100 Word Stories
Many, many years ago I started a project called 100 Word Stories. It’s exactly as it sounds - one story, one hundred words. Each story was accompanied by a photo that I took (and more often than not manipulated). Sometimes the story came first; sometimes I worked off the picture.
The stories are mostly full of loneliness and heartbreak. When I wrote them, I was working out buried feelings from long ago. Now that I’m reading them again they seem especially relevant once more. They’re not full stories, per se, but more like vignettes of the lives of the weary.
What follows is ten of those stories. Eventually I’d like to collect them all and self publish them, but that’s for another day. For now, here’s a sampling. Hope you enjoy.
They don’t say much on the drive. She leans against the passenger door, eyes shut. His eyes are on the road, his head somewhere else.
They’re never alone. All these things travel with them, taking up room, making it difficult to talk. The car is crowded with trysts and mistakes, lies and secrets. They whisper and mutter amongst themselves, their conversation making the windows fog up with accusations and unspoken apologies.
Even if she wanted to say something, she wouldn’t be heard. They just drive without talking, letting the ghosts in the car speak for them.
The road never ends.
They sit outside watching the sun set. It should feel perfect, but it doesn’t. There’s an intensely fragile air to it all, like it might fall apart any second.
It’s so much work, she thinks. It’s so hard to keep it all together, to not let the frustration of setbacks keep you from just giving in and letting go. She doesn’t know what’s holding them up, she just knows the slightest wind could take them down.
He lights a cigarette, exhaling smoke into a near invisible spider web.
It quivers for a second, almost keeping itself together before it collapses.
There are clawed, bony hands reaching inside her, scratching and digging to get at places she thought she kept hidden. Fingers prod and pull, twisting around memories and winding their way around secrets until they have enough to fill their fists then they pull it out into the open, sharp, ragged bones carelessly tearing everything in their path . The fingers unfurl, showing their wares to the flock of shadows that have come to peck at and feed off what is offered to them. When they are done, the hands close and wait.
There is more. There is always more.
She watches with something bordering on envy. But it’s not that. Not yet. Right now it’s a longing to be like them, to be laughing and running, to have someone to share secrets with. She wonders if they even have any secrets or if their lives are constant handsprings and laughter, everything so open, so perfect. Their laughter is the sound of people untouched by fear or defeat.
She watches as the sun sneaks behind the ocean and dims the light. They become nothing more than shadows of everything she was.
She wants to warn them.
But then they’re gone.
Eventually there will be just one of us left in the picture, standing there alone with a look of surprise on our face as if this wasn’t expected. The frame will seem to have shrunk in order to make whoever is left seem less alone, but we’ll know better. That empty spot won’t be blank; it will be a smudge, a blur, a piece of evidence that an eraser was at work. We’ll marvel at its imperfection and fool ourselves into thinking that it was supposed to look like that all along, with one of us holding an invisible hand.
“It will get better,” he says. “It has to.”
She’s not sure. It feels like the dark will never lift. She thinks she’s suffocating, that all the light is being pulled from her body and she’s becoming dry and brittle and fragile.
Birds are outside, flittering around in the snow, desperately looking for something to eat. A few of them look her way and she thinks they give her a knowing glance, an acknowledgment of hopelessness.
He stares at the television, some show about cheating death. “Just wait it out,” he says.
They’re never talking about the same thing.
There’s a world where everything’s barren, where the wind blows remnants of lives around like pieces of dirt. The wind is unrelenting and there’s always pieces of someone’s heart or the disarray of someone’s past getting in your hair and your eyes. The world is torn, the sky ripped open. Diary pages and unsent letters fall apart against the wind and come down in torrents, creating storms of regret no weatherman knew to predict.
She carries an umbrella and raincoat, but they’re never enough. She thinks one day she’d like to leave, if she could only find the road out.
While you were sleeping I walked outside. While you dreamed I sat under the sky and watched the dark fight for its space with the light. The light eventually won out and the moon and stars paled as black turned to blue.
While you were sleeping I made plans for when the sun came up while familiar monsters watched from the dark.
While you dreamed I watched the trees emerge from the night’s shadows and I watched the monsters disappear into the daylight.
I don’t know where they go every morning, but they always come back while you are sleeping.
After you’re gone I pick up what you left behind. You’re scattered everywhere. You left your voice here, words strewn over everything, and they haunt me rather than comfort me. You left your shadow; it hovers over our bed so the room is always dark. You left fingerprints on the table, dusty reminders of your touch, of how your hand felt in mine.
I pack everything up, stuffing boxes with conversations, stowing away kisses and dreams. I sweep your promises into a corner. Later, I’ll scatter them into the wind.
I don’t know what to do with all this space.
The sky, the sea, it’s all the same. We drift, we float. In the end we go down with a small fight.
Every moment is a fall with nothing to prop us up. Every slightly concealed sigh is another push forward in the race to swim away. We take our separate ways. You take the sky, I take the sea and we’ll see who gets there first. We put different spaces between us, but they swallow us up just the same.
We’ll meet in the middle where the sky and the sea merge and wait to see who drowns first.
I hope you enjoyed these. There’s plenty more where these came from and I’ll do a second batch if the reception is good. Thanks for reading, as always.
These are beautiful.
You know how to pack a lot of emotion and power into each of these!