Here is another of those two-sentence stories with poetry added. I’m thinking of them as “Minuscule” and quick to read.

Read the first Minuscule, the explanation of why I wrote it and got started on this idea, and search under the category Fiction/Poetry Combination for others in the series.

Exploded

The conversation was so ludicrous, it seemed to me that it must be made up of movable parts that had shaken themselves out of sequence, like one of those square puzzles where you pushed the letters around each other until they made words, if you could actually do it – I sure never could. Because what I was hearing could not be true: I knew we lived in dangerous times on a dangerous planet, but I never expected that the rigors and the tedium of grocery shopping would finally so unhinge my mother’s mind that she would hand me a hundred-dollar bill, tell me to get in the car, get a gallon of milk, and keep the change.

Which, for all I knew
it had been years in coming,
civilization
neatly falling to pieces,
but that it happened today?

(Tanka 104)
3/4/18

“OK, Let’s Go Shopping” – mail art postcard 2013.