THE PROBLEM WITH A RICH MAN

 “The problem with a rich man,” said Bob, and laughed, because Bob was the rich man, and everyone in town knew it. He had gone most of the way off the rocker since April, when his wife had been seen stepping into a light blue ’68 Coronet, “preserved perfect,” said Gerald Howard, who had been the one who had seen her stepping, and with a wink made it known that he meant both the car and Jeannette. For weeks after Bob spent more time than anyone thought advisable in places everyone went, the diner, the park, the stone porch of the ice cream shop. Too many people saw him for him to maintain his dignity, which had always been the source of his appeal, even more than his wealth. The time of excessive appearance was followed quick on by the time of sharp words hurled, in which Bob activated his membership in the dinner-party circuit, made sure that he was seated as an eligible single, and proceeded to berate the host and hostess. He called Fred Perlemutter a “day-trading fop” and Andie Perlemutter “someone’s memory of a good woman,” and it only got worse from there—French Wolf was “a jail sentence that hasn’t happened yet,” Louis Snodgrass had “so many ways of trying to distract you from the fact that he’s basically dead inside,” and Jocelyn Masters “never shut up, not for one god-loving second”— until one night at the Braysons he stood up with additional flourish, rattling china and silver both. Everyone held their breath for Phyllis Brayson, who was vulnerable in many respects, but Bob turned and wheeled and pointed at Gordon Howard, who he condemned as a “syphilitic traitor wrapped in rancid bacon.” “Harsh, but fair,” said Mrs. Howard, who escaped unscathed. Three days later was when Bob was found nude in the forest, babbling about the problem with a rich man, and also when he fought off the cop who found him, kicking the man harder than anyone thought he could. The cop, young, drowning in deference, held his fire until he knew that everyone would agree he had no choice, and the hit Bob with a new high-tech sonic stun weapon that a man even richer than Bob had paid to make part of the force’s base arsenal. Bob ended up on his back, staring eye-to eye with a burl on an oak that had fallen crossways into the lespedeza. 

 

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

STIRRINGS OF RESPONSIBILITY

That moment where the dog tenses and leaps off the couch, howling as it runs for the door, is the most horrifying aberration in his otherwise placid day. It is not nice, and puts a knot in his lower back that makes it impossible for him to sit still or stand up. He is not careless with his dogs. He latches the fence. He leaves out water. He hangs signs to tell the mailmen to slip the bills and circulars into the shallow metal box that hangs on the fence and drop the packages in the wooden box below. So what is it that upsets the dogs this much? It is a tornado of noise and fur and he is trapped in it, sick to think that there is something he has done wrong to worry them.

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

A MISUNDERSTANDING

About a week ago it was reported here that Ezra Boyce, formerly of this city, had been killed, at Chugwater, Alabama, though the cause of death was variously reported in different papers. This morning Thomas Fabrizio received a letter from Mr. Boyce in which there was no mention of his being dead, or of having been shot (as one report had it), or stabbed (as it went in another report), or strangled, or bludgeoned, or poisoned, or hit by a falling tree, or pushed off a waterfall, or mauled by a bear, or drowned in a tub, or seized by a faulty heart, or electrocuted by a torn wire flapping wildly in a sudden wind. It is not known how the story of his death originated. He says that he is in his usual good health.

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

MARTIN RESTON'S SINGLE-PARAGRAPH STORY "A KEYBOARD SITUATION"

To those who spend half their life in near proximity to a keyboard, each key has a voice as well as a symbol. As a finger passes over the keyboard, each key attracts with its symbol, and as a fingertip presses down upon it, it releases that voice. A consonant clicks as it watches the vowel beside it, which whistles or rustles. Up above numbers and special characters sit in silence, hearing their own heartbeats. When deployed, they will stop the noise for a moment, a second or a split- : they are rests in the measure, so to speak. The result is a song of the alphabet, a collection of symbols that sound together without shedding any individuality. Every word has so much music already knit into it.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

