Writing Life

Recently, National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” program held a Three-Minute Fiction contest. More than 5000 stories were submitted to the competition, none of them longer than 600 words. After reading over the winning stories online yesterday, I decided to write a few 600-word stories of my own. I’ve won a several contests sponsored by the Sacramento News & Review for stories as short as 59 words. Thus, I figured I wouldn’t find myself too constrained by a word limit of 600 words. I was wrong. It is extremely difficult to write a short story of no more than 600 words. I take off my hat to the winners of NPR’s contest. Below are three of my own efforts, which weigh in at 462, 583, and 595 words, respectively:

THE USELESS DIAMONDS

“Mother left them to me in her will. The last of the once-great Linlithgow estate. A few years later, after my divorce, I ran into financial difficulties. I couldn’t bear to sell them, so I reported them stolen and collected the insurance. Now, of course, they are far too notorious to be sold legally. Any knowledgeable jeweler in London would recognize them instantly. They’d have to be recut. The necklace broken up into individual stones and sold off separately. It would take a criminal mastermind to oversee it all, and I am no mastermind – criminal or otherwise. I cannot wear them. I cannot sell them. I cannot even give them away to my beloved niece, Clare. They are useless to me. And the effort of concealing them has finally grown too taxing for me to bear.”

“So you are traveling on this great ship to New York, where the diamonds are not as well known. Where the jewelers are less likely to recognize you. Where the police have no suspicions of you. You plan to resell them there and begin life anew in America. Is that it?

“Not at all. I plan to drop them over this rail at midnight and send them to the bottom of the sea. They have brought me nothing but ill luck. I shall be happy to see them go.”

“Surely, Lady Ainsworth, you will do no such a thing! Those diamonds were your mother’s last earthly gift to you.”

“The things I have learned about her since her death have tarnished my memory of her forever: The adulteries. The scandal in Nairobi. The suspicious death of the Earl of Bumbridge. You know…I’ve come to believe that these diamonds represent Bumbridge’s final revenge on my family.”

“But they must be worth fifty-thousand pounds! Please, Lady Ainsworth, I beg you not to destroy them. Let me buy them from you. If I can raise five thousand pounds before midnight will you sell them to me? I promise never to tell where I got them. You can give the money to your niece, if you like.”

“But they are cursed. Have you no superstitions?”

“I can’t afford them. Please, those diamonds could help save my father’s firm. He’ll be ruined if we can’t find enough capital to keep the mills running.”

“And do you happen to be carrying five thousand pounds on you?”

“Not a tenth that much. But if you’ll just give me two hours time, I’ll raise the money even if I have to borrow ten quid from every single gentleman on the Titanic.”

Lady Ainsworth opened her fingers and let the diamonds slip into the ink-black waters of the North Atlantic.

“I’m sorry she said. But I couldn’t bear to bring such bad luck upon you.”

PENNIES

Doug hated the pennies. Mr. Keyes hid them throughout the hospital before the start of each shift. If a janitor didn’t find all the pennies hidden in an assigned work area, Mr. Keyes would know he or she hadn’t done a thorough job of cleaning the area.

“I hid eleven pennies in your service area tonight, Mr. Holt. Why have you brought me only nine of them? Did you not clean behind all the toilets?”

Doug would shrug his shoulders and try to smile his way out of it. But Mr. Keyes couldn’t be charmed out of his commitment to keeping the hospital clean. If the pennies didn’t add up correctly, he would lead Doug back to the oncology department, or the outpatient clinic, or the maternity ward and figure out just what parts of it had been neglected that night. Somehow Mr. Keyes could always remember the placement of every penny he had hidden in a given workspace. And when he found a penny lying behind a bed or a toilet or a desk, he’d make Doug re-clean the entire room. Some nights, Doug had to thoroughly redo three or four rooms before he was allowed to punch out – all because of a few damn pennies.

Early in his tenure at the hospital, Doug tried to trick Mr. Keyes by keeping some extra pennies in his pocket. One night, when Mr. Keyes told him, “You missed three pennies, Mr. Holt,” Doug reached into his pocket and said, “Oh, here they are,” and added three more coins to the total. But this didn’t fool Mr. Keyes. He led a sheepish Doug back into the ophthalmology department and quickly discovered the areas that Doug had failed to clean.

