What makes a story a short story?




The most effective -- and creepiest -- short story I have ever read was a page and a half long in a paperback “pocket” book that I read back in 1954 or 55. I don’t recall the author’s name, but I do recall the story in every chilling detail. Set in the parking lot of a hospital at the end of her 3 - 11 shift, a nurse was getting into her car when a criminally insane patient she knew came up to her, killed her and ... well, you can imagine how the rest of that went, can’t you? 


The point I’m making is a simple one: A short story can be most any length, up to about 10,000 words (above that it sneaks over into becoming a novella). It has to tell a story, however simple. As poet Kenneth White said, a poem is the shortest form of short story. Some of these, though not poems, are very, very short. The following are several short-short stories from “Listening to the Elders”, a book I am writing and will send to my publisher in January. Your feedback is welcome.


 



Why older women drive

Pickup trucks


 


A year ago she tripped going up a neighbor’s front steps and dumped herself into the flower garden, breaking a hip. “I nearly died of mortification,” she said. Today she shows no sign of having broken anything, including her dignity. For transportation she drives a mid-sized Ford pickup truck.


“When you’re my age,” she said, “and you’re a woman and you drive a truck, when you want to turn left, people let you. They get out of your way. If I drove a car, it’d be different.”


“How old are you?”


“Seventy-three.”


“Oh.” I wouldn’t get in her way for anything, no matter what she drove.




Where do I go?



She is ninety-three years old and she doesn’t know where she is supposed to go. She stands next to the medication cart where two nurses are talking, expectant and silent. I look over at her and smile, and she comes over and says: “I don’t know where I’m supposed to go.”


I say: “Where would you like to go?”


She smiles. “I’d like to go to Heaven, but we don’t do that here, do we?”


I tell her: “No, we don’t, so here we are. Where would you like to go instead? Would you like to go to your room?” she says that’d be nice, but we have to ask the nurses, which I do. They give their permission, and I escort her to her room. A relative has given her a beautiful swing rocker for Christmas, and I remark how beautiful it is. When I leave, she is seated in it, like a queen or a child, a smile of satisfaction on her face.




Lovers



He was eighty-six years old and lived alone in his big house, and he told me with tears in his eyes that he had lost his wife of sixty-two years six months earlier. He told me how he’d met her, and I asked what his first thoughts were when they met. Standing there in his living room, he crossed his arms over his chest and, eyes closed, said: “Oh, she is so beautiful!” It’s clear that she has always been that beautiful, lovely, loved lady, who still lives in his heart of hearts. 


Her portrait hangs over the mantel of his fireplace, a truly beautiful woman with snow-white hair. I wished that I had met her. Come to think of it, I think I just did.




A cure for crabs


 

Alcohol does funny things to thinking, allowing people to reach conclusions that anyone in their right mind would know was nuts. This man had been an alcoholic from the time he was a kid back in Austria, and he spent all his life doing odd jobs between bouts of drinking. When I asked him how he’d managed to get himself in a mental hospital, he said he’d set his apartment on fire.


“You set your apartment on fire? How’d you happen to do that?”


“I had crabs.”


“Crabs? What does having crabs to do with setting your apartment on fire?”


“Well, I read somewhere that gasoline will kill them, so I went into the bathroom with a can of gasoline and sat down on the toilet and poured it on my privates to kill the crabs.”


“Yes…?”


“Then I lit a cigarette, and dropped the match in the toilet.” 


“Did you get rid of the crabs?”


“Oh, yah.”



Nuisance


 

I once met a retired physician who told me he’d given up his practice because he got tired of all the drunks and druggies coming in. They could be pretty insistent and were a hard lot to get rid of. He told me about one drunk who sat thee in his waiting room hassling him until he was about to have his nurse call 911, when one of his patients came through the door, a very large lady, who weighed in at somewhere between 350 and 400 pounds. She stood there eyeing the situation for a few moments, then marched over to where the drunk was sitting, stuck a finger in his face and said:


“Look, buster, if you don’t beat it, I’m going to sit on you right in front of all these people!”


Jolted by the prospect of her sitting on him, the drunk shut his mouth, got up, and fled.




