YOU MADE THE RIGHT CAREER CHOICE!

By Ben Greenman

From forthcoming collection, as yet untitled. 

Something was wrong then and something is right now. Every writer in Bemidji is busy; every writer in Shepherdston and Tumbler City is busy; there are not men and women enough to pen the stories and the books. Authors do not have to peddle their product now. No sooner is a sentence on a page that it is gobbled up by an eager reader, often with a fistful of cash and sharp elbows that gain advantage over the other, equally eager, readers. It is instant, automatic, frenetic. There are those who say that this boom time will not last, but even they must concede that for now it is a kind of Paradise.

ARTHUR MASTERS, MAN OF CONVICTION

By Ben Greenman

From a forthcoming collection, not yet titled. 

A civil young gentleman, Arthur Masters, made a claim.

He kept house with a runner named Arrow (her real name, though she lived up to it), inflated a promise and then burst it, that promise being that he would marry Arrow, the bursting of it being that he gave Arrow no proposition as such but rather a letter that related a story in which characters representing the two of them lived in a house on a hill, and around the hill went a spiral track like the thread of a screw, and the Arrow in the story ran down the track and back up it, and when she returned to the house (still in the story) Arthur was standing in the doorway with a bouquet of flowers and another letter, in which he asked her to marry him. A story folded into a story can then be folded out to create a third story. 

A civil young gentleman, Arthur Masters, made this claim, and he was right.

AFTER THE LIVESTREAM

Robert Rincon, called "Malvolio" by friends for reasons that he had long since forgotten, and that he hadn't understood to begin with, was in the basement thinking about playing guitar when the police banged (loudly) on the front door and shouted (even more loudly) that they were coming in, and then began a count that he assumed would end at three, ten at most, but which went on far past that, to twenty, to forty, to a hundred, to the point where Malvolio was no longer afraid that they would enter but beginning to despair that they would not. "What are they doing?" he said on the phone to his girlfriend, who had been someone else's wife until a month before. Her husband had owned the guitar that Malvolio was playing now. Malvolio had buried the man, his former rival, in the backyard about a week before he went into the car to retrieve the guitar. He did the math. That was three weeks ago, right? He had waited until his girlfriend gave him the high sign. The dispatch and disposal of the former rival had been her idea entirely. "Not everything lasts forever," she said, with a flippant tone that was intended to conceal an undercurrent of seriousness that verged on philosophy. "An undercurrent of..." He had read the phrase in a book about theater artists of an earlier time. It's what he once dreamed he would do. He started in music, left it for theater, then left that for tiny pills that were placed in his hand by a man who increasingly took all his money. From there he went to the sporting goods store for a knife, and then went back for a gun. This was ten years ago, before his first six to nine for armed robbery. He hadn't even met Hannah then, which meant that he hadn't met her husband. He moved his fingers about an inch above the strings, but made sure not to let them touch. Before he had gone into the dead man's car, he hadn't played a note on that guitar or any other since he was sixteen, half a lifetime ago. "You should play," Hannah had said when he came back from the car. "You're a regular..." This was a joke. She knew plenty of names: Reinhardt, Segovia, Burton, Page. But what she didn't say was always louder than what she said. This was the case on the phone now. "What are they doing?" Malvolio said again, louder this time. Panic crisscrossed his voice. "I don't think they will..." she said. Something clicked, either on the phone or off it. "Don't worry about..."

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

AN AVERAGE LIFE

He obtained a bachelor's in history and a Master's in engineering. He spent most of his life trying to invent a more elegant alternative to the plastic trays that divide and hold different types of silverware. He is survived by his wife.

 ©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

A BLANKET WENT: A PARABLE

By Ben Greenman

From forthcoming collection, not yet titled.

A blanket went over everything. Some people believed that it was a signal to sleep, and they slept. Some believed that it was intended to hide them and some protested, while others who held the same belief accepted their fate passively. And then there were the ones who interpreted the blanket as a rug and began to walk across it. They were unaware of those beneath it and when they were told of them they did not care.

