Sometimes I think about things . . . while I'm walking . . . I have silent conversations with myself that help me clarify how I feel, how I view the world.

Here are some things I thought about this week:

People as Books

I think every person is a story. People like to say that our lives are books and we're each our own protagonist, but I see it a bit differently. This train of thought started out as my questioning why women like "bad boys" or, really, complicated men versus simply very nice ones. And it's not about fixing them or changing them. It's more that those complicated men are better stories. They're more interesting than a guy who had a happy, stable childhood.

I'm not saying this is right or wrong. I married a perfectly nice, good man. But when guys ask, "Why? Why do women like guys like that?" I think this is at least partly the answer.

We're all stories. And not all books appeal to everyone. Which is why not everyone is going to love you. And some books you don't keep forever. Which is why some people will "read" you and then walk away when they're done with you. But you belong in someone's library. For some people, you're a keeper. You've just got to find the right people for that, the people who read you and get you and treasure you.

We Are More Than What Happens to Us

That said, I began to think about how people perceive one another. In particular, I began to think how one's perceptions change when one knows something specific about a person.

I'm tiptoeing here. I should come out and say it. What I was thinking about was the way people perceive victims of sexual assault. How, once a person knows you've been a victim, that's sometimes all they see or think about you.

I said to myself, What do you see when you look at the moon? Well, you see the moon. And you often think of how beautiful she is that night, or you talk about the man in the moon, or the rabbit, or the goddesses associated with the moon. You maybe think of romance. Your first thought is never about all the meteoroids that impact the moon, leaving their marks on her. Because the moon is more than that, just as we are more than the events that impact us. The moon is still seen as a whole. She is not seen as a collection of pits and dimples. She is not looked at as broken. She still shines and is still beautiful, and so are people who have suffered.

Love Is Not a Universal Constant

We like to talk about love as being universal. As though we all have the same metric for love. You can ask people if they know what love is, and most if not all will say, "Yes." But their idea of love and yours and mine and anyone else's is not the same. It's rather selfish to assume your version of love is the correct one, the one that everyone must also live by.

People feel love differently and show love differently. And different relationships, too, have different forms of love.

I get tired of love being presented to me (in books, movies, wherever) as: "This is how it is, this is how it's done, this is what it means." There is no standard. I wouldn't even say there's a "normal" for love. Everyone has their own normal.

We all understand love as a concept. But we do not all feel it or act it the same way.

Those are the things I thought about while walking this week. I really just wanted to write them down, though they sounded much better in my head. Ah well. Better to capture them partly if not perfectly.

Surprise

I saw the legs first, which may seem strange, but as I turned from slipping the Privacy Please over the knob, it was the line of the legs that fell into my view, the way they negligently stretched from behind the desk because he was sitting sideways in the chair. His ankles were crossed, his loafers almost ridiculously shiny for what was otherwise a casual Sunday. And his legs were straight, like something architectural designed for support.

He was reading one of my books.

Not one I'd written. One I'd brought with me and left lying around. I wondered how long he'd been there. Never mind how he'd got in.

I didn't say anything and he didn't look up. I knew him well enough to know this was not a snub; he was the type required to finish whatever he was reading before he could move on to the next thing, yes, even if what he was reading was not actually all that interesting to him. He could not stand to let things hang.

And so I went about dropping off my bag, kicking off my shoes, going to the minibar for a soda, until finally he set the book aside and looked up with a thin, strained smile.

"Surprise," he said.

He was thin, even for his normally lanky frame, and I wondered whether he'd been ill. But all I asked was, "Dinner?"

He shrugged.

"Well, I need to eat," I told him. "Stay in or go out?"

He glanced over his shoulder, out the window at the crepuscular city. "In."

I nodded and ventured only close enough to grab the hotel binder from the desk before retreating to sit on the edge of the bed. "And what do you want?"

"Wine."

I flipped through to the room service menu but was unable to see the words through the hazy confusion of my brain. I turned the card stock pages forward and back only to jump when he reached over and slipped the book from my lap. "I'll find something for you," he said.

I didn't wait to hear what he ordered, went instead into the bathroom to freshen up. When I emerged, he was stretched out on the bed and already half asleep. I made for the armchair but he made a noise that I could not decipher, giving me pause.

"I missed you," he said.

But a thought had occurred to me. If room service was coming, I needed to take down the Privacy sign.

Plumbing the Depths

The author walked down from the house, past the gazebo, around the wrought iron patio furniture whose paint was flaking and feet were rusting, and on toward the dock. The dock was only visible from the house in winter, and now it was summer and everything was green, the path overgrown, because he'd come back well before he'd intended and the gardeners had not been to cut things back and trim them into shape.

The house itself had once belonged to a doctor from Savannah who would spend his summers on the lake. The author wondered what the doctor's patients did while the doctor was away all summer. Just not get sick?

That doctor, who'd lived in what they called the Victorian era, even though America had no queen, had had a family: a wife, three daughters, and one son. And he'd had a housekeeper, and a cook, and a nanny for the children. The house reflected all these things. It was Victorian and very large, with a second staircase for the servants and a whole wing at the back in which to hide them. And there was a carriage house, too, that had since been converted to a garage.

In all it was a nice place to live and a quiet place to work, though it was too quiet and too big for him to wander late at night when he couldn't sleep (which was often). And these days he didn't work so much, either. He had ideas, plenty of them, but the effort of sitting down and making them concrete—turning them into written words—had somehow come to be beyond his abilities.

It was a strange thing because he'd never thought words were something one could lose, or that molding them into sentences and paragraphs and whole books would be something he'd forget how to do. It was an art. He fashioned words the way someone had fashioned that patio furniture, and words were better because they couldn't rust (could they? he wondered), but how was it he'd lost the knack of wordsmithing? Was it possible to wake up one morning and simply not be able to do it any more?

The ground began to slope down toward the edge of the lake. The dock was in sight now, the dirt path bald where it had been walked so frequently the hairy grass had worn away and would no longer grow there. The author concentrated on not tripping and falling, lest he roll into the water and no one find him for weeks. His assistant wasn't due in for two, but the author had hoped returning to the house early might jump start his creative juices. The house hadn't helped, the gazebo hadn't helped, the patio hadn't helped, and so now he would try the dock. Barring that, he would hike into the woods and camp like Thoreau if that was what it took.

But no, he wouldn't. He hated camping.

Liked campfires. Disliked sleeping outside.

The author made it safely to the dock and walked the hot, dry length of it to sit at the very end. The lake was low; he could not touch the water with his feet. He even stretched a bit, just to see.

Which is why he was very surprised when the water reached up to touch his toe.

A fish? It had to have been a fish.

The author leaned forward to peer into the clear, cool depths. Far below lay the brown, sandy bottom, green fronds lazily swaying. And yet he saw no fish.

And so when a fist of water reached up and grabbed his shirt, pulled him in, he supposed he wasn't so surprised after all.

Well, the author thought as he went under, at least this gave him something to write about.

Welcome.

I started this site with the idea of having a place to shelve some of my flash fiction. If you're wondering, "flash fiction" (also known as "sudden fiction" among other many names) is extremely brief pieces of storytelling. I love the form, for I think in many cases less can say so much more.

Here, then, will be featured "literary snapshots." Or, perhaps given the blog's title I should say these are arrows, darts, little lightning bolts of fiction, perfect for those five minutes when you just need a break from whatever work you're slogging through. I hope you visit many times to read and enjoy. ~M