Doug worked the graveyard shift, although they never called it that at the hospital (the shifts were referred to as “the daytime,” “the swing,” and “the overnight,” as if Doug’s onerous eleven p.m. to eight a.m. tour of duty were somehow akin to a children’s slumber party or a short camp-out). Whenever Doug arrived home from work late, Ginny would look at him and say, “Missed a few pennies?” And an irritable Doug would grunt in the affirmative.

Years later, when he was CEO of his own Silicon Valley firm, Doug still bent down to pick up every penny he saw glinting from parking lot, sidewalk, or supermarket floor. In magazine profiles this was often cited as an example of his tight-fistedness. “Doug Holt: the ultimate penny-pincher,” read the headline of one such profile in the Wall Street Journal.

But if you ask one of Doug’s employees about it, they’ll tell you a different story. They’ll say that his penny-grabbing is just another in the long series of eccentric behaviors that have marked his unconventional rise to the top of the industry, a series that began with the hiring of an elderly African-American gentleman, with no technological background whatsoever, to oversee productivity at the company’s first production facility. “All his competitors laughed at him,” these employees will tell you, “but Doug got the last laugh when that facility began producing record high efficiency numbers. What’s more, when the old guy retired to Florida after only two years of service with the company, Doug continued to pay him a full salary plus benefits. And later, when the man died, Doug financed a new pediatric center at the local hospital and named it after him. Now, does that sound like the behavior of a penny pincher to you?”

THE NOBLE BOLTER

She had a gift for breaking off engagements so tactfully that it seemed as if it wasn’t her idea at all, but yours. Weeks would pass before it occurred to you that you’d been dumped. Always she claimed to have done it for your own good, that her lowly origins would harm you socially, that the source of her wealth (her stepfather’s casino) would taint you politically, that her lack of a diploma would cause your intellectual friends to shun you both. We called her The Noble Bolter.

We were discussing her at the Harvard Club one afternoon and came up with the idea of hiring someone to exact revenge for us. We decided that Callison was the perfect man for the job. A recent graduate with tons of student debt, he had bundles of charm and rugged good looks that women found irresistible. We offered him $20,000 – half up front; half when the job was done. He was wary of the idea, but eventually we brought him on board.

We began inviting him to various social functions, where we would hint vaguely that he was connected to this or that great fortune on his mother’s side, that he was a shoo-in for some coveted government appointment, that he had friends in high places. Naturally, all this talk caught the attention of The Noble Bolter.

Soon the two of them were inseparable. In October, they announced their intention to marry the following July. We decided that April 1st should be the day that Callison jilted her. But he resisted the idea. You might say he had gotten warm feet. “I dunno, fellas,” he said, “I think I’ve really fallen for her.” We laughed at this. “When she finds out that you’re a penniless fraud,” we told him, “she’ll drop you like an autumn leaf. You may as well beat her to the punch and collect your ten grand.” Eventually we got him to see reason.

We wired his apartment for sound so that we jiltees could listen in while he did to her what she’d done to us. But it didn’t work out that way. As we listened in mute horror, he asked her to elope with him, to run out that night and get married by a justice of the peace in Atlantic City. Amazingly, she agreed. Before we could race over to his apartment and expose him as a fraud, they were gone.

Of course, we all knew it was only a matter of time before he’d join us in the Jiltees Club. We waited and we watched. When their son was born, we all thought: How tragic it will be when mom runs off to Bolivia with some surf bum and leaves Callison to raise the kid alone. Their second child, a daughter, looked so much like her mother we feared that someday the resemblance would come to haunt a lonely and abandoned Callison.

At their silver anniversary party, we thought it would be just like the Noble Bolter to use the occasion to announce her decision to end the marriage before it could grow old and stale and become a source of anguish for them both. It was exactly the kind of thing she’d do.

A few years later, after she’d been felled by cancer, we sat together at the back of the church and watched while Callison, flanked by his four children, wept bitterly before her casket. We couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. If only he’d listened to us, we thought. We could have spared him so much pain.