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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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Six Fictions”? One of my current projects is a manuscript of very short stories, and these are part of it. The stories have to work within the frame of a single paragraph, and so far I’ve been fussy about keeping them each under 200 words (I edit them down if they’re over). The goal is a book where readers can go from one to the next happily, page by page, a book that establishes a kind of rhythm, in other words, even though no two shorts intersect (an example might be one of my favorite books of all time, Charles Simic’s THE WORLD DOESN’T END). At first, when I started sending these out to journals, I fixed upon sets of nine and numbered each story within the set, in order to suggest that book-reading-type experience I was hoping for (one story to the next to the next). Three sets of this type came out, I think—in Electric Literature, Okay Donkey, and Bluestem. More recently, I’ve been putting together different-sized sets, without numbers, and even publishing some solo (I think the stories should have to be good enough to stand alone). In putting together sets like this one, the question is one of feel. Do they feel right together? Do they seem to work as a whole in some way? Of course, I’ll have to answer that same question for the larger manuscript, when it gets finalized at some point or other. by Scott Garson HOW MAY I HELP YOU? He froze when the cockroach jumped from the crease of his wallet. Smoothly she put the insect to death, using a slip of deposit. HOMECOMING QUEEN Eveyone’s voting for Missy. I get it. Be honest, though. Whether or not it’s me, wouldn’t you like to have someone who didn’t tragically die? VISITATION He came to their classroom. The twins sat in back. Their teacher was going to just give them to him, Kate realized. Jen whispered, Shh. RAY ANNE She gave herself a different name and didn’t tell anyone. She liked when her mother screamed, “Katherine!” She liked that her mother was wrong. STOPLIGHT Oh shades and cell-phone girl in the mirror. Please kiss me. Please cover my rent. HOURLY They gave me a job at Halloween Town. Strip mall with vacancies. Sad. I was a wizard, vaguely swinging my wand. “Everything change,” I commanded. Scott Garson is the author of American Gymnopédies. He edits Wigleaf. “Visitation” appeared in different form in a 2009 posting of Everyday Genius. How do you approach differently the creation of individual compressed fictions when they are part of a series, such as “Six Fictions”? And what are some ways to make pieces feel inter-connected when creating such a series? Probably you carry more of an awareness of form when writing pieces for a set. Even if the form you’re working within isn’t a known or established one, you try to stay conscious of what the form feels like to you. That’s to say, in addition to the needs of each piece on its own, there’s a need for likeness between them. Interconnections: tough subject! I feel like to generalize here, even modestly, would be to stretch the truth. In the case of this set, the “Six Fictions,” I put them together pretty quickly, within a two-day period. Two were scavenged from earlier material (“Stoplight” had been a haiku, first written while doing a reverse commute from DC to Rockville, Maryland). I did four of them during my office hour, and one at the sink while rinsing some plates, and one on a place mat at a restaurant with my kids asking what I was doing, and the last—a replacement for one that didn’t work—late the following night. I liked the number six. Six seemed like a good call for these things. When it came time to order them, I was hoping that their having arisen at the same time would mean that there’d be interesting links and counterpoints, and there were; I sensed that. But I didn’t think about it too much (Ever since I realized that the iTunes randomizer could often school me in the mix-making department, I’ve tried to be more brainless in doing my segues).Six Fictions
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