112 Words to Glory

Blame it on an attack of whimsy: We challenged some of our favorite writers to come up with pieces of fiction no more than 112 words long. Why 112? Because 113 seems impossibly wordy. You be the judge: Tell us which story is your favorite at
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"Obits."

"Milton Manque?" asked the sinisterly calm voice.

"Yes."

"Incredible. One ring."

"Excuse me?"

"I need to report a death of a very famous person."

"Right, and who would that be?"

"Only if you agree to write it…."

"How's that?"

"I just killed him and only you can create the justice this obituary deserves."

There was an eerily honest tone in his words. Milton's mind raced through ethics. If legit, this could be a breaking story that made dreams come true. Still, some might view this poorly. Complicit with evil. He looked around and decided to take a chance.

"Okay, who is it?"

"Why, it's you Milton, you have twenty four hours."

He didn't so much mind the rap music the neighbor kid played while he was washing his car in the driveway. He knew music was supposed to be exclusionary when it came to generations—it was just all the F-words and mean talk about women that got him ornery. The neighbor kid himself had always been a pleasant enough boy. Go figure.

The American flag in his front yard was popping smartly on the pole in his front yard and new issue of a popular gun collector's magazine (a Walker Colt on the cover) was waiting for him in the mailbox. He thought about what a tidy little stereotype he must look like (did anyone know he voted Democrat?) but found he didn't much care. Johnny Cash was dead and this September morning had February written all over it.

I never thought being dead could be so much fun. I just love it. You can get away with so much more than when you're alive. Take eating people. The consumption of human flesh is one of the last social taboos—especially if the human is still inhabiting the flesh. When you're as dead as I am it stops being a stigma and becomes an expectation, which is fortuitous for us carb-counting zombies on the Atkins. The movies have conditioned people to equate cannibalism with the walking dead; they also conditioned us to have a salacious appetite for people. And let me tell you, they're delicious. Especially the babies.

I'm at Hoover Dam two hours before the sun. I can't tell you why. There was nowhere else to go? Yes, there was anywhere else, and gas and coffee would get me there. But trapped isn't always trapped. There are more confining things than a cage, more desperate things than a crazy plan. Those have beginnings and ends. That I've chosen the world's most famous concrete monument in the cold, empty night over my warm bed, over 24-hour paradise, over anywhere else, is merely because here is not where I was, and nothing else I can tell you would make sense. Except that there was the pain. Except that here it is, too.

We used to do really stupid things together, my cousin Austin and I. Once, when we were 8 or 9 years old, we got the brilliant notion that climbing up on top of the garage (only one story high, at least) and then jumping off into the two and half feet of snow on the ground would be a good way to spend an afternoon. Austin went first. Then it was my turn. And even though Austin had just done it and was fine, I realized it might not be the greatest idea. Standing on the roof, with him next to me, I told him I didn't want to do it. He just said "OK, don't then." And then, bam, he pushed me right off. Too bad our parents absolutely lost it when they caught sight of us a little while later, jumping off the roof.

After the woman Mr. Bernstein saw on the Staten Island Ferry arrived at the terminal she met a hanson in which her employer had installed himself, a New York World tucked under his houndstooth sleeve. He stepped from the cab and handed her into it, hooked her parasol on the door latch. Fresh from finishing school, she started that day as his secretary on the garment factory's ground floor. For fifteen years they worked closely and with fastidious probity, despite longings mutually sensed and stanched, for he was married. Near closing time one March afternoon, he dispatched her with a note for the ninth-floor foreman and she perished in the fire.

"It looks bad up there."

"It's been worse."

"Should we turn off?"

"Nah, this road doesn't get that bad."

"Are you sure? I remember it being closed off before."

"Stop worrying."

"Oh, I'm worried. Maybe we should turn around."

"Where would we turn around?"

"Anywhere. Just turn around!"

"Calm down. There's no way to do it."

"We need to do something."

"It'll be all right."

"Stop the car!"

"It's not that deep, honey. We can make it."

"Stop the goddamn car!"

"Just a little further, I think."

"Did it just die?"

"It'll start again."

"It's not starting!"

"Shit. We gotta get out."

"Oh my God!"

"Roll down your window and climb out."

"I think you're going to like this better," the dentist said as he chipped at her tooth, smashing it, rocking it, trying to pull it free.

Like the others, it had rotted. She liked this. Drilling was a tangible fear, something she could grasp, identify and blame. Laughing gas took her places. In all her eight years, it was still her greatest high.

The wound would ache and throb for hours. It became a friend she could rely on.

Next year she would enter third grade, then fourth. Then what?

The hole in her mouth healed. She dipped her finger into the caramelized sugar and smeared the mixture onto a decaying tooth.

I will save souls today. I can feel it. God Almighty put me on Earth for this, to lead the lost, the tempted. He brings them here. I deliver the message.

Fifth period bell rings. The last few slide into desks. You may think it's only Driver's Ed. But it's not just the rules of the road. I'm explaining how to get home. Boys whine. Girls mutter. Heat rises. Sweat drips. I shake my fist. I preach: 'Don't try to pass on a double yellow! No matter how bad you want to! Something is coming! Wait!' Will they listen? The bell tolls. I bow my head. Some snicker. Some will pass.

A noise!

I sprang up in bed, extending tendrils of hearing down the quiet hallway—

Another noise!

I hefted the five iron I keep for home security and crept through the wan, moonlit house.

A rustle. A voice: "Shit!" In the library.

