Therefore it is with these two words that I define myself on this new, this grand adventure. Join me, and together we’ll see where it takes us.