This week’s piece is a flash fiction called Sunday, 10:03. (Flash fiction is a very short piece of finished fiction – usually under 1000 words. This one clocks in at a meager 524.)
I wrote this piece as an experiment in economy. My goal was to give the reader a crystal clear idea of characters, their history, and their motivations without actually saying anything about the characters, history, or their motivations.
The name “Nathan” for the male character was an unconscious choice. I’ve tried to change it since, but haven’t found anything that suits him quite as well.
What clues can you pick up about the personality and motivations of these characters from the dialogue?
What backstory do you construct for them in your mind? Are they married? Dating? Just friends? Where do they live? How old are they?
“So anyway, that’s what I’m going to read tonight at the conference. That and… well, maybe the other one as well. Depends on the audience.”
She sat at the kitchen table looking at Nathan. He was half buried in the Times as usual: One slippered foot extended to rest on a pile of magazines on the coffee table.
“It doesn’t have an ending.”
“What do you mean?”
“He gets off the train? And she just stands there?”
“It’s an atmospheric thing. The action is in her mind — and in the reader’s. They supply the ending.”
He shifted, sinking deeper into the piled cushions, and held his other foot up — the long planes of his foot flexing as the faded plaid slipper dangled from his big toe.
She hated those slippers.
“Where’d you get those women from?”
“Like… how’d I imagine them?”
“Yeah.”
“I saw both of them. The woman with the bag when I was 12. My grandmother was in the hospital, and my aunt brought me into the city to see her.”
“And you took the subway back to Penn.”
“Yeah.”
“And the other woman?”
“I was in a fiction workshop at Columbia. On my way home from class one night there was this woman in a blue dress. With a much older man. She looked young and alone. I… well, I just remembered her.”
“For 6 years? And 13, for the bag woman?”
Her eyes narrowed. “Yeah.”
He wasn’t looking at her, but at the cat, who — disturbed from his morning nap by the conversation — jumped down off the sunny windowsill and padded noiselessly away towards the relative safety of the bedroom.
“Wait a minute. How do you remember all this?”
“I don’t remember everybody I’ve ever seen. I have to be in a certain mood.”
“What mood?”
“Well… generative. Like — I have to be primed to write.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“It’s a writer thing. Writers don’t make sense.”
He shrugged and turned back to his coffee and newspaper.
“Nate?”
“Yeah?” The pages rustled as he flipped past the movie reviews and the crossword to the business section.
“Do I make sense?”
“You’re a writer, aren’t you?”
“Well…”
A golden leaf fluttered down from the tree outside. She noticed it turn and glide and disappear below the casement.
“Look. You come home and you scribble stuff on random post-its and you drink obscene amounts of tea—”
“Look who’s talking!”
“—Obscene amounts of tea, and then you get up in the middle of the night and disappear and… Well. It’s either a woman thing or a writer thing. And God help me if it’s a woman thing.”
She turned back to the laptop in silence.
“You want me to go away, don’t you?”
“What?”
“You’ve said you can’t write when I’m around.”
“No, I… want you here.”
The words sounded dead — stillborn in the pause between them and unconvincing. Not at all what she’d intended.
Nathan took another sip of coffee, picked up his newspaper, and followed the cat into the bedroom.
Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:
