Kites and Weddings
Very short stories
by
Charlie Close
SMASHWORDS EDITION
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PUBLISHED BY:
Charlie Close on Smashwords
Kites and Weddings
Very Short Stories
Copyright © 2011 by Charlie Close
Smashwords Edition License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.
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To my wife Kathy and the memory of my mother Susan.
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Introduction
Welcome to Kites and Weddings. Very short stories are a new kind of writing and I realize you may not know what to expect. I have written this introduction to explain what very short stories are and demonstrate how to approach them as a reader.
By very short stories, I mean stories that are no more than a few words long. If you have read a lot of novels and traditional short stories you might think this isn’t enough space to write an interesting or complete story. I want to show that in a well-written very short story, a handful of words is all you need. Let’s look at one particular story.
The real job, they were told, was not to be window washers at the Victoria's Secret Building after all, but something even better.
“Ah-ha!” you say. This thing isn’t a story at all. It has no characters, unless you accept that “they” are characters. And nothing happens. The only verbs, “were told” and “to be”, are passive. No story you have ever heard of has no actors and no actions. Case closed.
All of this is literally true, but it isn’t literarily true. The person is reading this story – you – are not a computer, and you can see more than is written explicitly on the page. What can we tell from the story by reading between the lines?
There are job-seekers, at least two of them.
They are probably young men since they have shown up for a low-status job where they hope to see women walking around in lingerie.
They are probably not very smart since everyone knows there is no such thing as the Victoria’s Secret Building.
There is someone who told them an obviously-false story about the window-washing job.
That person, whoever he or she is, probably has a reason for lying to the young men and does not have their best interests at heart.
Therefore, whatever the “even better” job is, it is likely to be even worse.
And because the young men are stupid, they will probably go along with it.
And things will end badly for them.
All this information is conveyed in one sentence. The story starts in the middle and it implies what must have happened before and what will happen next. What the story says, combined with what you can guess, form a complete story with distinct characters and a beginning, middle, and end.
You might point out that each “probably” and “likely” in the above description stands for information the story left out. We don’t know who is offering the job or his (or her) motivation. We don’t know anything about the poor dupes or the particulars of what will happen to them. If the job of a story is to tell the reader what happened, then this one falls short.
It’s true that information is left out, but that’s also true of a Norman Rockwell painting, or the photograph of the soldiers raising the flag at Iwo Jima, or a Far Side cartoon. Each of these combine the artist’s skill in deciding what to show and the audience’s ability to infer what is missing from what is present. They offer an emotional response just as strong as if all the details were included.
A good very short story can be as satisfying as longer stories. It can show a moment in time with clarity and punch without messing around with pages of description and dialogue. To work, it has to win you over in the space between two blinks of an eye. It invites you to use your imagination in collaboration with the author’s. It is short enough to memorize and you can read several in a single sitting, each as different as two snowflakes.
I hope you enjoy the stories in this book, as much for what you will bring to them as a reader as for what you’ll find in the text of the stories themselves.
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Kites and Weddings
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The photographer took a few pictures with the kite in the frame and a few without. He loved weddings in the park.
Baby gazed into the pug’s eyes. His fingers curled and uncurled.
This Madonna and child could go for some ice cream right about now.
Mom asked what kind of kitten they had found at the pet store. Dad held up the Chihuahua.
Joey ran up to the tall urinal and made Dad take the short one.
“Boy, I don’t care if Daddy’s cookie is bigger. He’s Daddy. Now go on.”
Mommy and Davey shouldn’t finger paint when Daddy’s been away so long.
“Mom, in rock-scissors-paper, what beats SmashTron?”
Why wouldn’t anyone teach her how to twirl a baton?
Jenna joined Gina on the bench. “Stay on your side. No glissandos!”
“Son, why don’t you let your brother play the drumset first.”
Grampa showed him how you gut a fish.
Sensei approached. “You are not allowed to pull your opponent by the belt…nor hug him to the ground…nor say ‘kowabunga’.”
He pinched the candy between his fingers. “What do you say?”
The girls sucked helium from the balloons and sang Old Man River until they fell asleep with the lights on.
Chris’s breath stopped when he saw the carving under the lid of his desk: “Chris '72”.
“See? You can sit on the wide ones.” The heels of his tennis shoes bounced on In Memoriam.
