My flash fiction story "Goat" has been published on Every Day Fiction:
Yep, “Goat” is a true story all right. That was me, the shy, nerdy middle-schooler who couldn’t stomach being the center of attention, yet who suddenly found herself in a bright and unwelcome spotlight thanks to a careless remark by a well-meaning teacher. That was me getting my ponytail yanked by the boy who sat behind me, and suffering the embarrassment of inadvertently drawing a wiener on the blackboard. That was even me once again changing school districts and having to overcome my natural introversion with a whole new crowd of people. How I wished I was still “Goat” then – at least I would have had something to talk about!
What I really enjoy about “Goat” is the way it allowed me to take a humiliating situation and craft it into something positive, and this was true both in the fictional version and in the real-life story. Although I never actually carried that nickname to high school (thank goodness!), oddly enough, the “goat” incident and aftermath proved to be a real turning point for me in terms of my ability to relate to other students, maybe because even at the tender age of thirteen, I was able to have a sense of humor about it. Oh, I would pretend to fume and glare when the other kids made fun, but I never really minded it much. I rarely got the impression that the teasing was mean-spirited. And in any case, it was still way less embarrassing than the time I won that classroom limbo contest. I jumped up and down in celebration for a good minute before another girl came over and whispered in my ear that I’d ripped the seat of my pants making the winning walk under that final stick. And I’d thought that all that cheering was in honor of my victory!
Sigh. Embarrassing moments. We’ve all had our share of incidents we’ll never forget, but wish we could. I know, I know, we should be grateful that we’ve had those experiences, because they’re what’s made us who we are today. But let’s not lose sight of the real value of our lifetimes of humiliation in front of our peers. Inspiration for fiction!
***
"Goat" is one of the stories featured in my autobiographical short story and essay collection Stories from My Memory-Shelf: Fiction and Essays from My Past (only $0.99 Kindle, $5.99 paperback). To learn more about it, please visit the book's webpage or subscribe to my newsletter.
My Muse has finally returned. Evidently he's been wintering in Mexico.
“Wow, you’re fast!” he said with admiration, gawking at me with wide eyes through a plastic face-shield thick with fog.
I turned to look behind me but I was the last player on the bench; this unfamiliar young man with the friendly face appeared to be talking to me.
“Uh, thank you,” I said, returning my eyes to the ice and uncomfortably shifting my grip on my stick.
“I mean it,” he assured me. “You are very fast, especially for, you know, a – Hey!”
The exclamation caught my attention more than the unfinished remark. I turned again and saw another young man sitting beside this one, elbow out as if he’d just used it to nudge his friend into silence.
“For a what?” I said shrewdly, watching in amusement as my neighbor struggled to solicit a polite response out of an apparently unresponsive brain. “For a woman? Or perhaps you meant for an older woman?” I concluded, putting extra emphasis on the “older.” At thirty-seven I was hardly ancient, but there was no doubt in my mind that these fellows were a good ten years my junior, a fact that gave me the indisputable right to tease them mercilessly.
His face, already beet-red from the exertion, flushed scarlet. “I wouldn’t say older!” he fibbed unconvincingly. “You’re what, like twenty-eight, twenty-nine?”
“Don’t mind my friend,” the other fellow said, leaning across him towards me and grinning. “He’s really a nice guy. Sometimes just a bit of a dumbass.”
“It was a compliment!” the nearer man stuttered before being abruptly rescued from his consternation by the return of the other left wing. He stumbled over the boards and onto the ice and his buddy slid over next to me.
“I’m Jim,” he said, extending his arm in my direction. “And that’s Sam.”
“Kathy,” I replied, bumping my glove against his by way of a handshake.
“I haven’t seen you here before,” he said. But before I could answer, I saw the one of the defensemen hurtling towards the boards and sprang to my feet to take his place. Jim followed hard on my heels to replace the other wing, who had just lurched, panting, over to the bench.