NOT A PARABLE, NOT AT ALL

Boxy was a box, and his personality changed depending on what was inside him. If someone put an apple inside him, he felt healthy. If someone put a match inside him, he felt angry and worried. If someone put a book inside him, he felt smart. Boxy lived in a huge house on the edge of town, on top of a hill that overlooked all the other houses. He was very rich. His father, Arthur Q. Box, had been a businessman who had invented the parking meter and the drinking glass and many other common items and become a multi-millionaire, and Boxy had grown up with all the advantages a young box could want. Every night he was filled up with gold coins and jewelry, and in the morning a butler put the finest soaps and towels inside him. At some point Boxy became aware that he was only feeling the way he was feeling because of what had been placed inside him, and that when he tried to bring to mind a clear picture of himself, he saw nothing, only empty space and the terror that came with it. He spent all night awake, many nights in a row, thinking of a plan, and then he worked up the courage to put that plan into action. Boxy pressed the button next to his bed to call the butler, and then asked the butler to put a smaller box inside him without telling him what was inside that smaller box. The butler obliged. Since Boxy didn’t know the contents of the smaller box, he had to imagine them, and the process of imagining was what gave him his own feelings. And with this, he began to become himself.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

BUILDING MANAGEMENT

Guterman in 4B is an actual mapmaker, by his own admission. 

Effie Simmons in 3A is not a tech whiz—she doesn’t see so well.

Ike Musa in 4A has a new cat and he’s not telling anyone. 

Melissa Johnson in 2A has always thought her name was too plain, too drab a container for her ideas, which tend toward thinking hard about the sun until the old ideas fade away, and that’s what she has spent the morning doing, not rolling back the blind and looking directly at it, she knows that’s potentially ruinous, not just for optic reasons but for psychological ones, but rather hanging an image of the sun in the center of her mind, rushing hard into it with a mix of jubilation and terror so that it falls, not breaking, not bouncing, just falling, and then leaping upon the way a soldier in a war movie leaps upon a grenade that has been lobbed into the midst of the platoon, knowing there will come a moment when the sun on the floor of her mind explodes and fills her with both light and heat, knowing too that the sense of things that follows that detonation will be more complete than anything she has yet to experience, an ecstasy that cannot be captured by language, that she will have to leave that ecstasy burning there in her mind, more than an ember, an engine, rattling her teeth, sharpening her sight, both creating and filling cavities in her skull, in her body, or at the very least what her mind still remembers of these things, remnants of the physical world, figments, and she is calling out names as she slips further into the state that will produce that sense of things, calling out her own name. 

Brenda Mattsson in 5A is making herself lunch.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

BIG BROTHERHOOD IN THE OVAL

A man with his shoe in his hand is called into the office of the president, where he expects to have to explain himself. 

He is not asked to do so, despite the fact that he opens the door with a disclaimer and the beginning of a story. 

“Jim,” he says. “I was at this store, Eyes Ajar, up on To Be Free Boulevard….”

He has known the president since they were boys.

(This story is set in some other decade, past or future. The mere fact that this needs to be said is as affront.)

The president, Jim, cuts Marcus off, confounded. 

He doesn’t want to know about the shoe and is more interested in the fact that Marcus is wearing a mask. 

The mask is nothing obvious, not a Richard Nixon mask or a werewolf or The Shape, but rather a thin transparent film that almost leaves Marcus’s face as it is in everyday life. 

“Your pleasantness, Marcus,” the president says. “I love that.” What he doesn’t say is that the mask has disrupted it.

The meeting is short, two-pronged, half about an upcoming diplomatic event that Marcus has petitioned to attend and that Jim regrets to inform him he cannot, the other half two old friends shooting, as it were, the shit. 

“What?” the President says. “No. I can’t be seen as having used that kind of language. Everyone knows I use it but no one must know. Does that make sense to you? I need for it to make sense to you. I need for you to have a clear sense of what I’m saying. I don’t want to disown you, Marcus. I don’t want to have to disown you. We are brothers, stitched together under the skin. We are two but we are one. I have never loved anyone as much as…”

“Shut up, Jim,” says the man with one shoe and the ability to make others feel he is wearing a mask—though there are as many masks on his face as there are on the foot whose shoe is in his hand, meaning no masks at all. “Just shut the fuck up. You weren’t elected to be anything other than this.” He waves his hands around. “This is what now you are. What now you are? What you are now.”

The two men, virtually telepathically, stand at the same time and walk out together. Marcus leaves his shoe on the desk. He’s not going back for it. Both of them know this as well as they know each other.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas