Short Happy Stories

The first volume of Short Happy Stories is now available! The book contains 50 stories. Order here–or ask about it at your local bookstore.

A Strange Strange Way

An orange moon goes up as a blue car drives by; in the house you lift a cup and the baby starts to cry.

Years will pass and you’ll crash and you’ll laugh, but this moment never stops; the future and the past will split you in half until the world pops.

The sky and the sea were meant to be—or maybe they weren’t at all… Still you search for a key, search for an answer, while hoping the moon won’t fall.

The house is now quiet but your mind is a riot because you don’t know the right route; but in a moment you’ll feel saved, in a strange strange way, by an owl’s cool calm hoot.

Model Sailboat

“I appreciate that you’re trying to give him a nice Christmas,” says Tom, “but this is too old for him.”

The shrink-wrapped box he’s holding says “Model Sailboat.”

“That one isn’t for Adam,” says Eliza. “That one’s for me.”

“You bought this model sailboat for yourself?”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing. I just had no idea you were interested in this kind of thing.”

“Everything starts somewhere.”

And this interest started two hours ago, downtown, in a shop where she was looking for a Christmas gift for Adam. Upon inspection she saw that two hundred and thirty-seven little wooden pieces are involved, and knew the model sailboat would be too complex and risky for their four-year-old son—but Eliza kept holding the box, kept looking at it.

Glue not needed for assembly. All two hundred and thirty-seven pieces fit together perfectly without glue. Supposedly.

The box also claims that when you join together all two hundred and thirty-seven pieces, and attach the two sails that are also included in the box, the sailboat will sail. This model sailboat will actually sail!

“How cool is that?” says Eliza.

Tom, examining the box, says “Wow.” Then he sets down the box and looks at the clock that’s hanging on the wall, above a family photograph. “Are you going to make the salmon or should I?”

“If these pieces—these two hundred and thirty-seven pieces—if they actually fit together gluelessly, and if the sailboat actually sails… Won’t that be so incredible?”

“That would be something. I guess I’ll make dinner.”

“I’m going to build this model sailboat. And then I’m going to sail it.”

As has happened too many times, the holidays are over almost before they have a chance to happen. But pleasant and unpleasant things did happen, and some memories will survive for decades—usually lingering in unlit corridors, but occasionally dancing in a spotlight—so there probably isn’t really anything to complain about. Eliza didn’t manage to set aside time to build, or even to start building, the model sailboat during the holidays, as she’d hoped; but she isn’t particularly surprised, and assumes she’ll start building on the soonest calm Saturday or Sunday afternoon.

When she’s halfway down the hallway she realizes she didn’t actually close the front door all the way. But she doesn’t go back and close it all the way right away; that can wait. Right now it’s important to not get distracted from what’s actually important.

Thank God: there on the shelf, exactly where she thought it would probably be, in the back, waits the shrink-wrapped box that says “Model Sailboat.” She takes the box off the shelf and puts it on the kitchen table and shuts the front door.

Sitting there at the kitchen table, leaning over the box with hands clasped, her joy is enormous. Two hundred and thirty-seven pieces, and they all fit together gluelessly! And then, when they’re all together, a magnificent adventure! Just think of all the bodies of water out there, just waiting to be sailed across… How had she forgotten about this?

When Tom gets home Eliza shows him the box and asks if he remembers it and he says “No. I don’t think so… Or maybe I do.”

“Well I had completely forgotten about it,” says Eliza, “until I was out Christmas shopping today. All of a sudden it came back to me.”

“I see,” says Tom, examining the box. “So… you’re giving this to Adam for Christmas? Maybe he’ll like it. Not for anyone under fourteen? That’s ridiculous. Adam can definitely handle this.”

“This is for me.”

“Maybe you and Adam can build it together.”

“This is something I should do on my own.”

“Why?”

“This is for me alone.”

“But…” Tom is on the verge of suggesting that she has a better chance of actually getting around to building the model sailboat if she and Adam agree to work on it together—but, instead of making the suggestion, he just stops talking. She’ll build it the way she wants to build it, or she’ll continue not building it; why should he care? He doesn’t.

Their exchange makes Eliza think Tom doesn’t understand why she’s so interested in this model sailboat—and suddenly she realizes something: she herself doesn’t exactly understand why she’s so interested in this model sailboat. Yes, obviously the fact that so many little pieces fit together gluelessly is extremely impressive… But does that explain the enormous joy she experiences when looking at the box? She doesn’t think so. But why does a feeling have to be explained, understood? It doesn’t.

