Stories

Excerpt: The time is now. The time is now. The time is now. Whenever I am tired, I enter into an inner monologue. “How are you doing today?” I’ll say to myself. “Oh well, I am doing just great. Just greeeat.” I will answer my own questions, rise to my own occasion and lay out all the many ways I celebrate me. Narcissism was really just a way of life for our family. My father would carry a steel-trimmed mirror around with him, pause at the entrance to the kitchen, the bedroom, the bathroom, look at himself and converse for hours. He would sometimes run through an entire Samuel Beckett play by himself, looking in the mirror donning different wigs of my mother’s and use different voices. Lucifer was my sister, Susy’s, favorite. Mine had to be the Big Bird impression that somehow made it into Endgame as the voice of the character Hamm. My sister and I would sit for hours listening to him babble on and pretend it was a radio show in the 1950’s. At one point, Susy even made a cardboard cutout of a Sentinel 284-W Classic and we pasted it to the bathroom door. She would turn the dials as I made the sound of static and in would come our father with his Beckett play. Mother would often look on and feel sorry for Frank (that’s our father’s name) but then she too was afflicted with the Narcissism bug.

Excerpt: Many years gone by—some say 100. Bark torn, withered, worn from that sole ingredient in aging—time.
It smiles solemnly as it sways in the tacit breeze. Below it sit the youth, vibrant, longing to reach as high as they can towards the sky.

The youth that thinks it knows all, trudging forth with high-soled boots, tramping everything underfoot. “This youth—yes, it too shall grow old,” the aged trees states under his breath. “But for now, let them grow and reach,’ he grins, ‘youth lasts but once for many and longer for those that are capable of capturing the essence of youth for the rest of their lives.”

And so, this aged tree of whom we speak, stood silently by as the younger overreached themselves and toppled left and right, snapping in the wind or crashing down under their won weight. Many remained though and these were those who lowered their pride for the betterment of themselves—who knew the necessity of adapting to new and changing environments.

Excerpt: That lime-green hallway had never seemed so long. It seemed to expand out in front of him like that unreachable horizon, that point in the distance that no matter how far you reach for it, it slips away, continues to taunt you. He saw the door: “Principal”. He had never entered there but knew that when people went in, they always came out different.

He pushed through the door and it scraped against the floor like a block of concrete. The secretary, long blond wig and pointed glasses with a beaded orange chain around her neck. The ceiling, covered in fly paper and the long-dead bodies of flies, mosquitoes, and a whole bunch he couldn’t name. Row upon row of filing cabinets lining the walls behind the secretary and a fervent, dusty fan bellowing from the wall its years of duress. The principal’s office, fogged, white windows covered in criss-crossing black bars, a door of steel and a sliding metal window on the front. He sat nervously on the foamy brown chairs, awaiting his turn and must have dozed off because he was awoken by the frantic shaking of the secretary, her false right eyelash dangling, her wig coming undone one strand at a time.