Ficly: Erica and the Bear

Posted on January 17, 2011 by Adam Susskind

Ficly about a woman and a moment of existentialism that might have cost her.

Erica turned from the window to look at the bear through the fog.

The house was caught in a perpetual gloom, every corner darker than the last, and the only light seemed to be the ultra-pale blue that slid through the think murky windows to spill across the floor and walls. She was in the kitchen, the sink on, splashing about the dirtied dishes from her solitary dinner the night before.

Candlesticks on the table, two places set, but she ate alone.

And now, her back to the sink and the rain outside, she looked across the wood floors that moaned under each step, and out to the back door. The mahogany paneling on the walls showed a silvery hue in the daylight, which felt more like moonlight in the weather.

A cool, misty chill crept across the back of her neck. The animal meandered about the yard for a while, its unkempt fur matted with mud and water. Small eyes recessed in its thick skull watched her occasionally.

She might have closed the screen door, for that was all that remained in the doorway of the old house, but something seemed so docile about the creature. She hesitated to obstruct her view of its magnificence. Even in the damp air, out in the wet grass of the field-like lawn that lay beyond the porch, this bear commanded her awe.

It snorted and growled, and eventually found the courage to enter the house, lumbering as was its way.

Some of those who knew her say they can still hear her screams when they close their eyes, but Erica lives in the south-land now. When people stop and point at what is left of her, others tell them to hush, and that it was a landmine or an accident of some sort. She is treated as a hero.

Ficly: Shell of a Man

Posted on October 20, 2010 by Adam Susskind

There’s… there’s just no excuse for this one. I kid. I actually like it. Let me know what you think.

He almost slipped on the shampoo that spilled to the suctioned rubber mat on the shower floor. When he caught himself before chipping a tooth, he clutched the handle on the wall and sighed deep relief, looking down at the drain as the spout battered the back of his head and the water dripped off his eyelids and nose and lips. Eventually he convinced himself to shut off the water and step out. In the steamy bathroom, he looked at his face. This was sixty-five. This was what he had become. He looked at his stomach. Loose skin grinning through his shreds of youth. He looked at the back of his hands.

He ought to cut his nails.

He knew he was getting older. His house looked like the house his parents used to own in Miami, because the nail clipper, like everything else, was exactly where he expected it to be. Next to the bottle of light-green toothpaste in the medicine cabinet with the sliding mirror doors that took a good shove to open.

Even his toilet had a furry pink slip-cover which greeted his rear when he sat down. ‘Christ,’ he thought. ‘This bathroom could be blue. It could be anything but this pepto-bismal pink.’ The wall paper was coming off at every corner.

He clipped one nail.

Then another.

His right hand first. Started on his second. When he got to his left ring finger he slipped and cut his finger tip. The clipper was dropped and he gripped his finger prematurely before the pain set in.

And he waited. Waited for the shock, the sting, a spot of blood. But none came.

Eventually he let go of his hand and looked. It was strange. A bit of skin was certainly missing, but it didn’t seem like there was anything on the other side. Just a kind of… hollowness.

He pressed and prodded, and eventually the edges of the hole chipped and the opening widened and he was able to slide one finger, into the other. His fingertip, the one was wasn’t bleeding- well, it was almost all gone. Little shards in the wastebasket.

Of course it was odd but there was something all too fascinating about it and he picked up the clipper and snipped away until the finger was entirely missing. Then he moved onto the others. He clipped a pinky-finger at the base and it dropped to the floor and shattered. Soon he had taken off the entire arm, clawing away at the facade-like flesh until naught but his shoulder remained. He had to find out what was inside him. Next he removed a leg, which toppled away from his hip, off the toilet, and disintegrated to dust across the expanse of tile. With one leg gone the other simply had to go, and soon after, his penis.

He beat his chest in to see if he had a heart, and he reached through the hole and felt around. There was nothing for a long while, but he knew there had to be… something. Anything.

And then someone from within grabbed his wrinkled hand. Their hand was soft and young, and out climbed a young boy. And the old man knew that the boy was him, and through parched lips he said, “Oh…”

“I knew you were in there somewhere.”

And the boy stood before him and hugged him, and the legless old man smiled, and broke into ten million pieces.

Ficly: The Limitless Rise

Posted on October 19, 2010 by Adam Susskind

Kind of a weird situation to think about. Little kid doing drugs. Sorta out of the ordinary. The title is from a song by RUSH.

Zack Ritter shuffled some of the bottles of shampoo around and moved the bath toys onto the counter top, placing them strategically so that it wouldn’t appear as if they had been dumped up there haphazardly. He crawled in, under the sink, into the cabinet, watching not to strike his head on the piping as he had last time. He closed the door and smiled his boyish smile in the dark where no one could see him. His sister told him he was too fat to fit in that space and, while it was cramped, she was wrong. She made a point of refusing to check for him during their games of hide a seek as a matter of principle and, knowing this, it was the only place he would hide. Eventually she convinced herself that he really couldn’t possibly be under there at all and would give up and get angry before even stepping into the bathroom.

