flash fiction

Composite Parts

/ Nick Olson / Leave a comment

I wanted to see trees the way that you saw them, not just color and movement, classification and function. I wanted to taste the sun in strawberry, see myself in others and have something like a life before my death. I didn’t manage that, but I have managed to draft this here, now, which will just have to be my consolation. I am collecting all the pieces of me from when I was alive, trying to find the leaves that serve the tree.

I saw you at my funeral. I wanted to say something, but:

1. I couldn’t,

and:

2. What would I say if I could?

Everyone’s words arrived like a fugue, their contrapuntal compositions echoing, and none of them could hear the melodies they were making. I saw something in your eyes then that I’d never seen while alive.

This is not much different than when I was here. There’s not a distinct boundary or separation. It’s a gradual process, and you don’t always know when that process has begun. I was in the process of dying for a long time before they put me in the ground, and it’s still not over yet.

I realize now that I had glimpses of it. Moments waiting in line at the grocery store, realizing that these signs advertising products will be replaced, then will be gone. These people will one day be gone, and the store will be as well. Time will sweep its dust under the rug of the world, and there will be nothing at all to see anywhere. There will be not even the concept of nothing. It’s like that, being dead is. It’s a strong dissociation, but it’s not a severance. At least mine isn’t. It’s seeing yourself see yourself, till it feels like you’re looking into a mirror that’s facing another mirror, reflecting ad infinitum. And I’m pretty much tired all the time.

I realized as I was dying that I didn’t want to die, but it had reached an irreversible point in the process, so I resigned myself to the fact that I was going to soon be dead. It just became a fact.

And then I went away, and my body was a collection of buzzing, brilliant things, separated by color and shape and size and weight, so it was like I was seeing all my composite parts. And there was my idea of you, alone in an unlit room in what used to be my mind. I never saw the fine details, you used to tell me. I’d never miss the forest for the trees, but then I’d never really see the trees at all.

Think of anything you’ve ever seen, and then forget it. Forget that you’ve forgotten. Anything Anthropocene is gone. Anything natural is gone. There’s something there, but it’s more like a vague feeling than an actual presence. There’s not really color. I don’t want to talk about it too much.

If I focus, I can almost see a world outside of myself, outside of what I did. I can almost breathe again.

I dream memories. When I dream, I’m back in the world of matter and color and wind on arms and light in bleary morning eyes. It’s nothing pivotal. It’s the small moments, the ones we shared. It’s waiting in line at the grocery store and eyeing tabloids, dollar chocolate bars, gum, the hum of the conveyor belt and the mechanical hey-how-are-you when it gets to our place in line. It’s crunching through fall leaves, adjusting steps to coincide, and the warmth of the sun past the chill, past the gray, past it all, and feeling that there only is just this moment. Only ever will be.

goodbye, goodbye, goodbye

/ Nick Olson / Leave a comment

Translucent plastic box in the basement, plastic and lidded, light filtering through it, plants on top of it, sitting idly next to an old Windows 95 behemoth. Coming back home after so much time, now masked, taking precautions, and the last of your personal effects are in this box, the stuff you couldn’t sort through before leaving, the things that reminded you of him. Now just color values and physical description–blurry shapes of belongings past thick plastic, years of dust, incomprehensible lengths of time that don’t correspond to calendars, appointments, birthdays. You have moved on and yet here are these outcroppings of a you who hasn’t.

Opening the lid and starting right away, piles separated between keep, trash, and burn, and you’re surprised by just how quick that last category is filling up. The unending process of self-uproot, plant, water, uproot again. Of having no land to ever truly call home. Your roots are spread too thin, atrophying beneath you, crackling through sidewalk cracks in desperation.

When it all comes through, you’re lighting a barbecue of photos, mementos, hand-written love notes. Sketches of the two of you, his beard snuggling yours, not caricatured but on the cusp, and browning, curling paper, shifting down to deep black, ash clippings sprinkling themselves into grill ash, gray in all that red. All the little rituals we put ourselves through.

If you could find a way to Eternal Sunshine your way out of having to remember him, you think you’d do it, but it’d probably be an in the moment thing, impulsive, the Clem to his Joel, and even that movie is tainted now because of all the viewings the two of you had, watching it every few years, after the inevitable breakup and getting back together, seeing your mirror images committed to film, and vacillating between siding with Joel or Clem depending on the viewing, the season. Siding with neither, and wanting to erase your brain, to take it all away if it’ll mean you don’t have to live with this pain of being stuck in his mental and emotional orbit.