I hadn’t even noticed them before – possibly because I’d been too busy trying not to embarrass myself my first time on the ice in my latest new town. But now I couldn’t stop watching them skating around in front of me; two of my nameless, faceless teammates had turned into people. Of course, meeting people wasn’t always as great as it sounded, as I’d discovered in the course of my many travels. You don’t worry so much about making a good impression when you’re an unknown member of an anonymous crowd. I pondered that as I forced my legs to an inhuman effort in chasing down the next breakaway when it came. I didn’t want to lose my newly established reputation for speed, after all.
“Nice job,” Sam said when I flung my body back over the boards a minute later, fresh sweat trickling coolly down my spine.
“Thanks,” I gasped, plunking my butt down on the bench and taking a deep swig of my water. My partner for the day was still nowhere in sight and I wished he’d hurry up and finish dressing; it was exhausting playing with only three D.
The guy named Jim leaned over again. “So are you new here?” he said, picking up our conversation right where we’d left off. It’s customary for hockey players to chat in fragmented one-minute intervals.
“Just moved to town,” I nodded, starting to catch my breath. “I was in a women’s league the last place I lived, but there isn’t one in town here. Thought I’d give this group a try, if it’s not too tough.”
“You’re tough enough!” Sam exclaimed. “I’ve seen the way you skate.”
“Trust me, I have no skills,” I countered, pleased in spite of myself. I wasn’t being modest; I was a poor puck-handler and had no shot to speak of, and it had already become apparent that my rather abundant apportionment of feminine muscle wasn’t quite as useful among these men, most of whom were younger and a lot bigger than me. And apart from my speed, I had few real skills as a skater, and already I was struggling a lot harder to keep up than I had in my last league. Ever heard the expression “tripping-over-your-tongue-tired?” That was me.
“Pshaw!” he answered, dismissing my critical assessment with a wave of his glove. I turned to look more closely at my new acquaintance. Along with that broad, boyish face and welcoming eye went the kind of personality that could use an expression that went out with the previous century without an iota of shame.
“Pshaw?” Jim echoed, making a motion as if scratching his helmet with his padded glove.
“Pshaw!” Sam repeated, unabashed.
“Okay,” Jim said, clearing his throat audibly and leaning towards me again. “So where are you from?”
“Um, well… New England, originally. Most recently, California,” I answered. “Up north, near San Francisco.”
Sam laughed. “So what the hell are you doing here? Sick of the beautiful weather?”
“Something like that,” I chuckled back. I wasn’t about to try to tell my life story to two strangers in the ten seconds before I had to be on the ice again.
“Well, welcome to Minnesota, eh?” Jim replied in a heavy and decidedly phony accent. I looked askance at him. He had the agreeable look of a young man who hasn’t quite reached his prime; I guessed he would be downright handsome about five years down the line. Slimmer, more serious-looking than Sam, with dark hair and deep brown eyes and a neatly trimmed beard that ran the length of his chin.
“Yeah, you’re welcome, eh?” Sam agreed.
“We don’t actually talk like that,” Jim assured me. “It’s just an affectation put on for outsiders, so they’ll think they’re in Canada or something.”
“You’d better start working on yours, too,” Sam said seriously. “Here, I’ll teach you,” he began, but fortunately I was rescued from a lesson in Northern American linguistics by the return of the entire forward line, which sent my new acquaintances scurrying for their positions.
My defensive partner finally arrived, plopping his enormous body down next to mine and effectively cutting me off from further conversational efforts with Sam and Jim. I couldn’t decide whether or not I should be sorry about that. But as the game continued, I watched them weaving in tandem along the ice, passing the puck to one another seemingly without effort, to all appearances like two balls on the ends of the same chain. They must have been teammates for a long time, I thought; they made such a good wing pair. I wouldn’t have said that they were great athletes; I mean, they were both obviously competent, but not spectacular in any way. But there was something in the way they played together that made them better, much better than their skill levels alone would have suggested. Almost as if they knew each other so well that one was an extension of the other; two minds and bodies separated only by twenty feet of ice.
Following the closing handshakes, I was surprised to find them both skating beside me back to the bench.
“Okay, so we know you’re not a native, but do you drink beer?” Sam inquired, as if it were a beverage endemic only to Milwaukee and cities of similar latitude.
“Of course!” I answered. I was actually very fond of beer, although I’d found, as I often did, that the styles that were popular in Minnesota weren’t the same as those that dominated other markets.
