Tradition and Fiction

Today is the birth of a tradition. As my facebook friends know, I brush elbows with many famous people. I'm often asked, "How do you know so many celebrities!" My answer: "The celebrities know me." Then I wink. 

Thus, tradition. For now on I will be precursing my blogs with a quote, about me, said by one of my celebrity friends. Billy Shakespeare will start it off.

"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind; and therefore is winged Cupid painted blind. I'd like to paint Michael N. Schrage with my kisses, a shame he's only into the Misses." --William Shakespeare

We’re good friends and known to get a bit rowdy after enough spirits.

Now for the meat of the blog. It’s a piece of flash fiction (500 or less words), and my first ever. I tend to write long novels, often 500+ pages, as well as many short stories, and even a bit of poetry. To me, flash fiction is similar to poetry, as you’re attempting to capture something in very few words, which often makes your word choice far more imperative. There’s something beautiful about trying to capture so much with so little. Hopefully it’s not awful.

Empty

The photo albums feel heavier than last time, weighing him down as he moves from closet to bed. The weight pains his arthritis, throbs in his hands and fingers, reminds him that these wrinkles came with age, and with age, pain. Longing. Remembrance. Loss.

The photo albums, three in all, are empty. No pictures, no letters or notes or ticket stubs, none of the usual things you’d find in photo albums. The pages blank, austere, the plastic still smelling fresh and new and meaningless. He looks at the albums to remind himself of all the things he hasn’t done, of all he has lost from never in the first place. He looks at the albums to regret.

He eases himself onto the bed, his back aching but hands feeling better with the albums beside him. He opens the first, the one with the red cover he loves so dearly. The memories, or lack of, are still fresh after all these years. The memories are good. They make him smile and weep. They make him wish for a younger self, a man who knew then what he knows now, and that is to never live without living.

Here should be the pictures of the wife he never married, the woman of his past; he had loved her—loved for so many years but never gave her his heart. Not fully.

She is beautiful on the first page, the day before they should have married, her eyes pale green and hair gentle curls of blond. He still remembers her—her face and smile, her fingers entwined with his, the smell of peppermint; she always had peppermints.

More pages: their wedding day, their first home, the vacation to the beach—which beach was it now? If only he could remember every detail of the life he had never lived, but was supposed to live.

If only he could hold on just a little longer, force the memories to resurface. Where are the pictures of the children he never had? The passing years as he stood by her side through the good and bad, sickness and health? Where is anything? His life? His dreams? So many empty pages, and one by one he turns them all, an occasional tear splashing soundlessly against the plastic.

He sighs and nearly shuts the album, barely able to remember why he opened it. It always hurts the deepest hurt.

Life’s too boring not to try, he had said, too late and wouldn’t have listened anyway. Life’s too short to let moments, opportunities, pass. Life’s just too short.

He flips through the pages until the last, where the lone picture lays against the bleak white. A picture of himself, weathered and wrecked and haunted. He lay in bed, only his face and hands showing above the white sheet, his eyes open yet vacant, his hands tightly clutching the red photo album against his chest. It lay open, empty.