Some Micro-Fiction Samples (from Pif Magazine)

Movado
by Ed Hamilton

I was helping a friend move some furniture one afternoon. I was sitting in his van on 23rd Street, out in front of the Chelsea Hotel. A black guy came down the middle of the street. He was hopping around with a jerky sort of walk, gesturing with his arms at the cars that streamed by him. As he got closer he spotted me. He stuck his head in the driver's window of the van. "Hey man, you need a watch?"
          "No."
          He thrust an open case through the window and into my lap. Then he hopped around to my side of the van, the passenger's side.
          "Take a look at it man. Movado."
          I had no idea what Movado was. I didn't care, and didn't want to encourage the man by asking. I was tired from moving furniture, and not in the mood for shopping. But with the case in my lap I looked at the watch. It looked pretty good, I must admit. A silver metal band, with a black face, and one single diamond-like jewel marking the twelve o'clock spot. Still, I didn't want it. I tried to hand it back.
          "Sorry man, I can't use it."
          "It's the real thing. Genuine Movado. Not like one of those fake ones you get around the corner."
          "Oh, I'm sure it's real," I said. "I just don't want it." Actually, I was not at all sure. What did I know about watches? But again, I didn't care. I just wanted to get rid of the guy. I snapped the case shut and tried to hand it back.
          He hopped back around to the driver's side. "It's Movado. Look on the back of it."
          I was hesitant to tell the guy to get lost. He was just trying to make a buck. Since I couldn't walk away myself, I was forced to open the case back up. Sure enough, there on the back of the watch was etched the magic word Movado. There were a bunch of other words etched there too, but I didn't bother to read them. I closed the case and tried to hand it back, again. He still wouldn't take it.
          "You see? You see? Movado," the watchman said.
          I didn't see how that proved anything. People who have the technology to make fake watches probably also have the technology to put fake engravings on the back of them.
          "That watch is worth a lot of money." He was back on the passenger's side now. I wished he would quit jumping back and forth like that. He was starting to make me nervous.
          "Oh yeah, I can tell," I said. "It's a very nice watch. You should have no problem selling it." I had the case closed and was holding it out the window.
          "Look at the price tag."
          I drew the case in again and opened it back up. He reached in the window and flipped the price tag out from behind the watch. "See that? $450."
          Yep, that's what it said. Once again, I didn't see how that proved anything.
          The watchman was on the driver's side now, looking around nervously. I sensed he was getting a little bit impatient. "It's not stolen, man," he said. "My wife bought it on a bad credit card." I guess that made it less stolen.
          I didn't care if it was stolen or not. I just didn't need a watch. But I felt a twinge of sympathy. After all that trouble scamming the credit card people, his wife would be mighty disappointed if he came home without the groceries. She was probably going to be needing bail money sooner or later as well.
          "Listen, I'm gonna do you a favor. Only 80 bucks. Movado." I didn't even have eighty bucks on me, only about seventeen. And I needed to buy lunch. If the matter wasn't settled before, it was settled now.
          "Where else are you gonna get a Movado for only eighty bucks?"
          "Uh, nowhere?"
          "Damn straight," the watchman said.
          I told him, "Listen man, I don't have anywhere near 80 bucks. I can't help you."
          "Well, what'll you give me for it?"
          "I don't want it for any price."
          "Make me an offer." I guess he thought I was one tough customer, really haggling. He said, "I might be able to go sixty."
          "No way."
          "Just make me an offer."
          "I don't want it."
          "Come on man, make me an offer. Come on."
          I finally gave in. "Alright, ten bucks."
          He snatched the watch back and stalked off, back down the middle of the street. "Fuck you man," he grumbled. "It's a Movado."

Ed Hamilton lives in New York City. His fiction has appeared in small press magazines such as Exquisite Corpse, The Lumpen, and Gazebo, as well as on-line in Pif, Assorted Realities, Time Out:Netbooks, Eclectica, Anthem, Lexicon, Children, Church and Daddies, and has been accepted for publication in upcoming issues of Pink Cadillac, and Southern Ocean Review.

Stacking Wood
by Rachel Barenblat      

October was a month of damp Sundays. The air was cool like wet cotton. The trees blazed with strange alphabets of color. We walked awkwardly to the woodshed, bearing logs like heavy blocks of myrrh. It'll be dangerous here in winter, I said, remembering how my parents filled their fireplace with green magnolia branches in a copper tub. When rain dug grooves in the garden we lit fires, but only Eddie could fetch wood from the woodpile, because he wore rough gloves that I could fit both hands into. The pyramids of logs were no place for children, I said. But there are no scorpions here, you said, No tarantulas, no brown recluse spiders whose bites masquerade as ant bites until the flesh disappears. Even snakes here have benevolent names, like "milk" and "grass." Compared with the hidden and hot dangers of my childhood, the challenges of winter are simple and straightforward. Ice is inevitable: the worst it can do is to break things in clean lines like quartz. That is why it is better to live in the North, you said, Where people speak plainly and nothing is disguised.

Rachel Barenblat is an MFA student at the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her first book of poems, "the skies here," was published by Pecan Grove Press, San Antonio, in 1995. Recent and upcoming poetry publications include The New Orleans Review, The Jewish Women's Literary Annual, Illya's Honey, and Mobius: The Poetry Magazine. She lives and writes in Williamstown, MA. When not writing, she sings alto and bakes a lot of bread. Her homepage can be found at http://members.tripod.com/~Rachel/.

