Another Collection

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Michael D. Brown

Five Fictions

01/28/12 Sparsely Furnished Dream

UNCANNY

TWILIGHT, WEEKENDS and WHISTLING

MOOD INDIGO

04/30/12 Slipstream

© Michael D. Brown 2012

Michael D. Brown

It Takes a Village

Madame Treyne had crossed the Rubicon in a way she could never explain to old friends and acquaintances, with whom she could not even communicate in any way ever again as her fondest desire had been granted; the person and she had exchanged lives for this and all Christmases to follow. The lonely, imagination-clouded widower who had for many years been caretaker of the colorful little village would now reside, as she had done for several carol-filled weeks perennially in her flower shop and for the rest wrapped in paper along with the others in a box in a dark place, though he would most likely make use of one of the gingerbread cottages that had mysteriously appeared, propitiously electrified, on the west side of the mirror lake, two, perhaps three, years earlier. Time was so hard to reckon these days now that it flowed continuously and did not occur in fits and starts as it had done for as long as she could remember. Her greatest regret on coming to this seemingly unstill life was that the joyously uneventful, yet musically charged days she recalled came again so rarely and held little of the charming ambiance she had formerly found so stultifying, but now missed with all her porcelain heart. There were times, to be sure, so filled with activity she did not have time to think about her former occupation, where it had been so easy to relate with her kind, but for the most part she now experienced the longing to be small and uncharged with responsibility that had shrunk the lonely heart of the person with whom she had traded places for all the wrong reasons. She often found herself gazing upon the unresponsive hand-painted figurines who populated her ever growing holiday village, which was never packed and stored as it sat eternally on display beneath a small, potted, carefully tended pine tree in a dedicated corner of what people sometimes referred to as her living room.

© Author 2011

Michael D. Brown

Don't Open 'til Christmas

In the bakery Señor Wemple is making the cookies for the children’s posada because the Christmas season is when he comes alive. The incessant caroling, however, has him a little on edge; it’s not that he doesn’t like Christmas carols, but there are only five of them and they play continuously while the people are away.
The florist, Madame Treyne, has made her most beautiful arrangements and is now sitting back to admire them, and this year a family will stand in front of her window apparently about to enter her shop, but they never will. All year long she works so hard in the box hoping that when they let her out they will appreciate her toiling, but nobody seems to have a care; only she must look her best to please them.
Madame Sparger lives on Crescent Way, alone except for her little dog Caesar, and a rabbit named Luther, and she is unaware that Caesar and Luther, able to communicate with each other, have planned a surprise for her this Christmas. How could a dog and a rabbit execute a plan one might ask, but one must wait, like Madame Sparger, until Christmas morning to find out.

This year there were two new buildings in the village and lights where there never used to be; in addition, children would be able to ice skate on a mirror, but since they rarely had time to move, nobody but tiny Rudolph was able to take advantage of the innovation. A young couple, obviously lovers, she with a muff, and he sporting a tam o’shanter, sat on a park bench that had been installed in the cottony snow bank, never moving even when it was possible; though Rudolph said they had snuggled closer during the time he had ventured out onto the icy mirror. Madame Treyne had looked her absolute best last year before being put in the box, but never reappeared in her florist shop, which continually displayed previously-fashioned arrangements, and it was rumored she had been broken in storage, which happens occasionally. Madame Sparger spent as much time as she could in the bakery with Señor Wemple, which kept him unaware that the caroling repertoire had been increased by several songs from an earlier era, and the two made suppositions as to who might be inhabiting the new houses, if anyone did, as the lights stayed on all hours. Caesar could have told them the little houses were electrified but empty as he discovered from sniffing around, but aside from these few moments snatched from suspended animation, there wasn’t much activity in the village this year, and it was rumored the people rarely went out because times were known to be hard, in spite of the new pieces, which were probably set up to distract from that fact.

