FAST FICTION #5: MILES

“Miles said, ‘Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there.’”

Tyler thought for a long moment before responding, and he was aware of everyone else’s eyes swiveling toward him as he said it. “I don’t get it.”

Maybe the goateed man sitting on the edge of the stage blinked with incredulity. Tyler didn’t know, because the blue-smoked John Lennon glasses, coupled with the shade cast by his carelessly/artfully tilted beret all but erased his eyes. “He’s saying that you need to look behind the notes, at what informs them, at what the player is adding of himself to the piece.”

Tyler found himself nodding automatically, just as he had done in countless over-his-head art lectures before. But since this wasn’t an academic setting, he felt irritated enough by his not understanding to try to lift his head a little higher so that he might actually catch something. “How are you supposed to know what someone’s *not* playing? Especially if it’s an original composition…”

The jazz man might have sighed a little. Or maybe he was just tired after finishing his set, and was unsure if he wanted to spend the time schooling these college kids who hung around afterward for autographs. “Even an original composition will lay it out for you first, young friend. At least, the good ones will. Then, like a branching tree, or an opening flower” – here he was actually moving his hands sinuously back and forth, clasping and unclasping his fingers – “it will go off in other directions, become its own thing. You grok it now? You dig?”

Tyler almost had it, but just as easily he lost hold of it. He could feel the friends he came with imperceptibly inching further away from him, into the smoky reaches of the crowd. “Uh… no, I don’t really, um, dig. So, to really put across a musical idea, you’ve got to… play something other than what it’s supposed to sound like?”

“You’re getting there, my young friend,” the jazz man said, snapping his fingers appreciatively. “Keep spinning the discs. You’ll get there.”

Tyler was about to ask if he meant “keep thinking about it” or “keep listening to the music”, but then, somewhere between the glasses and clipped beard, a nicotine-yellowed smile appeared. It was the first time the artist had done it since he took the stage eighty minutes ago. And for what might have been the first time since he had left high school, Tyler felt a rush of adrenaline brought on purely by academic thought. He felt like maybe he was blushing, or that the back of his neck was reddening, and people around him would think he was embarrassed that he had to ask a man such as this to explain his craft, but he didn’t care. He had actually asked a question and gotten an answer that made things clearer to him. He felt a little smarter, a little weightless.

Tyler never listened to jazz again after that night – admittedly, he had never listened to it before – and he broke up with the girl he had come with only two weeks later, but that rush he felt by making a connection with a learned person stayed with him. He found himself seeking out that feeling like a drug, asking more questions, getting more good answers. And it led him, inexorably, to the second part of his life.

FAST FICTION #4: DOUBLE YELLOW

Ethan didn’t know what the little metal tube was at first. But the more he turned it over in his hands, the more he realized he knew about it. Every few moments he would dip it back into the stream where he had first seen it, gleaming, halfway-stuck in the sandy bottom. Each dip would wash more of the creek-grime from it, and he could feel himself coming to full realization as it came more and more clean.

It was one of Garry’s bullet casings. It must have fallen here while he was out on one of his target practicing sessions. All the kids at school knew that he had come somewhere near here, to a corner of fields just before the woods started, to practice his aim, and hone his reloading speed. The more he thought about it, the more it fascinated Ethan – had the bullet jacketed in this casing originally been part of the box that Garry stored in his pocket that day he had walked into town, strolling right down the double-yellow line that ran down Main Street?

Ethan’s mind kept reeling off questions, faster than he had ever realized he could think. What had Garry been aiming at when he fired this particular bullet? And beyond that, what had he been thinking about? Was he imagining the act he was going to commit later, seeing face after face among the distant trees? And what had the expression on his own face been when he pulled the trigger?

Ethan felt too close to it all of a sudden, acutely imagining he could smell the gunpowder as it hovered over the creek bed like a ghost, all these months later. He began to shiver – he told himself it was because of the coldness of the creek – and ran. But his fist still held onto the casing. It was his now, and he already knew he was going to put it on his shelf, where it would sit forever. He was still young enough to think that some things can stay where they are put forever, despite what Garry had obliquely taught him, in fact had taught them all.

He kept running all the way back into town, breathlessly following the same double-yellow line, and didn’t stop until he was sure he had gotten farther than Garry had.

FAST FICTION #3: ORION (based on sculpture - "Orion" by Mark di Suvero)

“It doesn’t look like it’s supposed to be there.”

“It’s outside the art museum. Doesn’t that kind of exempt it from having to look like it belongs?”

“Don’t think so. In fact, that makes it even more necessary to make it blend in. I mean really, does standing under a fifteen-foot arm-bladed robot colored like blood make you want to look at some impressionist art?”

“You’re completely missing the point. And, I might add, you’ve been watching too many of those made-for-TV sci-fi movies. It’s supposed to pique your interest.”

“It actually makes me want to run screaming.”

“Quit being so melodramatic.”

“Not melodramatic. Just confused.”

“But there’s nothing to be confused about!”

“Do you think I’m the only one who thinks that?”

“You just think that the rest of us look at it and ‘get it’ and you’re afraid that you don’t.”

“And don’t you?”

“A little bit…”

“Aha!”

“Seriously, if we understand something you don’t, it just that we know that there’s nothing to ‘get’. It is what it is.”

“Don’t say that phrase. I hate that. ‘It is what it is.’ Can you tell me, right now, something that *isn’t* what it is?... Didn’t think so.”

“So are we going in or what? Maybe they have some information inside about this piece. It could give it some context.”

“I personally don’t think you’re supposed to have context for art. If it’s not there when you look at it, it’s not there.”

“But context can give you insight. You can really figure out what the artist was inspired by, why they did what they did.”

“I thought that you said there wasn’t anything to ‘get’, and this whole context thing sounds like there a lot of ‘get’ I should be getting.”

“I’m just saying, there’s layers to it. There’s what you see when you first see it, and then there’s what you see when you know what the artist was thinking.”

“That doesn’t make it any more inviting. It’s like something you’d see in a slaughterhouse chute.”

“But look how it reaches up to the sky! It’s like a pair of arms stretching up to the heavens!”

“It looks like it’s about to fall over on me.”

“Fine. You don’t want to go in. I get it. We’ll go play some foosball or something. How about that?”

“No, come on. I’m giving you a hard time, but we should take a look at what they’ve got.”

“You’ll keep an open mind?”

“So open my brains will fall out. I promise.”

“Good. Love me?”

“Of course.”

“See? You’re still looking at it.”

“I, for one, welcome our new alien overlords.”

“You’re a jerk.”

“Yeah. Love me?”

“Of course.”