A man hunched over a flashlight, blond hair gleaming, poised at my bookshelf. I pounced. Whack! Cursing, he fell. I turned the lamp on, and recognized him immediately: Leon Weiselteir, literary editor of The New Republic. In his left hand: My copy of Bridges of Madison County, half destroyed by the scissors in his right.

He groaned, looked up groggily. "A bad review wasn't enough."

I hit him again.

She looked up at the figure standing above her, feeling a mix of fear and anticipation. It was everything she had ever wanted, and everything she was afraid of. Malcolm looked down at her with compassion, but there was a hunger in his eyes that she could see was lying just below the surface.

"It's time," someone said, and pulled the sheet down to reveal her neck to the cold air.

Malcolm smiled. "You're going to be beautiful forever," he said. She tried to imagine that: Forever. It would take a long time to understand.

Malcolm sank his teeth into her, and she sank into the night.

Deep, royal red. Buttoned by mesmerizing black orbs. Crowned by a plush fur collar that strokes the cheek and bristles with sex.

Tingly to the touch. ... Electric velvet.

Like carnal catnip to the beast in heat, The Red Coat arouses me, lures me, tortures me. Purrs with the promise of forbidden, unspeakable paradise. This cherry caress of the heart, this ruby kiss to the soul, stirs a rush of adrenaline, a surge of testosterone, a gusher of passion, my engine roaring dangerously, unstoppably fast ...

The Red Coat falls away like silk, revealing the lush, radiant treasure within. The thrill of the gift finally free of its sumptuous wrapping.

The gift of Her.

He shuffled in slush outside the tent that constituted what was left of battalion, watching grunts, trucks and jeeps stream, converge and flee, while a second lieutenant his age documented Clint's survival of Echo Company. His lately romantic mind recognized the essential mechanics of retreat; staple of the centuries, the pang-slack faces of warriors running away. Clint settled against a stack of boxed motor oil, felt Felski's pack in his pocket. Fixed on the camel and oasis, he wondered what poor dumb dead Felski got from the habit, wanted abruptly to be Felski. As the smoke singed his lungs, he knew he would cough, and knew he would love this.

Bleach will do the trick. Yeah. In college, it was bane of his existence—always ruined his clothes. Left snowy splotches on the darks, turned the whites a piss-stained yellow.

Surely it could do the same to skin—his skin! Turn it white. Erase the ugliness bequeathed by ancestry. Give him a new life.

So what if he could run fast, jump high, do dances like the Cabbage Patch and the Crip Walk and lay pipe on the women like a plumber. So ... the ... f--k ... what.

Time's wasting, no more dicking around, let's do the damn thing. Bottles of bleach line the bathtub like some Clorox brigade. He pours and cries, pours and cries.

Death is ravenous. Teel saw it with Baby Jessica. Saw it with Oklahoma City, the World Trade Center and the Que Creek Mine. It isn't tragedy that whets the Reaper's appetite—it's Death's aversion. Oh, it's not like the movies tell it, avoiding a plane crash only to meet a fiery freeway death. Those were innocent bystanders. It's the active manipulators of Death's design whobecome victims. It's the rescuers who are driven to suicide. And now, looking at the victim's she'd saved from the burning inferno that was once a church, Teel was staring down her own guilt and self-loathing. She looked hungrily back at the fire. Death is ravenous.

It Slide

I am too old for this. Too old to be on hardened grass on a Thursday night, wearing pinstripe pants and a T-shirt reading "PT's Pub."

Too old to rumble after a fly ball in deep right. Too old to charge into foul territory. Too old to slide.

I dig a divot with my left knee. My glove—as old as me and strung as tightly—leads a crash into the fence.

I lay on my back, observing my dust and spitting grass. I feel the ball. Foul out. Inning over.

I am too old for this. But not tonight, when I will relive the moment in a hot tub most deserved.

There are aspects of married life they never tell you about, he thought. Oh, sure, there's being supportive of one another, loving in sickness and in health, 'til death or divorce you do part. Everyone knew those. But then there were ones no one talked about but everyone—every married man, at least—knew.

"It's your choice," she said.

Walgreen's. Aisle Nine. Hair products. Color.

Hadn't they just been here? A month, two months ago? Longer? Why hadn't they saved the damn package?

Clairol L'Oreal Herbal Essence.

Ash Coral Sand Bamboo Mocha.

Where was blond? Had he even married a blonde?

He closed his eyes and picked. "There. That one. Can we go? Please."

The passenger rolled up to the airport lounge and declared, "My life for a bloody Mary." The bartender nodded and started mixing the ingredients: the vodka that a noble Russian family had slaved over and died over for generation after generation; the bloody Mary mix that an unemployed cook had created in his home kitchen six years before, only to see it stolen by some corporate sonofabitch (a swindle that drove him to suicide); two shakes of a hot sauce bottled in a Third World deathtrap.

The passenger took a sip, made sour face and said, "That's good shit."

"Have another swig," said the bartender. "It won't kill ya."

I spot him coming at me from about 200 feet away, and though I can't see his face, I can tell by his brisk pace that I'm in deep shit. With each step, the menacing scowl becomes more apparent. His fists are clenched at his side, his veins are protruding from his neck. Pissed? Christ, he looks like Limbaugh in search of a couple of OxyContins. First instinct: Run. But where? My only escape route leads directly to him. I gulp hard. He stands over me like the Grim Reaper. I piss my pants. "I said I want 112 words," he screams, spraying spit on my forehead, "and I want them NOW!" F--king deadlines.