Fred Aiken Writing

April 28, 2023

The Thoughts My Dad While Relaxing on the Porch

Daniel tried remembering. He tried remembering the name of his daughter, what he had been doing for the past seventy years, how many times he had made love, and why he was forgetting everything.

It all looked like an unstable slow-motion sequence of images embalmed in layers of scotch being captured on a closed-circuit television camera without his knowledge. He kept on scratching at a glimmer of constancy without any luck, pondering over why he had so many chins.

Daniel concluded that everything was written in invisible ink on a post-it note.

Come on, grandpa,” he heard. “We can’t stay here forever.

April 28, 2023

Those Words that Make Up Things in Books

forgotten ideas in a book

look the same when they’re not memorized,

though i suppose they’re not as catchy,

but they can still be quite kitschy,

though only if those ideas are caught

April 27, 2023

Creative Suicide, or The Real Evolutionary Reason for Mustaches

It was February when Darby killed himself. February 22. That date used to not mean anything to Cathleen, Darby’s sister. She found him hanging. She couldn’t believe it. Darby hung himself by tying a noose from his mustache. She doesn’t know how he did it. But she can’t get the image out of her head.

He wore a bright-red plaid collar shirt with his favorite corduroys—Who can kill themselves in their favorite corduroys? she thought—and he had grown out his mustache for fifteen years. Had he been planning it that long? Had he been miserable all those years?