The Maelstrom's Denouement
by Samuel Merrin
The ink dripped off the page after the rain had stopped. Somehow the pages seemed to extend the duration of the rainfall even after the sky had closed itself off, after Nature had ceased her promulgation of anger. The notebook had been dropped and forgotten, and as the water washed the words away onto the muddy ground the thoughts also lost themselves in the maelstrom's denouement.
The writer was a mystery, but some of the words remained legible. There was a story compiled there for the notebook's discoverer to decode and understand. It's possible that no one would have discovered it, if it weren't for John.
The only reason John found the notebook was because Nicole was too busy (or so she said) to see him. He couldn't define her, she always seemed distant but every once in a while she would open up, and her words would silently move him because he understood but had never before heard the ideas she was expressing. He knew instantly that they were true, that they were right, and that they were his thoughts, though he had never thought them before.
Her hair, he had always thought, was a thousand different colors, not one of them a hue he had ever found elsewhere in nature. Lots of girls he knew had chestnut tones in their hair, or amber, or chocolate, or any one of the myriad phonetic combinations that literary artists over the years had invented to say the word "brown." Nicole didn't have hair like any of them, though he couldn't put his finger on exactly how she struck him as so different. She barely let him put a finger on anything, now that he thought of it.
Sometimes he was filled with an irrestistable urge to reach across the table and grab her hand and hold it, hold it tight because he knew that this moment was as real as any he had ever experienced. The thought of her slipping away left his heart beating, quaking his ribcage with an offbeat drumline. But she had sent him away, and it wasn't the first time.
He wondered if she listened when he talked. She must know, he reasoned, that he breathed for her, that he had since that first day, back in March. Now, the rainy season had overtaken the city, and rivulets of the remnants of broken clouds ran through the cracks in the pavement. It was only now that John understood things, gazing up at the slate-colored clouds that seemed to be packing up their things to leave, at long last finished with their seasonal task. The blue crack in the sky expanded as the gray, nebulous mothballs retreated behind the mountains, out of site.
Seasons change, John mused, kicking a puddle as a whiff of cold breeze grazed the back of his neck. Seasons change and people change. But they had to change on their own, out of motivation of their own volition rather than the will of anyone else. John couldn't do anything to change her mind, even though the course of his heart was irrevocably cemented.
By the time he stumbled upon the notebook on his walk home, John had already come to a decision. He would tell Nicole how he felt, and leave. He couldn't bear to hear her answer, the one he knew was coming because he knew she didn't love him and never would. As his rubber soles suddenly tread on the waterlogged pages of the notebook, tucked invisibly under a wind-swept pile of loose leaves blown free by the cool breath of the abruptly-subsided rainstorm, he crouched down to pick up the leather-bound book.
At that moment, a fireball-meteor fell to the Earth from outer space and John exploded.
Two Men, One Die
A short story by Samuel Merrin
It was a game of chance. It was a game whose winner chose himself. Its beginnings took place in the Los Angeles downtown Greyhound station.
Miles carried a pair of dice in his left jeans pocket. He also carried a plastic rubber band, a melted Almond Joy, three paper clips, a dime, and a wallet full of crisp 5 dollar bills. In his right jean pocket, he held his right hand.
His left hand was waving: he was waving someone over. The man he was waving over had a beard, a grey one, with white on the tips. The man's hair could have been called "salt and pepper" by those members of the upper crust who used such terms. Salvador never used such terms. Salvador was the man's name.
Miles waved over Salvador the way one man waves over another he has known a lifetime. The truth was that Salvador and Miles had known each other only the duration of the rest stops of their respective Greyhound coaches. To be more specific, they knew each other the duration of time their respective rest stops had aligned, allowing the two to meet. Salvador's rest stop was 45 minutes. Miles' rest stop involved a coach change, and he would be parked at the Los Angeles station for the entirety of three hours.
For the first 15 minutes of Salvador's rest stop, which the driver of his coach was using to eat a Dutch Crunch and ham sandwich at the rear, driver's side corner of the Greyhound bus, along with a lemon-flavored iced tea which he drank from a plastic thermos, Salvador couldn't even see Miles' face. This was because Miles was facing north, and so was Salvador. Salvador could see the back of Miles' head. In the 16th minute of Salvador's rest stop, Miles turned around, and Salvador's eyes met Miles'. Both men looked away, but in the 17th minute, Miles pulled two plastic dice out of his pocket, and juggled them in his left palm. Salvador's eyes moved to Miles' palm, centering on the dice. In the 18th minute, Miles had returned the dice to his left pocket and raised his left hand to wave Salvador over. Salvador walked the distance between the two men until the length of the distance decreased from 15 feet to 2. Miles threw the dice under a greyhound bus that belonged to neither of the two men. Salvador watched the two cubes on their sideways trajectory, a trajectory slightly marred by the curve of Miles' crooked swipe.
