Flash Fiction Friday

Thanks to JJ, for posting this little exercise, and to the universe that has allowed me the time to actually do it this week. Don't know if I like this piece, this thing I have created. But once the thought was there, I had to exorcise it, put it down so I could analyse it. Just don't know if I like it, though. (For more info on this Flash Fiction business, go here.)

I thought you were supposed to be a writer.

I am.

You went to school for it. To be a writer. You teach it.

Yes.

Well, doesn’t seem like one should go to school for it. To get some letters to place behind their name that spell it out.

MFA doesn’t spell writer.

You’re supposed to be a writer and you don’t even get my metaphor.

Rewind it, then.

Art can’t be taught at school. It’s something you either have or you don’t. You can refine it, sure, but writing is art.

If you want, I can bring out my lesson plan for this debate. It happens every first day of every freshman workshop.

I don’t want a lecture, I want a writer. I want Hemmingway in Cuba and Spain. With his little notebook in the trenches of France.

He was a journalist in the beginning and he became an artist. He didn’t just spring out of the womb and write a Pulitzer Prize winner with a red crayon.

It’s not about the words. I like your words. You write good little stories. Little? Sorry, I didn’t mean to say little.

But you want Hemmingway’s cirrhosis, is that it?

Well, there is something romantic in that. Don’t deny it. Parties and mistresses and muses. Disillusionment. Travel. The alcoholic author.

Think about Bukowski. That man could drink.

They say Kerouac was so prolific because of the cocaine. And Lewis Carroll and his opium, that hookah-smoking caterpillar.

So you are saying that you would still love me if I did more drugs or drank?

Not really. I’m saying that brilliance is usually associated with some sort of tragic flaw, some sort of wild and unmanageable vice. A wild-eyed passion of some sort, any sort. Artists, authors are allowed to swim outside the realm of the normal so they can return to the rest of us and share what they saw.

If you want an alcoholic, you can always go date-hunting at an AA meeting. Don’t think what you see will turn you on the way you think but…

Authors are supposed to be depressed. Messy. Absent-minded. Libidinous. A bit crazy. Nietzsche went insane at 44.

I went to a psychiatrist for three years.

But you were cured. And your house is neat as a pin. I’ve seen you work and it’s with a non-fat smoothie, a thesaurus, and like clockwork. Writers are supposed to scribble down jolts of inspiration on the backs of napkins, to say weird yet poignant things to perfect strangers. Not carefully plot out a character like writing a To Do list on a Palm Pilot.

You don’t like my work.

No, I do like it.

Then what?

There is just something a little bit quiet about it. About you.

Brilliance and art are products of flaw then. And I’m not brilliant to you.

Not like I expected.

What if I said that if you left me, I wouldn’t know what to do? That I would kill myself out of desperation. Would that make me crazy enough for you to respect me?

I wouldn’t believe you.

You are a waitress, for Christ’s sake!

And you were supposed to be a writer.