Category Archives: Short Stories

14 Sep

Spoiler Alert: The Beginning

“Spoiler Alert” is a serialized short story, coming in 13 parts every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. “The Beginning” is part two. It’s best if you know the end first, so go to part one if you haven’t read it yet.

I met David when I was in prison in El Salvador. What was I doing in prison in El Salvador? Drugs. Not my fault. Some asshat on a bus just outside of Sonsonate stashed an ounce of cocaine in my backpack. I think it was an ounce. Might have been a gram. I don’t know shit about coke.

In fact, I didn’t know shit about why I was in prison until David explained it to me. He said it was a scheme for taking advantage of tourists, especially solo ones — some guy stashes the drugs on you, the police look through your luggage, maybe taking a few choice items, and then they get you to bribe them to let you out of jail.

I asked him how he knew all this.

“By pretending I’m not fluent in Spanish,” he said.

Same thing had happened to him. He kept quiet through the whole ordeal until they finally came to him with the offer. “You give money, you can to leave prison,” they said. He told them to go to hell.

Why? Good question. That’s what I asked David. Here’s where it gets weird.

His answer: “If someone had told you when you were a kid that you’d break out of a Salvadorian prison when you were 50, would you believe them?”

There was a mouse moving across the floor of our prison cell when he asked me this. It came within a few inches of my feet. I remember thinking he had a lot of nerve, that mouse.

Then I noticed David looking at me with his eyebrows raised, like he wanted me to actually answer the question.

“No. I would not believe anyone who told me I’d break out of a Salvadorian prison,” I said. “Are you telling me that I’m going to break out of a Salvodorian prison?”

“Yes. I’m not entirely sure how it happens, but it will.”

I asked him if he knew when it would happen ‘cause Salvadorian prisons aren’t that comfortable. When he said no, I just chuckled and tried to get some sleep.

I think I dreamt of mice running through mazes. It wasn’t a very reassuring dream, but it was better than being in prison with a nutcase. So when David woke me up in the middle of the night, I wasn’t too happy about it.

“I was just getting comfortable,” I told him.

“Now’s our chance.”

11 Sep

Spoiler Alert: The End

(“Spoiler Alert” is a serialized short story, coming in 13 parts every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.)

Here’s how it ends. I’m on a bus in Guatemala, daydreaming about a woman I’ve never met and feeling slightly guilty that I’m not going to die today.

It’s about 100 degrees, I haven’t showered in at least a week, and everyone else smells as bad as I do. People standing in the aisles have been rubbing up against my shoulder, and the slightly overweight woman next to me has had her leg leaning against mine for the past half an hour.

And then the bus pulls to a stop.

We’re on the highway, for God’s sake. Why the bus is stopping is beyond me.

But five minutes pass, maybe ten, and people start getting off the bus. I figure it can’t be any hotter outside, so I grab my bag and go out.

The pavement is shimmering with heat, and there’s a traffic jam that extends up the road as far as I can see to a bend that sweeps behind a mountain. Somehow, though we’re miles from the nearest village, there’s a guy walking toward us on the road’s shoulder, carrying a cooler full of flavored ice. I flag him down and buy two tubes of the stuff, though by the time I get them open, they’re more like flavored cold water.

Still, they hit the spot. And I’m happy enough that I’m out of El Salvador to care too much about our current predicament. So I tilt my head back to finish off the last of my purple “ice” and relish the short inner chill as the liquid shoots down my esophagus. I’m imagining that it’s a margarita when an explosion reverberates through the mountains.

It’s close. It must be. Because I can feel my chest rattle and I can hear glass breaking. I squint to see beyond the bright reflections emanating from the cars stopped in front of us. In the distance, a cloud of black smoke plumes skyward.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. I mean, I’m not. But knowing it would happen doesn’t make it less tragic. In fact, I’m suddenly feeling so sad that my knees buckle a little, like some involuntary part of me knows it’s not worth taking one more step forward. Might as well just fall down right now and die.

I’m not dead, though. And since nobody around me speaks English anyhow, I say it out loud. “I’m not dead.”

