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Category: Original Fiction

Short Story: The UFO

It’s Monday or Tuesday. He can’t remember. He’d been on a World of Warcraft bender for a few days. Two? Three? Some chemicals may have been involved.

He’s gone stir crazy. He has to get out. It’s dark outside. It’s dark inside. He has been juggling with his sanity for a while now. He was bound to drop a ball. So he starts to drive out into the darkness. He doesn’t know where he’s going and he doesn’t really care.

What time is it? Who knows? Who cares? It all blends together in an electronic world. He can turn the lights on at night. He can duct tape the curtains down during the day. Whatever.

The road is nearly deserted for some reason. He sees a few cars pass by. The headlights give him Warcraft shell shock.

The windows are rolled down. The air breezes through. The open road! Is this true freedom? No. Freedom is a headset and a screen. In there you can die without dying. That’s freedom. But he needs something to break up the monotony.

He slows down near a curve. He hears strange noises. Strangely familiar noises. Yet unfamiliar. They give him that kind of uneasiness that makes your stomach tighten up just so much.

As he rounds the bend he sees a bright light ahead in the distance. It’s too big to be a headlight.

Wait! This is that crazy dream he’s always had. He always felt it would slip into reality. He’s dreaded it while half hoping it would happen. He knew it. It’s so post-modern. It is going to end perfectly! The aliens are coming to take him away. Bliss.

The UFO rises in the distance. It hovers. Its engines chirrup outside his windows with a sweet melodic twitter. How sweet the tweet. The kind of sound you hear as you stand homesick in alien corn.

He’s ready for this. He’s been ready for this for a thousand gamer years. He’s imagined this before – just this scenario. He knows they’ll accept him. Yes, for the first time in his life he’ll be accepted. He has a Tralfamadorian tattooed on his calf, that’s got to count for something, right?

He stops the car to await his destiny.

And the sun rises, and the birds keep singing.

Short Story: Picking Up the Phone

Pick up the phone! That’s what I used to say.

We were dating. I couldn’t get enough of him. I could talk to him for hours. I could spend half of that time just saying ‘I love you’ over and over again.

I love you more. No, no, really I love you more. I love you the mostest of the most.

Sometimes he wouldn’t answer when I called. I’d be devastated. Pick up the phone!

We didn’t have text messaging back in those days. No LOLs. No Twitter. No GPS position reporting. Not even email.

Pick up the phone! Where are you? I really need to talk.

And then he would, and we’d talk for an hour, and I’d go to bed already dreaming before I fell asleep. Dreaming that I would wake up to a ringing phone and it would be him on the other end. Good morning.

Now we’ve been married for over 10 years. And he watches football on his phone. And he plays Clash of Clans. And he emails his boss. And he Skypes with his clients. And he texts me from upstairs and asks me to bring him up a manila folder. I’m trying to make dinner.

And I find myself saying, ‘Would you please put down the phone?’

Short Story: She Walked Away with the Psychologist

I’m in the fourth grade. A girl in my class doesn’t show up. She doesn’t show up for days. For weeks. There are rumors. I don’t understand them. She didn’t move away. Is she coming back?

Then one day she shows up. She’s not alone.

A man I’ve never seen walks to the front of the class and tells us he’s a psychologist. I don’t know what that means. He tells us the girl has something to say to the class.

She stands up at the front of the class. She’s the teacher now. She seems confident for a fourth grader. A little nervous, but hardly showing it.

“I tried to hurt myself,” she says. “I took a knife out of our kitchen. I cut myself.”

“I’m getting counseling to help me so I won’t hurt myself anymore.”

I don’t remember the rest of what she said. I thought she said she was coming back. I don’t know. It is the disappearance that I really remember. She walks away with the man. Where are they going? Will she be back?

The next day she’s not there. Or the next. Or ever. I’m still here. I still don’t know why she did it. Or where she went.

Did she try again? Did she succeed in her next attempt? Is she now a well-adjusted mother of three? Does she take Prozac? Is she the next Mother Theresa?

I don’t know. Google doesn’t even know. Does that mean she is as good as dead? If she’s Facebook dead, then she must be dead, right?

The man gave her back to us for a moment. Fourth grade girls cried. Fourth grade boys didn’t understand.Then he took her away. Do people always disappear when they walk away with the psychologist?

*Note* This story may self-destruct in a couple of days. If you want it to stay up, you may want to tell me.

Beach Monkey (1)

Uno: A Monkey Pines

Marco the monkey lived deep in the jungles of South America. If this were a science book I would need to explain that Marco was a Howler Monkey, a species of New World monkeys. I could spend pages and pages telling you all about the different types of New World monkeys. But, though I just told you a couple of facts, this is not a science book. This is a story, so let’s get on with it.