E10
by Carey Dean Potash     

Musterson jacked himself up from his special chair, fat arms applying four hundred pounds of pressure to the Formica desk. Legs like logs crashing together, he waddled toward the vending machine. Empty wrappers crunched in his pockets with each hippopotamus shuffle. Law students mimicked his lopsided strut during lunch breaks, crushing tin foil to demonstrate the sound of his candy bar diapers.
          He loosened his Charlie Brown tie after the paralegal left, his pants button after the last attorney, dropping his mighty stomach onto his thighs.
          He fished fifty-five cents from his pocket, slid the coins in, and punched E10. The machine released cheese doodles with a clockwise spiral that stopped a moment too soon. Musterson landed a quick left-right combination, slapping the steel. The shiny bag was snagged by its corner, swinging. He gave the machine a flagrant push, tipped it back and forth. He yanked the coin return, pounded E10 repeatedly, and hammered the glass with his fist.
          He was staying late to finish a case his father gave him. A fictional school superintendent being sued by a fictional chemistry teacher on the grounds of fictional nepotism. His father reminded him daily that he lacked determination and that he was sticking his neck out for him. Ver-ee Em-por-tent, his father mouthed phonetically as if he was hearing-impaired, handing him the flimsy file.
          Along the bottom row doodles dangled, provoking Musterson. He marched his eyeballs down each row, each colorful box and wrapper, feeling the laughter, the betrayal. In cozy, little cages, they mocked him; basked in his failures. Snickers grinned. Krackel busted up. Baby Ruth was in tears. Incensed, Musterson shook the machine furiously, shouted obscenities, pleading sweetheart.
          With a slothlike running start, he rammed the machine, belly on glass. He drove his meaty knees into the sides. He squatted like a Sumo wrestler, squeezing, squeezing, squeezing.
          Mr. Musterson was the first to find his son crushed under the vending machine Tuesday morning. When the boy saw his father storming down the steps, he whimpered in horror, flapping his limbs like a crab on its back.
          Five burly cops pulled the machine off his white bread belly and found a bag of cheese doodles steamrolled on his chest and blown open from each end. An orange dusting stuck to his damp neck and chins.
          Jeezus, the oldest cop with a spotty beard said, breaking the long silence, you can't say the pumpkin wasn't determined.
          He looked at his son who rolled his cheek flush on the gray carpet, exhausted. His boy would float motionless for hours in the swimming pool, without kicking or thrusting his hands to keep afloat, his burning stomach sucking in the rays. The smaller children sought shelter from the scorching sun, diving deep to the bottom, hiding in the confines of the massive, shimmering shadow he cast upon the pool floor.
          "You’ve been here all night, Dennis?"
          "Yes sir, I have."
           A light-brown bullet of piping coffee filled the father's small cup. "I see."

In the author’s words: "I am a graduate of Rutgers University. I live in New Jersey. I enjoy playing the gee-tar and writing songs. If ever I find a bass player, a drummer, a lead guitarist and an ounce of guts, I'll be the greatest damn rock star Lawrence Brook Elementary School has ever seen at a half-hour assembly. My fiction has appeared in Sink Full of Dishes."

Ashes
by Diana Stauber      

Name them. Father, brother, brother, infant sister and finally mother. My friend is from a family that loves to die.
          And this is not to say, that they are sloppy or reckless. The brothers, perhaps, but who can say they have not had wine and gotten behind the wheel. There are bad cells, abnormal counts, missed beats.
          It is: There, but for the grace of god. We sow what we reep. Ashes to smashes. Dust to rust.
         These are the words they give my friend. Or some of them. He has been handed so many lines he can’t keep a straight face. So he jokes for them: Group plan, economy of scale, let’s lay them boy-girl-boy-girl-boy....
          I am his only confidant and even I can’t resist. I ask him what it’s like. How the few left go on. He smiles and says, We got family VALUE. And it’s true. At Thanksgiving they have doctors, a coroner and a florist join in on the meal. My friend serves them like his own. He leans over and whispers to his single sister: The way to a good burial is through a man’s stomach.
          But alone, I can see otherwise, while he fingers the shoulders of his two young boys like a pianist seeking keys.

Diana is a June 1997 graduate of Bennington’s MFA Program and has been published in The Nocturnal Lyric and Whiskey Island. She is the Global Network Manager of International Management Group and lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.

Avarice
by Bruce Burrows      

He believes he loves a kaleidoscope; the turn of her neck brings replacement, a new stranger to discover.
          Seven unopened bottles of French drinking water sit on the cement next to her. Two empties rock slightly in the breeze. Another, half empty in her hand, becomes lighter as she pours along the lines of her body, nowhere near her mouth. This is more than hedging against heat. Each bottle is a speech. Extravagance, decadence. Greed.
          He downs the last of his lemonade and crouches at the edge of the pool, watching the movement of her arm in the shadow stretched across the water.
          "Can I have one of those?"
          "No."
           He nods. This voice he knows, no matter the face. The voice that makes him invent chants or quote Russian authors in his head. He turns his eyes from the scene and looks down the lip of the pool. That amazing sun is making jewels dance in the concrete. What are those? Like small pieces of broken glass, always afraid they would cut the bottom of his feet. What do they do for the concrete?
           He starts at the sound of the empty bottle on the patio, and his head snaps up to watch the shadow. Dropping back on rigid arms, he turns his head so the sun will throw his profile to her.
          "You know, when I was little, my older sister took these classes after school. Which fork to use, books on her head, that kind of stuff. You know?"
          "Yeah." Her fingers open the next bottle. "So?"
           "I was just thinking about it for some reason. Going to pick her up. My mom came for me, and then we drove over together and got her."
          She smiles and her eyes dance under the sunglasses as she watches the sweat diminish on his back, as if the drops are moving away from her. "In the station wagon? Oh, yeah," she says, "that helped."

Bruce earned his MFA in Writing & Poetics at The Naropa Institute. Despite this, he works as a Software Consultant based in San Francisco, spending most of his life in airplanes and hotels. His work has appeared in various publications, including The Little Magazine, Spike, & Bombay Gin.