Marching Forth

March is a tricky month.  You think Spring is going to break out and warm things up.   Then it gets trapped behind a bank of rain clouds until April. 

I dated this guy once, a budding writer, who asked me to guess his favorite day on the calendar.   This was a week or two after our first date, both of us basking in the glow of a new relationship.  He posed it to me as a riddle:  What’s a date that is also a command? 

I was young and I wanted to show him how clever I was, especially to this aspiring novelist.   So, I thought for a few moments and came up with the answer:  March 4th.  March Forth. 

His eyes lit up and he hooked me in with his arms and his big goofy smile.  I remember feeling quite smug and pleased with myself.  But also a tad disappointed. 

The riddle was too easy to solve.  It wasn’t enough of a challenge. And why was he testing me anyway?

The relationship was lovely but inevitably short.  Sadly, I don’t think I was particularly ladylike towards the end.  Still, I remember fondly that spark of writerly connection and competition that he coaxed out of me. 

Always, of course, on March 4th.

My latest story is about endings rather than beginnings. The Body In The Living Room has just been published by Blue Sea Writers, my writing group here in Valencia.

It’s a very short piece of flash fiction, inspired, in part, by Sheila Heti’s terrific short story, My Life is a Joke, published in the New Yorker.  I listened to Otessa Moshfegh read it in the New Yorker Fiction podcast and I loved every word. 

It is also, I think, influenced by Etgar Keret’s sublime and surreal short stories.  If you haven’t read his work, I heartily recommend any of his short-story collections but, particularly, Missing Kissinger and The Nimrod Flipout.  

In the meantime, I’ve set myself a goal to publish more short works of fiction but also to dig into longer works with more complex story arcs. Will post my progress soon.