Nurse the Hate: More Very Short Stories

The father pulled the car over in the downtown neighborhood so the boy could see the fire trucks. The little boy walked from the car and stood outside of the apartment fire staring at the flames whooshing out of the broken windows. The flames changed colors from a construction paper red into a jack-o-lantern orange. It was beautiful and powerful. The firemen were furiously engaged in their tasks. The boy stood transfixed watching something that he had previously thought only possible on his favorite TV shows. The boy turned to an equally transfixed little girl and said, “Wow… Isn’t this great?” The little girl’s gaze never broke from the fire as she answered him. “I live here.”

The young man ran his fingers inside the panties of the young woman. She let out a little moan. He struggled to free himself out of his jeans, and climbed on top of her. He could hear the rush of the stream’s waterfall in his left ear, and the gasp of her breath in his right. “I love you”, he whispered to her. She kissed him hungrily. It didn’t take long. Afterwards as he put his jeans back on, she asked him “Do you even remember my name?” Quickly he replied, “Sure, it’s Ellen.” She paused a second and responded. “No. It’s Emily...It’s Emily.”

It was a small town with two stoplights and one railroad crossing. Every time he drove over the railroad crossing he thought about how years earlier two high school seniors had raced a train and lost. They were drunk probably. Who knows. The boy in the passenger seat was a basketball star. He died instantly. The driver was a boy that made lots of jokes in class. Everybody thought he was funny. He lost his legs. That boy’s family moved away quietly soon after he had healed enough to leave the hospital. That was probably two years ago now. The railroad crossing had lots of high grass on either side of the tracks. Even now, when he drove over the tracks he always looked towards the edges, thinking that one day maybe he would see the wheelchair boy’s severed legs partially hidden in that high grass. That would really be something.