Small cruelties of children

By will dewees

We all have children, don’t we? Or know some? At least everyone can claim to have seen, or maybe just been, a child at some time or another. See whether you can find the child in this fourth collection of flasch fiction, Small cruelties of children. Some are easy. In other stories you have to make a little effort. But in a few you will have to find the child in yourself. Or not.

• Language: English
• Publisher: will dewees
• Release date: Jun 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476470665

Book preview

Small cruelties of children

By Will Dewees

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also by Will Dewees

On a China country bus

The great Amesville, Ohio, flood of 1998

Memoir of a liar and cookbook

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Village newspapers near Athens, Ohio, rave about Will Dewees’ latest step on the banana peel of writing, namely Small cruelties of children. Soon to be available all around Athens County, Ohio.

The Trimble Trimbune

If every writer wrote like this one, maybe readers would get used to it. The real question is how he can call himself a children’s writer. Dick and Jane, and their teenager sister, Flossy go out of their way not to be seen with this Spot. Other than that, all the stories are short so if you don’t like some, I personally didn’t like many, you can just skip them and try to find one worth reading. I got through it very quickly.

Evelyn Wood, Editor in chief

Lottridge Ledger

I recommend all but a few words of the author’s oeuvre this time. If I could remember anything at all about this latest book, I would be able to tell you which words those were. I guess I wondered why, uh. Oh, yeah, that was it. I wondered why he wrote them.

Pablo Thescher, Publisher

Jacksonville Journal-Companion

Nobody said reading Small cruelties of children would be easy, but who would have predicted it would be so difficult, so confusing, so annoying. I want to keep this review short so I can finish reading his last few…, what are they? Stories? Tests? Bloviation?

Your roving reader

The Collegetown Argus- a tabloid

This is the fourth book in a seemingly endless series of flash fiction, or so the author claims. Claims it’s fiction rather than some strange beast, descriptions and narratives that appear to be stories, or is it just the opposite? Too much monkey business, so don’t pick it up because you won’t be able to put it down .

A library tattler

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We all have children, don’t we? Or know some? At least everyone can claim to have seen, or maybe just been, a child at some time or another. See whether you can find the child in this fourth collection of flasch fiction, Small cruelties of children. Some are easy. In other stories you have to make a little effort. But in a few you will have to find the child in yourself. Or not.

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Small cruelties of children

by Will Dewees

Will Dewees copyright 2012

[e-mail]

Athens OH 45701

First Epub 6/12

Smashwords edition, license Notes

This ebook is licensed for just your own personal enjoyment. It’s not good to resell it or even just give it away to other people. Imagine how many sales I’d lose if you shared it somewhere. To be fair to me, be sure to get someone else who wants to read it to buy it. If you’re reading what someone else bought, it’s better to pay for your own copy from Smashwords.com. That way you reward me for writing the book. That’s the ethical way, right? The way you’d like it to work if you were writing.

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To those kids,

you know the ones.

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We were all young once, I think.

Molly

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Acknowledgments

My extraspecial thanks to Judith Daso who spent hours coaxing me to make the stories easier to read. She did her best, but I never could work out that easier stuff.

And to seven year old Simon Dewees-Hanna who created the graphics in this book with his special skill.

To Brian Blauser and Thomas Hodges for the kernels of stories that I went on to spoil, I’m sure. To Donald M. Wirtshafter, Jr., Atty. at Law (go Don E!), who supplied all the imagination I needed for these and many other stories. To XiaoYue who makes me think about stuff I never would have thought of. To John Knouse, aka Jaques House, the hero of the hyphen, for immaculate and insightful proofreabing.

And last of all for being first of all, the Farians, ah, that crew that put meaning to Julia Farver’s phrase, paradise with politics, thanks for the memory glitch. You’d be surprised how much I still love ya. Uproar becomes folklore.

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By the way, these are stories, all made up. You may think you recognize people or situations, but they are all fiction. They’re not about anyone living, dead, or otherwise. They’re not ripped from the headlines or lifted from my friends list. So don’t get all huffy or feeling like you’re getting some inside dope. They’re just stories.