With my Lois and Clark ® mug of coffee in hand, I sit staring at less renowned, yet smiling porcelain figurines, and invest whatever emotions I suffer to run into theirs. Outside the season, they don't have any of their own, you see. Before the deaths of friends and loved ones on key dates, it was just a holiday experience, from the ides of November through the opening of January, but lately the time frame has expanded on either side of the calendar, and now my ennui obtains until well past anniversaries in April. As the miasma of the rainy season, with nary a catalytic flake of snow, synthetic or otherwise following, lasts here from April through September, the year is fairly well drenched with unextraordinary days. Sometimes, I wish I could go back in the box and sleep along with Madame Sparger, Señor Wemple, and the rest for eleven months, but then there would be no one to awaken them and let us have our lives. Alternatively, I wish I could, like Superman, fly backwards really fast around the world and relive undamaged days.

© Michael D. Brown 2011

Writer: Michael D. Brown

Unobserved

As your tear-blurred eyes indicted me, I came to believe I could never learn the grammar of your unwritten language, the gist of which appeared to claim a promise to mollify is a promise nonetheless and not to be mitigated by melancholy, while not discounting the prerogative of reconsideration. Memory has its place, but what of the moment and the unworded glance?

Though I might one day visit the place from which you spoke, I would be traveling alone. Having allowed your lesson to slip away in a grasp at understanding the context of the moment, thereby overlooking the details, will I fail to recognize history, in a way, repeating itself? Will you, then, wherever you are, smile at my foolish lapse? Or will you take pity? Can your intangible pity supply anything more than a reprimanding look from the silent ghost of a guilty conscience? Will that ease the pain I may be going through then, as I now, ineffably attempt to ease yours?

Such a shame you will pass intestate, and those of us who survive can only guess and try to remember wishes you expressed on brighter days. The irony of the sword that strings together your mumbled incoherencies is in how it likewise pierces our hearts when recalling that you taught this stuff for years. Making sense was your livelihood.

There were times when I could not immediately ascertain what you were trying to say in your writing, but the compositions were always available for rereading. We were both men of letters in those days, and though you were always a private person and declined to relate your own tale, one could divine your work’s provenance. Now, this kind of transitory communication—this does not work for me. I cannot discern whether you are begging or damning, and desperately need something to go on.

As I watched you swat invisible insects and relate your unstoried life to shafts of sunlight, I asked, “Where are you now?” “Schism…trellis,” you said, or at least that is what I heard, as your mind regressed through several decades perhaps seeking comfort as a tabula rasa, every observed movement an unformed, but learnable word.

In this last month-long half week, your race to that place has quickened, and I am reminded of college days, and Einstein, and the hypothetical astronaut who returned to encounter his aged self. If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one around to hear it...?

The night comes on, and the atmosphere in this room, responding to a faulty thermostat, is chilled by what does not occur between us. I am certain there will not be many more of these nights. Honestly, and I apologize for feeling this way, I no longer believe in my promises from yesterday which you could not help leaving unacknowledged. I pass on what you could not parse.

I replace the pillow at the foot of this strange bed. I cannot commit to our fleeting plan. I do not have it in me.

There are no words for how I feel, and you have none to give me. I do not know where you are, but you will have to find your way alone, as I will. We are beyond enabling each other.

I think I want to leave, want to run, but I only think it, and instead sit in a chair by the useless window in hopes that if I wait and watch a while longer, Nature in her kindness will obviate the need to erase what has not been written here.

“Cello…ingmit…grense,” you utter in sounds that in no way resemble condemnation nor atonement.

© Michael D. Brown 2011

disenthralled: Two by MDJB

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MuDJoB Guest Writes: First Anniversary