He looked up from the wet pieces of glass at his feet. “They’re just fish.”
I’m the one who dared him to straddle the well.
“Tell your brother thanks a lot for teaching Junior to whistle. Now I’m scared to take our family to church.”
The sign on the door said Irish Dancing Lessons. Rivka went in.
Davey finally got the tap shoes for his birthday. He ran across the carpet to the sliding glass door and out onto the patio.
Aunt Lucy buttered us each a slice of banana bread and sent us into the living room to watch wrestling.
The first Halloween after, Aunt Sara turned out her lights and prayed for rain.
“Give me the grease gun. Go in the house.”
He set down his rifle when he reached the buck. His father and brother stood behind him.
The accordion weighed more than he thought it would.
This year Donna’s mother invited her into the kitchen. “Your Aunt Margaret needs help with the stuffing.”
Aunt Shirley poured vodka into the gravy boat and Mom put a hand on my shoulder. “Auntie’s house, Auntie’s rules.”
“You say the grace, Bobby, not me. I made this meal and now you can pray over it.”
He poured gravy over everything on his plate. He said, who’d have thought so many women could fit in one kitchen.
Mom told Dad, don’t buy a pogo stick for Christmas. Wait until summer, she said. But Dad wouldn’t listen, and now he’s yelling at me.
They each got a tape recorder for Christmas. Joe lost his before New Year’s and Jane used hers to tell the truth about their mother.
He packed away the ornaments and wrote a note to place in the last box: “You found the best tree ever this year.”
He said beer tastes colder in the cab of an 18-wheeler.
She looked at him out of the corner of her eye and kept stirring. “The secret to gumbo is not to ask so many damn questions.”
“No,” she said. “I want you to eat it.”
He gestured his knife to young Bucky. “The point of whittlin ain’t the shavins.” The boy nodded and looked for a broom.
Melanie asked Dad if she could ride the lawn mower now that Angus had a broken leg.
“Go away! I’m not hungry and I have to practice walking in this dress.”
Kevin’s sister painted his toes robin’s egg blue while he was asleep. He awoke to the tickle of her gentle blowing.
She knew better than to ask her mother if she looked good in this black cape.
They were backstage when Brandon showed how he could turn a cummerbund into a bra.
He dared her to solve the Rubik’s cube. Ten seconds later he was in love.
Betsy and Patty exchanged lunches every day until Patty got braces and Betsy met a boy in the lunch line.
Heather pulled her lips slowly off the mirror and her sister said, “No, you’re not doing it right.”
Her friend Bobby made her peel the butterfly sticker off the corner of her glasses. He said it was stupid.
Sharkey wished wind sprints could get him a girlfriend.
When Mr. Jones told them to switch partners, he was surprised to find Becky Jordan’s upheld hands were red and damp.
Stanley took her hand. “You didn’t call me here just because you wanted to know the square root of 169, which is 13, did you?”
His sister said, “What makes you think I know how to tie a tie?”
They stood side by side, hands almost touching. She did not stop looking at the painting until he did.
No matter how long Sarah stared at the mirror, she could not tell how big her nose looked to Tommy.
“Yeah, ‘What’s your name?’ That’s the oldest line ever, are you trying to put me to sleep? My name is Rhonda, what’s your name?”
Ellen remembered the day in seventh grade when she first met a boy with hands bigger than hers.
Melissa taped Michael Edwards’s senior picture deep inside her locker and shut the door before anyone could see.
He brought her to the swings. If he couldn’t say it here, he could never say it at all.
It was Saturday night, and Melody, Morgan, and Ophelia had more than buttered popcorn on their minds.
He held the popcorn in his lap between two greedy women, but he wasn’t worried he’d get his. He was ambidextrous and bipolar.
“I think we have to say goodnight,” Kimberly whispered. He breathed in her hair. Then he fell asleep. He had narcolepsy.
Uncle and I entered through the gate. There was an ax stuck in a stump and the yard was full of moving chickens.
The intersection was too steep and the road was too busy for learning to drive a stick. Or it would have been if he hadn’t already started.
They had only one pair of boxing gloves between them.
Rafael felt the moment when his opponent was ready to give up. He let go of regret for him and began to push his arm to the table.
Fourth down and four. The linebacker sang “That’s Amore”.
I arrived at the far end of Third Street just before dawn. For a while my cymbals and I were at the front of the parade.
