2010 was the first year that I took writing seriously. This is a collection of 20 of my favorite flash stories that were posted on the Six Sentences Social Network (www.sixsentences.ning.com) and Thinking Ten–A Writers Playground (www.thinkingten.com).
Elliott Cox is an aircraft mechanic, musician, writer, father, and son; not always in that order, and rarely ever all at the same time. He can be reached at L.ElliottCox@Gmail.com or www.ElliottCox.com. © Elliott Cox 2011 Cover Art Used With Permission © David Varney 2008
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YELLOW WEED After being thrust into the wind by a child’s innocent breath, a graywhite seed was deposited by a water flow into a crack between layers of asphalt, where a dandelion began to grow. The seed did not ask, nor was it told, where it was bound; a small patch of processed rubber and tar, long since abandoned by its human creators, would be its home. The gray-white seed produced a green sprout which produced a yellow flower, which begat a spherical plume of gray-white seeds. The dandelion never questioned its origin, never envied the flowers that covered the grasslands, never pitied the sprouts that didn’t make it. When it was plucked from its hold in the earth, the dandelion allowed its seeds to be thrust into the wind by a child’s innocent breath before its bare green stalk was discarded, now useless. The dandelion never dwelled on adversity; adversity loves you not.
*Posted on the Six Sentences Social Network on February 26, 2010. 3
TO EACH THEIR OWN If the world were blind, music would be the vision of beauty, not the catalyst for lust. Words would be spoken, not written; the first draft would be the final draft. If the world were deaf, music would be a manuscript, passed along from soul to soul, each deciding the rhythm and reason. Spoken inflections would be lost to time, the con-artist losing purchase. If the world were mute, words would be written with conviction, no explanation of why a sentence had to be written, only more useless words. "I love you" would come from proof, not from thin air.
*Posted on the Six Sentences Social Network on July 11, 2010. 4
DINGANE Dingane is not only the elder male of his family at the age of thirteen; he is the only person, male or female in his family. He was among the second generation to be born in Cape Town’s largest shanty-town and had lost his mother to AIDS, his two sisters to prostitution, and didn’t know which wealthy sex tourist had planted the seed of his future into his mother. Dingane walked eight hundred plus kilometers north to Namibia, with nothing but a small knife, his wit, and an undying will to keep his family name alive. He lived in a hut built from the local flora; it wasn’t much, but the walls felt to him like the warm hugs that he used to get from his mother. Every morning, Dingane went down to the river to get water for washing and cooking, and every morning he saw the same Cape buffalo; he knew it was the same buffalo like a blind mother knows the smell of her newborn baby. The two displaced elder males shared a respectful glance as Dingane said, “Hello dear friend.”
*Posted on the Six Sentences social Network on July 25, 2010.
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EEUWIGE LIEFDE
Elvin sat on a bench facing the North Sea a few miles from his home in Harlingen, The Netherlands watching the occasional ship and the constant work at the docks. “Hey honey, remember the crazy days from way back when? I felt so bad about bombing Dresden that I couldn’t stand myself and went AWOL? I didn’t speak German, you didn’t speak English, and we decided, god knows how, to run away to Holland, because neither of us spoke Dutch?” Elvin started laughing so hard that he had to lean on his cane to keep from going headfirst into the concrete. “Oh, such crazy kids we were, Elsrieke. God I miss you.”
*Posted at Thinking Ten on July 29, 2010.