I think about how David patted me on the back in Jutiapa just before getting on his bus. “Doubt is a wonderful thing,” he said.

Now, David Schumaker is no more. The plume of smoke rising over the mountain is coming from his bus. I’m sure of it. David’s dead, and there’s nothing he or I could have done about it.

Still, I feel partially responsible.

19 Jun

Eviction

In-class exercise from Day Four. The assignment was simply to incorporate metaphor. If we’re getting technical about it, though, I incorporated symbol and simile, but not metaphor. However, I’m inclined to label all comparisons of two unlike things metaphor.

The eviction notice came on the 15th. She didn’t think McCreary would follow through with his threats. But he had, and she was forced to call Mary for a place to stay. In her bedroom, packing clothes into black trash bags, she found two and a half five-dollar bills at the bottom of her underwear drawer. They were ten years old, from the days she’d worked at the diner.

A man – tall, dark, and Canadian – had come in for breakfast on a Tuesday. He was down for a funeral or something equally sad. But his “good morning” was cheerful, and when she took his order, he looked her in the eye. He asked her questions about herself with an accent just slightly different from hers.

After the meal, he’d left a five-dollar bill ripped in half and a note saying, “I’ll bring the rest tomorrow.” They flirted shamelessly all week and then Sunday came; he was gone. She had two and a half bills. He never returned.

Now, back in her half-empty apartment, with a half-empty garbage bag of clothes, she sat on the floor and shuffled the five pieces of torn bills, fanning them out like a sad poker hand.

18 Jun

Men at Work

Exercise from Day 3: Create a dialogue between two characters who want very different things. This was fun. I got to pick on a certain TV show.

Ted tried the bell, hoping no one would answer.

Brian opened the door. “Hey, man. Thanks for coming.”

Ted threw his tool belt on the floor. It thunked against the wood. “Sure. No problem,” he muttered.

“Um, so,” Brian said, glancing at the tool belt. “I was thinking about this space here.” He pointed to a blank wall. “Do-able?”

Ted examined the area and shrugged. “Seems pretty ambitious to me.” He sighed. “But sure. I mean, it’s not gonna be cheap exactly.”

“Oh, that’s not a problem. Carrie wants it this way, so, you know.”

Ted didn’t mind giving up the occasional weeknight to help out a friend, but did it have to be Thursday? He was missing his favorite TV hospital drama.

“So what’s the first step?”

Ted looked at his watch. 7:00. Maybe he could get out of here quick enough. “Well, you want a floor-to-ceiling unit, right? That’s a lot of wood.”

“Oh yeah. I got more than we could possibly need.”

Shit. “All right. Cool.” This was no small project. The space was about 8 by 12 feet, and the floor was likely unlevel. These old houses were nightmares to renovate. He ran his hand along the wall. It too seemed uneven. “You got a level? I left mine at home.”

“Sure.” Brian disappeared into the basement while Ted sauntered into the kitchen. A miniature TV rested on a countertop. Ted turned it on. Pretty good reception.

Brian returned with the level.

“Hey, you mind if we bring this in the other room and turn it on?” Ted said.

“Sure, no problem.”

Ted got to work measuring the space, snapping chalk lines, and framing the shelving unit. An hour passed quickly, and when the opening credits rolled, Ted fixated on the TV.

Brian followed his gaze. “Oh, this show is the worst. Here, I’ll change it.”

“No, no. Don’t.” Had he sounded too desperate? “I mean, the stupider the show, the better I’ll work, you know? I won’t be tempted to watch. You put on that Terminator show, and pretty soon I’ll be eating chips and staring at the TV instead of installing your bookshelf.”

Brian shot him a knowing smile. “Oh, I know. Terminator. That chick is so hot.”

“Which one?”

“You know, the robot. What’s her name? “

“Oh, right. Yeah. I can’t think of her name right now, either. But yeah. She’s a hottie.”