The early days, pre-coming out, when he was a good friend, then thinking it was “just” that you were gay, as if that would ever be a “just” where and when you grew up, and finding other people, other bodies after each break up, learning to fit yourself into the configurations you thought were expected of you, the shifting serpent of sexuality, probably looking just like the one from CCD as a kid, when they tried to convince you that we’re born doomed and need external help to be saved. You haven’t sat in a pew since the mid-2000s, have no desire to, but there’s that familiar old Catholic orisonic muscle in you still, even now, trying to get you to pray it away, give it over to god, and even turning that over in your mind makes you laugh away the sting, the frustrated tears, the way he made you feel and how that could be divorced from how much and how often he hurt you, what that consistent betrayal did to you in the end.

Or maybe it’s the change itself. The changing of colors, of minds. Taking something from one form to a very different other, and to be, somehow, surprisingly okay with it in the end, if that’s what it’s going to be for now. Because it’s as much the final shot as it is the repeat, over and over again, of that shot. It’s curling your farewells into the burning, till it’s all just goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

The Dead Friend

/ Nick Olson / Leave a comment

The dead friend shows up like a glitch in a poorly-tested video game, clipping through walls, lagging, animation wonky. He’d look real enough in a freeze frame, but in motion the physics are just off.

The dead friend shows up wearing the jacket he wore when he became the dead friend. The jacket is thick, and woollen, but its fibers cannot adequately absorb the blood from the dead friend. They were made for other things.

You can’t seem to get the attention of the dead friend, and you’ve tried everything. All that DF is capable of is to carry out glitched animations, cycling through the keyframes until he can start the next animation.

And here is the dead friend now, sitting on an invisible bench, talking into an invisible phone, asking inaudibly for help. And you can try to sit on this invisible bench with your dead friend, can fall back and onto the ground. You can crouch down beside him, get right in front of him, attempt a lip-read, wave in front of his eyes, call out to him. You can do whatever you’d like, but he won’t notice.

Your dead friend will come for you in the liminal states, too. Don’t think it will only be when you’re out and about. He will sit on your chest like some sleep paralysis demon you’ve seen paintings of, but you will only see the whites of his eyes, will only hear his underwater voice of regret, not words but still intelligible, because regret can never adequately be expressed in words anyway. How would you even begin?

Your dead friend has been dead long enough where the experience of being a person is clearly fading from his cellular memory. He has more in common with the fog coming up off the hills during your morning walks, sunlight breaking up the view through car windows as you pass, thinking always that you’ve seen him, that he’s seen you, that there is a way out of this paroxysm of grief.

Or maybe he’s not the fog, not the wind, but what’s traveling through it. A dream, something that’s been coming back night after night. Your friend is a kite floating on the wind. You are holding the string that is tethered to his foot. All of him has been hollowed out. He is paper-thin, and empty, and his eyes are holes that wind can get through if it must. You look up and the string you hold is tethered to two other strings. They connect to his arms, to the spots once cut, tethered to the places that untethered your friend from this world.

In the dream, you’re not sure how you know that things will be okay eventually, but there is this deep, all-abiding sense that that will be the case. You can bring your friend down and out of the wind, collect his string, and walk him back home when the conditions are no longer right for flight. You can both go back home.

Kinds of Stained Glass

/ Nick Olson / Leave a comment

Some days he felt his memories had been implanted in his skull, injected from somewhere near the base. It would at least explain all of the headaches. Makes the urge to drink a foreign entity that doesn’t arise in him. Something he picked up from another lifetime, one he can’t remember. Angling down and into sleep is languid and painful, like dipping toes into scalding water, then feet, then shins. He gives in sometime in the second week of this.

When he comes to again after so much time without it, one more big binge, he can almost remember the name from before. Rather the designation. To be held captive by drink is to not be alive, not really.

In bleeding early mornings he is alone. Times when his head will burn and the urge will come in like rolling sick deep in his belly, hands on knees, collecting air and hoarding it in his lungs. An image: big splasher flopping on a pier, gaggle of children huddled around it, in semicircle, watching. Waiting for it to die, and not knowing what they’ll do once it does.

The permutations of who he could be and could’ve been, dancing around him in the early afternoon, dew burnt off already, and he’s got years on his mind, ash in his hair, and he’s weighing himself on a scale he knows isn’t accurate but which he uses anyway. It’s just something he can’t seem to part with.

