5 Short Stories by Edward Mullany
Saturday
You wake early, like you always do, and are downstairs in the kitchen eating breakfast with our two girls and with Lulu, our dog, by the time I appear, though as soon as I do one of our two girls, the younger one, climbs down from her chair and runs up to me and wraps her arms around my leg, hugging me, as if she is overjoyed to see me, which maybe she is, she hasn’t seen me since the day before, which to her might seem like a long time.
A Phone Call in the Middle of the Night
I happen to be awake anyway, not because I haven’t been trying to sleep but because I’ve been unable to sleep, though I’m no longer in bed, lying there beside you with my eyes closed, but have gotten up and am sitting at the table in the kitchen, with the light on, drinking coffee from a mug that I retrieved from a cabinet above the sink and into which I’ve stirred some granules of sugar that came from a package that we bought a few weeks ago from a store to which sometimes one of us, and sometimes both of us, go.
Minnesota Dave
One morning, when the school year was already underway, our teacher stood at the front of the room and introduced a kid whose parents had just moved to town and who was going to be our new classmate. And so it went, for a while he was our new classmate, we didn’t know him very well, and he didn’t know us, and everything he said and did, while normal in one way, was unpredictable in another, so that the mere fact of his presence seemed to us almost interesting. And yet, as the year progressed, and we got to know him, and he got to know us, he became less new, and he did things that we learned to expect, so that we no longer thought of him as our new classmate, he became just another kid, though we knew, as well, somewhere in our minds, that unless someone else came along, from another town or another school, and joined our class as he had, he would always be the most recent student to have done so, and thus from our perspective he was always somewhat new.
Cynthia’s Mother
I was supposed to have lunch with Cynthia’s mother, though Cynthia would be there too, as would be the dog that belonged to Cynthia’s mother and that went everywhere with her, so that there’d never been an occasion when I’d encountered Cynthia’s mother without also encountering the dog, which was a small dog, one that you could hold in your lap if you were inclined to do so, though I was not inclined to do so, and though the dog did not seem inclined for me to do so either.
The Material World
There was a man who was in love with a woman who was not in love with him, though she had once been in love with him, and though she still loved him, she would say to him, in the more important way, to which he would respond with the question, what way is that, to which she would answer, the way that hasn’t been your way but that could be your way yet.
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Edward Mullany is the author of If I Falter at the Gallows, Figures for an Apocalypse, and The Three Sunrises. He is also the creator of the comic strips Rachel and Ben and Excerpts from a Boring Man's Diary. He is the recipient of a Barthelme Fellowship from the Inprint Foundation. His writing has been included in the Norton Anthology of International Flash Fiction, and in other journals.