A BIOGRAPHY OF A GUY READING A ROBERT CARO BOOK

The house in which the man lived and read was located on a street that went straight for three blocks and then curved to the right. From the head of the street, it was not entirely visible, especially if the weather was poor or if it was nighttime, because one of the streetlights down at the curve, known to locals as the hook, was out, and also because the man who lived nearest to the head had floodlights mounted outside his front door, and they washed out the vision of any observer unless he or she moved closer, up the straight part of the street and around the hook, at which point the house came into view. It looked larger up close, as many things do, as proximity is a factor in the apparent size of an object, but not in the actual size, which is to say that the house was not actually larger when it was closer, but that it seemed larger to observers. It was two stories, though there was a large finished attic that could be accounted a half story. The basement walls extended a few feet up from the ground level, which created the impression that the house sat in a box or tray. The house was of a type known commonly as the Foursquare, and it adhered to the floor plan common to houses of this type, with a first floor that included an entry foyer (which in turn included the stairs that led to the second floor), a living room, a dining room, and a kitchen. The kitchen included three chairs in motley mismatch, two made of a dark wood and the third lighter in both material (plastic) and hue (a sunny yellow). Though the wooden chairs possessed dignity and style, along with a certain solidity of purpose, the plastic chair was the man’s favorite, for it reminded him of a chair in another house, not a Foursquare, where he had grown up some three decades before, and where his earliest ideas about chairs and kitchens had been formed. It was in this third chair that he sat. There was a teakettle on the stovetop, no longer whistling, though it had been whistling a few moments earlier, signifying that the water within it had reached a temperature commensurate with the requirements of the duty it was about to perform, which involved transfer to a ceramic mug that also contained a small bag made of a blend of wood and vegetable fibers and filled with cured leaves of the plant Camellia sinensis. The water, freshly boiled, would pass through the semi-permeable membrane of the bag, reaching the leaves and creating a solution suitable, when cooled, for drinking. The tea was made at half-past nine and was, at thirty-five minutes past nine, judged sufficiently cool enough for sipping. In the fie minutes elapsed between those two events, the pouring of the just-boiled water over the cured leaves and the judgment that the water, now tea, was cool enough to drink, the man in the kitchen of the Foursquare house had made another judgment, which was to lift a book from the center of the table and turn it over in his hands to signify to himself that he was considering reading it. The man had turned over books in his hands before, and not just books: he had also turned over utensils, items of clothing, weapons, bottles containing medicine, erotic aids, and foods, but none of those things were books, and none of those books were the fourth volume of a biography about a man whose career in American politics had fundamentally reshaped the way in which the legislative branch of the Federal government exerted its influence, nor, for that matter, the way that the executive branch had done the same. The man in the kitchen lifted and lowered the mug filled with tea, transferring a small amount of liquid from vessel to mouth, and then sat in the chair of sunny yellow plastic, at which point he opened the book, the fourth volume of the biography of the man whose career in American politics had fundamentally reshaped the ways in which influence was exerted by the legislative and then executive branches of the Federal government, and he read the first word.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

 

 

SALES ARE DOWN

By Ben Greenman

from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled

"High Tide, High Time" was the slogan Jack had settled on, after toying with a series of others ("Shore Thing," "Seaweed Solutions," and the rather generic "Just Add Health!"), and he even went so far as to type an email to Stanley with "Got It!" in the subject line and, in the body, a long paragraph explaining the winding but rewarding path that had guided him to the door of what he now believed was the only intelligent destination for the campaign. "We must stress the origins of the product," he wrote. "Isn't that what your father always told us?" He paused and remembered Stanley's father, Theodore, a six-foot-two Brahmin with mostly gray hair cut by a streak of black. "The past inheres," Theodore had said, and then he had pointed at Jack and said, "Stress the origins of the product." Jack could not remember the first time that Theodore had said it, but he did know that at some point he had started to count the occurrences in his mind, and he remembered where he was the hundredth time he had heard it. In fact, Jack remembered that Stanley had been there, too, hearing time number one hundred with his own two ears. Stanley had been young then, just a kid, maybe eleven, maybe ten, he had been in the office on one of the company's Family Fridays, playing a game he liked to call "Mr. Mayor," a game he had invented with his father that had started when he (Stanley) had removed a magazine from his (Theodore's) desk and noticed that he (Stanley) exactly resembled the mayor of Brampton, Ontario, down to the angle of their eyebrows. "We must preserve our floral gardens," Stanley said, waving his eleven-year old hands. "We must fix up our factories!" Then he took questions. At the time Jack had been thirty-two, skating toward his first divorce, convinced that his heedless forward progress would be brought under control by his second marriage, which he was certain would happen as soon as he came to terms with Mariela and convinced Dot that he was free. Dot was Theodore's assistant back then. She and Jack had been seeing each other on the sly for a year or so. She was roughly midway in age between Jack and Stanley. But Jack had been wrong. He had been wronger than wrong. Dot had not married him even when Mariela stood down. "Oh, you can't?" he said when she told him. And then he expectorated his greatest fear. "Theodore?" he asked. She nodded, and his blood ran cold, but then she was laughing. "It's not Theodore," she said. "Don't be daffy. He's a great boss and a great man but for the love of all that's holy, Jack, he's three times my age." She had, she went on to explain, decided that she was attracted to all beings, though women more than men, and that she planned to live in what she called a "multi-faceted amorous community," by which, she said, she meant a share-house where everyone occupied whatever bed beckoned. Twenty years had passed. Dot was still in the house, still beautiful, still mostly with women. Jack had a bent back and a bruised sense of nearly everything. Stanley had never been elected mayor of anything. The great man was in the ground.