National Pick A Short Story - Any Short Story - Day
Happy first annual National Pick a Short Story - Any Short Story - Day! I’m sure you’ve already done all of your shopping for this auspicious holiday and the turkey is in the oven, cooking away. So sit back and relax.
Actually, there is a real National Short Story Day. It lands on December 21. Get it? Shortest day of the year... short story... Ha!
But the National Pick a Short Story - Any Short Story Day ( abbreviated as NPASSASSD for T-shirts, mugs, and other swag) is WAY different. Hugely different. So different that... (give me a second here...) it’s... um... really, really different. For starters, I made it up.
The NPASSASSD (which, now that I look at, could be interpreted as an obscene salutation exchanged between irate road-ragers) was motivated by two things.
First and foremost, the fact that short stories are (imo) very cool, but also virtually dead in our culture. Sure, they show up in obscure college literary journals. But for the most part, people don’t read them. Short stories are the sad little step-children wedged between flash fiction and novels. They hang out with novellas, another underappreciated and underprivileged form of writing.
Short stories are (imo) very cool, but also virtually dead in our culture.
Second, the New Yorker recently published a new short story by Haruki Murakami. If you are unfamiliar with that name, you obviously aren’t into massive (page-wise), rather strange, but usually peculiarly satisfying fiction. (One of my favorite Murakami’s is actually his memoir: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.) Strangely, Murakami’s story was part of a Flash Fiction series which was decidedly not flash fiction. But reading it got me thinking about short stories.
Okay, there’s a third, less noble reason for this multiple choice short story blog: namely, we’re going camping this weekend and I’m not in the deep-thinking, blog-producing, draw-something-profound-out-of-our-present-circumstances mood. I’m in the load-the-dogs-and-all-our-stuff-into-the-Jeep-and-let’s-blow-this-popsicle-stand mood.
So below, you’ll find three stories. I’ve included the first paragraph of each to give you a taste of what they might offer, along with links to the full stories. Also included are the approximate read times and appropriate music to set the stage. Choose one story. Choose two. Choose all three. Read them now. Read them later. Read them when you’re sitting in the DMV, trying not to catch COVID or a myriad of other communicable diseases, or when you’re “working from home” (wink-wink) and need a break, or when you wake up in the middle of the night and can’t go back to sleep. Pretty much any one of these should effectively knock you out like a hammer. ZZZZzzzzz....
And if short stories just aren’t your thing, feel free to head back to Facebook and scroll away. I won’t be offended. Much
Your choice. Enjoy!
Quiet City
Time Investment: 20 minutes
Tone: edgy and contemplative
Music: Aaron Copeland - Quiet City
He lifted it again, pressed the cool silver mouthpiece to his lips, closed his eyes...
Not yet.
The evening sky was already a deep indigo directly overhead, a desperate, dying smudge of orange lingering on the horizon.
Leaning out the open window of the third-floor apartment, he surveyed the other buildings. The air was vibrating crazily: radios, televisions, voices of husbands, wives, landlords and children, traffic, car horns, sirens...
He loved the city. It could be smothering, a damper that closed off the flow of oxygen to the brain. The city was a half-melted box of crayons with gooey colors running like mad to find low ground - a resting place. But there was no resting in this zoo of humanity, this hodgepodge of glass, concrete, asphalt, and smoke.
It was his home.
Saturday’s Run
Time Investment: 20 minutes
Tone: satirical and irreverent
Music: Sia - The Greatest
He didn’t hear the golf ball and certainly didn’t see it. Had sight, hearing. or any other of his senses picked it up – like say, the way an F-16’s radar picks up an incoming bogey – he would have taken evasive action.*
*I’m using terms like F-16, bogey, evasive action in an ironic way of course since he was running along the golf course at a U.S. Air Force base when it happened. I would name the base but, as you are probably well aware, they would have to kill me. Top secret, hush-hush, G-14 classified stuff, if you take my meaning.
So anyway, he was running along the golf course at Petersen Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, Colorado… oops. (If I’m in the middle of a sentence and it just sputters out without a period or a conclusion, you’ll know what happened: thump-thump – that’s the literary sound effect for a pair of top secret, CIA-issue bullets coming out of a top secret, CIA-issue silencer and sending me to an earlier-than-I’d-like, top secret, CIA-approved grave.)
The Bus Driver
Time Investment: 45 minutes
Tone: social commentary-ish
Music: Santana - Primavera
Benito was listening to Tejano music, as he always did on the drive in, thinking about home, when a Jeep passed him doing at least 85. It had two shiny, expensive looking mountain bikes strapped to the back and, beneath the dangling, slow spinning tires, Texas plates. He swore at them in Spanish, then recanted, crossed himself, and shook his head, willing away the curse. They were going too fast and had broken a double-yellow line designating this as a no-pass zone, and they were tourists - he gritted his teeth in order to refrain from swearing at them again. But, he told himself, trying to be forgiving, they were just anxious to get up to the mountain. They were in Colorado and had woken, as he had, to find another cloudless day with a deep blue, high-altitude sky brooding over them, and had risen excited, hardly able to wait to ride the gondola to the top and hurtle down the steep, sometimes treacherous trails on their bikes. No, he decided with a sigh, there was nothing wrong with them or their behavior. They were simply la vida loco - crazy for life.