She crosses the threshold and crosses the distance and opens the door of the yellow taxi, shining in the sun. She hears Tom close their front door—and almost before she understands what she’s doing she’s hurrying back to their front door.

Two minutes later she joins Tom in the taxi. “It occurred to me that I should bring this,” she says, showing him the shrink-wrapped box that says “Model Sailboat.”

“Ah,” says Tom, just barely remembering the box he last saw years and years ago.

Eliza was already very excited about this vacation, but now she is very very excited about it. They’ll be in the countryside for a week, so she’ll definitely have enough time to have a wonderful time building this model sailboat. And, if she remembers correctly, there’s a nice pond quite close to their friends’ house. A pond that will function as the perfect venue for her model sailboat’s maiden voyage.

“Doesn’t that sound like a wonderful plan?” she says to Tom, smiling because she just knows her future will be satisfying.

Wind is moving the pond; the reflections are abstract. “How does it feel to be a grandmother?” says Joan. Not immediately sure how to answer, Eliza looks at the trees. The leaves should be red and brown and leaving their branches; time and wind and gravity should be conveying the dead leaves to the surface of the pond, to conceal the abstract reflections and make it obvious that the year is coming to a close; yes, this really should be, Eliza feels, an autumn scene. But it isn’t. The young leaves are green, vibrant, gripping their branches with ease.

Her week here is almost over. If she had arranged her time differently, she could be watching the model sailboat right now. The sailboat could be sailing across the pond. How easily she can imagine it…

“Whose is this?” says Adam, showing Tom the shrink-wrapped box that says “Model Sailboat.”

“Oh, yes,” says Tom. “That was your mother’s. She would get very excited about that from time to time. Never got around to putting it together. As you can see.”

Tom transfers his attention from the box to the things on the other side of the window and takes another sip of coffee.

“The box says you should be at least fourteen,” says Adam, “but that seems kind of ridiculous. I think Sophie would be fine. And I think she would actually really like this. She’s always been really curious about airplanes and trains… And boats. She asks about why things move the way they do. How they’re built. Do you mind if I give this to her?”

“With my arthritis I wouldn’t be able to build it even if I wanted to. And I don’t. So go ahead.”

“Thanks. The box says you don’t need glue. Two hundred and thirty-seven pieces, and you don’t need glue. Do you think that’s actually true?”

“I don’t know. All I know is that if that model sailboat makes your daughter even half as happy as it made your…”

Tom stops talking because he just forgot the point he was about to make.

Then he remembers: “She’ll be very lucky.”

The Winter Is Now

Snow—bright—covers the lawn, and all of the clouds are gone. Inside the pub voices—not many—float between the wooden walls, and the barkeep waits for a call.

While Fiona waits she listens—or at least tries to listen—to the man sitting at the bar. He’s telling her about some inane problem; she’s pretending to care.

What she finds particularly annoying, though, is the fact that he’s whining.

Fiona never whines. At least not anymore. Unlike Brian, she is tough. Life has taught her that when dealing with a problem it’s always, always better to disregard your emotions. The more you engage with your emotions, the more likely you are to lose perspective and make avoidable mistakes, dangerous compromises.

In this very moment Fiona is demonstrating—only to herself, but that’s important, right?—her own mental strength: the call she has been waiting for could change the course of her life, and she isn’t thinking about the call at all.

Well, she’s constantly aware that she’s waiting for the call—considering the stakes, how could she not be?—but she isn’t actively thinking about any of the corresponding facts, perspectives, issues. Most people would probably fixate on the drama of it all; but stoic Fiona disregards the drama and remains focused, resolutely, on outcomes. And since everything she can do has already been done, there’s nothing for her to think about. So for now, thanks to her mental strength, none of that stuff exists. She’s proud of herself.

But of course she’s kind of thinking about last Wednesday, when—

“Glühwein, if you please.” Due to the new arrival’s accent and request, Fiona assumes he’s German.

“Mulled wine?” says Fiona. “We don’t have any of that.”

“But snow is on the ground,” says the woman who came in with the man. She also speaks with a German accent. “When we were walking here I could see my breaths. I have also seen frozen water. The winter is now. The time for glühwein is now.”

“I suppose I could heat some red wine in a kettle.”

“Red wine, yes,” says the woman. “But red wine alone will not be sufficient. You will add cinnamon sticks and star anise and cloves and zest of orange and orange—”

“I’m afraid you’re dreaming.”

“But the winter is now.”

“The sad truth is that you’ve found yourself in a rather worthless establishment. Some would call it simple, but I think you and I know better than that.”

