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100-Worders
Welcome to my latest writing project, a series of 100-word stories. Like any art form that keeps you within tight, restrictive parameters, you hae to make choices. Sometimes, the results are surprising. My current project is to write one hundred of them. Here are a few:
Bonsai Fiction
I have caught a specific strain of the micro-fiction bug. When you constrain a piece of writing to exactly 100 words, each story is a tiny bonsai tree. You prune away all but the most necessary branches, careful not to disrupt the tree’s life system. Each word and phrase counts. Each must sing close harmony with the story’s essential tune and perform no more and no less than its job. Like a bonsai, each 100-worder is an exercise in cultivation and ingenuity for the writer, who creates a tiny, living world within the brittle confines of a totally arbitrary box.
Here are three 100-worders, dedicated
to a close friend who died:
His Father’s Hands
Andy inherited his father’s hands. He told me that when he was ten, World War shellshock made his father freak out when they drove over bridges in the city, so Andy had to take the wheel while his father hid, covered his eyes, and trembled. His father was a dentist with giant, gentle, sentient hands, soft like a catcher’s mitt. Once, Andy came up behind me and showed me how his dad would wrap his big, amazing hands and forearms around his patients’ heads. They would relax so deeply that he could drill and fill cavities without novocaine.
Limits of Love
They live together to share the rent, but who really needs a house here when your love is pure? They started as two mainlanders from New Jersey, but now, they are ocean people. They wear sarongs and say, “Aloha!” Bamboo forest winds crack a million wooden knuckles above them, but only the sound falls on them. One day, love is put to the test. They go diving off the side of a boat. When a curious whale comes near, she grabs her man and thrusts him in front of her. “Here! Eat him!” Love, like the sea, ebbs and flows.
My Friend
My friend did an incomprehensible thing. For sixty-eight days I wore the beard of passage, hugged the cloak of invisibility about me, became the old man he will never become. My eyes went rheumy, as together, we journeyed the shadows and the blindspots of others. Never an invitation from him, “Come with me.” No request on my part, “Please take me with you.” In the end, a solitary traveler kept walking, one step at a time, into the unknown. His steps continued where mine turned back to this world. How do we live with those we can no longer see?
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