“Good,” Jim replied. “We usually go out for a beer after the game, and we think you should come.”
I was taken aback. They seemed like nice enough fellows and all, but I really saw no point in going overboard with the acquaintance. Sure, I was a little lonely. It’s never easy being the new kid in town, no matter how old you are, and I hadn’t exactly been a ball of social fire in any of the many places I’d lived in the wandering course of my adult life. But really, what besides hockey could I, a relatively mature woman, possibly have in common with two twenty-something-year-olds? Boys, practically, to my mind.
I guess my lack of enthusiasm showed, because while I hesitated in answering I heard Sam saying, “I don’t think she likes us, Jim.”
“Well, you shouldn’t have made that comment about her skating like a, ‘you know,’ ” Jim replied, shaking his head dolefully.
“Please just come have a beer with us!” Sam pleaded. “Otherwise Jim will never let me hear the end of it.”
“Unless you really don’t like us,” Jim said, narrowing his dark brows at me. I wasn’t short, especially with my skates on, but standing up he still towered a good six inches over me, and I might have been intimidated had he not had such an indisputably gentle face.
“We wouldn’t blame you much,” Sam chimed in. “We are kind of obnoxious.”
I looked from one to the other. There was something refreshingly youthful in their earnestness and a part of me was touched. It was sweet, really, the way they’d taken pity on me. After all, I probably seemed as old to them as they seemed young to me.
“It’s not that,” I answered finally, weighing my words carefully. “I was just surprised that you’re old enough to drink.”
“Oh-ho, she got you back, Sam!” Jim said with a laugh.
“Says you!” he shot back. “Jim’s just jealous because I’m more mature.”
“You’re only six months older than me!” Jim said. “And older does not mean more mature!”
That was certainly the truth. Here I was in my late thirties, with no husband or children and no particular desire for either yet. In a new city with a new job that I wasn’t even sure I was going to like because I still hadn’t decided what I wanted to be when I grew up. Plus I was living in a one-room apartment with cardboard-box furniture and a mattress on the floor. What did I know about mature? Maybe my mistake all along had been in trying to meet people my own age: settled, adult, grown-up people. I’d be right at home with these guys.
“Twenty-six is mature!” Sam retorted. “Isn’t it, Kathy?”
“Hmm, sorry, I can’t remember back that far,” I joked. “It’s been a long decade.”
We retreated to the locker room to undress. As usual I kept my head down so I could pretend not to notice those few bold fellows who stripped down to their bare asses before changing into clean clothes. Me, I never bothered. I was always way too sweaty after a game to even think about forcing fresh pants on over my sticky thighs. I did wonder, though, how the other players would react if one day I, too, decided to strip down naked and wander around the locker room with all my goods hanging out like it was no big deal.
That was one way to make an impression, I thought. I’d never been what you’d call beautiful, even when I was younger, but I wasn’t bad to look at, either, especially since hockey had sculpted my once-flabby form into a passably pleasing shape. I hoped that having a decent figure helped to distract the interested observer from my other physical flaws, which weren’t too tough to overlook if you didn’t look too closely. I had very plain brown hair that I wore cut to the shoulders, and kind of a square face that was rescued from dullness by deep dimples, rosy cheeks, and big green eyes that I simply adored. Most days I didn’t mind not being gorgeous. It was much easier to blend into the background when you were average-looking, and I’d spent most of my adulthood trying not to be noticed. And I could still clean up pretty cute when I wanted to, although I knew those days were rapidly drawing to an end. Hmm, I thought as I glanced around the room full of strangers and contemplated the cold and lonely bed waiting for me at my apartment. Maybe I should flaunt it while I still had it.
