20 and 21: Microfiction and six-word memoir
A day late, a dollar short.
Microfiction
After high school, I tried to sell knives. I only sold one, and I cut myself on it. The next summer I sold donuts.
Six-word memoir
Sold knives. Cut myself. Sold donuts.
I recently wrote a short story about fatherhood and George Saunders and my stream of consciousness. I’m just putting it out on submission now, so it won’t be ready for you for some months.
While you wait, read or listen to Ben Lerner’s short story “Café Loup,” which is so similar in theme to my recently finished story, and so superior in execution, that if I had read it sooner, I might have been scared off of writing mine.
Lerner’s opening sentence:
When I became a father, I began to worry not only that I would die and not be able to care for my daughter but that I would die in an embarrassing way, that my death would be an abiding embarrassment for Astra—that in some future world, assuming there is a future, she will be on a date with someone, hard as that is for me to imagine, and her date will ask, “What does your father do?,” and she will say, “He died when I was little,” and her date will respond, “I’m sorry,” hesitate, and then ask, in a bid for intimacy, how I died, and Astra will feel ashamed, will look down into her blue wine, there will be blue wine in the future, and say, “He had an aneurysm on the toilet,” which is one of the ways I often fear I might die.
Now I have a new neurosis.
Ben Lerner’s kid went to my kid’s preschool. They left before we joined, but we heard from the director and at least one other parent, “Did you know Ben Lerner’s child goes here?” It was like the High Maintenance where everyone says “Ditmas Park? Sufjan Stevens lives there!” So now Ben Lerner will eventually show up in one of my own parenting stories, because how could I waste that kind of brand-building tie-in?