50-Word Fiction

            No one can believe the house is gone.  Everyone ran into the street, even the neighbors.  Mom can’t stop crying.  Dad lies, saying, “It’s only stuff.”  He holds her.  She holds herself.

            They’ll never find the guilty party.  I threw the evidence into Lake Michigan.

The Sick Bed

    I sneezed hard three times, my throat raw as a smoker’s.  Spit hung off my lip.  The pile of tissues in the basket grew by the minute and I blew my nose one more time.  Dropping the snot rags off the edge of the bed into the shiny mesh bin was my only entertainment.
    She entered with (another fucking) cup of salty soup when what I wanted was to be left alone, or, at least, a mild clear broth.  The salt scraped along my coarse esophagus like hot gravel.
    I closed my eyes and wished it all away - the sneezing, the fever, the stabbing pain in my chest like acupuncture needles on the inside, my girlfriend and the fourth cup of soup in the last two hours.
“Hey, baby.”  Her lips pouty, her eyes almost weepy with sympathy, she sat softly on the edge of the bed, pulling up the blankets I’d pushed off.  God, I was fucking sweltering.
She held the cup up to my lips and I wanted to yell ‘my arms aren’t broken.  I can feed myself.’  I hadn’t said a word in two days, the last thing out of my mouth (other than the spit of my last sneeze and the vomit from yesterday morning) was, “Oh, shit,” just before I ran to the bathroom to project that morning’s omelet into the toilet.
I coughed, (fucking needles in my lungs) and she quickly pulled the cup away, accidentally dribbling soup onto my chest.  She daubed at the Campbell’s with Kleenex as if she’d spilled wine on a priceless rug, apologizing profusely and needlessly.
“Do you want me to bring you something to read?” I shook my head and tried to sneer, to add authority to my no. 
I tried to say NyQuil and my swollen throat wouldn’t let the sounds form, so I pointed at the bottle on the nightstand behind her.  “Tissue?” she asked, and I shook my head, pursing my lips and furrowing my brow, like a mime, all my emotions expressed through exaggerated facial gestures.  I coughed twice more, keeping my lips closed tightly to try and suppress it. 
“NyQuil?” 
I nodded slowly, as if communicating with a foreigner relieved to have found a point of agreement.
“Are you sure?  It’s only…” she checks the clock.  “…Two o-clock.”  I wanted to hang the green bottle upside down and run an I.V. drip from it to arm, my head, straight into my fucking chest and into my lungs and heart.  I smiled as sweetly as I could, like a child begging for a cookie he knows he’s going to get anyway.
“Ok.  You need your rest,” she said, rationalizing on my behalf.  She tilted the bottle and filled the measuring cap to the brim then held it up for me.  I opened my mouth and she poured the elixir down my throat.  One more, I thought.  I’m a junkie -and I don’t care.  If this is being an addict, right now, I don’t want to be clean.
I fought off sleep as long as I could, not because I didn’t want it, but because I liked the descent.  Drowsiness takes the medicinal edge off the taste in my mouth, and guides me into the sweetness of dreamless sleep.

Publication!

A photo I took of Jack is being published. Annette Gendler is the editor of book called Our Chicago: Eleven Writers on their City. I'm don't know which essay my photo is paired with, but I'm excited to find out.

Same World, Different Realities

I believe that there's an underlying reality to everything.  (So did Einstein, so there.)
It doesn't matter whether one thinks the earth is flat; it's not. This, sadly, is problematic on a global scale. The world is littered with people committing horrible acts of kidnapping, murder, rape, sometimes all three. The people responsible admit to these acts freely, proudly, though they don't believe they've committed a crime. They BELIEVE, regardless of the chasm between their own thoughts and the real world, that they did something righteous, noble.

When I say Jewish and you say Muslim we are building on two different foundations. This isn't to say that there can't be consensus, peace, even friendship. But when fundamental realities differ then you're treading on the thinnest veneer of ice. When I say science and you say faith it makes it difficult, sometimes impossible, to reach agreement. How can we agree on ends when we can't even agree on beginnings? I get the appeal of religion, especially as a parent:

"Hey Dad, where does the universe come from?"
"God did it."

I can appreciate both the ease and brevity of that conversation.  It's sure-as-shit easier than explaining (or understanding) Bell's Theorem. Easier answers are sought not by those who want the truth (oh, the irony) but by those who can't be bothered (for whatever reasons) to delve. Of course, they'll argue that they do delve, they read all kinds of things: the bible, things that tell them the bible is true...other things that tell them that scientists are often wrong and that the bible is NEVER wrong.

As I sat in the grocery checkout line recently, Riley facing me from the basket, I noticed the child in line in front of me, about the same age as Riley, his hair was white-blond, his teeth were crooked as a canyon, and his mouth seemed to be frozen open in a squared-O shape that I took to be a crooked smile. An Asian child, also around the same age, sat in the shopping cart facing her mother.

All three babies noticed each other, and of course all three parents noticed their kids noticing each other. These three kids all occupy the same reality. Their needs and wants don't differ much, in general, one from the other.

When I skim the news about, say, the pissing contest between Boehner and Obama I can't help but be distracted by the thought that these men are living in different realities. They're not reading off the same menu but they can't figure out why they can't decide on what to order. Boehner lives in a world, regardless of his partisanship, that apparently dictates tax cuts raise revenues. If I owned a store and I needed more money, would lowering the cost of items raise my bottom line? This isn't politics, it's simple math.

I looked from one kid to the other, each of them now babbling happily, kicking their legs, each of them laughing and pointing, and started to wonder how long their internal realities would stay so similar, and how wide it might grow by the time they become parents.