Seth Miller's Stories

Unlisted Number

2008-05-30T17:40:22Z

“I’m so sorry, you’ll have to speak up,” she said unapologetically. The weight of Edgar on her hip digging in to her patience. His whine muting the other end of the phone.

These customer service types were all the same. Outsourced to some international, no foreign, company. Staffed by folks barely out of diapers themselves. Or maybe wearing diapers on their heads.

Dottie chuckled grimly to herself and missed the explanation again. “I’m sorry,” she sneered. “Say it one more time. Your accent is kinda thick.”

“Madame,” he spoke slowly, assuredly. “As I have heretofore attempted to mention on two previous occasions, I am of the firm belief that you have mistaken me for someone I am most certainly not.”

Dottie sat stunned. Edgar let out a piercing cry.

“If you are still unable to discern, either because of my enunciation or the protestations of your offspring, you’ve called Betelgeuse! Good! Day!”

He waited for the bodily “thud” and her crying child to hang up.

“Who was that, dear?”

“Just Earth. Again.”

Mellow Yellow

2008-05-14T14:50:33Z

“Are there any other kinds of mallow besides marsh,” he asked between bites of his PBJ ?

Sabrina just chuckled. He’d gotten a glob of goober on his upper lip from the sandwich. Again.

“Here,” she said, wiping a smidgen of the stain away and handing him the remains of the napkin. “Clean yourself up and get your head out of the clouds.”

“Fluffy, billowy, pillows of marshmallow clouds,” he grinned. Heaven help her there was jelly slathered over his bicuspids.

“The most you’ve said to me in weeks and it’s your magnum opus on mallow?” She had turned away while asking the question, wiping coffee from Formica, not meaning menace. Not too much anyway.

Only now as she turned back he was sobbing. Big, shoulder-shaking shrugs of tears and wailing. Reverse laughter: giant guffaws of grief, ground from his guts.

He inhaled calmly like an Olympic swimmer and not like a drowning man.

“I just don’t know how to tell you I love you anymore,” he said through fishbowl eyes. “How to tell you I love you and that it’s over.”

Hooked on Phonics

2008-05-13T14:20:46Z

“Peter and Paul had a propensity for playing in a prodigious pile of corpulent porpoises.”

The sentence popped around the cold, metal room with the pinging reverberation of a coin. Somewhere behind him a man coughed, breaking the tinny half-silence with a new wave of echoes.

“Again!” barked the commissar.

He sighed slowly, steeling his mind to the task at hand and waiting for just the right moment to continue. Sensing silence, he let the words just flow, muscle memory trumping thought.

Sitting there on display like some caged animal, an unseen throng applauded their approval from above. The commissar’s thick-gloved hand signaled silence and a hush happened all at once.

The commissar strode confidently in front of him, the clink-clank of his steel-toed boots producing a staccato rhythm.

“I give you, dear friends,” he lingered for the effect it had – sucking even more air out of the sardine-can room – “the spy whose stem-cell-grown tongue can speak no truth.” He licked his lips. “No matter what he says.”

Clyde Corrigan

2008-05-09T14:20:14Z

April Joyce was compelling.
She compelled him to act.
No matter how irrationally.
He knew all the details except for one: how he’d ever succeed.

The prop coughed a hacking flam fire, belching soot-gray smoke from the piston engine. Clyde Corrigan cocked an eyebrow at the thought of piloting the old lady today. He’d be lucky to make the trip in one piece, let alone leave the ground alive.

The gray morning fog, smell of leather and the hopelessness of winning her heart kept him distracted from the potentially fatal pre-flight checks. Forgetting as he always did that the chill of her stares could ice his wings in mid-flight.

A few gauge-checks and switch-flips in, the first shots gnat-whizzed by, sharpening his mind but not his wit.

“Fuck off!”

Competing against the engine he continued, “I’m for Ireland!”

“Long Beach, Cali,” he corrected, making his lurching arc skyward. She wouldn’t hear him anyway.

If she ever loved him before or thought she could in the future, she’d have to start with forgiveness.

She And Him

2008-05-02T19:00:24Z

“Why do you let me stay here,” she questioned, rolling over onto to her right elbow to address me more formally?

Still in the afterglow, hands behind my head like one of those sunny day, happy family long distance ads, I just smiled and laughed.