"Call them." This was Miles.
"Three and six." This was Sal.
"Check." Miles.
And Sal crawled under the bus. One die, he saw, was a three. At that moment, the 26th minute of Salvador's rest stop and the very close of Miles' three hours of waiting, the bus driver that had been smoking around the corner tossed the butt of his cigarette into a station trash bin and climbed into the driver's seat. He drove two feet before Sal was dead.
Miles unwrapped the Almond Joy as the ambulance came. One man, and a pair of dice, lost.
Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday
A short story by Samuel Merrin
She had left the teabag in the mug too long again. You couldn't even see to the bottom, that's how dark the tea had got. Angela cursed the distraction that had caused her to do this. That alarm she couldn't figure out how to disable. Just as she had been ready to pull the teabag out of the mug, when the idea had entered her mind first, that's when the alarm had gone off. It was a new watch--she could never figure out how to set a new watch. It caused her undue stress, to buy new, complicated things like that. It only had four buttons. One of them had to disable the alarm. One of them could stop it, but five minutes later the alarm would go off again. This happened four days a week. Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday.
Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday she was safe. She had pressed all the buttons in all combinations. She had read the instructional insert that had been printed and packaged and included with her watch. It was unreasonable that she couldn't figure it out.
Five minutes had gone by. The alarm was going off again. The temporary respite she had earned from her flustered button manipulations had ended. She pressed another button. The watch was silenced, but she knew it wouldn't be for long. Angela took a sip of her tea. It was bitter.
She was adding milk to her tea when the alarm went off again. She pressed a button, appeasing the needy device. She added sugar to her tea. Again, the beeping. She silenced it, and took a sip from her mug. It was all right. It could have been better, if she hadn't left the teabag in so long. The alarm seemed like it was getting louder now. She stared at it, at its blinking light, at its incessant chirping. She dangled the screaming watch over her steaming mug of tea. Tea that had been diluted and sweetened to make up for initial mishaps of preparation. She clutched the plastic clasp of the sport watch between the thumb and index finger of her right hand. She didn't want to ruin the watch, or her tea, but there seemed no other option now. It would be a perfect end for both of them, almost poetic. The tea that had been ruined by the offending watch would be its downfall. As she released the watch from the tight grasp of her thumb and index finger, she wished all of life could be this just.
Until she heard the alarm, five minutes later, emanating from the flooded confines of her mug of oversteeped tea.
The Absurdity of Uncle Joseph
A Short Story by Samuel Merrin
"If I lived in a cereal box," my Uncle Joseph used to say, "I would hope it would be a box of Lucky Charms."
I always thought it was a strange thing for him to say, my Uncle Joseph, because he was a hot cereal kind of guy. Oatmeal, Cream of Wheat, all that moist, mealy mush. His reasoning for the whole Lucky Charms decision was simply that lucky charms were lucky, and he was a man of firm superstitious beliefs. He didn't walk under ladders. Black cats sent him to the opposite side of the street. God help you if you broke a mirror in his presence.
He was a cautious man until the day he died, my Uncle Howard. He washed his hands meticulously before and after eating. He flossed regularly. His remote controls were bereft of dust, and none of his curtains had rips. He lived alone for most of his life.
I never asked my Uncle Joseph his thoughts on marriage. I assumed he had wanted a wife at some point: he wasn't the renegade bachelor of the family (an honor bestowed on my Grandpa Mark, who after a string of no less than three wives instead took to roaming the countryside in a smoky RV, wind in his mustache.) Uncle Joseph was a quiet one, and his musings (like that of the Lucky Charms cereal box) were often incomprehensible, and thus seemed absurd.
He had one favorite meal, meatloaf, and one favorite plant: the fern. He had one favorite chair, though he had several chairs in his living room, all centered around a circular coffee table with 8 magazines that had probably never been read.
My Uncle Joseph's inner life is a mystery that is bigger to me than the question of what happens after we die. Whatever my Uncle Howard thought about, that was what his life was.
When the majority of your life is spent silently, there must be a deep well inside. Some kind of great wisdom, or some kind of great tragedy. Or maybe some kind of great misunderstanding. Or the opposite.
The question of if he had ever loved, and whom, puzzled my mind for years before I got to college. For years after, as I started living my own life, I lived out loud: rarely in silence. I found myself presenting to the world a caricature of the opposite of my Uncle Joseph, in effect giving him the position of "Most Influential Family Member," mostly by default. A silent life didn't appeal to me. I wanted to live audibly. I wanted to be heard.