“Chad, this drum circle has standards. Remember that. Okay, let’s greet the sun again!”
We made big a circle and pretty soon we figured out who was supposed to throw the frisbee to who.
“Listen,” he said. “I don’t play notes. I play sounds.”
She took the elevator four floors up. The lounge and the rooms down the hall looked the same, but what about the girls who lived here?
When the dance was over Janice stood and asked the other girls if she could help clean up.
She didn’t cry all the way home because she did not go home.
She stuck in her front tooth and laced up her skates. 5:00 AM always came so early.
Sasha stepped out. Yes, the hip boots had been made for a taller woman, and no, zebra print bandanas had not yet come back in fashion, but…
She wore her white dress for him. He ordered the buffalo wings.
Even though a bowling date was her idea, he turned out to be a much, much better bowler.
Jason held the dumpster lid for Lisbeth. When she found the fresh tomatoes, he knew she was the one.
He threw her sandals into the surf. “Let me carry you,” he said.
Todd stuck his Metallica poster to the middle of the wall. That’s what you can do when it’s your apartment.
Cindy stored the flowerpots in a corner of the garage where she could see them all through the winter.
She watched her soaps while she carefully painted her toenails black. Halloween comes once a year and it was Tony’s baby after all.
New Year’s Day. Jerry took his book to the laundry room and sat on a drier.
He looked down at his knuckles. Then he kissed them. Good thing no one else saw that.
Kathy put her collie on his back to brush his teeth. “Just you and I, just you and I.”
He painted a button on the last cadet and set it down. The lamp shone above the parade ground at West Point.
He carried his camera all the way to Istanbul and took pictures of people eating.
He wondered how the professionals covered a drumset in flames.
The guitarist spoke a little softer. “This song doesn’t need any drums.”
The guitarist said, “Whose soul do we have sell to find a bass player?” The drummer raised a stick-twirling hand.
He shut off the headlights. He liked to drive this road by feel.
He touched the pen to his tongue and wrote down his phone number for her.
Lucy whispered in his ear, “The way to win at blackjack is to follow your heart.”
“Okay, anyone who DOESN’T want me to become a nun, raise your glasses - I mean glass. Okay.”
By the time he got to the shady grass it wouldn’t be shady anymore. He started pushing the mower again.
He stood on the log and looked into the water pooled on one side. The camp was still three hours away.
She read a book. He studied her bare knees.
He ordered the hash browns. Brenda smiled and set a full sugar shaker on his table.
She scraped her peas onto his plate. “I don’t like peas,” she said.
The real job, they were told, was not to be window washers at the Victoria’s Secret Building after all, but something even better.
He said, “It’s ‘barbed wire’, not ‘bob war’, and personally I don’t see what the problem is.”
“Heh! That, my friend, would be Easter Sunday.”
The blue and red light flashed behind them. He smiled. “So, ladies, here’s the plan.”
I stood next to the Indian guy and we both took pictures of the Taj Mahal.
“Stop touching me. My grampa died in this bed.”
“Oh no, dear, I’m not going to look at those old letters again. You go ahead if you want to.”
“It’s terrible when you get to that age of having sick parents, man. That’s really hard. Well, you probably know that, huh?”
Thankfully her dog died first.
He pointed the channel changer at his dog, whom he had not walked since the first snowfall. “Buddy, you’re getting fat.”
“Before you say anything else, Steve, the bed we’re shopping for is for my mother.”
Michael saw his old college friends often. Amber, for one, worked in a nearby building and bought a latte from him every morning.
I didn’t think to shake the new guy’s hand, but Adam did.
He groped for a business card.
They shook hands firmly. Only one of them knew his toenails were painted with purple sparkle polish.
The application said, “Describe your previous experience driving a bus.” Ed winced and moved to the next question.
He drove his bus through the streets of Seattle and picked up passengers who, unlike him, did not have a Ph.D.
He wore his work boots into the sushi restaurant.
Ron leaned on his broom out of sight of the open doors. The last day of school was always hard for him.
POW! Flies don’t have a chance in winter.
The lights ahead were streaked and blurry. The radio was too loud. He told himself again he would not be late.
Mario wanted not to be holding this beer bottle any more.
“Man, there are tons of fish on this side of the boat. Whoo, they’re jumpin!”
