Size Mattering

Fetty had finished his shopping and was heading out the door when another shopper coming in the door tripped over his shoes and said to him, you there, what size are those, they look like clown shoes and Fetty says, they’re 47s and the shopper says, hardly, they look more like 46s to me and Fetty replies, you know they do feel a bit snug and then the shopper asks Fetty if he’d like to swing by on his way home and flatten the neighbor kid’s bicycle that’s always being left on the sidewalk for him to trip over and Fetty says, hmm, let me see, as he pulls out a little notepad with pencil from his shirt pocket, okay, got you down, you’re 45th on my flattening list, so when Fetty eventually swings by one Tuesday and flattens the neighbor kid’s bicycle, the shopper meets him outside by the wreckage and thanks Fetty by handing him his wife’s very first pair of home-made knitted socks she thought she’d never ever find feet for.

***

No Need for Intros

There were maybe six of us on the whole of Main. A warm morning. No one was running. Only one couple glued at the hip. Not one stray. Nobody waved or shouted, nice morning. Everyone simply went on his way. Then I stopped for no reason. Perhaps to get a reaction. Everyone surprisingly stopped too. Nobody inched except for eyeballs. To the left, then the right, up, then down like in an eye exam. I pointed to the sky. I opened my mouth in a long, silent O. Everyone did likewise. I shook my fist like I was mad at a cloud. It wasn’t the bully cloud that had been blocking the sun but a little gassy one that had been trying to get by. The air quickly filled with fists. Windows of apartments above stores opened up with fists. All of a sudden the little cloud caught fire brought on by the friction of fists. It fell on us like ash from a backyard burn barrel. We rubbed it on our hands and faces, bare arms. We were just happy to have pigment again.

***

No Longer Going In

Second time you called I’d grown my arms out long enough so I wouldn’t have to get up out of my chair to answer the door. This created a stir. Whole neighborhood joined in and soon came to look like an octopus ranch or squid farm. My legs, whole town’s legs appeared to shrink but only contrastingly, and after a summer spent in sun, all of us looked like orangutans behind our self-propelled mowers. We also began to play each others’ spinets from benches in our own parlors and occasionally pick broccoli from each others’ teeth! Once I became accustomed to my arms wrapping themselves around everybody, not to mention multiple times around myself and my leaner friends, so did everybody else and then was when we all began working from home.

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Charles Springer has degrees in anthropology and is an award-winning painter. A Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction and Best of the Net nominee, he is widely published in print and online. His first collection of poems, Juice was published by Regal House Publishing. A second collection of prose poems, Nowhere Now Here was published by Radial Books. He writes from Pennsylvania.  Visit him at https://www.charlesspringer.com.