I wrote these with the intention of submitting them to a contest. I must have gotten sidetracked because I never entered the contest. Each story is 25-words long, on the nose.
Crossed Lines
“Indiana. Indi-ana,” Cheryl stressed into the phone. Robert looked around at the Hindi and Sanskrit signs, knowing he could never make up for this one.
The Test of Love
She believed that if she stood still, Charles wouldn’t see her, so Emily stayed in the corner. Charles saw her, and continued to ignore her.
Mumbling Through
After putting her dog, Dennis, to bed in his crib, Joan sat on her plastic-covered couch and wondered why her daughter didn’t talk to her.
Elena swiped a red-tipped, talon-like finger through the sealed envelope of the letter that the waiter discretely delivered to our table on a small silver platter. Her pointed ruby lips opened wider as her eyes darted over each word; her alabaster hands gripped the edges of the letter, causing the paper to wrinkle. She looked up at the table, her blue eyes beaming under a well-coiffed mess of white-blonde bangs, and emitted what sounded like a raptor’s screech as her lips awkwardly curled into what some suspected to be a smile before suddenly leaping up and sending her cushioned chair to the plush carpeting with a thud. The always-composed and icily stoic Elena now skipped and spun about the restaurant, clutching the letter over her head as her frail, bony frame wove unnaturally between tables to a clearing in the middle of the room.
“I’m free!” she sang in an eerie, operatic voice, “Free! Free! Free!”
Elena turned to flee to the patio, but her run was halted abruptly as she smacked into the glass patio doors and crumpled to carpet like a misguided pigeon in the wintertime.
“I always find the blue ones to be too cold, whether they’re roasted, grilled, seared or served in a rich béchamel sauce,” he said in between chewing his food and inserting another piece of prime roast between his lips and running the fork across his teeth.
He sat at the head of the table, clad in a burgundy dinner coat over a ruffled, white blouse. A mess of perfectly oiled and curled black hair sat atop his pear-shaped head. His full, black eyebrows nearly obscured his smallish, close-set blue eyes, which he shielded with tiny, rectangular blue-tinted glasses. His nose rose like a pink peak from two billowy, ruddy cheeks. Beneath his tamed and waxed mustache, which curled out comically at the ends, small, red puckered lips emerged.
He held himself with esteem of one who finds his charms immensely pleasurable and cannot fathom how they could be lost on anyone except those given to boorish and unfortunate life lots.
“The green ones,” he said, holding his knife and fork aloft like a maestro with stubby sausage fingers attached to fleshy ham-hock hands, “have a fresh, nearly ripened quality – a roundness of flavor, if you will. I find them most refreshing in the spring with a rocket-and-Pecorino salad, or as a mid-summer treat with squab.”
He sliced into the glistening slab of meat, letting the silver scrape across the plate’s white porcelain surface. He raised the cut, puckered his mouth open and pushed the morsel in; gravy dripped down his chin. He raised his glass of red wine, took a gulp and set it on the table. Oily finger prints shone in the candle light.
“But the brown ones,” he said, his voice trailing, “So robust, so flavorful, so…aahhh…bravisimo!” He sat back, put one paw across his stomach, and kissed the finger tips of his other hand. “The browns’ flavors could be woody, sweet, earthy or savory. They melt in your mouth and are perfect with a red wine reduction. Autumn is the best time for the browns.”
He surveyed the feast laid out in front of him on the oaken table piled so high with roasted game, succulent root vegetables, aromatic breads and rich cheeses that the guests couldn’t see each other across it save for the shadows they cast on the opposite walls of the wine cellar by the baroque candelabras.
He sat back and ran his fingers across the outline of his lips, musing. “Autumn is my favorite time of year,” he announced. His proclamation was answered with a chorus of “Oh, yes,” “Hmm!” and “Absolutely!” As he sat forward in his intricately carved, wooden chair with the plush velvet cushions, and surveyed the guests, he noticed the curly auburn-haired woman sitting two chairs down from him on his right. She looked at him confidently, listening to his oratory and daintily picking at the food on her plate. No one else at the table would look at him directly, but she didn’t blink or shy away.
He leaned down the table to get a better look. His shirt cuff rested in the gravy bowl, but he didn’t seem to notice. “And you, my dear. You are?” he asked.
“Charlotte,” she said as she picked up a sliver of meat from her dish and popped it into her mouth.
“And your eyes,” he said, leaning ever further, spilling the gravy, “What color are they? I have never seen eyes like yours before.”
“Hazel,” she said. “I hear they taste like caramels.”
Ernie sits on a park bench and watches her eat lunch. He’s been coming out to the park every day for three months to sit across from her quietly ever since the day he saw her after he was let go from his job as a copywriter for an Internet marketing firm.
“Don’t take it personally,” the manager told him. “The entire department is being let go.”