The hospital show was opening with the typical sentimental narration: “Sometimes in life, you’ve just got to buckle down. Whether it’s studying for a board exam, telling your best friend she’s got AIDS, or sitting through your father’s 12-hour surgery to remove his brain tumor, there’s just no way not to get your hands dirty. And other times, you’ve got to eat chocolate.” On the word chocolate, the scene cut to four college girls in their pajamas having a pillow fight.

“Dude?” Brian said. He hadn’t been watching the TV, but he looked now. “Dude!”

The two of them stood transfixed for the next five minutes. At the commercial break, Brian snapped out of his trance. “Well, we’ve got a bookshelf to build.”

“Yeah.” Ted grabbed some boards and a box of screws and completed as many noise-producing tasks as possible in the next two and a half minutes as the commercials aired. Then the show came back on, and he did a lot of measuring. Quiet measuring. He was hoping to buy time till the next commercial break, but it eventually became absurd. So he readied his drill and lined up the next screw. That’s when he heard the main character shout, “He wants a divorce?” He dropped the drill.

17 Jun

Stone Still

My exercise from day two. The assignment was to create a scene that incorporated a flashback of some sort.

People don’t like seeing a living statue walking through the streets. They laugh, shout wise cracks, and point unabashedly. It was almost enough to keep Jeff from venturing out in his grey face paint and toga costume. On the way to the park, he was a freak – some lonesome guy with a weird habit of dressing up like a Roman. He had taken the subway to the 8th Street Station, but all the pointing and laughing made him self-conscious enough that he decided to head for the less populous Washington Square rather than the Liberty Bell. There, he could practice his breathing exercises and try out the self-validation techniques he’d recently read about.

But he also knew a little immobility would help. When you stop moving, the ridicule ends. People still look at you, but they’re looking at something different, not at the DSL installation guy with Social Anxiety Disorder. You become a virtual two-way mirror, safe in your secret room.

He chose a bench near the Walnut Street entrance, struck a thinker pose, and focused on his breath. Not two minutes into his act, a boy entered his peripheral vision. The kid was combing the park for something, crouching occasionally to pick up one of his finds. They were stones, Jeff soon found out – smooth, round stones. The boy approached and set his treasure on the bench. “Hey, you wanna play a game?” he said.

Jeff stifled a sudden urge to cough. Clearly, the kid didn’t know the unwritten code. You don’t talk to living statues. Everyone abided by the rules. Jeff depended on them.

The kid looked to be in middle school – certainly old enough to know better. But he didn’t wait for Jeff’s reply. “When it’s your turn, you can take any number of stones away from any one row. But you can only take from one row at a time.” He began arranging the stones in three rows. “The object is to leave your opponent with the last stone. Ready?”

Jeff knew this game. He’d played it with the children in Changsha on his way back from the wet market every day. He glanced sideways to confirm. One row of three, one row of four, and one row of five. Yep. Same game. There was a secret to it, a sort of algorithm that would guarantee victory as long as you didn’t go first. He waited for the boy to make a move, then, remaining statue still, he reached a gray arm toward the stones and removed one.

The kid stroked his chin like an old chess player before removing his stone. Jeff knew the winning combinations. Leave your opponent with a 1-1-1 or a 2-2 and you couldn’t lose. He’d taught the Chinese kids by beating them every day. He didn’t believe in letting them win. The lesson was stronger when they figured it out themselves.

How bold he’d been in China, striking up conversations with shop owners and neighbors. He’d even paused once in the middle of a busy street, turning his head skyward as bikes and buses passed him by. The pungent smells of urine and freshly-killed poultry mingled with the car exhaust and newly-poured concrete. And under the heat of a dirty sun, all his fear had evaporated. He was a foreigner; he was forgiven his foolishness and his trespasses. They’d parted around him like an island in a river.

And here, on this park bench, some odd middle school boy was inhabiting that same world.

Jeff envied him.

Even as he won each new game, he envied him.

“Wow,” the boy said, finally looking Jeff in the face, “you’re pretty good at this game. For a statue.” And then he gathered his stones and walked off.

Jeff broke form at last, yelling after him, “What’s your name?”

The boy turned around and said, “Jeff.” Then he walked on, leaving a statue frozen and waving goodbye.