I hauled my gear out to my car and then, with some trepidation, headed upstairs to the sports pub. Sam and Jim were waiting for me in the doorway and that relieved me somewhat; I always felt hopelessly awkward walking into a place alone. I nonchalantly looked them over. Unlike me, who was twice my normal size with gear on, they didn’t look that different without it. Sam, I saw now, had golden blond hair that he wore in a buzz-cut all over his rather round head; it added to the general impression of constant cheerfulness that he radiated like sunbeams off of every edge of his person. He had a solid, stocky build and was several inches shorter than Jim. With his fair skin and bright smile, I’d describe him as cute more than handsome; he seemed to ooze a boyish sort of charm that made him appear pleasant and harmless. Jim, by contrast, had a darker, almost olive complexion, and seemed the quieter of the two; something in the set of his jaw suggested a level of reserve his friend seemed to lack. He had a narrow face that went well with his lean form, and seeing him in his street-clothes, I would have sworn he didn’t have an ounce of fat on him; only lithe, long muscles that ran like thick wires over his elongated limbs.
“Shall we?” Sam said, extending an arm as if to offer it to me with old-fashioned courtesy. When I hesitated, he seemed to think better of the idea and hurriedly retracted it. I pretended not to notice.
I followed them inside. A few of the other guys from the team were up there and nodded to Sam and Jim. Then I caught them looking bemusedly at me and I blushed. Self-consciously I raised my hands to my head and felt my hair all utterly disheveled into sweaty locks, as it always was after hockey. I’d never gotten in the habit of showering after a game, either. I figured since I was always going straight home afterwards, what was the point in enduring the fungus-ridden locker room shower?
This is why you don’t have a boyfriend, I thought as I plunked myself down at the small, circular table Sam selected while Jim went up to the bar to buy us a pitcher.
“So why did you move here, Kathy? Was it for work?” Sam asked as Jim poured our beers and I slipped him a five for my share. He pushed it back across the table with a pleading little wave of his hand. I shoved it back towards him with a bigger, more insistent wave. His eye caught mine and I watched it crinkle in amusement. Then he nodded and, conceding defeat, tucked the bill into his pocket. It was very rare that I lost the battle over going dutch with men. I hadn’t been independent all these years for nothing, after all.
“Was it for work?” Sam was repeating.
“Oh! Well, sort of,” I answered, jerking my attention back to the conversation at hand. “Not really.”
I took a sip of my beer while he stared at me as if expecting me to continue talking. Jim was peering at me keenly through narrow-rimmed glasses he had not been wearing during the game. I liked them. They did something for the shape of his face.
“No shutting her up, is there?” Sam said at last into the silence.
“So are you naturally not very talkative, or do you just have a lot to hide?” Jim inquired.
I chuckled. “A little from Column A…”
“Well, what do you do? For work, I mean?” Jim said.
“Oh,” I hedged. “This and that.”
They looked at one another.
“Wait right here,” Sam said. “I left my good dental extractor in the car and I think we’re gonna need the big one if we want to get any information out of this girl.” His voice was husky, and a little edgy, as if he spent a lot of time joking around; it rather pleasantly complemented Jim’s deep, gravelly rumble.
I laughed. “Really, there’s not much to tell. I have a Bachelor’s in Film Studies, which, as you might imagine, is pretty close to worthless.”
“Film Studies?” Jim interrupted. “That sounds interesting!”
“It was!” I answered enthusiastically. “Oh, I really enjoyed it. It’s not what people think, criticism and all that, it’s more like a sociological study, looking at the culture behind movies and so on. You do a lot of reading on the history of the time and write a lot of papers – it was really fun. Kind of useless in the real world, though. There wasn’t much I could do with it except get a doctorate and then teach, and I don’t really have the personality for that. It looks good on my resume, though; proves I was smart enough to finish college.”
“Why’d you choose it, then, if you didn’t want to make a career out of it?” Sam inquired.
“I dunno,” I answered vaguely. “There wasn’t really anything else I wanted to do, I guess.”
“Huh,” Jim replied, resting his head on his hand as if seriously considering the meaning of what I had said.
I gave up attempting to describe what was obviously a foreign concept and hurried on with my speech. “Anyway,” I said, “I haven’t got what you’d call a career. I’ve done all kinds of work: office jobs, waitressing, copyediting… I was even an online retailer of out-of-print videos for a while. Right now I’m working as a bank teller.”
“Well, that’s cool!” Sam said without much enthusiasm.