While the man’s rather expressionless expression has not changed since he submitted the initial glühwein request, the woman’s whole demeanor just changed drastically: a moment ago she seemed stern and entitled, and now she seems terribly sad. Even though she’s middle-aged, she somehow exhibits a child’s disappointment.

“I will have one of your Irish whiskeys,” says the man, moving smoothly into the future.

As Fiona pours whiskey into a glass she says, to the woman, “And you?”

“I require more time to make my decision,” says the woman. “Always in this weather in Germany there is glühwein. The glühwein in essence eliminates the cold. In doing so it reminds us that our species is not required to accept the indifferent and brutal parameters of existence. The warmth of our species can indeed be more powerful than the frigid apathy of the cosmos. But it is a constant war—and when one finds oneself in a situation such as this, in a cold winter day devoid of glühwein, yet another battle is lost.”

“Elke! Mein Gott! You go too far! Enough! Just have one of these Irish whiskeys. If you have one of these Irish whiskeys, all will be wunderbar.”

“But… Friedrich…” She stares at Friedrich with disbelief, as though witnessing a betrayal she could never have imagined. As though realizing she has maybe never known who he actually is.

“We are not in Germany,” says Friedrich. “We are in Ireland.”

What Elke says after lowering her eyes and turning back to Fiona: “May I please have one of your Irish whiskeys?” Her voice is infused with resignation.

As Fiona pours whiskey into a glass she hears Brian again: “If I were to start talking to you two Germans—which appears to be exactly what I am doing—and if I were to put forth the proposition that your dear departed countryman, Herr Thomas Mann, is—”

Brian keeps talking but Fiona stops listening because exactly when she places the drink in front of Elke the telephone rings—and Fiona remembers that she has been waiting for her future to be… decided, she supposes. Is that really what’s about to happen? Amazingly, the glühwein couple had caused all awareness of the call, and of the corresponding facts and perspectives and issues, to temporarily vanish. But this really is a big moment. It’s interesting, how your view of something can completely change in an instant: now that the call and the facts and the perspectives and the issues have returned, the last few minutes seem like a marvelous gravity-free era. As she takes a few quick steps to answer the telephone, with breath held, uncertainties siege her mind.

The voice coming through the telephone makes it clear that what Fiona would prefer to happen—fine, she’ll admit it: what she really wants to happen—is not going to happen. The snow is bright in the sunlight. Yesterday the lawn was green, and today the lawn is white. Nothing can be done to change that snow, so Fiona simply accepts it—just as she will accept the information just communicated.

Well, she supposes she actually could do something about the snow on the lawn: she could heat up kettle after kettle after kettle of water, pour the hot water onto the snow, and systematically, slowly, melt all of the snow. How many times would she have to fill the kettle? And… Would the hot water somehow damage the lawn?

But why is she even thinking about this? She doesn’t really mind the snow. She actually kind of likes the snow. She only wishes it weren’t so bright. Its brightness bothers her eyes.

“Alright,” she says, and hangs up the telephone. While some things can’t be changed—or simply aren’t worth the trouble—there’s always at least one reasonable thing that can be done to improve one’s immediate world; and the thought of pouring steaming kettles of water onto snow makes Fiona realize what she ought to do in this particular immediate world.

“Elke—that’s your name?” Elke turns to Fiona and nods while Friedrich keeps listening—or keeps pretending to listen—to Brian expound on Mynheer Peeperkorn’s waterfall excursion. Fiona continues: “Elke, tell me the glühwein ingredients and I’ll pop over to the shop around the corner and get them all. I want to make a good glühwein. Because you’re right, Elke: the winter is now, and we need true warmth.”

Elke is smiling. “Thank you, but that will not be required. Your Irish whiskey has surpassed my expectations. It provides a perfectly sufficient warmth. Had your pub not been bereft of glühwein, I would not have discovered this delight. Perhaps it is sometimes preferable to have your hopes demolished. Because then you gain space for new things.”

An Admirable Butterfly

The butterfly is missing a big part of a wing. The butterfly is on the pavement, right in front of our front door, alone. It’s a pretty butterfly. Nice bright orange. Intense black. Hazy white spots.

It seems unlikely that this butterfly will ever fly again. It seems likely that this butterfly will soon die. But what do I know? Maybe the butterfly won’t be able to fly, but will be able to survive on foot. Is there a special term for a butterfly’s feet? I really don’t know anything.

In the middle of the night I wake up and resume butterfly thoughts and find myself moving toward the front door, thinking the butterfly almost certainly won’t be there. Something must have happened by now. Maybe the butterfly walked away. Or somehow managed to fly. Or is now being digested. Something.

