tiny fiction vol 1

Sometimes at the beginning of a writing session I like to crack my knuckles by knocking out vignettes. I might make it a habit of posting them here every now and again. This one clocked in at seven hundred words. If anyone's interested, I might post the 500-word version later.

Dan woke up, like always, at seven. Time was, he could doze back off on weekends but since there wasn’t such thing as a weekend anymore, it was up at seven. Winter days like today, the cold white light would come in all bent from the blinds. He got that feeling like the floor was going to be cold, so cold, and it made him want to go back to sleep but there was nothing for it. He was awake. Susan exhaled long and low beside him, asleep, earplugs against his snoring. So she said.

Susan slept until at least ten these days. When they were younger she’d get up with him. Then it started slipping past eight, minutes stretched until she wasn’t really up until nine, and so here they were now six years since he’d retired and she was dead until ten. Dan wondered if maybe she was so tired of him that she was slowly stealing back her minutes. He didn’t feel like that about her, but some women got tired of marriage.

He thought about that floor again, as he rolled his girth over, away from Susan’s curved back. There was the sharp pain in the knee after hours without moving it. Angling his elbow against the warm bed, Dan pushed himself up and out, ignoring the knee for the sudden and immediate need for the bathroom. Susan slept still.

He wiped sleep from his eyes as he slumped into the armchair in the front room, after stuffing himself into a too-tight bathrobe that Susan kept threatening to throw away. The remote was on the window ledge, and Dan was leaning towards it when movement out of the window caught his eye, a little kid racing past where his car was parked. And then Dan could see very clearly that the window of the car was smashed. The whole damn window.

He didn’t realize he was shaking until he was braced by the shock of cold, rubber slippers slapping against grey concrete. He threw open the iron gate and there she was, front door all kicked and dented, jagged teeth of the window glinting in the early sunlight. The light green paint scratched in long vicious streaks by keys, or knives.

Dan’s teeth knocked against each other. He put a hand on the hood, gently. It was an odd motion, like laying a hand on the leg of a friend in the hospital. He stepped closer to the window. The guts of the console spilled everywhere, stereo ripped out and mud prints on the mats. The door was unlocked but Dan couldn’t bring himself to touch anything. He needed to call the police, he realized. It’d feel good, he knew, to call them and let the neighbors see that Dan wasn’t afraid of the hoodlums that lived here, that thought they owned the street. Stooped old man though he was. He wondered if he should wait to call later, when more of them would be awake. But no, it was cold and he wanted to clean up the glass soon. It was only when Dan had his hand on the gate that with cold clarity he remembered the sound of the building’s front door slamming behind him.

He stood there, immobilized and cold. He’d have to ring the damn bell until something got through those earplugs of Susan’s or maybe not. He knew someone else would see him from a window, someone would offer to let him in, use the phone, offer coffee. Those new people, probably, the young married people that were so polite, so unfailingly polite, that it made him nervous. It’d probably be them that let him in, the crazy old man in his slippers.

Dan turned back to his vandalized car, looking down at the scattered diamonds of glass on the sidewalk. When he couldn’t think of anything else, he carefully opened the door, watching more shards of glass tumble to his feet. He punched at the unlock button, then went around to the other side. A windowless van rumbled past. He yanked his bathrobe tighter around his belly and heaved himself into the seat, pulling the door shut behind him.