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Pif Magazine
ISSN: 1094-2726
Published by:
Pif, LLC
PMB 248
4820 Yelm Hwy SE
Suite B
Lacey, WA 98503-4903
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| PAST MICRO-FICTION | MORE MICRO-FICTION |
Poor Tree : Page 1, 2
Soon the whole tree was reduced to glowing fragments in the mulch. Smoke. The smoke became gray streaks, ghost-like in the night air. I watched the smoke for a while, then I went back to the embers in the mulch. How long could they glow like that? The mulch seemed to be dousing them already.
"That was something," the old man said, the first thing he said that I wasn’t thinking myself. I frowned and he squeezed my shoulder. "Come on, boy," he said, "let’s go get a drink." Yet another thing I wasn’t thinking.
This old man dressed like someone who could buy me a lot of drinks. "Go on, pops," I said.
He went on. He walked with his hands in his coat pockets. He looked around as though he had found a new appreciation for the night. Just before he could disappear from my sight, sirens sounded in the distance. He stopped and turned to me, his face in shadow once again.
"Those might be for us," he said. "Maybe we should both go on." It was good advice, and maybe now I would have taken it and played it safe. But as I’ve said, I was a young man then, and I kept watching the embers. Amazing: half of them were out already. Not even they had a chance.
"You hear me, boy?" the man called. "You going to let them get you over a sad little tree that had given up the ghost anyway?"
I kept watching the embers, how they fought on their way out, those last little specks of orange before they got sucked in.
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By the time you finish reading this, Weems will have changed jobs. Now he will teach at a high school in easy reach of go-go and a quaint old bar run by an equally old dame named Francis who keeps a rocking chair by the taps. He will also be teaching fiction writing at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. His second tattoo is official, and now he knows how addictive they are. Numbers three and four are already envisioned, though no piercings have entered his mind yet. Nothing, however, is certain.