Pool Table

Contributor: Eric Suhem

- -
Oliver, just out of jail, was in the supermarket committing a holdup, threatening the employees with curare-tipped darts. As the frightened store manager was opening the safe, a bag boy emerged from the produce section, and threw fruit at Oliver’s head. A cantaloupe knocked Oliver out, and he slipped into oblivion.

The next thing Oliver knew, he was entering a pool hall, feeling disturbed by the neon-colored sprouts on the outside sign, which lit up the bleak alleyway in an organic glow. “Another sign of gentrification,” he declared darkly, walking through the door. He approached the cashier and upon payment was given a rack for the game, each pool ball replaced by a fruit or vegetable. The cue ball was an orange, the 1-ball was an apple, the 2-ball a head of lettuce, the 3-ball a lemon, the 4-ball a lime, and so on.

The rack was set and it was Oliver’s turn to break. He hit the cue ball (orange) into the 2-ball (head of lettuce), and it rolled across the felt, unraveling quickly, resulting in lettuce leaves strewn across the table. Oliver took a deep breath, trying to maintain his temper. After enough times hitting the cue ball (orange), it started to spring leaks, with orange juice and pulp joining the lettuce leaves on the felt. As the 6-ball and 7-ball (blueberry and raspberry) engaged in a number of collisions, they also began to come apart. “You have now created a fruit salad! Congratulations on your accomplishment, as we are also a dining establishment!” announced one of the proprietors cheerfully from behind the counter, quickly handing menus to Oliver and his opponent. The pool hall had been purchased by a nameless, faceless conglomerate that was combining various services to increase profits. Oliver glared at the proprietors, annoyed by the distractions.

Looking towards the dart board, Oliver pulled out a small case he had brought, filled with darts and a vial of curare. It was his hostile use of curare that had landed Oliver in jail. “When I was a kid, all I heard was ‘Eat your fruit, Oliver’…and now this,” he said, looking at the fruit scattered across the pool table. “I just wanted to play a simple game of pool, but now it’s time to play darts,” he added grimly, dipping the tip of a small pointed missile into the poisonous curare, aiming towards the proprietors.

Oliver gazed over at the pool table one more time, noting the tangerine in the middle of the green felt, which transported his thoughts back to when he was a kid. “Eat your fruit, Oliver!” There was always a bowl of tangerines in the middle of the kitchen table. The neighbors had a rickety pool table in their basement. Young Oliver was the best pool player in the neighborhood, and had gone on to win a number of tournaments. Everything seemed so full of promise. What had he done with his life since then? Oliver looked at the tangerine, and knew those days would never come again, but suddenly things seemed a little more clear. Maybe there was still time to change?… He put the darts and curare back into the case, grabbed the tangerine, and slowly walked home through the dream.


- - -
Eric Suhem lives in California and enjoys the qualities of his vegetable juicer.
Read more »
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
  • Digg
  • Sphinn
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Mixx
  • Google
  • Furl
  • Reddit
  • Spurl
  • StumbleUpon
  • Technorati

Snap, Snap, Snip, Snip

Contributor: Sue Ann Connaughton

- -
Snap, Snap, Snip, Snip

Whenever he felt lonely, Beau dug out the puppet, talked to it, played with it, as though it were George. He made the puppet, himself, after George moved, by cutting and pasting a photo of George’s face, dark and grainy in that schoolyard-photograph manner, onto cereal box cardboard. For the handle, he taped a twig on the back. Primitive, but Beau was only six years old. He stored the puppet in a secret shoebox, hidden behind clothes in his wardrobe.

When Beau was ten years old, his grandfather died. He hunted through family albums for photos of his grandfather and used them as models that he drew onto a rubber ball. No matter how the ball rolled, his grandfather’s face was always visible, always available to play a game of catch.

Beau’s parents divorced when he was seventeen, just as he was leaving for college. It wasn’t a surprise; his parents had separated once before, so he was prepared. Beau chose a photograph of them together, smiling. He mounted it on black poster board. With a razor-sharp tool, he carved it into a jigsaw puzzle with one hundred, tiny, intricate pieces. It worked as a two-sided puzzle: a person could put it together with the expected photo side up; or for an added challenge, fit together the reverse inky side, without pictorial clues for a guide. After he finished the puzzle, Beau immediately dismantled it and sprinkled the pieces into his secret shoebox, tucking them around the puppet and ball.

At age thirty, Beau married Doria, whom he adored so much that he began shooting photos of her from their first date, in anticipation of the day she wouldn’t be around.

As their first wedding anniversary approached, Beau secretly crafted a special gift for Doria. He sifted through hundreds of photos and had the prettiest one enlarged on heavy stock: a photo of Doria descending a staircase in her wedding gown. He sliced it into precise vertical strips, which he wove into a form and molded into a basket with the rearranged image on the outer side. On the bottom, he attached curved strips of balsa wood, so the basket could rock. On their anniversary, the “paper” anniversary, Beau presented the basket to Doria.

She examined his offering, inside and out. With her index finger, she traced the intersections where her image fractured into abstraction.

His heart pounded as he braced himself for the possibility that she might laugh at his foolish gift and leave him right then and there. Why did he ever think he could reveal the fruits of his weird hobby to a woman as normal as Doria.

Doria set the basket in the center of the dining table and tapped it, lightly.

“What an ingenious construction! I’ve never seen anything like it. Look, Beau, how easily it sways at the touch of my fingertip.”


- - -
Sue Ann Connaughton writes compact fiction from a drafty old house in the witch capital of North America, Salem, Massachusetts
Read more »
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
  • Digg
  • Sphinn
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Mixx
  • Google
  • Furl
  • Reddit
  • Spurl
  • StumbleUpon
  • Technorati

Brief Candle

Contributor: Manuel Royal

- -
Vingy was dead: first of all. He caught on fire -- well, somebody lit him on fire. Plus, he fell 300 feet from a revolving restaurant, onto a public fountain featuring a bronze statue of the Little Mermaid. That usually does it.

The fountain's flowing water put out the fire and rinsed a lot of blood down the drains, but Vingy's intestines and spine remained draped over the statue. The scene was cheerful in its color scheme (at first, until the blood darkened as it clotted) but, frankly, depressing in every other way.

Three blocks south from where much of Vingy was spread out so publicly, three dozen people had distributed themselves amongst a hundred chairs in a ballroom, mostly in the middle rows. They flipped through their seminar materials and waited for the main speaker, Reggie Vingy, to come out and explain how they'd get rich by badgering their acquaintances into distributing kits that would, at some point down the slope of an imaginary pyramid, allow somebody to sell somebody else a product, all using a principle that Vingy called Dynamic Value Exchange (DVE).

Vingy never showed; he was the late Reggie Vingy in every sense. Two senses, anyway. This became a family joke, repeated every Christmas when Vingy wasn't there to trim the tree. His children hung a Little Mermaid ornament and lit a candle.

His widow inherited the mantle of DVE royalty and strove to honor Vingy's legacy. And indeed, she ripped off many, many people, so perhaps somewhere Vingy was smiling. But definitely dead.


- - -
Manuel Royal was born, like Tristram Shandy, with a broken nose. He will die. In between, he lives and writes in Atlanta.
Read more »
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
  • Digg
  • Sphinn
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Mixx
  • Google
  • Furl
  • Reddit
  • Spurl
  • StumbleUpon
  • Technorati


Help keep Linguistic Erosion alive! Visit our sponsors! :)- - -


Archive