He named his IV stand Julio. He introduced himself as Robert and asked his new friend if he wasn’t a little too thin.
He imagined that each flower delivery was really from himself. He loved everyone and wanted them to get well soon.
Married him after all. Trying to love Sioux City.
Peeing on the strip. Then crying on it.
All Rita’s friends brought pregnancy tests after work Friday night, and hell yeah, she was really pregnant.
The wedding photographer snapped a picture of me. I don’t know why. I was just a guy at a wedding.
His boat floated under the bridge beneath people he would never see and who were going the other way.
He shut his locker and noticed how his glove arm was tan down to the wrist. Maybe it had been a good season after all.
Sylvia pulled off her dress shoes and wished she had different feet.
Steve ate his pudding cup in front of Joanna. “It’s French vanilla,” he said. “From France.”
“OR...or…you could use that same ingenuity to get me the thing I asked for in the first place.”
“Do you know why he wants to put a popcorn machine in the kitchenette? To steal a headcount from my project. Nuh-uh. Ain’t gonna happen.”
“And I said, ‘I’ll get Chad Dixon on the phone.’, and Chad said the project wouldn’t be funded until Q2! So Mike had to shut up after that.”
“Yes, I know we’re friends, Jody, but things look different on this side of the desk.” He tapped it with a knuckle.
Sandra picked up her guitar case, grabbed her car keys from their hook, and kissed her husband. “Time to rock,” she said.
He saw the trombone case when he woke up the next morning. What had he been thinking?
“Shake it, Mom!”
They did for Sushma what they did for everyone who joined their team. They took her out to Lucky’s for the best cheeseburgers in town.
Jerry wrapped Farouk’s wife in a hug. “I’m so happy to meet you! Welcome to our home.”
She waited for the Garcias to fill out the paperwork and wondered, not for the first time, what the fine print would look like in Spanish.
He waited for the church to be empty.
We pushed all the chairs together at one end of the floor and stacked the phones on a desk. We hoped someone would want them.
There was only the desk, the pen, the paper, and the fluorescent light. He was already out of coffee.
“So you didn’t work on your novel today. Why are you telling me?”
He decided to focus his writing on quality instead of quantity. Ultimate quality.
He stopped mid-sentence, paused a moment, then typed a period.
“What do you mean, this shirt looks autumnal on me?”
“Don’t worry, you can rewrite it.” she
said.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, all of it.”
He bought a hat to go with his new riding lawnmower.
She pulled out a club. “Use the seven iron,” he said.
“Honey,” she said. “There’s a mosquito in the tent.”
She smashed a mosquito with her harvest maize spatula.
The salesman addressed himself to the wife. “These pants will fit him nicely.”
He opened the cabinet door. Where was his wife’s belly dancing workout video?
He pushed his way through the door. “Excuse me, I have something for your wife.”
He read the note again. “Dog pop? What’s dog pop?”
The ringing telephone interrupted their lovemaking. Melanie was calling to tell them she had arrived safely at college.
“No. No! I don’t care if you love me, you’re not coming near me when the air conditioner’s broken.”
Now that he had emptied his mind, he thought he would have something to say. He thought he would have something to say.
And so they combined their two novels into one big novel and were delighted to see they were almost half done.
He began the reading from his favorite passage in Chapter One. His toe was pressed against the box of books he hoped to sell.
The two chairs cast slanted shadows. Harvey sat in one and drank his beer.
John and I pulled the rope together to raise the chandelier to the ceiling. Our ceiling. And then I asked myself, what if I let go?
She looked down at her neighbor’s cat. “Why do you always eat here now, kitty? Is it because I feed you better than her?”
The storm knocked down all her windchimes.
He laid down in the grass beside and above his mother.
The bottle they had bought did not hold all her ashes.
I drove through the junkyard gate. All my stuff was now junk.
“The studios are just waiting for me to die so they can make movies from my books without me.”
The man blocked the light and pushed a plastic mask on my face. “This will help you breathe,” he said.
When they ran out of chips, the Elk Grove Rest Home poker club played for pills. Ernie, who had swept the last hand, was feeling great.
He put the camera back to his eye. The boat had left the frame, but not the wake.
The End
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Other Books by Charlie Close
Burning Embers and Other Stories of Marriage, Work, and Family (ISBN 978-1598588187)
Visit Charlie at http://charlieclose.com