Ficly: The First Step

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.

Share

Ficly: Those 4:00 AM Moments

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.

Share

Ficly: Eat the Vegetables

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?”

Share

Ficly: While the World Sleeps

Posted from the bus on the way back up to Ithaca.

I pulled the phone out of my pocket. The bus was quiet. 3 A.M to Buffalo. Everyone was asleep save an older man with a newspaper in the back of the bus and the pretty girl with the laptop behind me.

We cruised across the pavement, a cough here, a grunt there, all drowned in the white noise of the air conditioning.

There it was. On the phone. My feet, her feet. A picture I took three years ago. Maybe I forgot to delete it with all the others. No faces, just our lower legs, my shoes, and her sandals at one end of a hammock. I would never know why it popped up. Maybe I had shifted in my sleep and hit a button. It didn’t matter.

I took two seconds to look over the image, and then deleted it. I needed to know that the world was going to forget about her before I could let go. I wanted to be the last person ever to think about her, but I wanted to stop thinking. Cancer had done his dirty work over two years ago, and with that last picture gone, I was hoping her memory was going to disappear as fast as she had.

Originally on Ficly: http://ficly.com/stories/20843

Share

Ficly: The Field Again

The first post from Ithaca, NY.

When I started this one, I had something else in mind. I kinda wanted to write a different style of story, but this is what came out. The next one I do will probably be more in vein of the last one, “Single Socks,” which is to say, more ordinary, slice-of-life kind of thing.

I would have to send them in again, or replace them.

When I looked out the window of the third floor, I saw them in the field again, staring upwards to the sun like they were about to drown in a sea of UV. They had burnt out again. Fried. Something inside always snapped.

I watched for a while, sipping slowly from a straw through the mask. If I was going to bring them inside I was going to have to lather myself in that white ooze, and at my age you just lose interest.

This was all very routine for the most part until one of them stopped and looked around at the other two. They were strong. Male figures, all of them, although not particularly correct in that sense. Naked, pale white flesh that bubbled and oozed after a few months of sun. They stood on the cracked clay with their shovels.

And then he laughed. A full, convincing laugh, before clutching and ripping a sheet of skin from his left cheek. There was no blood, just a little sap, which dried before he hit the ground.

Originally on FIcly: http://ficly.com/stories/20745

Share

Ficly: The White and the Water

Here’s another Ficly about a woman locked up somewhere. I like how this one came out.

Grinning devilishly, she tipped the glass over and watched the water rush across the white table surface to the edge where it dripped unceremoniously into a small pool that swelled and splattered by the foot of her chair.

This was entertainment at its best. Two years of this, and if she kept it up, maybe another five. Home was a padded room on the top floor of an industrial building originally built as a cubical hell-hole, but which had been turned into a kind of forced-refuge for people the state of New York considered too guilty for freedom and too innocent for jail.

The water dripped. She knew that on the other side of the mirror there was a doctor or an attendant or at least someone in a blue security uniform. She knew that they’d be taking notes, and that the spilling water was only buying her more time in that room.

But she was so bored, and the only thing that looked interesting anymore was when the sun rays from the skylight in the room hit the pool of water and refracted into a million colors.

Originally on Ficly: http://ficly.com/stories/20157

Share