Short, short story #1

She was afraid to enter the revolving door.

Her friends laughed and laughed. Still,

who walks without even a little fear

into a blender?

I watched a man with one hand make himself a cup of coffee once.

I watched a man with one hand make himself a cup of coffee once. I admired the dexterity that one hand had. I watched him open a box of brown sugar, put some sugar in his coffee, and close the box again. He did it quickly, connectedly, exactly, as if it were all one fluid, daedel movement. He popped the cardboard tab on the top of the box open with his single index finger, then widened the mouth of the plastic bag that held the sugar with his five fingers. He bunched them together, then spread them apart a few times, quickly. (It reminded me of a squid's propulsion, that spreading of his fingers.) He picked up the spoon to lift out a rounded mound of the brown granules, stirred the sugar into his coffee with a few quick flicks of his wrist, then brought the spoon to his mouth and sucked it clean. As if as a finishing flourish, he tossed it, clinking, into the sink's metal basin.

He picked up the sweetened coffee with that one hand, his left hand. His left arm was very strong; I saw how strong it was as he lifted the mug to his mouth. I wondered if he had always been left-handed, or was forced to be by the loss of his right, or whether he was born without his right hand and so never knew whether he would have been right-handed, if he had had both. He toasted me with with his upraised fist, curled around the cup of coffee.

In the moment before he turned away, I found his one hand very beautiful, very nobel and worthy of respect. I held back the flooding impulse to kiss it. I resisted because I did not know how steady his hand was, despite its strength; I did not know how his hand would react to my untoward kiss. My pressing his hand with my lips would probably have knocked the coffee cup, anyway, and would have burned my face, and his fine fist.

Shaken

You live alone in an apartment building beside a freeway. Where you live is always trembling. Whenever trucks rumble by on the freeway, your apartment shakes. It is often shaken by these trucks. But it does not take something very large to make the apartment tremble: if your neighbor above walks with a sufficiently solid tread, it will shake you too. Even a heavy step in the hallway will make your cup clink in its saucer, the water tremble in your glass.

On top of this, you live in California, where sometimes even the earth will shake. You have been through enough earthquakes that you are skittish of them. Your heart begins to pound anytime you feel a tremor, an imbalance, out of fear of an earthquake.

It doesn't help matters that you have vertigo, and often feel a swaying when there is none; it goes without saying that your heart often pounds from fear.

You are old and unsteady on your feet as it is. And so it is hard for you to tell whether the shaking you feel is internal or external, natural or artificial, real or figmentary. You only know you feel shaken, most all of the time.

The Eyepatch: a fable

You have decided that if you ever lost an eye, for whatever reason, you would wear a black eyepatch. You would accept the piratical jokes, and maybe even embrace them. Get a parrot or something. You wouldn't get a fake eye or try to hide it with your hair or do whatever people who have lost eyes usually do. You would wear an old-fashioned black eyepatch. If they even sell such things anymore. It would give you character, maybe even distinction. People would know that you weren't afraid to draw attention to this thing about yourself that would always demand attention anyway.

And one day, improbably, some man would fall in love with you. He would look into your one good eye with so much love and affection that it would tire you out, having only one eye to stare into both of his, so full of love. Sometimes, you would lay your head on his shoulder, or his chest, just so that your eye could rest from looking into his eyes.

And when he had loved you for a while, a long while even, sometimes when you were comfortable and unguarded, he would ask you to take off the eyepatch. He would ask you to show him your scarred or missing eye. You would shake your head, maybe hiding your face behind your hands, your eye and your eyepatch behind closed fists. You would cry and cry from your one good eye and tell him No, No, No. You would walk around without an eyepatch all day, let every stranger see and look away, before you would let him look full on your injury even once, you would tell him.

Eventually, of course, you would show it to him. But you know that you would keep your good eye closed while you did. And you know that you would not let him mention it afterwards.