Heads Up

The first time I saw How the Grinch Stole Christmas was 1969, the same year that Tim was my first boyfriend. We watched it together, Tim and I, along with my brother’s other best friend Doug. My brother wasn’t there somehow, even though we were at my house.

We watched Grinch in a lightless room, something my family never did. It was believed that watching a bright screen with no other light in the room was reckless and hazardous, and could have tragic consequences, which remained vague and therefore almost mystical. Doug sat at one far end of sofa, Tim at the other. I curled up with my feet resting against Doug and my head in Tim’s lap. Every so often, he reached down and touched my hair.

The magnificently long-suffering, but loyal and philosophical dog Max. The clenched-hearted Grinch. The village of Who’s whose joy at their mutual sense of belonging transcends all evils. Snuggled between two Nice Boys, I felt safe and warm and protected and loved in a way that was precious and rare.

When the boys left and my parents said that They Had To Talk With Me, I was certain that I was gonna get clobbered for watching the television set in the dangerously dark room. A terrible wave of guilt shot through me, a pang at having been so lulled, so incautious.

“Never, ever put your head in a boy’s lap.”

This was so entirely unexpected, it took me a minute to even decipher the words. The meaning. And when I did, I was even more bewildered. “What?” I said.

“Your head was in Tim’s lap. That’s not something you can do. Ever.” One of them said while the other stood there in a rare display of rock-solid alliance.

“What?” I said again, looking from one to the other.

“It’s not fair. To the boy,” my mother said. “It’s too stimulating.”

My father bit his lip.

As I work on getting my third completed novel Out There, I have been playing around with several new ideas, and it’s possible that one has taken hold! I have long been intrigued by writing a full-length work that takes place within a time frame that is less than 24 hours (think Mrs. Dalloway, Ulysses, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, etc.). I have recently become intrigued by the possibility of telling the entire story in separate pieces of flash fiction — each of which would be entirely free standing, but all of which together would tell the tale. The piece above is the latest flash.