He could spend an hour or two in there even if he knew his sister had long since stopped looking for him, and he would play with the bottles on his lap in lieu of the friends he didn’t have. The depth of the black never scared him because the space was small and the door was immediately in front of him. Occasionally he would grope for one of the aerosol bottles and spray it for a moment or two and inhale. Dizzy, he felt. It was a sensation of weightlessness, or no, of being in a limitless expanse of darkness. The sensation was heightened when he would use more than one can at a time, and it wasn’t long before he was begging his sister for any excuse to play hide and seek so he could breathe in the fumes again.

Every time he went under he would hold down the nozzle for just a moment longer than the previous time until he really felt as if he were falling, spinning, deeper and deeper into a hole from which he could never escape, but he loved it. It was sanctuary from the nasty lunch ladies and the other children at school. He was far away from everything else, and he fell asleep in that hole. Slowly, as if falling through an increasingly thick fog until he was completely underwater, a dark, cool water. And in the moment when he stopped breathing, nothing made any sense, and it didn’t have too.

His sister gave up looking for him, and when his mother panicked and called the police, the last place in the house that anyone checked was the cabinet under the sink.

Ficly: The First Step

Posted on September 30, 2010 by Adam Susskind

A ficly about pre-performance anxiety. Thanks to my good friend for the idea.

The crowd murmured while we watched from behind the curtain, dancing around the backstage in a kind of nervous strut. Stage left, stage right. Looking out, trying to get a sense of the size of the audience that night.

Blue and red lights hit the cymbals on the kit, a kind of mixed purple hue sent splashing across the wood floor that seemed to have seen so many shows before us.

The amps were set. Guitars. The microphone on a thin stand like a nervous young girl in the spotlight. I fidgeted in my seat, unsure of whether to sit or stand. A pencil of a man with a headset stepped past our manager and looked at us as a whole, not making eye contact with anyone in particular.

One minute.

We lined up. Jim always walked out with his pick already in his hand. It was kind of a tradition of his. I didn’t have any traditions. Each night was new. I was asleep, and with the start of every show, when my stick hit the metal of the ride, I was reborn. Kevin had sweaty palms. That first note was always the most important. We had to nail it or the show was more or less shot.

The floor lights dimmed, the effect lights overhead started to flash, we looked at our respective instruments, and in one perfectly synchronized motion, took the first step.

Ficly: Those 4:00 AM Moments

Posted on September 28, 2010 by Adam Susskind

Just keeping the brain flexible. Short story in the works.

When I woke up again, the sheets on the other side of the bed were cool. The room was quiet, yellow ambiance from the lights outside pouring in through the slats in the venetian blinds. Bamboo bedroom, the Ikea dream. I could see it all from my pillow. Bargain-bin lamp shade. Television furniture. White curtains. The fake plant in the corner next to the dresser that matched everything else. The familiar scent was missing, replaced with a cool breeze that only served to remind me how cold it was under the blanket alone.

I could get used to her being there. I wanted to get used to it, like it was the only thing I needed, but I didn’t because it was the one thing I really couldn’t have. I felt so ambivalent.

I glanced at the clock. Early morning. Had to get up in four hours. I couldn’t stand thinking about that last weekend. She flew out for three days and it seemed like we only had just enough time to say hello before she was heading back to Vermont.

The worst part about waking up was remembering that when I turned over, there was no one to hold. Months of being away, sleeping alone, and it felt immediately natural to have her between the sheets with me again. Nothing foreign about it. Nothing uncomfortable about cracking my eyes open at four a.m. and finding someone there. Now my four a.m. moment was empty, like my discount bedroom.

Ficly: Eat the Vegetables

Posted on September 15, 2010 by Adam Susskind

It’s late. I’m posting this. I don’t even know why. I’m so tired. Lots of homework and I’m not even done. Just gotta laugh it off. Here. Maybe this Ficly will make you laugh. I doubt it, but if it does… well… Go find help.

“Have you had enough, son?”

The man nodded, juice dripping from his chin as he glanced up at the older man. A wrinkled old hand lent itself to the younger gentleman’s shoulder.

“Are you sure you’re full?”

The man smiled with an blank gaze. He turned back to the brown mush in his bowl, the iron spoon listing slightly out of the bowl before clattering to the stained table below. Deep, hollowed knots in the wood of the counter on which the man ate. Sometimes he ate with a utensil, sometimes with his fingers, but always for the past month here, he had eaten twice a day, the same brown salty meal the texture of warm oats and milk.

The rooms of the house were always well lit, those that he had been allowed to explore at any rate, and the carpet clean, the furniture brushed and flowers placed out each week on the small glass coffee table by the couch, but the priestly old figure refused to entertain guests whom were not inclined to spend any more than two weeks. Well, that had been alright for those many who had passed through the door. A long stay was perhaps just what they were looking for.

The juice fell from the younger man’s chin. He had grown fat in the month, and slow. And while everything seemed the same that morning, there was now a change in the older fellow he had not seen since right before the last guest left.

“Well.” The quivering voice said, a kind of desperation in anticipation waiting immediately below the surface. “If you’re quite finished, perhaps it’s time I show you the basement, hurm?”

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