Little arguments: stories,

, flash fictions from a work-in-progress,

~

The Thousand Islands on the St. Lawrence River, of which we know there are actually one thousand, seven hundred and ninety-three. Why is precision valued less than an approximation? The number more fluid than fixed. The counting became, I’d suspect, rather tedious.

~

From American police dramas, law dramas and numerous crime scene investigations, the list of the fictional dead has increased exponentially, even as American national statistics fall. Car 54, where are you? I suspect that the number of murders in Prime Time would eventually reduce any population down to near zero. In a country where many perceive reality and television merged, I wonder if most are aware of the image it portrays and projects? Someone once told Timothy Findley, “Real life writes real bad,” and now I’m convinced that everyone in Miami either airbrushed, a drug-lord, or both. I wonder how real numbers would compare, to these high-definition fictions. Is this why sex in the media so prevalent? The television world needs to repopulate, quickly. We might have no one left to watch.

~

There was the summer we lived in the abandoned blue 1970 Ford, nestled amid ancient maple and oak in a field between farmhouses. It sat on the boundary of our two properties, at the back of the treeline, and neither of us knew who might have left it, her father or mine. Do you drive out a car until it stops on its own to take root, or was it deliberately planted? The summer she kissed me. We were thirteen years old, and perhaps shouldn’t have been in a withering car, more rust than blue. The difference between English- and French-speaking families, my mother would warn, is where one left your non-working car. In French, they sat in the driveway, the yard, the garage. In English, they lay far afield, the back forty, as distant from the house as was possible. Out of sight, out of mind, I suppose. Perhaps this might have been particular only to us, our small corner of Canadian rural, the bare stretch of sky and stalk barely separated by trees.