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Contents

Prolog

Super powers

Apology

How to wipe yourself

The crying booth

Envy versus jealousy

Tadcaster Road

Mercury

Stuck

New course

Why people talk

It was just a seed

Flashing lights

A story with a dunk tank

Barn door

Dancing

Deaf and dumb

You can have it all

Eat in Togo

Garmin

Body double

Fan out

Parents buy a clock

What you want to learn

Aphorisms to remember

The value of jade

Midnight

Swan poem

Plagiarism

Eyas

Just too many

Attention

Trap happy

Humboldt’s parrot

Speling bee

Gravy

We buy silos

Flash mob

Eating out of his hand

Onions

Crude

What just made me think of Paul Tescher?

Ask elders

Daai

Switching

Prints

Who are you like?

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Prolog

Description is never enough. A telling, however detailed and evocative, is no more than the natter of old folks, the prattle of children, those-were-the-days tales.

I have just returned and sit facing you across a stiff linen table cloth, still weary from my journey.

You. Elbows on the table, forearms columns up to your hands on your temples, plying me with questions as if the traveler were the oracle.

But I. Because I’m impeded by spoon and napkin, must only nod to your love, make body promises, use other less proximate communication than words. The metaphor is the message and its interpretation is the answer.

Description is never enough.

The story, however detailed and

evoking, is no more than

the natter of old folks, the

prattle of children, those-were-the-days tales.

I have just returned and

sit facing you across a stiff linen table cloth,

still weary from my journey.

You. Elbows on the table,

forearms columns up to your hands

on your temples,

plying me with questions as if

the traveler were the oracle.

But I. Because I’m impeded

by spoon and napkin,

must only nod to your

love, make body promises, use other less proximate

communication than words.

The metaphor is the message

and its interpretation

is the answer.

Ever since I was a child, I’ve been serious about that as you will find out. Very serious.

Will Dewees

The Light House

Winter Solstice, 2011

return to table of contents

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Super powers

Why don’t they work? They did work. They used to work. They have to work or…or…something awful is going to happen. Super powers have to work.

The first time I tried on the tights, the mask and the tunic and the gloves, I could fly. I could leap from my bedroom window upstairs in Mommy and Daddy’s house and soar over the city watching for crime with my eagle vision. I was red and green with a narrow yellow line down the back of the helmet and the satin of the tunic. There were fins on the gloves. And, oh, that cape!

There was an almost dyadic division between destiny and freedom. I mean, I would fight crime and win without even a nod to the rule of law and the constitution. I can see that now. So you know how overwhelming the super powers were to me then.

I wore the costume all the time. I had a pajamas version of it that pretty closely resembled the actual one. Those gauntlet fins were sharp, so when I went to bed, my mommy made me put them on that little table next to the night light. That way I could slip into them easily in case of a crime happening. And the hat or the helmet, whatever you call it. It was right there in the bed with me, next to my pillow. The mask was tucked inside it so I could move swiftly if I had to.

At the playground swings with mommy and my little sister. She couldn’t walk yet and she ate sand if you put her into the sandbox. And every night from those swings, I would fly up into the sky over my house and protect my sandy little sister from the forces of evil.

I never worried about what people thought. It was what I wore. Mommy tried to get me to wear overalls. She said it would be like Clark Kent so I wouldn’t be so obvious, but who wouldn’t want to be obvious when he had super powers? I mean, duh, if someone has superpowers it’s always obvious to evildoers anyway. So why hide it if it showed?

Did you know everyone has one super power? You are using it right now. Until I mentioned it, you weren’t paying any attention to the sensations all around you. No gravity. Not your butt on the chair, your arm on the table, the glasses on the bridge of your nose, that tattoo that was itching just a minute ago. Of course, now that I mention it, you can feel all or any of those. In a way you descended into your body from that dimension where everything was in your head.

So here’s how you fly. Just lie down somewhere comfortable and that’s quiet enough. Someplace where you can just, be, I guess, yes, just be. It’s like that white elephant exercise. Someone tells you, Don’t picture a white elephant, and then you do, but you’re not feeling where your shoe scrunches your toes. You’re not feeling anything while you’re thinking about that elephant.

Well, at some time as you lie there, your mind will start to wander and you’ll know it’s wandering and you’ll call it back by noticing. You’ll do that a couple of times and then, while you’re thinking all that, you won’t feel your back on the bed until you notice. The only part of flying that will challenge you is to stop noticing.

