I have not written much flash fiction, but then I saw there was a Boise-area writing contest asking for it. I have been trying to push myself to enter such contests lately, so I gave it my best shot. The rules were it needed to be 300-500 words and begging with one of three possible first lines.
I came up with four options for myself trying to write something decent. I'll review them next week, but here are the four, in the order I wrote them.
Jessie is a friend. He is one of those do-everything types, the only person I’ve known who took a break from college to work on a cruise ship and see the world. Every day on Facebook, it was something different -- “Just me and Big Ben, no biggie,” “Bike tour in Puerto Rico. My legs are killing me.” “Sometimes I practice my studious look, but only when I am brooding over my kingdom from a castle in Ireland.” “Couscous! In Morocco!”
Back in high school, Jessie and I took driver’s ed together. The teacher was the same guy who had taught my aunt, so that was weird, but whatever. I remember the first time Jessie got behind the wheel, he had to ask the teacher what a green light meant. I’m serious. The teacher just laughed at him, like it was a joke, but when we got to a light and Jessie gunned it on accident the moment yellow turned to red, man, I thought we were all going to die.
When he got back, from the cruise ship, you know, we had one of those late night talks, the kind that start in a restaurant, then continue in the parking lot for an hour before finishing in someone’s basement when one of you falls asleep. Jessie could tell stories like none other. Dramatic pauses, sound effects, hand gestures. You ever known a storyteller like that?
I’d love to hear one of those again.
I just can’t pull myself out of bed today. Even when someone is physically gone, it’s different from when they’re gone gone. And my heart is too still to beat right now.
It’s like with the blankets over my head, I can pretend the world smaller.
Dear God, help me out of bed today. Please. I need your help.
“It feels like a perfect night to dress up like hipsters,” the Dorian Gray boy said. Gorgeous, dangerous, met him in a Park City art gallery during Sundance. Surrounded by paintings of mountains, forks bent into stick men, and a bronze Last Supper sitting in front of a window that opened onto an alley, we were the only two in there just then.
It was the stupidest pickup line in the world, not even a pickup line, but I’m too easy and half an hour later saw me making out with him one steep street over in the middle of a looong flight of stairs. I figured it was Sundance. Might as well, right?
But that boy was the stupidest bad-word-my-momma-would-scream-if-she-heard-me-say I have ever met in my life, ‘cause a week later I caught him stealing more than just French fries and trying for more than just French kisses. And by that second part I mean he was trying to go all Bill Clinton all over my butt.
His pants were down and I was telling him no, this was too fast, we only met an hour ago, but man you did pick a pretty spot for this, on top of a mountain and secluded and all, and I respect you for that, and I like your nice car, too, we should just keep driving around in it or something.
That’s when he said, all hot and heavy, that it wasn’t his car, and that’s what I meant about the stealing more than French fries part.
There’s one thing my momma taught me that is the truest thing I have ever known: If you don’t want a man making love to you, pee on him.
After that, he jumped back enough for me to reach past him and open the door. He’d been leaning on that door then and so he lost his balance and fell out.
So yeah, I pushed him down the mountain. With his pants down.
Snow is pretty good for sliding on, especially when it’s steep and the snow is the dry sort that won’t stick together.
I drove away before I could see how far he went, though, and that’s a shame because it would’ve been hilarious on my Instagram. But at the time, I was more concerned about whether to return the car before or after cleaning up the pee in the back seat. Sundance problems.
Jessie is a friend. At least, I think she is. Candice is a friend and Audrey and Donna and Kate and Sara - but Jessie, I don’t know.
I don’t know because when we stood in line together in the second grade, she only talked to the new girl, who was from Russia and therefore interesting. But that was okay. She gave me a pencil later, one with my name on it, and played wolves with me at recess.
I think Jessie is my friend because in middle school, when my grandma died and I first started hating flowers, she sat on my family’s deep freezer and held my hand.
Jessie is my friend because when I was a high school freshman with a crush on that boy in my geography class, she helped me think of ways to meet him then taught me how to curl my hair into pretty ringlets so he would notice me. And then, when he asked me to be his Facebook friend, she freaked out with me in the parking lot and we went out for frozen yogurt to celebrate.
Jessie was definitely my friend on the day that we graduated. We took photos together and laughed and high-fived our favorite teachers, then went to the after party and, well, and she left with that cute guy she had a thing for. But I know she was my friend because later that night, she called me to tell me what had happened - ALL of it.
But now I don’t know, because Jessie won’t answer the phone when I call, and this year, she forgot my birthday. I need to tell her something.
I need to say I’m pregnant and scared, and I could really use a best friend right now to hold my hand. I am not ready for this.
This feels like the perfect night to dress up like hipsters. At least, that’s what everyone else at the Flying M seems to have decided tonight, except me. Me and the woman at the table by the large windows, that is.
She’s wearing a blue dress without sleeves, and she’s been sitting there for over an hour, writing poetry on orange peels with hands decorated by three ring tattoos and veins that are raised rivers, belying an age that is greater than her dress, red purse, or orange peel scrawls.
“It’s as if the trees were whispering,” she’s written on one, a strip discarded near her elbow that I saw on my way to throw out my drink.
A glance out those large, garage door-style windows shows it’s stilll raining beneath the trees outside, and I wonder what they are trying to say.
But as I wonder, the woman gets up, slipping her oranges into her bag and leaving a tip on the table. I see her step into the evening and stop beneath a sidewalk tree to touch its trunk with one of her river hands, skin like paper and rings like old promises, as if to bid it farewell.
As far as I know, the tree does not answer, but she smiles anyway and it’s a quiet smile, a poet’s smile. She reaches back to free her hair from its clip and it falls in sheets, pulling back in the wind and settling down her back before she turns from the tree and clicks down the sidewalk.
I glance at the hipsters one last time before I check the time and see I should be getting home. On my way to my car, I too stop by the tree and place my hand on its trunk, cold and hard and startlingly white. No words, but perhaps the quiet is a message of its own.
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