His funeral was a hodgepodge of characters, mostly family, and the whole services from what I remember lasted about twenty minutes. None of us had known if he was religious until after the funeral, cleaning up his one-bedroom house and finding a rosary under his pillow. The beads were worn.
When I think about my Uncle Joseph, now, holding tightly to those strands for years, the pressure of his own fingers slowly wearing away the shellac of the ancient beads, it floors me to this day, confounded, when I try to understand what my Uncle Joseph was praying for all this time, and if he had ever gotten an answer.
The Story of Lions
A Short Story by Samuel Merrin
There once was a family of lions. A father lion, a mother lion, and three baby cubs. There was a second family of lions that lived in the next jungle over. That family had a father lion, a mother lion, three baby cubs, and four other mother lions.
The two families of lions rarely got together. Once or twice a year, for major lion holidays, they would have a meal together, or sometimes just an early evening with cocktails and light zebra hors d'ouvres. The baby lion cubs would play nearby while the mother and father lions discussed the news of the day.
It was a constant source of tension, the four extra mother lions in the second family of lions. Not for the family they belonged to, but for the first family of lions, the family with a father lion, a mother lion, and three baby cubs. The single mother lion, whose name was Wanda, took a great deal of pride in her family and her ability to hold on to her partner lion, Eric, without any other mother lions to distract him. Seeing those five mother lions together, as she did a few times a year when they would celebrate lion holidays, always left Wanda wondering if, secretly, that was what Eric really wanted. She wondered if, when they left those evenings, baby cubs in tow and superficial promises of "getting together soon" fading in the Sahara sunset air, Eric was hoping for four more mother lions. He had assured her numerous times that this wasn't the case. But how could it not be, wondered Wanda? Lions were lions. Wasn't it in their nature to want a harem? How could he not be jealous of his neighbor lion, with his five mother lions?
Eric sensed Wanda's anxiousness every time they went to visit at their neighbor's home. She never seemed to enjoy the zebra hors d'ouvres the five mother lions had prepared for them. She always picked at them with her fork. She also drank quite a bit. He assumed it was to calm her nerves.
Eric wished Wanda would stop wondering about his fidelity. Yes, it was true, he took good care of his mane, and he took a great deal of pride in the tone and pitch of his ferocious roar. But the reason he took pride in his masculinity and virile lion nature was so that she could enjoy it. Yes, he enjoyed the admiring glances he received from the neighboring five lion wives. But it was Wanda he came home to every night after a long day of hunting prey. It was Wanda who had raised their three baby cubs single-handedly. He wished she could understand that.
In the months after Lion Christmas, Eric noticed Wanda paying less and less attention to her appearance. She seemed depressed, unmotivated. She would forget to pack the lion cubs' lunches in the morning, and send them off to lion school without so much as a meerkat to munch on during their mealtime hour. By the time he got home from hunting, she was almost always drunk. Eric didn't know what to do. Wanda wouldn't talk to him anymore. When she did speak, she only accused him of infidelity, and the cubs were suffering.
Help came, eventually, from the very source that had unwittingly caused all the problems in the first lion family's household to begin with. All five of the neighboring mother wives came over for a visit. They had noticed a change in Wanda, and wanted to help. At first, Wanda shut them out, unable to bear the thought of these five wives, whom she so envied for their happiness and community, knowing that she was unfit as a mother. Eventually, she allowed the five mother lions to help her.
The five mother lions stayed with Wanda for six months. They brought their baby cubs over, and soon the household was alive with activity and joy. Wanda had never been so happy. Eric was pleased to see Wanda in good spirits. The five neighbor mother lions discovered that they liked Eric and Wanda's jungle better than their own, and sent a lion telegram to their husband lion, who had been living a lonely life alone in his jungle for the past six months.
"Dear father lion of the second family," the telegram read. "We have moved in with Wanda and Eric and are never coming home."
Samuel Merrin: The Definitive Short Story Collection
What I've found, however, is that a short story is addictive. It's small size makes it something that tempts the author with the possibility of perfection. I've found that, after writing a short story or essay, I read the same words over and over again in hopes of improving a word or sentence. The fine-tuning process of a short story is circular, and it is very difficult to stop the editing process once you've started. The story is so short that you think you can make it flawless. But anything created by the human hand is, of course, inherently flawed.
The short stories posted on this site are nowhere near perfect. These are quick stories that I concocted on a late night in a Peninsula coffee shop called La Tartine, fueled by copious amounts of brewed coffee and a lack of anything really better to do than jot down a few harried thoughts in short-story form. Pay no attention to the attempt at pseudo-literary-philosophy behind the curtain. This is a ridiculous site with random stories that I hope you enjoy, and that's all. I hope to update this site semi-frequently with new stories.