The Compact Physician

(Physician, park thyself)

The Compact Physician is probably a small woman with big ideas about beauty. I bet she goes by the name Rosemary Waters and owns a lifestyle consultation business on Melrose Avenue.

She likely wears high heels with platform soles and brags about being able to run in them. I bet she spritzes orange blossom perfume on her baby pink business cards and keeps a single fresh flower in the vase on her desk

I imagine she is a single woman who can fix everyone but herself. I'm picturing her at home alone at night, sitting on her antique hope chest drinking white wine out of a mug, running her fingertips over her cashmere blanket. She might even cry to herself at night, all alone and unhappy. Maybe she's writing a self help book called 'Physician, Heal Thyself' for the successful but single female doctor.  


Working in the beauty business is hard when you don't feel     pretty on the inside.

Letter from Earth to the Student in the Sky

Dear Manny,

I hope you are enjoying your time in the clouds. I received your postcard, but I suppose the moisture in the air must have been quite heavy on the day you mailed it because all the ink ran together and I couldn't read a word you wrote!

Luckily, I saw that it was postmarked 'The Clouds' so I knew it had to be from you. I hope you were writing to tell me that going to Cloud College is everything you had hoped it would be. Too bad there's no wifi up there yet.

What are your dorms like? Are all of the structures made of clouds, or do they build houses on cloud foundations? Do you make a lot of 'silver lining' jokes up there? Can you see the Great Wall?

What do you eat on a cloud? I assume you don't EAT the clouds, but I also can't imagine it'd be very easy to grow crops or keep animals on a cloud. If I had to guess what you're eating, I'd have to say astronaut food. I know that in deep space, the human tastebud is dulled so they have to make space food extra flavorful- are your tastebuds dulled on the cloud? I hope so, only because it would suck if you had to eat NASA's strong cooking without the weakened tastebuds.

I have a lot of questions! Sorry if they're stupid but I've never lived anywhere but on the ground.

I'm enclosing a little envelope filled with dirt for you. You may recognize the type of envelope- it's the red and gold kind that we bought together in Chinatown. I hope you enjoy the dirt! It's from a potted plant I purchased at Ikea.

Write back soon! And make sure to laminate it!

-Val

570 Words on Soul/Body - FLASH FICTION

I am a spirit trapped in a body. I like to make the eyes look all around. I like to make the toes wiggle. The more I make them wiggle, the more I convince the body that it is getting harder to wiggle them.

I like to make the hair grow. I like to make the nails grow. I like to make the words come out without considering what words and in what order. I don’t consider what foot to start with. Period.

This is all utter bullshit and if you’re pretending to enjoy this, you’re lying to yourself or to myself or to themselves. I have a great idea! Let’s all get in a car and drive to a dive where it’s too loud to talk and to smokey to breath. Let’s all get some drinks that are too expensive and then drink many of them and never really say anything that matters and then get back in the car and drive off a cliff.

What a great day! I woke up and discovered that the pile of fingernail clippings I left under my pillow has become self-aware. I looked at the pile and it looked back at me. It was very exciting. 

“Who am I?” is a good question. I was born, and in the instant I breathed, I was inside this body. I was changed by the people I was around but I was still a variation on a Me. I was born this lump of clay and I don’t care how much you dig me and sculpt me I will always be the same damn clay.

I made this body my slave, but just because I own it and it does what I say, that doesn’t mean that I can make it do whatever I want.

The day the clay became self aware was a good/bad day. Good because I wasn’t aware I wasn’t aware and it’s good to be aware of such thuses and hences. Bad because I was thus aware I wasn’t aware and so hence I started to think what that meant. What that meant about what I had just done for those years in the past. I wasn’t aware, but I was alive.

Or I wasn’t alive. I was in a natural state of suspension. Suspended the waiting, but before the waiting I wasn’t anything. I am not sure if you can suspend nothingness, but I guess it’s like filling your lungs with outerspace. You filled them with nothingness and then you get back in your spaceship and breath again and you’ve suspended the nothingness and instigated a new oxygen-based phase of your life.

This is all a load of crap and if you are pretending like this is a deep comment on the existence of the soul and its struggle to be seen through the body then you are wrong/right.

Did you see when my lungs were full of emptiness? Did you see when I wanted to make the eyes close and the brain stop? Did you see that expression on my face and I really couldn’t care about the face anyway because I’m a soul not a face. I don’t care about potatoes because I’m a soul not a potato. I don’t care about grass because I’m not a blade and I I guess I don’t have a face if I’m not a body.

What a great day.

The Creature in the Trunk - FLASH FICTION 2011 - Round 3

(This is a horror story, so pretend my bat is an axe)

Here's the horror story I just submitted for the 3rd round of the NYC Midnight flash fiction contest. I had to write a ghost story in round 2, so I already have one spooky story under my belt for this competition. I'm thinking of expanding this into a longer story. (Which reminds me, I have another ridiculous chapter of Pegucy Bundcardo and the Haunted Mall to publish! I know you all just can't wait to read it.) Anyway, without any further ado:

The Creature in the Trunk

When Robin walks she likes looking down at her feet. Most girls assume Robin walks that way because she is painfully shy.  Not so. Her extreme shyness probably caused her to look down at her feet in the first place, of course, but her black patent leather school shoes were the real reason it became her standard walking posture. The shiny shoes looked so much prettier than all of her other shoes that they transfixed her. She loved to see how the shoes contrasted against the purple-gray concrete sidewalk and the speckled linoleum floor of the school halls.  Sometimes she would even get lost following her own feet.

School uniforms were invented, in part, for students like Robin. Uniforms are meant to make all students look equal, even if they’re not. If the girls at Sacred Heart were to see the hand-me-downs Robin inherited from her older siblings she would be humiliated, but in her uniform she looked just like everyone else. She liked that.

On this day, Robin was walking across the lawn towards the gymnasium admiring how her black shoes clashed against the green grass when she smacked right in to junior class vice president Amber Charles.

“Just the person I was looking for,” Amber said. “I have a job for you.”

***

Why Have I Been Turned in to a Goldfish? FLASH FICTION Round #1

I entered the NYC Midnight 2011 flash fiction contest again this year. The contest is really fun: I get 48 hours to write a 1,000 word story. I am assigned a genre, a location, and an object.
First Round Assignment
Genre: Sci-fi
Location: Fish Farm
Object: Herion
Final Word Count: 999

Here's the story I ended up writing, entitled: 
Why Have I Been Turned into a Goldfish? 

Why have I been turned into a goldfish? Good question. I have been turned into a goldfish because I was afraid of everything, just like you. It happens. I knew an accountant who got turned into a redhead because she was caught biting her nails. The Aseptians have a sense of humor about sentencing; they like to be amused. They value the teaching power of absurdity above the correctional benefits of gore in their judicial system, and that is much appreciated! Rehabilitation sentences like mine force us weak-minded humans to reflect on our lives, to see where we are imperfect, see how we can improve.

Getting turned into a goldfish by a superior race of aliens has given me a fresh outlook on life, and I thank the mighty Aseptians for using their powers to help me, a human, better myself.