Monday, March 26, 2012

Three Minute Fiction

Every year NPR has a competition which they call 3 Minute Fiction.  Listeners are encouraged to write a story of no more than 600 words (approximately three minutes when read aloud) using the prompt supplied by NPR.  This year's prompt was: She closed the book, placed it on the table, and finally, decided to walk through the door. Just for fun I decided to enter the contest this year.  I threw in nods to Fitzgerald (since Gatsby is one of the greatest works of all time), as well as to Nietzsche, Levinas, Heidegger, et al., because such things are never far from my mind.  This was my entry:



Every Present is a Past/ Every Past is a Present

She closed the book, placed it on the table, and finally, decided to walk through the door.  In the morning people would know what she had done. 
                “It doesn’t really matter anymore,” she thought to herself, “Sometimes a person just has to walk away.” Even this thought didn’t overcome her fear, her regrets… her pain. Her past, the smiles and tears alike, seemed to be a mere fiction. She felt the present, as she had never felt it before, this one brief moment, being borne back into the past. She couldn’t help but chuckle with derision… the past. What is the present but that which is continually dying. There is no present but the eternal recurrence of the same. She was suddenly aware that the unnerving feeling of déjà vu was simply due to the fact that no present can escape its own past. The dying away of the present, the ‘now’ which is always already the ‘not anymore’ , this was the only future to which she might look forward.
                Past. Present. Future.  Did these words even have meaning? Perhaps the past was all that is, and all that ever can be.  She thought back over her actions of the past 24 hours, and of her actions over the past 3 months. “He had it coming,” she reminded herself. She had done only what she knew to do. Nobody would fully understand what she had done… nobody could. She didn’t understand. She had been thrown into this situation, but she wasn’t entirely sure how, and couldn’t even contemplate the possibility that there might be a why. Is there ever a why?  We live, we act, occasionally we think. She had to laugh at the absurdity of it all.
                With absurdity on her mind, she picked up the book again.  She leafed through the pages with no interest in the words therein. He had been given the book, but refused to read anything that didn’t, in his mind, justify his own stupidity. He was convinced that he was in the right, that the entire world revolved around him. Of course, he couldn’t have admitted this; he couldn’t even have thought it. “He had it coming,” she reminded herself once more. Some people think that a person is like an onion: a person must strip away the outer layers to find the core, the heart of a person, the soul.  She laughed yet again.  Of course, a person is like an onion. Each and every one of us is a series of layers, but, the reality that is tragically ignored is simply that a person has no core.  When the layers of a person, just like those of an onion, are stripped away, nothing remains. Her mind was again dragged to thoughts of the past, whatever that meant.  She saw clearly how each and every decision of her life, each fleeting present, had given her a new layer.
                   She gingerly returned the book to the table, careful not to disturb the quiet of the room. She stood up and walked toward the door.  With one final glance around the room she prepared to leave for good. As the door creaked open she was filled with hope. The present was already passing away;  it would be replaced with a seemingly infinite series of presents in the future. Perhaps the future is not entirely dictated by the past. Even the past was only what she made of it. With a smile she stepped through the door, and, swinging it closed behind her, she said to nobody in particular, “I’m better off right now.”