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DRIVING PAST
I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. Thomas is sitting on a stool, working on my feet while I’m soaking my naughty bits in warm water and Epsom salts due to some unfortunate chafing issues that I won’t go into (you’re welcome). Yesterday started out much differently than today did. I was walking along I-95 somewhere in South Carolina. I don’t know exactly where I was, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t but a few miles from the factory that manufactures humidity and gnats. I was walking on the shoulder of the interstate with my back to traffic and my thumb out, feeling the wrath of every bad decision I’ve ever made. I heard a car slowing down behind me and I knew that that meant one of two things: I was about to get a ride; or, I was about to have something hurled from a car window at me by some teenage boy trying to impress some teenage girl. I was hoping that if someone were going to throw something on me, it would be a milkshake. An old pickup pulled onto the shoulder of the road about a hundred yards ahead of me. I looked into the cab through the passenger window and saw an old man in the drivers seat. All he said was, “I ain’t gonna kill ya’ or nothin’.” I liked him immediately. As we went north, he introduced himself as Thomas, but most folks around there called him Uncle Tom, he wasn’t sure why. He told me that he lived alone since his wife died a decade ago and I was welcome to spend the night at his place, so long as I worked off the debt in his garden. He was smiling as he said it, and I thought that a night indoors would be nice for a change, so I agreed. We walked into his rustic cabin and it looked like something from a movie. It was sparsely furnished and tidy, with everything in its rightful 7
place. The kitchen was small, but not crowded. It had a small wooden table in the middle and prints of grapes, apples and assorted fruit baskets hanging on the walls. We ate ham along with tomatoes and cucumbers from his garden for dinner and drank homemade wine to wash it down. After dinner, we sat on his screened porch and looked out at the expansive farm behind his house. We talked for a while and Thomas told me that he had spent most of his life at sea, both as a merchant sailor and on subs in the Navy during the war. He and his wife decided to move out to the middle of nowhere to retire from the rat race and live off the land for a while. “She died, I’m here, and that’s that”, he said after he drained the last of his wine. “Well, let’s get you a good nights sleep and I’ll fix you up in the morning so you can work your rent off.” This morning I rolled out of bed, feeling like I had been walking from Florida to South Carolina, because I had. Thomas is fixing me up, then off to work. I’m kind of fond of the old coot, and I think he may dig me as well. Who knows, maybe I’ll stay for a while. I could get used to living in the woods, away from cities filled with drugs, drug dealers, and people that are what I used to be.
*Posted at Thinking Ten on July 31, 2010. 8
PLAYING IN SPECTRUM MINOR
Tommy stepped off of stage left, his bass hanging from a cramped shoulder. The muscles in his left forearm barely surviving the normal phases of a good gig: from tight enough to crack a walnut to burning like phosphorus, then finally as numb as a hardcore dental assistant that found the key to the Novocaine cabinet. When Tommy got to the greenroom, he grabbed a bottle of water and started wiping his bass down to keep the sweat, stale beer, and finger oil from ruining the finish. The Super-glue that he poured on the fingers of his right hand, to keep them from splitting open, flaked off of the strings in dandruff sized proportions. The lead guitarist/singer of the band flopped down on the couch beside Tommy, "Man, you were really out of your groove tonight, you need to get up?" Tommy said, while still wiping his bass down, "I told you man, I'm off the shit, this is the first time in years that I've been able to see the colors of the music, and I ain't going back to shades of gray."
*Posted on the Six Sentences Social Network on August 9, 2010. 9
THE FAMILY TREE Wild Willie and I always made the chestnut tree “home base” for any game we played. At first, home was the magnolia tree, but we got tired of having to go through four feet of ass kicking to get to the trunk, so we had a thirteen-year-old-boy-counsel-meeting. We decided that the chestnut tree would be a perfect fit because we could run at it at full speed and when we got there, we could grab one of the low branches and try to swing all the way around the branch and land on top. Bill was on vacation with his family to some stupid place in Florida, so I was left to roam the fields alone for two weeks. It was a summer day and I saw Sara standing at the edge of the field. She was just standing there looking, so I went over to see what she was looking at. She said that she had been watching Bill and me run around and she wanted to know what games we played. I told her that they weren’t games for girls, but I would show her the rules anyway, just so she would know what she would be admiring when Bill and I got back to it. We got to the chestnut tree and I made the run for my usual branch, grabbed it, kicked my feet off of the trunk, and landed on top of the branch. She was very impressed. She asked me to help her up because she wanted to learn how to climb. After a few disclaimers, I helped her up. She sat beside me on the fourth branch up, just being boring, when she told me to look at the scrape on her shoulder. I looked over and before I knew it, her lips were on mine. She took control…I was confused…she went home…I was still in the tree. If I have it my way, Bill will just move to Florida, because those games that we used to play were just plain stupid. *Posted at Thinking Ten on August 12, 2010.