As soon as you can just let your mind wander, your body will fly along. Try it.

It’s the other super powers that are the problem, that is, most people don’t have them. I don’t mean Plasticman that stretched all over and around corners. Obviously, that’s not a real super power. You can see how someone could spin so fast they caused tornadoes that swept up the crooks’ getaway car. Or when you see some of these modern wooden legs with all their springs and computers, it’s possible that someone could have them put on. Those aren’t the powers that I wonder about. But take X-ray vision, for example.

Not everyone has this one, and it’s mostly men. On the Sunday funnies page or in a comic book, you see a fish’s skull with the bones showing all the way down to the tail. Or a skeleton behind a window -looking X-ray thing. That’s the most common one. Every once in a while, when you looked at somebody, you could see vertebrae and phalanges. It held for just a moment and then you were back to seeing clothes and shoes and hair between you and what you saw before. Some people can do it. You could try. Just look at someone and think of that fish in the cartoon section of the funnies. Think of those bones and maybe you can see them in somebody.

Strength is the other. Everybody’s heard those stories of a little old lady lifting up the front of a Volkswagen to free her granddaughter who was pinned under a tire. Back your car over a favorite pet, a newborn, your lover, and see whether you can lift the car. People have dealt with steel beams and collapsed roofs, crushed buses and boulders. So there are lots of ways to tap into that super strength.

But just floating around isn’t flying, and strength includes not getting hurt when you fly into a building in the fog because your X-ray vision was on the blink. Up until now, now that I’ve done what I’ve done and then done it again, up until now, I’ve used my powers for good, or so I thought. But there must be some sort of prism that good goes through, a prism that splits good into all its gradations and what I did was on the red end of good, and I knew it.

So now from this window, I can see through floors that they are coming and they are armed, big armed men. I’ve fashioned a cape out of one of the curtains. I know it looks silly, but a bucket is all I have for my head and the gloves are the yellow ones the cleaning lady used when she washed the sink. No fins.

This is far beyond floating. Now or never. When I jump, no, leap from the roof of this sky scraper, I have to fly. I know I used to fly. Or else, I need the strength power, the one where nothing can hurt me even if I hit the ground.

return to table of contents

Apology

So this Chinese friend of mine, kind of like a brother really, somebody I really like, told me about apologizing to his girlfriends. Tian is sort of a genius. He made it through China’s brutal Cultural Revolution in a gang of kids who didn’t join the Red Guard Youth, just did their own mischief. This was in the late 60’s and early 70’s, right. His gang would flash mob a vendor who had showed up to sell veggies. This was in the days before Mao’s Red Guard were branding the trembling vendors reactionaries for having private garden plots. Here’s something Tian could have apologized for, he and those kids ripping off some man risking his poor peasant life to sell a few cabbages and some squash. They’d mob him, so many kids that he couldn’t identify any one of them. They’d grab what they could and disappear before anyone could do anything. And nobody would anyway. The police were at the whim of the Red Guard’s marauding teenagers and the greedy manipulators during the Cultural Revolution. The police couldn’t do anything about crime, let alone something as petty as some poor carrot seller’s troubles. No, that’s not what Tian chose to apologize for.

Half a generation later in college, Tian put more time in on poker (for the money) and bridge (for the stimulation) than he did on his books. His college years were during an expansive time. In the late 1980s the Central Kingdom was opening up, offering economic opportunity. An electronics degree from a university as well known in China as Stanford is here, Zhejiang University, Zheda. The place where the photo telemetry for China’s bomb was developed on little old Apple computers. No, Tian played championship soccer and won swim meets. He just soaked it in during classes and scanned the poorly written textbooks the night before the exam. Usually he was at the top of his class. He never smoked or drank in college, unlike the seven other undergrads he shared his dorm room with. He didn’t sleep much. And he had five girlfriends in three years of college.

Getting into college in the 80s was like stepping into heaven for a Chinese boy ready to graduate from high school. In ’76, when Mao Died, Tian’s mother returned to her position as a head teacher, and his father to the principal’s office. Tian was the oldest son. They knew he was bright. He would go to the finest university, Xinhua in Beijing, or Zheda in nearby Hangzhou. So his mother arranged for special tutoring and entrance exam prep for him. By now his