Work: Micro Fiction

-His wife slept in a frigid bed: he worked late.

-His work friends are nice, but his birthday party was barren. 

-Slapping the alarm clock, he escaped back to fakelife. 

Jon and His Books

Jon surrounded himself with books. He considered himself both a collector of books and a true connoisseur of the written word. Ironically, almost all of Jon’s collection of books went unread. When someone pointed out this fact, it didn’t really faze Jon. He figured that the search was as important as the books. And he could burn a weekend scouring used bookstores purchasing books he had no intention of ever cracking. He plundered yard sales and library clearance sales for extra copies of The Scarlet Letter, which he’d swear he had read at some point in his young life, but a blank ten-foot stare was his only response if you asked him anything about Hester Prynne.

Jon never bought comics. It’s not because he looked down on pulp fiction—he would proudly brag about his extensive collection of graphic novels and noir fiction—but Jon just didn’t like that there were no bindings to admire on the side of a comic when filed on his shelves. Comics, like magazines, had no girth; thus, these forms didn’t have the eye stopping power of Moby Dick or a Grisham novel.

A Mouse Parable

A man in a white lab coat drops a light brown mouse into a cage. The light brown mouse sits quietly in the middle of a cage. He wears a smile on his mousey face, and he grins as much as a mouse can grin and is oblivious in the way only a happy mouse can be.

As soon as the man leaves, the other mice in adjacent cages creep out of their hidden corners, nests, and orange plastic tubes to see the new mouse, the fresh fish in a sea of cedar wood shavings. Each approaches from his or her adjoining corner with hesitation.

A Few Good Things: Part 1

I always said that I saw more of myself in Justin than I'd like to admit, and I think that I was half-right. Every time Justin and I spoke little was actually said, but much was communicated. Justin's silence was filled with my head-voice. He ended up becoming a mirror for my imagination. I could create stories about Justin that revealed little about him and much about myself. But I didn't know that until after the fact.

A Few Good Things: Part 2

Justin Wakefield worked in the cubical next to mine. On occasion Justin would randomly laugh during the day, which lead to my intrusive habit of peaking over the 5-foot cubical wall to sneak a peak at what was so funny. After a while, the peaking became an obvious waste of time. It really just became of awkward shared moment because Justin wasn't laughing at anything in particular. But I didn't stop.