Her eyes and heart fluttered a bit, exposing more of her shoulders and a flash of her breast. She scooped up the covers and retreated.

I propped up to investigate. “The better question,” I continued as I leaned in to kiss her, “is whether I’ll ever let you leave.”

A blush betrayed the embarrassment through her sheeted veil, which she lowered to accept my advances. Nose to nose, eye to eye, we were closer now than we had been coupled in coitus.

“I love you.”

Neither of us flinched. Both of us stared.

To this day I honestly don’t remember which one of us said it, though we both heard it spoken. Maybe it was simultaneous combustion?

Instead we just started laughing and kissing, stopping to lay back down and stare at the ceiling, contemplating our shared fortunes.

The End

2008-04-19T00:15:49Z

“C’mon! It’ll only take a second,” she said. “Besides, we’ve been meaning to have our picture made together.”

“Taken,” I corrected.

“I’m sorry?”

“Taken,” I repeated. “Have our picture taken.”

She smiled demurely, looked over her glasses and slowly shook her head. “I thought you meant you were taken.” Crinkling her nose and chuckling she continued, “and that just wouldn’t do, since we’re about to have our picture made together.”

She winked. I winced.

“I realize I’m taking your bait here.”

“And?”

“And I think you’re wrong. Pictures are taken, not made.”

She tapped her foot, head cocked just so, arms folded. “I’m listening.”

“Well,” I said, “a painting is made since the utensils used create something from nothing. There’s a genesis that’s missing in a photo.”

She let me continue.

“Snapshots are just rendered or captured. Where’s the epiphany or the artistry?”

“But, in the end, the picture you take is equal to the picture you make,” was her retort.

We were both smiling when we had our picture made.

Christmas At Ground Zero

2008-04-18T14:13:56Z

“You’ll always be,” he stammered, pushing eyeglasses to forehead glasses, mopping up his sloppy tears. Chestnuts roasting on open fires wafted from the overhead speakers.

Flush in his face, flushed down the toilet of refined sentiment. Embarrassing himself again and me for the last time.

“I love her, dad.” I pulled my hand drawstring tight about her hip, snugging us together for a three-legged race down the aisle. “There’s no reason to finish your thought.”

“My little girl,” he calmly stated.

This was no continuation but something new and joyous not maudlin or depressive at all. His glasses fell back on his Rudolphian nose, making him quite the right jolly old elf.

“Go to him!” she prodded, disengaging us and pushing me forward.

I hesitated equidistant between them, crossing like a chicken in a childish joke. We stood there waiting, the three of us, until the boarding call “dinged” and we were shocked out of our state of stasis.

Only then did I run.
Only then did I cry.
Away from him.
Away with her.

Unnecessary Accessory, Part II

2008-04-11T21:11:04Z

“This is the new reality,” he said to no one in particular.

“History will not judge you kindly,” I said.

He paused, only to dismissively huff and turn to face the window. This new reality still had light and dark though there were shifting shadows.

“Am I a pontiff if I don’t pontificate?” he asked. Again, it was as if wasn’t there, chastising him towards some semblance of morality.

The pregnant pause gave birth to laughter, first from him and then from me. Our voices echoing to a roar until the room’s exotic tapestries swallowed them, made them alien and inhuman.

I fumbled through the folio looking for an exit. I found myself at the barrel of a gun, not in a clause or attachment as I had been expecting.

“This is the new reality,” he said to me, distinctively, enunciating each syllable as though he were speaking some foreign language. Or speaking mine perhaps for the first time.

I felt myself slip uneasily into blankness, an unseen assailant blunting me towards the nightmare.

“Sweet dreams!” he hissed.

Unnecessary Accessory

2008-04-11T17:17:02Z

“I thought you’d be taller,” was as clever as I could muster.

“Siddown,” he clipped, never taking his eyes off mine.

I lowered myself into what looked like plush fabric but felt like concrete. Despite myself I thought the “taller” line over in my head. I must have smiled because his eyes smoldered, his brow furrowed and this time he barked: “SIDDOWN!”

I couldn’t have sat more upright if I’d wanted to. The chair seemed unwilling to admit it was there for comfort, only active repose, if that even makes sense. He seemed likewise inclined; sitting forward ready for action, willing to pounce.

“Take out the ruling.” No big flourishes, just a meaty jab towards the folio on my lap.

“Here?” I questioned before I could stop myself.

