The Need for Character
flash fiction by Richard K. Weems
Cheap Stories, volume 5
The Need for Character
flash fiction by Richard K. Weems
Published by Written by Weems, Ink.
© 2011 by Written by Weems, Inc. All rights reserved.
Smashwords edition.
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Cover art by Svea Barrett.
Author photo by Svea Barrett.
Also by Richard K. Weems:
Anything He Wants
The Cheap Stories eBook series:
The Fine Art of Fletcherism and two more stories
Paradigms and Curbside Boxes
Apples and Self-Interview – two stories
Falling – avant-garde fiction
The Need for Character – flash fiction
Soup – three flash fiction pieces
Mercy – three micro-fiction pieces
Violence and Sitting Danny Rolling – two essays
Democritus’ Atom – two stories of extreme sexuality
Rules of Combat and Dangerous Theater – two essays
CONTENTS
Thanks to the following magazines for publishing earlier versions of these stories:
“After Art”: The Mississippi Review
“Tell Everything”: Story Bytes
“The Need for Character” and “Writing the Blue Book”: Pif Magazine
for Svea, my BabyMine
Still, every now and then, you get guys in here asking for Art. I tell them, “No. No Art tonight,” because that’s the truth of the matter, and then these guys will turn right around and go back the way they came, their heads bowed sometimes but always shaking. They leave like they’re leaving a funeral. And they are, really—even the regulars don’t come around anymore.
When we had Art, there was no room here for anything else. If you’re tired of standing around, the rumor went, just pick your feet up. They stood in line out the door, around the parking lot and back. They got food at the Starvin’ Marvin’s down the road and had picnics in the street, they had to wait so long. All just to take hold of the harness strapped to Art’s back and have their turn flinging that damn midget as far as they could. We had waitresses too, the biggest waitresses we could find—six-foot-one the shortest of them. They broke up fights when the bouncers had trouble getting through the crowd, and they had free reign to clock any wise-ass copping a feel. It was easy to scam drinks, then, for then it was too busy for anyone to check up on you—a push here, a slide on the other end. A good bartender could clear a couple bills before he even started emptying his jar.
Now there’s supposed to be room in back for a kitchen, a deli, maybe, somewhere to make sandwiches, but these new owners don’t know a thing about running a place like this. The old guy, Sam, sold out long ago. His wife and two daughters left him soon after Art, like they knew things were only going to pot, and Sam, he cracked—put every bit of his money into land, and bought up a long tract outside Palatka. I heard he tried bringing his wife back by promising to build a house, but there’s no money to build a house. All he has is land, and he likes to sit back and admire the view. I hear he’s put up a roof, perched on the ends of two-by-four’s, and there he’s got a cot, a 12-gauge with no ammunition, a tool chest, a rocking chair with a cracked runner, his Rottweiller, Kirkegaard (the dog came with that name), matches, lantern, a Coleman cooler and a sink that isn’t connected. I hear he spends his days playing fetch with Kirkegaard, and before throwing out that stick, I hear he looks off into the untamed woods that is his land and thinks of when the dance floor was nothing but a sea of heads topped with waitresses like foam riding over wakes, like mermaids, the people brimming and sweating and clenching their fists, all wanting to get their hands on Art, who waited for them in his bright yellow jumpsuit, grinning as if he couldn’t wait to be thrown again...
But you should have seen that little guy fly through the air—turning, I tell you, turning in the air, spinning around like a bagel, like a goddamn egg bagel on the wing. And everyone wanted a piece of him.
The old man, my grandfather: smiling the way he always did, his hat atilt on his unnaturally bald head, his stinking excuse for a leg stinking up the room the way it always did; his cane shaking in his grip as it always did.
This is not all…
“My boy,” he said (I swear these are the exact words) as he spread out a hand in way of invitation, as if motioning to sit (O, had there only been a seat!).
“My boy,” he said, trying to be kindly, but achieving only an old-man-who’s-a-stranger kindly, “my boy my boy my boy.” Such a greeting by other elders accompanied a ritual fishing in the pockets for loose change, but he offered only an outstretched, unclenched hand, limp and erect both, like rotten melon rind. “My boy my boy my dear sweet Walter.”
I am offered up, prodded forward by the parental ones, my thighs announcing their fat by way of the skeeving together of the shorts clad about them. I approach the old hand groping motionlessly for me; I notice now the odor of pickle on his breath.
I swear I am telling the whole thing as it happened, front to end, sparing no detail. My instructions are clear, my aim true.
His cane in the right hand, his left hand outstretched. (I’ve considered the reverse—cane in the left, the right meandering toward me—but I am certain that things were this way.) “My boy my boy,” he said, “my boy my boy. My boy my boy my dear sweet Walter.” He was not repeating himself—this is recap to keep hold on the moment for full disclosure, a pause if you will, the smelly leg and the cane and the shorts around fat legs and the pickle far from everything I need to tell, and before I go on the moment must be fully assessed, evaluated, deciphered, for there is no going on without that…