I shrugged. “I like math,” I said. “It’s one of the better jobs I’ve had. I actually did it once before, back in New Jersey, but then I got promoted to New Accounts and I didn’t like it as much. Dealing with people… It can be really irritating, you know. And when I moved to North Carolina, I decided to try something else so I never advanced any further in banking.”
“Why did you move to North Carolina?” Jim inquired, his eyebrows raised as if he thought it a strange destination.
I shrugged again and let out an awkward laugh. “No real reason, I guess. Just felt like a change.”
“How many places have you lived exactly?” Sam asked, furrowing his brow. It forced his forehead into shallow, barely perceptible wrinkles that made mine look like the walls of the Grand Canyon but without all the pretty colors.
I smoothed my wet hair down over my forehead uneasily. “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “I guess on average I move every couple of years.”
“Every couple of years?” Sam replied, astonished, drawing back to peek underneath the table at my lower half. “No moss grows beneath your feet, I see.”
“I guess we shouldn’t get too attached, eh, Sam?” Jim said.
“Why so often?” Sam asked me.
“I can’t stand cleaning,” I said seriously. “It’s easier just to move when the apartment gets dirty.”
***
These are the first ten pages of my latest novel. Comments are welcome!
Scooby-Doo. Amazing, isn’t it? Here it is, nearly fifty years after the first episode aired, and Scooby-Doo movies and cartoons are still being made.
I’ll admit that I haven’t watched any of the newer programs myself, so I can’t speak as to their quality. I loved the original Scooby-Doo shows way too much to taint my memory of them with some newer (and undoubtedly less charming) version of a classic. Besides, I still watch the reruns from time and time, and you know what? I’ll be darned if they aren’t just as good as they were when I was a kid. Of course, maybe I appreciate them on a slightly different level now.
Because it turns out that the Scooby-Doo shows, in their early manifestations, weren’t about a gang of teenagers and a talking dog. They weren’t about how many ways you can work chocolate sauce into a quadruple-decker sandwich, or how easily villains are fooled by cheap, impromptu disguises. They weren’t even about solving mysteries. What Scooby-Doo was really about was the triumph of reason over superstition. Because what devotees of Scooby-Doo learned from watching the show was simply this: There is a rational explanation for everything.
It’s brilliantly done. You have Fred and Velma, the logical leaders of the group, who are consistently convinced that there’s no such thing as ghosts and are determined to prove it. You have Daphne, who stands on the fence, being sometimes a believer and sometimes a skeptic. And finally you have Scooby and Shaggy, the superstitious “cowards” who fall prey to every supernatural trick. Yet they’re the ones who always end up having to lure their paranormal pursuers into the gang’s cleverly designed trap. They’re the ones who constantly have to find the courage to confront their fears, and who ultimately reap the greatest satisfaction from uncovering the truth. And they’re undeniably our favorites, the ones we identify with and support.
You can’t help but root for the hungry young man and his faithful and equally hungry Great Dane, to hope that they’ll learn to trust the logic of their peers even as we ourselves learn to trust it. Because the show proves, time and again, how needless their fear really is, how silly their conviction that werewolves and mummies and monsters are real. And as viewers, we know better, because we know how it always ends. The phosphorescent alien footprints trailing across a barren field. The eerie thumping of a mysterious and invisible drummer. The green ghosts emerging from hidden hallways and secret staircases to taunt and terrorize our valiant crew. Week after week, we watch and we learn.
There’s no such thing as ghosts. It’s always a trick, a scheme devised by mere mortal men to keep people away from the site of the haunting or other creepy phenomenon. There’s always a plot to abscond with someone else’s treasure, or to foil the attempts of greedy neighbors to abscond with one’s own. No matter how frightening or eerie or persuasive the phantom, it always turns out to be a man in disguise.
That’s what makes Scooby-Doo the ultimate symbol of my generation. It’s why we think the way we do; why we champion proof and science, and why we’ve discarded spooks and angels. It’s why when a door slams shut in the middle of the night we suspect a prowler and not a poltergeist. It’s why we blame trick photography and digital imaging for producing shapes and shadows we can’t discern or identify. It’s why we’ve lost belief in demonic possession and intensified our interest in mental illness, and why we hope to find aliens and not to fight them. Because we know that crime is real. That evil is real. That fear is real. But we also know that no supernatural power lies behind them. Only a human, just like us.