He’s trying to live in a way that will let him remember, after all this time forgetting. He’s trying to be a person again.

When he opens the blinds in the morning, he half expects to see the crowded block he used to live on, halogen lighting blinding at night, tracking the paths of strangers and their shadows coming in and out of view, when life wasn’t a series of days to be crossed off. He thinks he can see himself now, over there, just past the window. Can see, yes, the shape of unkempt hair, the mop of it, can figure out the era from this mop, estimate his age, through the window, and the whole block is lined with versions of himself at different ages, different branching pathways. “All the varieties of me that there might be.” He couldn’t really feel himself coming alive anymore, is what it had come down to.

He fell away into the bottle again, and when he came back to he was flat on his back in a bathtub that wasn’t his, shower curtain as blanket, and the light was on, and today’s repeat mental word was haggard. Haggard, and the songs his brain gave him, wanted him to sing, at least hum along to, and all the lyrics had to do with failing, falling, losing some intrinsic part of you in all that darkness. The way the water felt when it sputter-spilt out of limescale shower head was something like baptism, and there’s another image, of communion he’d refused after so many years of taking it, sitting in a pew he’d never sat in before, letting the late melody of half-forgotten hymns wash over, and the way to forgetting is the opposite direction of forgiving.

He goes back every now and again, to his old town, course charted, cautious turnings, changed directions, taking a roundabout way to get to his old block and only upon getting there realizing that he did it to avoid the old church. Of trying to remember these call-and-response words that they gave you there, of all the prayers and songs and affirmations that can be repeated like ingredients from an old recipe, rote memorization, and he’s pouring every bottle he’s got down the drain, throwing the last of them against church wall, and the spray that explodes on the side and even onto the window, a different kind of stained glass, and to be inside with the pain is like being an observer of an observer, a neuronal game of telephone you can never quite make sense of. He’s going to the broken bottle and grabbing a long shard, checking the way it looks against the smooth draw of flesh. Breathing. He is breathing now.

And when he’s done and it’s finished, there are carvings in the body of the old priest’s car. Words, and scratches, and reminders, all for him to find later. Something he wouldn’t forget.

Dry Time

/ Nick Olson / Leave a comment

Take things day by day is something they tell you when you’re visibly heading toward a future without days. I don’t know. Maybe it’s just weird that now that I actually want to be here, the entire world is crashing down around me. I go in the backyard, take a few laps, try to clear the sour taste from my mouth. When I inhale, there are notes I never sensed before, little hints of neighborhood post-crisis, and the birds are singing at night now. I’m putting down words, drinking down tea, lining up my queue and working through. I’m taking things as they come, another favorite from back in my therapy days. Scenes play out in my mind’s projector, flickering at twenty-four, showing what I’ll look like at forty-eight, then ninety-six, shuttling through the seams of life till I am the last person out in the world, streets empty, grass clear and tall, and all of the things that used to matter so much are no longer a concern, I’m just carrying on, ever-forward, designing and desiring times like these, as chaotic as they might be, even so, letting them be and become what they will. Counting each day down and watching in eon-time, using the distinctly human gift of forward-thinking. See the sprouts grow, reach their predetermined top, come back down once again, as the human rockets buzz and hum around, appearing and disappearing as the sun yo-yos up ahead, first up then down then up again, stars shifting, spinning the sky in time, and I am here again, all at once, locked in a painfully slow retelling of a life I’ve already lived and seen. These are the things that make up a life, reduced to their core functions, and here are all the rooms you’ve entered, the ones you can never enter again. Here are the people you have seen, none of which you can see right now, some of which you might never see again. Here is the great abiding grief that accompanies the ones who’ve already left you, the ones yet to leave. Here are all of the things you can feel, dry now, because you are sober and will stay that way no matter what, these things you’re allowing yourself, maybe forcing yourself, to feel. Here are all the things that make up your altered, segmented life, the segmented lives of everyone right now. Because there is no going back, and you’ve seen that for some time now, since this whole thing began, but quarantine wasn’t the beginning of the change. It was already shifting, imperceptibly, by degrees so small that you could scarcely notice. You are really alive here, even now. There it is. You’re even breathing, taking down that water, letting light refract and strike the wall behind you, picture-smooth, rippled grooves like vinyl as you wake and wait for the day to stop hitting. And here it is, as it is, right now in this perfect, terrible moment. In this snapshot that is all there is but not all there ever will be, and that’s okay.