Ernie took it personally until he saw her sitting there, under a tree, alternately taking diminutive bites of her sandwich and flipping the pages of her book. He sat down across from her, took his phone out and pretended to check his email while watching her. She seemed so serene and oblivious to the chaos on the streets around her: Men having heated business conversations on their phones as they walked by, college students laughing and shoving each other and the man two benches down covered in pigeons.
Ernie returned the following day and she was there. He watched her from above the pages of the book he held. He returned the day after and the day after that. She was consistent and he admired that. Every day she sat at the same bench, crossed her ankles and removed the contents of her lunch bag: An egg salad and lettuce sandwich on whole wheat, wrapped in wax paper, a pink thermos filled with tea, three gingersnap cookies and a hardback book. Ernie liked to imagine that the books were about science – not science fiction like he enjoyed reading, but loftier topics such as calculating negative angles in astronomy or the fundamentals of celestial mechanics. He entertained the idea that this woman with long, white-blonde hair, delicate features and small hands had more going on beneath the surface than people credited her for, and he imagined her life: She was an amateur astronomer who lived alone in the East Village and could say “moon” in 10 different languages; she was fluent in Russian, French and Czech; and on weekends, she performed with an underground circus troupe as an aerialist and fire eater, sometimes combining both into one act. She also had a fantastic singing voice, despite the fire eating.
As Ernie watches her, noticing her pale-pink painted nails (she must have gotten a manicure over the weekend), a pigeon lands on his shoulder and he lets it sit there. He doesn’t want to move suddenly, break the serenity of their lunchtime ritual and call attention to himself. He desperately wants to talk to her, hear her voice as she says her name and feel her skin against his as they shake hands for the first time, but he doesn’t want to destroy his image of her with the truth, and he certainly doesn’t want to explain why he’s sitting on a park bench, dressed as a squirrel.
Tall and lanky, sporting canary yellow hair (obviously not his natural color) swept up in a pompadour, and arched, primary-red eyebrows that match the red beard that accentuates his angular face, he steps onto the train with a bike wrapped in duct tape and outfitted with a small motor. Sitting on the blue bench of the Six Train, wearing rolled up jeans with green suspenders, a plaid shirt and high black boots with white socks, he looks around at the other passengers, gets their attention, raises his eyebrows and a grunts a greeting – or is it a comment? The fluorescent light of the train makes his hair glow.
At the second stop, he stands up, looks around, stretches his arm up above his head and plunges it into the bag attached to the bike’s handle bars. Like a magician, he pulls out an apple, inspects it closely, grunts and sits back down. He holds the apple out at arm’s length and then brings it close to his right eye. He does it again, only now bringing it to his left eye. Then he places the apple on top of his yellow head and stares directly in front of him. The passenger across the aisle – a young, rail-thin woman on her way home from work, reading a book entitled “How to Ignite Your Passion” – gets up and moves. He grunts. She rolls her eyes.
I can’t help but wonder what he does all day, or what events led to the evolution of a pop-art eccentric. Was he a former CEO of a Fortune 500 who finally snapped from the grind and decided to seek out a carefree (albeit rather strange) existence? A performance artist who got so do deep into character he never re-emerged? Or, was it possible, somehow possible, that he was born with yellow hair and red facial hair?
I go back to reading my magazine, and don’t notice when a group of drunken college students get on the train. They are quiet at first, but then get louder – especially when they notice the yellow-haired man wearing an apple as a hat. They try to suppress their snickers and jeers, but everyone on the train can hear them. “I wonder what he does with a banana?” one of them says in a stage whisper.
I look up from my magazine and notice that he is watching the students, who stand in a circle around a subway pole, wearing matching khaki shorts, jewel-colored polo shirts with popped collars and faded, backwards baseball hats. They are sunburned and unstable with the train’s movements, and still laughing and making jokes about the yellow-haired man.
The yellow-haired man stands up, his eyes narrowed at the students, his eyebrows pitched into angles. He stretches out his right arm, flicks his wrist and reaches for the apple on his head. He then stretches out his arm, extends the apple toward the group of young men, brings it back to his mouth and chomps into it.
“Rotten,” he says in a low, growly voice. “Rotten!” he says louder, apple bits spewing from his mouth. “Your core, your core is rotten! A ha-ha-ha-ha!”
The young men stop talking and look at him in half horror, half rage that someone who looked like him would talk to them.
He chomps into the apple again. “Your souls are rotten! Your seed shall never fruit!” he proclaims, spitting apple parts all over the subway car. And he begins to laugh, not an evil-villain laugh, but the laugh of someone who knows how the movie ends because he wrote it.
As the train slows down, he turns his bike toward the exit door. “Come along, chariot!” he announces, striding through the doors as they open. I watch him depart the train from the corner of my eye.