I open the front door and see I’m wrong: the butterfly is still there, in the same exact spot.

But not everything is the same: wind has arrived. A cold and significant wind. The wind shakes the butterfly—but the butterfly keeps clinging to the pavement, keeps refusing to be blown away. What resilience! I’m very impressed, then very sad. Very sad because… What’s the point? Can anything ever actually improve for this butterfly, with its crucial deficiency?

The moon, loitering over the opposite rooftop, also looks like it’s missing a big part of itself. But it isn’t.

Feeling powerless, I go back to bed.

And now the night is gone and the moon is gone and the wind is pretty much gone and the butterfly is still there, in the same exact spot.

As I close the front door I hear “Will you be ready to leave soon?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say. And it’s true: I don’t know what she’s talking about. No idea. I’ve been thinking about the injured butterfly.

“Weren’t we going to go to the bookstore?” she says. “And then that fish place?”

“Yes. That butterfly is still out there, you know.”

“Should we put it out of its misery?”

“I admire this butterfly.”

“OK.”

“The way he perseveres… We could probably learn more from this little butterfly than we could from all the fat cats and muckety-mucks and—”

“Maybe we should take it to that grove. Sometimes there are a lot of butterflies there.”

Yet another frustration: her idea is great, and I don’t understand why I didn’t think of it first.

We manage to get the slightly trembling butterfly onto a piece of paper. When the car starts the radio goes on. I turn it off.

The butterfly is not trembling now. Is he comfortable?

Does he remember flying? Or is this moment everything that has ever existed?

While she drives she tells me that two particular black dots on this butterfly’s wings—below the big absence—indicate that this butterfly is a male butterfly. “I was thinking of him as a boy,” I say. Then she tells me that these butterflies migrate. Apparently a lot of them travel two thousand miles, down to mountains in Mexico. She tells me these things, and I am both grateful for the information and annoyed she knows so much. Then I imagine severe mountain passes filled with soft orange butterflies.

The grove’s tall eucalyptus trees move in the wind; leaves rustle; the sun’s massive light is divided into countless unique little shapes. And fortunately, thank God, yes: many butterflies are here, fluttering around and resting on trees.

We place the injured butterfly close to some other butterflies, and hope he’ll have a happy death.

A Passage To Oranges And Moonlight

Since the curtains are open you can see the little lake and the modern wooden house and the two dogs on the grass in the sun, sleeping and maybe dreaming, and on the other side of that modern wooden house’s windows a cardiganed woman who is no longer young is standing at the top of a spiral staircase, explaining melodiously why she’s living the way she’s living, but you stop listening to her because in a simple frame, on the wall to her left, there’s a painting of a desert that becomes your new focus, and now it almost seems like the whole world is nothing but sand dunes, the tops of which are being erased by wind, and sand seems to be absolutely everywhere until its dominance is disrupted by an infinitesimal sun, which gets bigger and bigger, and soon you understand that what you’re looking at is the actual sun’s reflection on a silver train, and this shining silver train hurtles two martini-drinking lovers who are also deceivers to a city with grand boulevards and clever alleys that are not devoid of people who refuse to accept the new methods, people who sometimes sit in comfortable cafés and discuss against-the-rules ideas that are intriguing and stupid and visionary, talking a bit too loudly, being too conspicuous while a decrepit boat begins to move down the river, leaving the palaces and monuments and museums behind, barely not sinking, now sliding between a wide autumn field and a stubborn stone village where the low late afternoon sun flows into a small stone room where a timeworn clockmaker is hunched over a vulnerable pocket watch, with special glasses perched on the tip of his nose, using tiny tools to adjust tiny gears, some of which don’t look dissimilar to galaxies, and the tiny jewels are giant suns, and as the timeworn clockmaker looks at the giant suns his expression changes and he removes his special glasses and his wrinkles disappear, and now he’s a young man standing at the edge of an ocean, and the low late afternoon sun throws his long shadow against a magnificent rock off the shore, and a command is carried by the wind: “Open the sails!”

The movie goes on—onward, to unexpected places with familiar strangers. A voyage on the high seas and gambling in Monte Carlo and a woman who says the most cutting things and advice from a blind man in the woods and, in the end, a Spanish villa with oranges and moonlight.

After you’ve seen many pieces of the world that you’ll never actually see, you leave the movie theater.

The movie was like a dream.

And now your life kind of seems like a dream: you don’t live in a Spanish villa, but you’re pretty sure you have an orange at home, waiting.

And look! Amazingly, in this exact moment, the moon emerges from a cloud.

This world can sure be wonderful.

Feel free to contact me at [email protected].