Happy Valentine’s Day.

After all these years, I still don’t like being away from you,
whether it’s a three-hour flight halfway across the country,
or when you run up to the store just a few blocks away.

(Grocery shopping with you is one of my favorite things to do.)

I’m a man of words who doesn’t know what to say.
After all these years, you still leave me     …speechless.

I live in a fantasy world, and it’s all my wife’s fault.

Saturday, July 21, 2012

In my world, there are no power outages leaving us in sweltering heat, no grouting in the shower that needs to be replaced, no weeds to pull, no raccoons pooping on our deck, no anxiety from the daily mess of life, the stress from which would make a Navy Seal feel like “Flat Stanley.”

In my world, I’m married to a beautiful blonde who still looks exactly like the college picture of her I carry in my wallet. In my world, whenever she walks into the room, no matter what’s happening that day, all I see is the two of us sharing a palm tree at the edge of a turquoise ocean.

I live in a fantasy work and it’s all her fault – and only one of countless reasons that I always have and always will love her.

“Hey, good morning. ..Where are you?” I hear her coming down the stairs.

Jeez, she’s up early. I’ve got to hurry up and post this.

“Happy anniversary, honey!” she tells me, cruising into the kitchen where I’m typing frantically at the table.

“Hey. You too!” And then I realize, pressing the WordPress “Publish” button in the nick of time, looking up to see her smiling at me… It’s all true. I really am married to a beautiful blonde.

-wf

Happy Valentine’s Day

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Today is the one day of the year, so we learn as kids, when we are commercially compelled to acknowledge our affection for someone special. For me, it all started with one of those no-envelope cards kids buy in bulk. I wrote my name on it and left it, when she was hanging up her coat, for the little girl with short, curly blonde hair sitting two rows over and three desks up in Miss Brewer’s second grade class. (“If only, just maybe, she feels the same way about me,” I remember thinking to myself. “ ..Oh. Uh oh. She’s turning, holding my card and now she’s smiling at me. ..Oh, jeez. What do I do now?!”)

Decades later, she still has me asking the same question. “Jeez, what do I do now?” For many more years than I can count on all my fingers and toes, I’ve been married to that girl with the short blonde hair. Not the same one I met in elementary school. Not exactly. It just seems that way, as if we’ve always been together, as if that was the way it was supposed to be from the very beginning. It’s a good feeling and I’m pretty sure that was when, back in Miss Brewer’s second grade class, I fell in love with the girl with the short blonde hair I met in college and married a few years later.

Mary

Short Fiction for Guests of the Wordfeeder
Thursday, February 2, 2012

Time to write another short story, but I’m not sure what I should write about. ..Hm. Should that be “about what I should write,” so I don’t end up with a dangling preposition? I don’t care. I don’t like the way it sounds.

I need a storyline. You know, a plot, not to be confused with a “plat” which is a drawing of a lot, versus “Gersplat!” which is the sound you make when you fall off a building onto the pavement, followed by “buh-bump” when the bus runs you over just when you started to get up.

I haven’t written a detective story for a while.

Maybe Mary will be horny and stop by after she gets home from work. Do I mind being her go to guy for an occasional quickie? Are you kidding? You haven’t seen Mary. Actually, yes I do mind. She hangs out with me. We have a great time talking, laughing at stuff, rubbing body parts. She even stays over some nights, always at my place for some reason. Heck, I know the reason. We’re good together in every respect, except in public. That’s because she has a boyfriend. He’s a dentist. How boring is that?

Last Picked

Short Fiction for Guests of the Wordfeeder
Friday, December 30, 2011

“Hey.”

“Hey. ..I’m just finishing up. What can I..”

“Some of us are going out for burgers, the little Happy Hour kind. Why don’t you join us?”

“Well, for one thing, I don’t eat beef and I have absolutely no social graces.”

“Why don’t you eat beef? Is it a religious thing?”

“No. It’s a saturated fat thing.”

“What about forks? Do you eat with your fingers, or do you use forks?”

“Only when I order soup.”

“Great. What more can a girl ask? You’ll fit in perfectly.”

The Elevator Trilogy

Sunday, October 23, 2011

Part 1: Going up.

Our story begins the morning after the night when the crew from Otis started renovating the other elevator. There were only two. True, the building was relatively short, a mere 28 stories tall, having been built in a era before downtown property values pushed buildings to the sky, but the elevators were soooo slow, so crowded, stopping on virtually every floor, they were the prefect place, you guessed it, for love.

Of the twelve people waiting in the lobby, two of them, unbeknownst to each other, were about to meet. For the sake of discussion, we’ll call them Bob and Jane, not because I’m trying to protect their identities, but because those were their names. Their names may have been ordinary but, trust me on this, they were not.

Imperfect Together

Short Fiction for Guests of the Wordfeeder
Monday, September 5, 2011

“You know,” Greg mumbled into his pillow, wondering if he’d been drooling, “I can feel you staring at me.”

“That’s not possible,” Georgia responded from where she was sitting up against her pillows, her knees up, one hand on the TV’s remote control waiting to see if she should change channels.

“Are you staring at me?”

“Well, yes. Sort of.”

“How did I know?”

“Because you can feel the intensity of the anguish emanating like laser beams…”

“Like red laser beams.”

“Right. Like red laser beams out of my electric blue eyes.”

“That’s it exactly.” Sitting up, Greg grabbed and stacked up his pillows against the headboard, fluffing them just so, scrunched his tush up and interlocked his fingers while staring mindlessly at Jimmy Fallon’s monologue. “Okay, I’m up. What’s bothering you?”

Happy Anniversary!

To my wife who, unbelievably, is more beautiful now, in all respects, than she was the day I met her, from her husband who is not… (Now how is that fair?)
Happy Anniversary!
Thursday, July 21, 2011.

Although it’s been a while, the number of years we’ve been married doesn’t matter. All I know is that I’ve been in love with you forever and always will be.

-wf, aka “me”

Shiny Things

Short Fiction for Guests of the WordFeeder
Sunday, May 15, 2011

His handwriting was something you had to learn to read. It was quick, the way he talked, going this way and that, often without stopping between the words. Slightly out of control, but in an artistic way. And so began another entry, the way he started all the others.

“This is the Journal of Jason Sinners,” he wrote at the top of a fresh page. “Wednesday, April 20, 2011.” He’d be given a beautiful leather bound diary, but preferred to write on single sheets of copier paper he kept in a drawer, still in the torn paper the ream had come wrapped in, next to an open box of his favorite pens. He like the gel kind, black ink, with the medium tip, that moved effortlessly across the page. There was a notebook computer, screen up, to his left on the table he used as a desk, but there was something about drawing his thoughts on paper that he preferred.

Rubbing the pen for a moment, he let his hand settle into position and wrote, “She was a girl who liked shiny things.”