My quirky fictional love story “Closing the Distance” was published today in the beautiful Imogene’s Notebook on Medium. I am providing you the friend’s link, no paywall. I hope you will take a gander if you get a moment. Thank you for your support. Most sincerely, Margaret
Category Archives: Pandemic stories
Touching Like Candy from a Baby
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I did something this week I never imagined myself doing. I touched a man I didn’t know. It happened in the theater, and I shouldn’t have allowed myself to do it. But I haven’t touched a man in four years. Maybe it was like going to the grocery store hungry.
He was a big man, not totally my type, and he seemed intensely clued in on his food. But he was the only man in the whole dark room. Don’t get me wrong, I like them tall and beefy, but he was a bit extra horizontally. Still, he seemed kind of innocent, unfazed, just out for a flick.
I got brave when we started laughing at the same things, the same stupid ads and previews. I tried to laugh as loud as he laughed, louder, so he might turn to see me. He didn’t. He was engrossed in his system of consumption. He had a huge popcorn to his left, a box of candy in his lap, and a tub of soda to his right.
When the dark, atmospheric film began and the actors in period costumes started wandering fields with torches, I moved a seat closer to him. (We were seated on the same row, at opposite ends.) He never looked up, never registered any sign of his surroundings.
By the time the slimy, hungry monster on the screen was moving in on the human kill, I was sitting midway in the theater. Only a few more chairs to go. I marveled that the man kept eating with no breaks.
I waited until dark scenes engulfed the theatre to move closer to him. The only lights showing were the exit signs and track lights on the stairs.
When we were sitting elbow to elbow, he looked over at me and smiled. I took this as ascent and so I took his popcorn and fed it into his mouth while we watched the show together.
I felt his soft lips slobber on my fingers. I felt his tongue.
That was all I wanted.
When the credits rolled, he took his empty food boxes. He didn’t thank me or ask me my name. He didn’t acknowledge me. It was as if I were part of the theater, like the workers who tore tickets and swept up popcorn.
I wondered if I saw him again in the theater whether we might hug. I wondered if he would allow it.
As I stepped out into the sun, I assessed my choices. Maybe I had been too hasty in breaking up with my Greek, my steady from before the pandemic. My Greek had started neglecting me. Maybe I should have allowed it. But how much can a woman take? Besides, men don’t know what they need, what they want, what’s good for them. We ladies have to show them, and risk not getting so much as a thank you and kindness for our service.
I saw my new man drive away. I waved to him from the curb, but he must not have seen me because he didn’t wave back.
“We’ll take it a step at a time,” I said softly to his car as it cut through the deserted parking lot. “You’ll see.”
A Short and Sweet Valentine’s Story
12 Saturday Feb 2022
A short and sweet flash fiction piece I have posted on Simily! For every view, I get two cents! Yay!
Happy Valentine’s!
Day 7: Write a story that takes place entirely on the bus or train when you’re commuting to work “Night Moves”
08 Monday Nov 2021
I had lost my alimony, the pandemic being what it is, the source of my income having passed. I sold everything, including my car, furniture, and almost all possessions. I managed to find night work as a turndown attendant for Hilton. I managed to put a roof over my head, but just. I now qualified for low-income housing.
On my first bus ride into work, I sat near the back, hoping to avoid passengers peopling rows on their return journeys home, their night jobs at Disney and surrounding theme parks.
But then, wouldn’t you know who climbed aboard: a repairman for my former apartment. It was the kind of apartment you had to be wealthy to afford. Tony had become overly friendly during those last few months of my residence. Water had flooded into my hallway and soaked the carpet. He spent as much time flirting as trying to solve an increasingly dire issue. He asked me if I wanted to get a massage with him and went so far as to touch my back.
I pulled up my jacket hood and rang the bell to get off. I had managed to avoid him. One more month to find another job. One more month until eviction.
Inktober: Prickly
24 Sunday Oct 2021
Life as a domme demanded she be prickly. With few other resources, this idea for making money had somehow evolved but humiliating took commitment. When a man begged her to freak him out using his credit card, she was sold.
Old Stories for a New Year
30 Wednesday Dec 2020
One of my favorite “Christmas adjacent” stories is by the late German author Heinrich Böll. (My son and I get a kick out of the descriptor “Christmas adjacent” in referring to movies which are set at the holidays but which are not solely focused on Christmas, such as our viewing preference “Die Hard.”) Heinrich Böll’s story “And there was the evening and then the morning…,” published in 1966 in his collection 18 Stories, has to do with love and forgiveness. The story is set at Christmas. The aspect of gift giving plays a role though a great deal of the story is nonetheless “Christmas adjacent.”
Heinrich Böll won the Nobel prize for literature in 1972 and is considered one of Germany’s finest post World War II writers. He was born into a pacifist Roman Catholic family and refused to join the Hitler Youth in the 1930s. He fought in the war and afterwards married and had a family and worked various jobs. He took the plunge into full-time writing when he was thirty and went on to become an acclaimed novelist, short story writer, essayist, and writer of radio plays.
Here is a lovely Wikipedia description of his work:
Despite the variety of themes and content in his work, there are certain recurring patterns: many of his novels and stories describe intimate and personal life struggling to sustain itself against the wider background of war, terrorism, political divisions, and profound economic and social transition. In a number of his books there are protagonists who are stubborn and eccentric individualists opposed to the mechanisms of the state or of public institutions.
I want to excerpt from the very short story “And there was the evening and then the morning…” I will leave the heart of the story out for the curious to pursue. Heinrich Böll’s 18 Stories is available, used, via online merchants and so maybe you would like to read the whole thing. I looked for it on Project Gutenberg, but no dice. So here, I will simply excerpt a small passage, so flawless in ironic tone and meticulous observation. It applies to the turning of the season and our final celebration of the year.
…[Brenig] walked slowly across the square…and looked in a store window where the window dressers were exchanging Santa Clauses and angels for other dummies: ladies in décolleté, their bare shoulders sprinkled with confetti, their wrists festooned with paper streamers. Their escorts, male dummies with graying temples, were being hurriedly placed on barstools, champagne corks scattered on the floor, one dummy was having its wings and curls taken off, and Brenig was surprised how quickly an angel could be turned into a bartender…
Another “old story” is told in the form of a novel by the late William Maxwell – prolific writer, fiction editor at The New Yorker, legendary mentor. It is called They Came Like Swallows. It is set at the time of The Spanish Flu and was published in 1937. Just like the work of Heinrich Böll, the work of William Maxwell continues to ring out so strongly in our times. It is simply gorgeous and gripping. (I apologize for this tasteless alliteration.) I studied it carefully in graduate school, analyzed it for my thesis, and prayed some aspect of it would rub off on me. I hope to unearth it among my books to read it yet again as we turn to a new year in which old stories have much to say.