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CAPSTONE
The damage was done. I tried to cross the space-time continuum but, unfortunately, I'm still here...the fabric of time has eluded me yet again. My attempt to time-travel, most recently, wasn't a huge request; I was just looking to go back ten minutes or so, it wasn't like I was trying to pre-abolish slavery or anything. Ten minutes ago I was painting a white KKK hood over the mayor’s head, erasing that cocky grin from his selfappointed mural on the east wall of the courthouse, when I was grabbed by the shoulder and taken for a spin to face the thin security guard that snuck up on me like a ninja. The bucket of paint that I had in my left hand splattered like a money shot all over my chest and the guard’s shoes. This wasn't going well. My only saving grace came when Molly screamed at the top of her lungs from about a block away. I told her to hoot like an owl if she spotted anything that would get me busted...she took it upon herself to ratchet the threat level up. The guard looked in her direction, I dropped the bucket, and ass-hauling ensued. I'm sitting here in a puddle of who-knows-what, hiding from George. When George tells my Dad what I've done to his mural, my ass is grass.
*Posted at Thinking Ten on August 28, 2010. 11
THE LAST TIME
Everything was a blur. I got the call early Sunday morning; the call that I had been waiting on for over a hundred Sundays before, but could never prepare myself for. I ran out of the house and hit the ground in a run to get back to my childhood home – Son…Dad’s not doing good. I walked into my parent’s bedroom not knowing what I was going to see, but knowing what to expect. The moment I saw my father, my mentor, the man that taught me to stand proud in the face of adversity lying in his bed, everything that I expected went out of the window and was replaced by cartoonish colors and surreal visions. The several years that he had been battling cancer had certainly taken a toll on his body, but it never touched his will or his mental acuity. He had family and friends all around him during his last few days and I spent as much time in that crowded room as I could. I didn’t feel the need to rush to his bedside to spill any last minute words because our slate was clean; we had already said everything to each other that needed to be said several months before. Dad passed a little after ten o’clock Tuesday morning in his own bed, in his own home, surrounded by his own family; just the way he wanted it. Tuesday night, after all was said and done, Mom and I were getting his burial clothes together and found that his suit jacket was a little heavier than it should be. We found a .38 revolver in a leather holster and a church program in the inside pocket of his jacket. The only thing we could do was to start laughing and say “Yep, that was Dad.” The next day, one of my sisters enlarged an old photograph taken of the small police force that patrolled our town. Dad sat in the bottom row in the middle, the proud Chief of Police for the Town of Hemingway, SC.
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We sat that picture, along with one more, on a table at the base of the casket for the viewing and visitation. *Posted at Thinking Ten on September 4, 2010.
Dedicated to the memory of Larry S. Cox: March 06, 1942 - August 31, 2010. I miss ya, Pop. The sun sometimes shines on a sinner’s dark mind, even when they don’t seem to believe. And sometimes it rains on people with faith, like a sparrow stuck in a breeze. Oh, these clouds, they don’t seem to care for me.
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A NEW LEAF
As the sultry heat of summer's days give way to the cool evenings that autumn has been patiently waiting to deliver, I'm starting to see some semblance of a routine begin to re-form. I knew that I was going to be facing a major challenge in trying to keep up on my reading and writing over the past six weeks of business travel and general busy-ness; what I didn't foresee was my father passing away right in the middle of all of it. This will be the second piece I've written since August 31; the first piece was forced and not all that good, but as I write these words now, I'm getting that familiar vibration in my writing bone, which seems to live near my stomach, and I know that I'm ready. It's time for me to fill the inkwell and get on with it. The leaves don't ask for permission to change color, the snow doesn't wait for the go-ahead to fall, the grass doesn't wait for the green light to turn brown...they just do. If any of you need me, I'll be over here going on with my bad self.
*Posted on the Six Sentences Social Network on September 18, 2010. 14
SHEETS OF EMPTY CANVAS
We've been art buddies, Jeremy and I, for some time now, because he gets my writing and I get his paintings; two mediums, one love. I walked into his studio to water his plants while he was in 'Frisco for a couple of weeks to "get his groove down." Sheets of empty canvas lined the space; in rolls leaning against the walls, in squares piled up on tables, hanging in frames on the walls...all empty. When Jeremy got back home, I asked him about it. "My friend, when you see a cursor blinking at you from an empty page, you freak out because you see nothing; when I see an empty canvas...every bump, every thread, every millimeter screams to me. I like to make the canvas suffer with anticipation so that it will stop thinking of what color it wants, and start thinking about what color it needs."
