Two Stories
—
Kathy Fish
A Good Soldier
If you are sad or depressed, obey. A sulky beauty or a gloomy genius should obey. This means you should obey. The quicker the better. With snap and accuracy. Make your voice and face cheerful and bright. Make your skin fresh and sweet. Make your system free from impurity, your suffering and sorrow clean and healthy. A higher kind of cleanliness. Obey Captains and Councillors. She would obey. She would rule a big, undisciplined mob. This means she is better than you. A good housekeeper should obey dust and dirt. Obey, whether you are cleverer, or older, or larger. Obey her orders. In a great crisis, a small well trained army can always conquer. This means obey first and complain afterward. Cheerful music, cheerful plays and cheerful books obey! Obey, instantly, just as a good soldier obeys. Nobody will thank you. You try to endure dust and dirt. Think about this: You will never do anything. Think about this: A pure mind cannot endure. Obey. The quicker the better. This means long practice in obeying. The girl or woman who cannot obey can never govern the mob. The mob is only a crowd of separate persons.
Save thousands of lives.
Turn defeat into victory.
Obey!
A collage of excerpts from Scouting for Girls: Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts, 1925, Project Gutenberg.
❊
Time Can Do So Much
“You see, my memory is defective.” *
“Extraordinary trick the memory plays.” *
“Your only hope left is to disappear.” *
“Time blindness’ can mean you are always late, or always way too early to avoid being late. It can also lead to poor estimates of how long a job will take, leading to ‘over-promising. Days, weeks, months can be meaningless…” *
“Extraordinary trick the memory plays.” *
“Your only hope left is to disappear.” *
“Time blindness’ can mean you are always late, or always way too early to avoid being late. It can also lead to poor estimates of how long a job will take, leading to ‘over-promising. Days, weeks, months can be meaningless…” *
Because time is one-dimensional and space is three-dimensional. Because time is the plate and space, the long hallway. Because love is a wolf.
I am cradling my grandmother. I am rocking her against my bony chest. I am ten years old and she is fat, squalling, inconsolable. She knows who I am, but she cannot be consoled. She and I have lost each other a million times over. We are of the same ilk.
There is no timeline or lifeline or line in the sand.
She takes no initiative. ~Sister Mary William, my 4th grade report card
Sister William has my number. She hates me, but she gets me. Had. Got.
Which is to say, Sister Mary William is no fool.
Time is on my side. Yes it is.*
You are strange and ungovernable, is what she says.
What she means is, unlike time, I cannot be managed.
I watch the moon rise and the sun set. I watch my mother’s hair turn gray. She is bouncing my son on her lap. I am the child, standing next to them on the plate of time.
I may be making this all up.
I mean I definitely am.
Which is to say, this is a complete fiction.
To be time blind is to be forever stuck in the present. I call it living in the Now. Maintenant.
Though in truth I am living in both the now and the then.
And the wolf stares at me from the pile of blown snow.
I am the child and the woman and the mother. My grandmother is convulsing in the bed next to me and I didn’t know what to do then and I still don’t know what to do. The neuropsychologist rubs my collarbone with his thumb and I draw back, but I do not slap him. We are living in the junior one bedroom with the faulty plumbing and the Cape Cod overrun with mice and the house in Sydney we can’t afford. My son is a newborn, a toddler, a preschooler strapped to an MRI machine, a nineteen year old with premature male pattern baldness. He is always there at the end of the long hallway of space and I am always here, crawling towards him on the plate of time.
My husband says, do you remember this and this and this, and I say I don’t. I don’t.
I mean I do but it’s all a blur.
Which is to say, this is a complete fiction.
Which is to say, this fiction is incomplete. •
* from Waiting for Godot
* from the Online Adult ADHD Magazine
* from the poem, “Summer Day,” by Mary Oliver
* from “Time is On My Side” by the Rolling Stones
Kathy Fish‘s stories have been published or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Five Points, Guernica, Swamp Pink, Electric Literature, Denver Quarterly, Best American Nonrequired Reading, the Norton Reader, and Norton’s Flash Fiction America. She has been honored with a Copper Nickel Editor’s Prize and multiple appearances in both the Wigleaf Top 50 and the Best Small Fictions series. The author of five short fiction collections, Fish teaches a variety of writing workshops online. She also publishes a bestselling craft newsletter on Substack: The Art of Flash Fiction. Her writing has been generously supported by fellowships from the Ragdale Foundation and the Kerouac Project.
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