The ancient bird

(Old Man Walking In The Snow)



We were in the midst of one of those late winter storms that Minnesota has when I saw him. It was one of those storms that dumps heavy, wet snow and blows it around in blasts of icy needles that sting your face and takes your breath away. As I stepped out through the door of the hospital where I work, the wind lunged at me, and I set off running for the bus shelter with one hand on my hat and the other gripping my briefcase. My face burned from the cold. Behind me the big flag, whipping and snapping on its tall pole, sent out loud rifling reports as the wind tore at it. The cold wind was bitter and biting.


When I reached the bus shelter, I went inside and pushed the button on the heater. There was no one in the shelter but me, and no one on the street but a few drivers who went slowly by hunched over their steering wheels, staring straight ahead, jaws clenched. I turned and looked back at the hospital, and it was then that I saw him, a very old man, coming slowly down the walk from the medical office building, lifting one heave-booted foot and then the other in a slow old man’s way. He was dressed in a long black overcoat that hung to his boot tops, and a hat on his head with flaps pulled down over his ears. He stopped, stamped his feet, struck his mittened hands together and looked back at the building as if wondering if it would have been wiser to wait until the storm subsided. Then he turned and continued toward the bus shelter. When he came to the ridge of snow that lay between him and the street, he stopped and looked at it. He stamped both feet. He lifted one foot way up and lowered it, then raised and lowered the other one. Then, holding his arms out like wings, he stepped up onto the ridge and, waving and waving his arms, hopped down into the street where he stamped his feet again and looked back at the medical office building one more time. Then, as if satisfied, he turned and walked down the street toward the bus shelter.


The old man’s feet were inside enormous buckled black rubber boots. As he walked, he moved them up and down in a deliberate sort of way, stopping every now and then to stamp each one on the packed snow, then moving on, the big boots going up and down, up and down, like slowly-driving pistons. Looking at him I could see that he was very, very old; his face was thin and gray and nearly swallowed up in the hat that came down to his eyebrows. As he came nearer, I saw that he had no teeth, and that he held his mouth in a tight O like a knothole in a tree. His eyes receded back into their sockets, from which they looked out like small wary animals from inside their burrows.


As I watched him, two women hurried into the bus shelter, holding their collars around their faces and exclaiming at the fury of the storm. The wind shook the plastic walls of the shelter, causing the older woman to exclaim that she hadn’t seen such a wind all winter, most people have better sense than to be out in it, to which the younger woman replied, “Yes, but look!” The old man,  having reached the intersection near our shelter, paused for one last look at the medical office building, then came stamping  his feet across the street toward us. When he got to the high ridge of snow that blocked his path, he stopped and gave it a long, hard look. Then he lifted one big foot and put it down, and repeated the motion with the other. He waved his arms. He struck his mittened hands together. Then, lifting one booted foot high into the air and looking straight at us with his bright black eyes, he came up the ridge like it was a long steep hill, picking up his booted feet and waving his arms, with his head thrust forward and his stubble-covered chin jutting out and the dark circle of his mouth pulled tight and the big boots slapping-slapping the snow.


At the bottom, he stopped and looked at us. Then he came stamping his feet into the shelter, all out of breath from fighting with snow banks and wind. He said something to us that sounded like “fuff-fuff-fuff” and “heh” and sent his eyes darting around over us, saying A”heh-heh, fuff” until the older of the two women turned to him and said, “Here, why don’t you sit down right here, Grandfather?” and guided him over to the long wooden bench at the rear of the shelter, under the heater. The old man backed up and started to sit down, but he straightened up again and looked at the woman with his whole aged face and reached out a hand and patted-patted her arm. She turned and looked at him and said “What?” and “Oh,” as he crinkled up the corners of his eyes at her, said “fuff-heh,” and sat down.


When the bus came a few minutes later, the women helped the old man to it through the roaring wind, then the rest of us got on. There were only the four of us waiting for the bus that afternoon, and only two or three on the bus. I sat toward the back and watched the old man. He got off a few blocks later and stood on the sidewalk waiting for the light to turn green. When it did, he was off, moving his huge booted feet up and down and holding his arms out from his sides, looking very much like a huge black flightless bird.


~ ~ ~ ~ ~


As Woody Woodpecker used to say at the end of a film, “Th-Th-Th-That’s all, folks!”