*Posted on the Six Sentences Social Network on September 22, 2010. 15
THE FAMILY TREE FALLS
I turned thirteen that summer. I shared my first kiss with the woman that has been my wife for forty-one years now during that summer. Sara approached me one afternoon as I was sulking because my best bud, Bill, was on a family vacation and I was left with no one with which to send and receive thrown rocks. She tricked me into sharing our first kiss, and I have never forgiven her for that. Ever since that kiss, poking things with a stick, pushing someone into a pond, and farting in someone's face have failed to fulfill me with complete satisfaction as they did before I met her. Those things still give me some satisfaction now, of course; I won't claim to be completely grown up even at the age of sixty-one. I knew that it was time for me to cut down this long-dead tree, but I still had to wait until Sara was out of town to do it. This is the first time in my life that I have had to operate a chainsaw with tears streaming from my face. This tree that I just felled and cut into small pieces was the tree in which we shared our first kiss. I still have to smile, though, because who would have ever thought that our love would have outlasted an oak?
*Posted at Thinking Ten on September 28, 2010. 16
SHIMON SHAYS
He was a big guy, but he was more cruel than he was big. I was used to getting beat up by him just about every day and I learned to just stop, drop, and cover my face as soon as he came near me with that look in his eyes. After I had gone my usual two rounds with Simon yesterday, I did something that I thought I would never do...I fought back. Viciously. As I was dis-fetal-positioning myself, I watched as Simon slapped a girl from behind. When I saw the bright pink left side of her face become wet from tears, I saw red. I have to go by what other people tell me to recount what happened next, because I don't remember it at all. I stood up, picked a two inch think pine limb from the ground and calmly walked up behind Simon. As casually as tapping someone on the shoulder to ask them the time, I got Simon's attention, and then broke that pine limb across his teeth. When Simon came back to school a week or so later,I found that he had developed a lisp. When he said the letter "s", it sounded like a cobra hissing. After a bit of taunting for it, Shimon shkreemed at the top of hish lungsh, "I'm gonna kick all your ashes!" I, for one, wasn't worried.
*Posted at Thinking Ten on October 1, 2010.
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ADAM KNOWS WHAT TIME IT IS
"Sooooo...you meant to gray his face out?" Adam dumped the old coffee grounds into the trash and ground new beans, "Of course I meant to gray his face out! Can't you see it? Feel with your heart, man, not your eyes!" "I'm still not getting it, dude. I'm sorry." "Aargh! Okay...okay, okay. Just do me one solid." "Of course." "Just leave. Now. Come back tomorrow...leave your preconceived notions at your place. I'm burning lean tissue here, my friend...I think I have it."
*Posted at Thinking Ten on October 2, 2010
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GO NORTH, YOUNG MAN
He sat in an old ratty lawn chair looking out on the woods. For the first time in nearly a decade, he noticed that all the trees were leaning toward the south. The pines that would normally whisper in the wind screamed to him now. Their scent in his nostrils beckoned the past, but the looming black clouds coming in from the north told his future. He picked the lawn chair up, tossed it in the already flaming pile, and headed north, keeping the U-Haul between the lines on the road, he drove through the heart of the storm and emerged on the other side to find the sun shining bright, and everything washed clean from the rain.
*Posted at Thinking Ten on October 8, 2010.
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REDLIGHT DREAMS AND WINDMILL NIGHTS
Trust me, it's not what you think. God...if only I could take that advice now... Five thousand miles from home; light years away from the small, southern street that I remember from my youth, where the milk was cold and the cookies were hot. The old cobblestones under my feet loudly promised excitement, but the whisper of reality has fully grasped my ear now. About three months ago, I decided to drop everything and move to The Netherlands to write my life's work...my masterpiece. I left my wife, my job, my house...everything. The novel started with a shot. I sat at a cafe on the edge of Rembrandt's Plein every morning, soaking in the amber fall light, watching people's movements, and feeling the vibration of 20
Amsterdam in every pore. Sufficient inspiration for even the laziest writer. When fall gave way to winter, I had to find another source to tickle my writing bone, so I turned to cocaine, naturally. It was easy enough to get, of course, and the price was right. I still had at least two years cash from when I cashed out my 401(k) plan, so no sweat...another year here, and the work will be done, I thought to myself. I must have been last in line when God was handing out brains, because here I sit, on the same cold cobblestones that looked so different to me a few months ago; flat busted, no work, and a cocaine addiction. Man this is going to make a great novel.
