Micro Fiction by Steven Huff

DOOR TWO                                                

They made her dress in a clown suit, with long stupid shoes and a luminous red rubber nose, and a hat with a burping plastic frog.  But she doesn’t care. Because what she has to do this morning on TV might get her out of her lowlife apartment into a new place across the dirty river, one that comes with a washer and drier, no more pulling midnight duty in the laundromat, the one with two bullet holes in the window glass.  Except, about twelve million faces are watching her now (at least that is what the ratings say about this show) and she is haloed in burning hot light. The beaming host offers her fifteen hundred bucks worth of travel luggage. Or, do you want what’s behind one of those three doors? Ugh, she’s thinking, I don’t have any travel money, what am I going to do with suitcases? Sell them on e-bay?  Or Door Two, she wonders. Because two is her number: she has two kids with two dads, she still has two breasts although they found a lump in one last week and she’s scared, she has a couple two-year degrees—Pharmacist Assistant and Produce Management; though she couldn’t snag a job in either field—two copies of The Journey to Ixtlan left by the two dads (one of whom was truly a mystic) and she’s read both. Both dads stayed for two years. There’s two windows in her apartment, one in the living room and one in the kids’ bedroom. She has two driver’s licenses, although that is a long story. And now, before her, this damned door?

_____________________________________________________________________________

THE SEARCHERS                                         

Here’s one about a guy named Ed who worked in a shoe store, and who went to see The Searchers, a John Ford movie about a young woman who was kidnapped by Comanche Indians. I think it was from 1956. In the opening scene, gold titles appear on a dark screen: Texas 1868, and then a woman opens a cabin door on a sunny panorama of mesas.  Well, it was stunning, and Ed loved those scenes, and he saw the film nine or ten times until it left the first-run movie houses, and then he caught it a couple more times at the drive-in.  In fact, he had sex for the first time in the back seat of his car during the buffalo shooting scene. The majesty of those mesas.

I’ve got to get to Texas, Ed said to the manager of the shore store when he quit. He was in Texas a long time before he realized that The Searchers wasn’t shot in Texas, but in Monument Valley, Utah which doesn’t even look like Texas. And he’d seen the movie a few more times on the late show.  By then he’d worked in three or four shoe stores and was married and was drinking, because his own searching days were over and he knew it. Sometimes he liked to throw his tequila in the stove to watch it explode like John Wayne does in The Searchers. At least he got that satisfaction.

Steven Huff is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently A Fire in the Hill (Blue Horse, 2017); two collections of short fiction, most recently Blissful and Other Stories (Cosmographia, 2017); and he is editor of Knowing Knott: Essays on an American Poet (Tiger Bark Press, 2017). His blog, In Our Home Ground (inourhomeground.wordpress.com), is a chronicle of journeys to grave sites of authors in Upstate New York. He lives in Rochester and teaches in the Solstice Low-residency MFA Program at Pine Manor College in Boston.