Is it better this way? Perhaps. Except that we’ve gone beyond the golden Scooby-Doo moment of discovering that the spirit of which we were deathly afraid is just a run-of-the-mill crook playing a trick. There’s no revelation here, no joy in finally uncovering the man behind the mask. Because we never thought for a moment that the ghost was real. We never believed it was anything more than another troubled human taking what wasn’t theirs and scaring people in the process. Because that’s how thoroughly we understand humans now, how much more dangerous they are than demons and phantoms. Fear doesn’t come from outer space or beyond the grave anymore. It’s right here beside us, sleeping in the upstairs apartment or working in the next tiny cubicle or tramping down the same tiled hallway.
Science has triumphed. Rationality has triumphed. But they haven’t turned our world into a prettier or less intimidating place. Rather they’ve made us aware that what humans harbor in the darkest depths of their hearts is more frightening by far than any monster we could have imagined. We expect monsters to kill and destroy without thinking, and without reason. We don’t expect spirits to care whom they frighten, or whom they hurt. But we expect humans to behave better than beasts or bogeymen. How do we explain it when they don’t?
Scooby-Doo understands. Because here, in the real world, behind every event we can’t explain, there also lies a mystery to unravel. Perhaps it’s not the mystery we were expecting, because it’s not merely a matter of proving that the ghost is a fake, or that there’s a real live person behind it. This infinitely more complex riddle can never be solved in twenty-two minutes with a jumbo box of laundry detergent and an industrial-sized fan. It’s the mystery of human behavior, of what truly transpires on the other side of the masks that all of us wear.
My erotic flash fiction piece "Missed Connection" has been published in The Pittsburgh Flash Fiction Gazette:
http://pittsburghflashfictiongazette.net/fiction-missed-connection-lori-schafer/ (Adult Content)
A couple of months ago, I wrote a post about my short-short “Delayed Connection," which was then the home-page story on Romance Flash.
In it I describe how the original idea for that very sweet, very
romantic story came to me from this one, “Missed Connection,” which is a
much more sexual and also strangely sadder piece.
The original
premise was actually not, as you might think, the chance meeting at the
airport. Rather it was about the confession with which the story begins.
Because I think we can all relate to that, to the regrets we have over
the “one that got away,” over never making a move when we had the
chance. How afraid we were to share our feelings, for fear of being
rejected, yet how simultaneously eager we were to admit them, on the
unlikely chance that our emotional and/or physical affection would be
returned. The narrator here has taken the bold and incredibly foolish
step of actually making the confession – in writing, no less – not in
the middle of the acquaintance, but after it’s too late for anything to
happen between her and her object of desire.
What could possibly
motivate a character to do something like that? There’s nothing in it
for her, obviously, nothing to be gained but an increase in her pain and
humiliation, so why would she do it? The answer is simply that she
wanted him to know. At the very last, she wanted him to know how
attractive he was to her, and what kind of fantasies he inspired, even
if it meant exposing her deepest secrets to someone who had already left
her behind. It’s a remarkably unselfish act. Stupid, surely, but
unselfish.
I’d like to say that she's rewarded for making this
unusual parting gift, and perhaps, in a way, she is. In the end, she
still doesn’t get what she wanted. But maybe she feels a little better
about not getting it. And if you find yourself grieving over a lost
love, you would be a fool to hope for more than that.
***
The “Lori Schafer Special” is now up on The Pittsburgh Flash Fiction Gazette;
the front page features four of my flash fiction stories, including my
latest release, “Missed Connection.” Please check it out to read my
interview with Guy Hogan, in which I discuss my forthcoming novels,
modern pornography, and the art of writing erotica. As always when
visiting the Gazette, be forewarned that besides sexy fiction, it also
features naked ladies – lots of naked ladies. And no, none of them are
me!
http://pittsburghflashfictiongazette.net/lori-schafer-write-erotica/
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"Missed Connection" is one of the stories to be featured in my forthcoming collection To All the Penises I've Ever Known: Romantic and Erotic Shorts by Lori Schafer. For more information, please visit the book's webpage or subscribe to my newsletter.
