Matt enjoys writing flash fiction, short stories under a thousand words. Here is one example of Matt’s flash fiction:
New Family
Paul Fisher was a graduate student studying biochemistry at Emory when he met my mother. They met at a writer’s critique group, both working on their poetry. I suppose I should have been impressed by the fact he was studying biochemistry and had an artistic side as well. All I could dwell on was his age. He was barely older than me. Granted, Mom had me when she was extremely young, my father disappearing into the ether of the South.
Mom convinced me to try the writer’s group, and by the time I decided to attend one of the writing group sessions, more to analyze this Paul than to have my fiction analyzed, they were already close. I could tell as she sat on a couch and he sat on the floor in front of her. He reached out, gently touched her calf. She didn’t draw away from it. Passages were read aloud and comments were made. I sat there staring at my mom’s massaged calf.
I also realized I’d seen Paul before, occasionally walking around campus. I couldn’t place the specifics, but I’m sure I saw him from time to time with his curly black hair and backpack perpetually slung over his shoulder.
It was clear there was chemistry there, a biochemistry I guess, as the words flowed in turn from each writer’s voice. They were sharing a rhyme and rhythm as old as anything, and it was impossible not to see the electricity between them.
I asked her once about his age. She simply smiled and said, “David. Please.”
She was right. The last thing I needed to do was begrudge her her happiness, after all she’d sacrificed for me. Raising me alone, no other family to help with expenses, she’d worked every day as a janitor at the university. Even when I was little, I could hear the sadness in her songs as I sat in front of her, her guitar following her voice, her eyes closed in – what? - supplication maybe.
I always thought she was a beautiful woman. Now it seemed someone else did as well. She read her poems, lyrics really, and I saw Paul’s eyes closed, feeling the beauty of her words and the heart beneath them. It was strange but good.
Within a few months Mom told me they were going to marry.
###
A little over a year later they had a son, a boy they named Simon. It was strange enough having a stepfather a few years older than me. Now I had a half-brother twenty years my junior. I’m not sure what Simon thought of the arrangement, but he did cry a lot.
I don’t think I’d ever seen Mom happier. When I’d come over from the dorms to their place for dinner or sometimes to help with things in the evening, she seemed to have found a peace in her new family, a normality she never had with me. Paul, even with his studies, somehow managed to work and find time for Mom and his newborn son. But when I was there, I couldn’t help but feel a loss as they grew together and at the same time apart from me. It was like I was someone from my mom’s past, some old friend come to visit.
I missed her even before she was gone.
Nine months after having Simon, Mom was killed by a drunk driver.
###
We couldn’t have an open casket, it was that bad. We sat staring at the polished wood, its cover closed. Paul cried, Simon wailed, and I stared at the casket in disbelief. I didn’t know what to do for him or he for me. During the funeral I tried to read some of her poems, but I had no voice.
Grief came in waves, constant and monstrously high at first, then further apart. Paul finished his degree, hired onto a research company working on DNA replication. Our lives spiraled around each other, Simon the gravity that kept us in each other’s orbits.
I would come over and play with the now mobile Simon. He would scamper around, and Paul and I would try to come up with non-recycled questions. We never touched much on Mom, never really shared our grief, maybe since our relationship with her was each in a different way. I could see the pain in the black under his eyes, in this lost, hopeless stare he tried to hide. I don’t know if he could see the pain in my face every time I looked and marveled at Simon, so clearly my mom’s son.
This is when it happened again. While Paul was driving on I-75, someone returning from a party clipped his car. Simon’s seat, in a one in a million chance, didn’t hold, and he was thrown outside. He didn’t survive smashing into the concrete construction barrier at sixty-five miles an hour. Paul, pinned but alive in his mashed car, prayed for death.
###
I found my life then. I decided to raise Paul. His broken body, his shattered spirit, they did something in me, gave me a purpose. Even in my numbness, I knew that the only way he would make it was for someone to be there for him and take care of him.
I was there every faltering, agonizing step he took when he re-learned to walk. I sat beside him, held him, when he shook with grief over the loss of his family. I told him stories, sharing with him the mom I knew as she raised me. We cried and laughed and there was poetry in the sharing of our lives.
We move forward, each day a little stronger.
I miss Mom and little Simon. I sometimes wonder what she would think of this new family. Father and son, sometimes I the father, sometimes Paul. And at the same time, brothers.