I Would Love To, a micro fiction story
There was no more self to retrospect, no butterfly sprung from its cocoon, but still: had Mark known that morning what he couldn’t know now—that, walking to his motorcycle after work, helmet under one arm, the gold sedan with its headlights off would hit him in the parking lot and send his head cracking to the concrete—he would have told his daughter “I would love to” and read her the picture book with the caterpillar, again, and counted all those fruits and sausages and desserts with the holes, her head nestled into his side, instead of “I can’t right now, maybe tonight.”
I learned a lot by writing this story.
The concept for the story first came into focus as a spare sentence I typed into a text editor one day. I knew the story would be a piece of flash or micro fiction. (Flash fiction is a compressed story that’s told in 1,000 words or less; other forms, such a micro fiction, are even shorter.) But that first spark didn’t include any concrete specifics or sensory description. It was only a seed: the notion that the dad in the story, if he could have known that he’d die later that same day, would have chosen connection with his child instead of hurrying along to whatever was next on his schedule. I put the seed away for later.
When I finally opened the text file again, months later, images immediately began springing to mind, and I gave myself over to that wave of energy. My sense for which sensory details were proper for the story was mostly intuitive; consciously, I was much more excited about the technical challenge of crafting a gut-punch narrative in very few words—in part, because I could feel myself learning as I wrote. I focused on things like sharpening the language and tailoring verb tenses, until it seemed to ring the proper emotional note. That intuitive sense of emotional truth guided me in knowing how to edit and when to stop, but it remained tacit: the story just felt right. I was still wrapped up in the craft of it all when I started submitting the story to some magazines that publish very short fiction.
Everyone passed on it.
Rejection is a fact of life when it comes to writing, and it’s not personal. Still, I was disappointed. I really love this story, and as I thanked the various editors for their time, I began to reflect on why I believe in it so much.
That’s when I realized that the technical aspects of the story, however much I’d enjoyed learning to tackle them, were of only secondary importance to me: they were necessary for the story to do its work, but they weren’t what motivated my care.
The thing I loved was how the sheer everydayness of the story’s events, told in an impossible way, forced me to reflect on my own actions. The narrative is entirely mundane: a dad feels too hurried to sit and read his kid The Very Hungry Caterpillar one more time, so he defers it until a later that will never come. That’s it. The underlying moral sense of the story comes from how it’s told: from the impossible perspective of what the dad would have recognized and who he might have become, if there were still a “him” who could reflect on the meaning of his final day of life.
That impossible if—that would have and might have—unsettles me deeply. How often do I sacrifice connection for the sake of efficiency, and from whom do I turn away? Recollection follows: instances when one of my kids has invited me to play, read a book, or something else equally meaningful, and I, tired at the end of an afternoon, have said something like, “Not right now, I need to start dinner/fold laundry/whatever.”
“I Would Love To” calls me to get better about noticing and honoring when my child is asking for connection. It forces me to get real about whether my hurry in the moment is justified and worth missing out on connection with my kid—or whether, perhaps, my hurry and stress would settle, and I might find greater joy, if I were to prioritize that connection in the moment.
This movement toward reflection had been the underlying call that guided me in writing the story, and the writing had been an exercise in shaping how I pay attention.
Indeed, just yesterday, I almost deferred connection in much the same way as happens in the story. Cub asked me to read a book aloud, and I started to say—while turning away and moving toward the kitchen—“Not right now, I need to start dinner in just a few minutes.” Then I caught myself: this was exactly the kind of everyday deferral of meaning that “I Would Love To” calls into question.
I paused. I took a breath, looked at the clock, and got honest with myself: I had at least 10 minutes before I needed to start up the oven and start prepping dinner.
I turned back toward Cub and said, “You know, actually, I can sit for 10 minutes and read. What book do you want?”
Cub smiled and ran to get a book, and we sat together to read.