No harsh words or tone or yelling now. Just a slight up-turn of one corner of his mouth. It wasn’t a smile you wanted to have shared with you.

“This is the new reality,” was all he said.

“History will not judge this kindly,” I thought to no one in particular. No one who would care.

Shelter

2008-04-04T14:21:23Z

“Pisz-ghetti,” she smilingly sputtered through tomato teeth.

“Spaghetti,” I softly replied, curling the corners of my mouth into a tenuous smile. Finger to my lips, I reminded her to “shoosh”, sotto voce.

Her mother and I shared table-length glances, helping each other find firmer footing on which to perch our silent smiles.

Kim giggled, letting a sloppy noodle drape down over her chin, sauce staining her white smock. Bashful eyes fearing some baleful response, she gave in to tears.

“I’m so sorry Mommy!” she squawked, thinning dinner with her tears. Bonnie was first by her side, kneeling to catch stray dinner-lets and brush back hair. “Pisz-ghetti” was tolerable as long as it was a pronunciation and not a hair bow.

Another glance, this one decidedly not a smile, had me off my seat and helping clean up relief.

Then:
Whine!
Hiss!
Thud!
Boom!
Woosh!

The aftershock rocked and rolled like music I only vaguely remember hearing.

We embraced, sloppy as we were, softly sobbing, knowing we only had each other.

Bed-ridden

2008-03-31T13:33:03Z

In detentes instead of in flagrante delicto when in a coma might provide the best relief.

She rolls over. Heavy sigh.

I roll over. Heavy brow, brush her thigh.

Now we’re fighting again. From zero to sickening in nothing.

I fall. Flat. On my back.

Hands pressed tight to ears. Can’t hear.
Eyes closed to the light. Can’t see.

I’m being called a simpleton and a child and unreasonable and immature and a bastard. Even though I can’t see or hear any of this, I’m not missing anything.

She climbs on top of me, straddling the line between the fight and our reconciliation, dividing us both vertically, straight through our centers. Through our hearts.

Her hands are fists, my hands are palms. She softens, I harden until we’re grappling for one another and inverted. We both find something to hold on to and invert again.

There are soaring, flying, air metaphors but after it’s over we’re still just ground-bound and angry. Less of each but the detentes is more palatable, the flagrante not delicto and the coma: sleep.

Expletive Deleted

2008-03-28T14:45:34Z

“Expletive Deleted!”

“Redacted!”

“Chevy Chase! Wait! No! That was Gerry Ford”

The buzzer sounded, sighs sighed and shoulders slumped. We had lost a round of Verboten. Again.

I couldn’t say:

Tricky Dick
Watergate
I am not a crook
Impeached
President

“Sucks to be you,” Henry added to the silent denunciations my own mind was telling me.

“Sucks to be us,” I corrected.

Henry and I had been losing to his wife and sister-in-law at Verboten every other Saturday night for about 2 months now and it never got old.

You see, Henry’s lovely wife Janet had hired me to kill him and my research period was just about up.

I clapped Henry hard on the back just between the shoulder blades and went to the fridge for a beer while Henry cleared his throat and tried to act like my chop hadn’t bothered him at all. It was a put-on he failed to pull off and the two women snickered at my conquest.

I cracked a smile over the door of the fridge, offering a beer to Hank as well, which he begrudgingly yet happily accepted.

No More Friday Nights

2008-03-27T16:50:31Z

Dry mouth is a misnomer after you’ve had your last swig of beer. Skunk mouth too base; Slack-jawed: your face.

No holds are barred and this bar can’t hold you. Off your ~~rocker~~ stool to go play pool, you say, or some such other brawny, burly, ballsy nonsense.

Now I’ve seen tipsy and cow-tipping, but tipping a waitress with an ass-grab and an air-smooch is a new low, even by your slithering snake-belly standards.

My neck, craned left from scowling, now aches from shaking.

My next boyfriend will have to be a chiropractor.

I say my goodnights with a quick extinguishing of a lit cigarette in the withering remains of that swill by the bill.

If no-contact kissing was good enough for her, fair play follows that you like it the same way.

I take one long last look back at your salty pillar before hitting door, pavement and the eye-rolling, thumb-drumming dreams of that Pink Cadillac.

Ashtray-licking was just a blunt metaphor you’d stolen from someone funnier. Maybe I’ll laugh again if it’s told differently.