*Posted at Thinking Ten on October 10, 2010.
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A WOMB WITH A VIEW Elvin smoked a cigarette as he sat on the dirt floor of his homemade basement; his "man-hole" he called it. There wasn't a fancy bookshelf that gave access when a faux copy of some extinct volume was pulled; he got into the man-hole by sliding into a hole that he dug into the earth on the side of the house that was on a hill. He was reading looking at pictures of nudie mags that he had stolen from here and there. He put his cigarette out in an empty beer can and shook it to make sure that all the fire went out. He took a pull on the nickel-plated flask that he'd lifted from the preacher's car - who was he going to report it to? - and almost spilled it all over himself when he heard his mothers footsteps moving toward the back door. He tossed his pack of smokes, the three Playboys and the flask in a small trash bag and stuffed it into a dark corner. His mother walked out onto the porch a couple of seconds after Elvin was all the way out and she said, "See anything, Elvin?" "No, ma'am. Whatever keeps digging this hole must be gone to find food or something. I'll fill it back in again. I hope we catch it one day." "So do I, honey, that thing smells horrible. Now come on in and wash up for supper."
*Posted at Thinking Ten on October 19, 2010.
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SUSPENDED WORDS Chris sat at his desk in the dim light of the study, staring at the envelope. It had taken him three hours to write that letter to Janet, but he still didn't have to courage to seal and address it. He stared at his pen; at the plastic tube inside that held the black ink and wondered how many words were trapped inside. Surely thousands, if not tens-of-thousands of words were floating together inside that tube waiting to be drawn out. What had Chris the most upset was that out of all of the words that were inside his pen, the only ones that would come out were I miss you.
*Posted at Thinking Ten on October 21, 2010.
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PEE FOR PLEAS He dropped to his knees and kissed the ground. What a lightweight, I thought as I put the cigarette into my mouth and lit it. If three rounds of dunking his head in the toilet was enough to get this dink to kiss the ground - the floor was covered in piss, I might add - I should have no problem getting what I need out of him. Hell, I might not even need to bring the badger in, the lucky putz. I pulled the ski mask from my face because it itched like a barrel full of burlap and sat him on the toilet. We were face to face now, and I said, "Okay, ya prick, I'm sure that your frail little brain is in a fog now, but we have a few things to discuss."
*Posted at Thinking Ten on November 13, 2010.
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DREAMS Josh closed his eyes and let the sleeping pills do what science intended them to do. The first sleep was always the hardest/5:30 p.m, or 1730 as his drill sergeant had called it so many years ago, wasn't the optimum time to sleep when a body got off of work at four o'clock, but that's where science beat nature...the check meets his mate. Josh had his eyes closed, willing the dream that he intended to join, when he remembered that he didn't have his cards in place, nor did he have his next dose prepared. He got out of bed, crouched down, and pulled a cardboard box out from under his bed. Satisfied that he was utterly alone, Josh pulled out a stack of empty index cards and set them on his bedside table. After he scribbled on the back of one of the cards with a fine-point Sharpie to ensure that it worked, he climbed back under the covers and double-checked that his alarm was set for eleven pm...It was, and four pills lay on his table beside a glass of water. "I'll be back in a minute" is what he said to the pills right before he drifted into the land of his creation. Josh put his feet on the floor and walked into his living room, where his family greeted him from around the Christmas tree. The presents all got opened and he was cuddling with his wife, being careful not to spill his wine, when she started making an odd noise with her fingers/he woke to find the alarm clock dutifully sounding off. Josh slapped it away as best as he could and fumbled for the four pills, almost inhaling them before chasing them with the glass of water. The empty glass melted in Josh's hand as his son dropped a new football on his crotch. "Get your coat on and we'll go out and toss it around a bit" Josh said, as he got up to put his own cold-weather clothes on. Before he got to the door, his son faded away as the sunlight penetrated the blinds and took Josh from his world. When he was done showering and dressing for work, Josh put the newly inked index cards into the cardboard box, slid it back under the bed, 25
kissed the picture of the family that he had lost so many years ago, and said, "I'll be back in a minute, Daddy has to go to work."
*Posted at Thinking Ten on December 27, 2010. 26