Views

Two small people carry one large thing and an argument ensues,
It ends with the big thing left on the street when one of them blows a fuse.
A patient sues his doctor and the lawyer sports new shoes,
The doctor makes excuses, saying, “I’m always the one they accuse!”
Fans at the game are anxious to see the visitors lose,
Though the leading player rolls on the ground and rubs a swelling bruise.
Mom and Dad watch a crime in progress on the local news;
A hateful man in an interview hurts with the words he spews.
Three competing suitors are hoping the beauty will choose
Against a backdrop of music and hearts of pink in varying hues.
The tenants default on their rent with excuses by ones and by twos,
And complain of the neighbor who stinks up the hall with the garbage that he strews.
Eli propounds on Kate’s erroneous definition of clerihews;
In order to get her to see the light, he gives her a book to peruse.
The church falls short on worshippers who can’t sit in predestined pews,
And Masons turn out their membership for failing to pay their dues.
A husband abandons his wife in aborted attempts to amuse;
Her demeanor is drowned in pot luck casseroles, soups and stews.
A detective sifts through the ashes searching remains for clues;
He’s found an earring, a tooth and a nail, but he doesn’t know whose.
Teenagers wooing, say they aren’t smoking. They are. It’s only a ruse.
They’re thinking of eloping because her father is turning the screws.
Workers waiting for jobs are standing outside in queues,
While the hardnosed factory owner seeks alternatives to use.
Someone is at the zoo with a child his ex-wife would abuse,
And an old man who’s lost a fortune regains it by singing the Blues.

© Michael D. Brown 2011

Equation: A Collection of Six-Sixes

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Critters at Six Sentences

Open publication - Free publishing - More six sentences

These Shoes (I Dare You Challenge)

This week Jo Prescott’s I Dare You challenge at her site JM Prescott - A Reader's World came in the form of clothing..."Clothing can set the scene as certainly as a wedding dress, predict plot like a ski mask and laytex gloves, or reveal character like chaps and spurs."
Herewith, my response to the challenge:

These Shoes

These shoes have walked all over London. They have traversed Bermuda and the Bahamas. They have climbed to the caldera in the Azores and stood atop Gibraltar. They have walked all through the worst parts of Lisbon until they made my feet ache, and some of the best parts of Hamburg, where again my feet were hurting at day’s end. In Barcelona, they walked a good part of las Ramblas. They have stood on the tarmac at the little airport a short distance from the edge of the Pyrenees and taken me through olive groves and parks where flamingoes danced and balanced on one leg. They, these shoes, not the flamingoes, helped me walk all around Las Vegas to take in everything there was to see and do for free, and because my feet were sore, I credit them with keeping me from losing more than $40.US in those oh-so prevalent slots. I did pick up another pair in Denver, but they’re really the same shoes, and at the end of the month they will take me back to Costa Rica.

These shoes have walked the decks of many ships and the aisles of dozens of airplanes. They have gotten me to airports early and to church late. They have guided me through shopping malls and into cinemas and across the streets of New York City against the light. They have walked me from the Battery to Harlem, from Sutton Place to the Chelsea Piers, from somewhere to no place. These shoes have walked me from childhood to my maturity.

These shoes are my guide. They are brogues. They are sandals, boots and loafers. I have walked a mile in another man’s moccasins and returned home in these shoes. They wait under my bed to greet me in the morning and take me to new places and the same old places. They can get there without a map. They have marked the mileage and taken into account my weariness. These shoes will never fail me. They are ruby slippers and if I click the heels together three times and wish solemnly for something, well, you know where that will get me. I have not yet been to Kansas, but I understand we all wind up there one day.

I have never drunk champagne from a woman’s shoe nor has any drunk from mine but the possibility is not ruled out.

Every so often, I remove these shoes and flex my toes on a sandy beach or swim in a pool or bathe, but for more hours of the day than I have them off, I have them on. The natural condition of my feet, it would seem, is to be inside these shoes. Sometimes I wonder why we have made the earth so hard and dangerous a place to walk barefoot that these shoes are more a necessity than a whim.

I am attached to these shoes, and have contributed to the fortunes amassed by men like Thom McAn and Mr. Florsheim, if there was such a person, and if there was, he must have been very attached to his shoes. Why else dedicate his life to providing them for so many others. He had not much work convincing people they needed their shoes. Everybody takes this for granted here in the first and second worlds. We are working on those in the third world, getting them to see the necessity of shoes.

Someday, everybody in the world will admit how much they are attached to shoes. Then, we will work on hats.

© Michael D. Brown 2010

52 Pick-Up

Open publication

The MuDJoB Story

A Look Backward: TecIngles (pre-MuDJoB)

MuDJoB 66: Students' Writing

Men and Women at Six Sentences

Six Verses Before the Chorus at Six Sentences