Six Fictions

by Scott Garson

 

ZOMBIE

Starts in a way she couldn’t have guessed, not even if she had been guessing. Starts with a mood. Blue mood. Weak and forlorn. Failure of something inside. She hides in her office. The words on her monitor won’t hold still. They slip, and resume their place, and slip, like the beat of a heart. Nothing holds still in her vision, in fact. What she sees: it is somehow approximate. What she hears. The voices of colleagues, whorled and garish. Perhaps she needs sleep. This is what she is telling herself at this point. That she has a choice in the matter. A power. To blink, to gather herself. Shake herself, wake herself up.

~

NIGHTFALL

Early reports of the sickness varied. People were cautious and stayed inside. Morgan and Keely, who didn’t have phones, kept to their room and took turns peeking out of the dormer. Nothing to see. They read books. They made ramen, with peas, with hard-boiled egg. Their mom could forget about food. Their mom, who battled anxiety, stayed quiet until the sun went down; then she would drift upstairs and make smooth gestures with her cigarette hand as she tried to describe her youth, before she was their mom, when nothing was settled for her, when things could still go either way.

~

LISTEN

I don’t know why The Death should not be played at the neighborhood supermarket. People seem to like The Death at low volume, without thinking “I like The Death,” without doing more than following a tune they’ve followed before, while gauging red steaks lain out in double rows in ambient LED lighting, or knocking on ponderous cantaloupes, to feel what has happened inside.

~

SPACE STATION

We want to imagine an alterlife where we are as free as our thoughts. But it’s hard. I mean, like whole aeonic seas have been elided. We’ve got to sit down. We need, like coffee. See us trudging corridors toward less defective light? It is a comfort, our being this empty, this tired. As if there is only one mind in this place and nobody cares whose it is.

~

MISSIVE

If the dish could run away with the spoon, then what are the rules? What’s out of bounds? Could daffodils not stand straight and get dressed and take to smoking a pipe? Could people not go through the dishwasher and live a different life? How about you? If you picked up a stone in a field. And it was some interesting color, like pale blue. And once it got warm in your hand you forgot why you left Hope, Arkansas, and saw that you had to come back.

~

APOCALYPSE O’CLOCK

If I wake in the night, I shake thought from my head, just like salt from the oven-top shaker. Actually no. But how awesome that power would be, shake-a-shake, with maracas, with bongos and bells, and I two-step into my fruit-colored dreams, where little white crystals parachute into my hair like the gentlest of rains.

 

Scott Garson is the author of IS THAT YOU, JOHN WAYNE?—a collection of stories. He lives in central Missouri.

 

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