The Coffee Table

So, normally I don't post my fiction to my blog. Not out of embarrassment. I would love to hear what readers think. But because I'd like to try to publish most of it.

Many journals for short works, which is mainly what I write, do not accept stories if they have been previously published, and a portion of that number includes "previously published" as being posted to the author's blog.

I've run into this enough times that if I want to publish something, I find it best just to keep it to myself.

However, the flash piece below I have no intention of publishing, I guess. I wrote it for a class forever ago in undergrad in response to Willie Gass' Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife.

Here is the Amazon description of the text:

"In this paean to the pleasures of language, Gass equates his text with the body of Babs Masters, the lonesome wife of the title, to advance the conceit that a parallel should exist between a woman and her lover and a book and its reader. Disappointed by her inattentive husband/reader, Babs engages in an exuberant display of the physical charms of language to entice an illicit new lover: a man named Gelvin in one sense, but more importantly, the reader of this "essay-novella" that has attained the status of a postmodernist classic. Originally published by Knopf in 1971, published by Dalkey Archive Press in 1989, now available again."

Since this piece has such a singular function, I might as well share it here.

So, keeping that in mind and that I also was reading Toni Morrison's Paradise at that time, here is my flash piece in response to Gass' text.

 Coffee Table

     The coffee table is surrounded by men of no importance and their friends, the actors and writers (the real pimps of their town), and sits low to the ground and unnoticed. It is covered with cards, red and blue chips, and half eaten sandwiches, and it is screaming inside of its milky white skin. Dark circular rings embody the past of drinks and the charades of their drinkers. There is one spill, a stain near the top, that while many stories are attached to it, no one actually recalls how it got there. They only know that it is purple and milky yellow and creates a belt around the edge.

    The coffee table loudly expresses its inner dreams and its crimes of the past, while occasionally pausing for poetry or mockery of its guests. The room however is silent, bar the husky laughs and strident bantering of the men. “I am used, but I am loved, but I am forgotten!” the table pleads and it crashes to the floor. The men are suddenly still. They are shocked and appalled and their bodies fill with guilt. 

     “The table!” one shouts, and the others hush him and move toward the walls. They do not know what to do, for as they stare at the broken table, it is not a table at all but a woman, a wife, sprawled naked on the floor. The dark, cup shaped circles now appear to be bruises. The purple and yellow stain remains still a mystery. But no one sees these details. All they see is the woman, save for one man in the back. Wille Gass tilts his head and he does not see a woman at all, nor does he see a table, but he sees literature in its purest form. He leaves the room in search for a pen.