Marco was like most Howler Monkeys. He liked to climb trees and slowly skip (if you could call it that) across the top branches from one tree to another. He liked to lounge around in the treetops and eat nuts and leaves.

Most monkeys would be perfectly content with such a life. Marco was free. He could climb any tree that he liked. He could eat any food that he liked. The weather suited him just fine. And he had plenty of friends and family to keep him company.

But, from as far back as Marco could remember, he had been a piner. What is a piner? It doesn’t mean that he liked pine trees. There were no pines in Marco’s jungle. It means that he was a daydreamer. Marco liked to climb up to the top of trees and look out over the forest while he filled his mind, or let his mind drift away, with dreams. He pined.

What did Marco dream of? What did he pine about? He didn’t dream of bananas, or getting married, or finding the perfect tree.

Years ago, when Marco was a young monkey, he met an older monkey called a Muriqui. Muriquis are pretty common in South America, but little Marco had never met one. He had heard of them, but until this point he wasn’t even sure that they really existed. They were known to be very wise (they were called sages, but Marco didn’t really know what that meant). So, naturally, he was quite excited to meet this monkey.

The Muriqui’s name was Gazer. And he drew quite a crowd among the Howlers, especially the young Howlers. They would gather around him and listen to his amazing stories – stories of lands that very few monkeys had ever visited.

But one particular story caught Marco’s attention in a major way. Gazer explained that there was a thing called ‘the ocean.’ This ocean was somewhat like the rivers that the Howlers had seen many times, but it was bigger. The ocean was like the king of all rivers. It was big and blue, but that was just the beginning. All of the fish in the world longed to live in the open waters of the ocean. The sun, Gazer said, rises and sets in the ocean.

Marco had always wondered where the sun came from, and where it went during the night. Gazer explained that every night the ocean swallows the sun, causing it, and all the sky around it, to turn red like blood or pink like a flower. And every morning the ocean, having become warm from holding the sun overnight, would release the sun to come out and warm the rest of the world.

Gazer also told the little monkeys that the ocean attracted a thing called sand. No one ever saw sand in the jungle. Sand lives in dry lands, like deserts (another thing Marco had never heard of). But the sand loved the water, and so it was always trying to get to the ocean, where there was an abundant supply.

Gazer said that the ocean was the source of all life. Everything needs water to live, and all of that water came from the ocean. Rivers were just little streams pushing forward, trying to make it to the ocean so that they could blend with the great Water.

Gazer was a traveling sage (though Marco still didn’t know what that meant), and so he didn’t stay around for too long. Like a dream, he was gone. But Marco, though he was quite young when he met Gazer, never forgot him, or his stories – especially his stories about the great Water known as the ocean.

And so, there sits Marco, perched in the top of a tree like a great bird, and he is daydreaming. What is he dreaming about? He is pining away for the ocean. He couldn’t even imagine precisely what the ocean looked like. What did a real wave look like? How big is this giant mass of water? In some ways, he wasn’t even sure that the ocean existed, but he really wanted to find out. He certainly wanted to believe in the ocean. Yet he could never be quite sure. Unless…

If only Marco could travel to the ocean. If only he could stand on the sand and watch the sun be swallowed up by the great Water. If only he could, like the sand, take a journey to the Water’s edge. Then he would know. Then he wouldn’t have to dream anymore. Then, maybe, the other monkeys would stop calling him names –

Names like Beach Monkey.

©Tides and Turning, 2013. All Rights Reserved

Introducing Beach Monkey

We have been celebrating my daughter’s birthday for the better part of a week (who says it can’t be birthweek instead of birthday?). My in-laws gave her a set of Boom-Its. What are Boom-Its? you ask. Playing Boom-It is pretty much like playing badminton, except the paddles, or whatever you call them, make very loud noises when you strike the birdie (or, again, whatever you call it).

As children will do, my daughter was randomly hitting things with said paddles. She began to hit balloons at one point (birthday balloons of course). And as she did so, for reasons which I still don’t fully understand, she began to repeatedly say the phrase, ‘Beach Monkey.’ She said it with enthusiasm: ‘Beach Monkey, Beach Monkey, Beach Monkey!’

As we say in the south, I got very tickled at this. I asked her why she said it. No explanation. She just said it. I liked it. I told her it sounded like the name of a book and that I would therefore write her a story about Beach Monkey.

I have written stories for my daughters before, and I have never let anyone other than my daughters read them. But this time I thought, ‘hey, why not make it public?’ I’m still in the process of writing it so it may take some time. And please remember that I’m writing this story for a 4-year-old!