NPR contest

A few days ago I submitted a little (and I mean little) story for an NPR contest. Three-Minute Fiction, I think it is called. Six hundred words or less. Including the words "plant," "button," "fly" and "trick." It was novelist Ann Patchett's (writer of Bel Canto) as the judge. I am not sure that it will see the light of public radio day, but this is the one that I put in, with the editorial help of Ms. Anne Petty:

Flight

Where emotion was concerned, the man was a plant. He stared at things as though they had no innate emotional condition within him. He could name them off like anything else. This is my mother's handkerchief. This is my father's wristwatch. But, they were like other people's parent's things. He walked along heavily, enumerating not the quantity of beauty within the trees' myriad blooms with their myriad colors, but only the things he needed to do that day in order to live. These things were: drink three cups of water, full to the brim; eat four square meals; do twenty push-ups and twenty pull-ups (on a bar he bought at the drug store because it was on sale and he felt that exercise was important based on the facts) which he did not for the sake of flattering himself in the mirror or attracting women he might only have casual sex with (which he didn't do), but because he felt exercise was important based on the facts; cross the street if he saw anyone smoking cigarettes to avoid second-hand smoke; avert eyes from intimidating looking people which might cause harm upon him; wear sunglasses to preserve his eyes; have a child to carry on his name (this was one thing which he hadn't done much legwork on achieving seeing that he had little to no social skills); sleep seven hours and forty-five minutes because eight made him feel tired the whole day and seven did the same .... And this list went on in his head while he stared forward. This man has little to no social skills, and even has trouble purchasing gum from the corner store. He can't form sentences and is only really relieved when it is a foreigner taking the money he puts on the counter, even though foreigners also make him nervous. He felt he had many nameless diseases and disorders, all of which racked him with a vague dread that almost approached emotion yet not in any substantial or winning way. He stayed in his apartment most the time and worked from home. He ate nuts and fruit and chicken and wheat bread. These are things that were supposedly good for you. He didn't keep chocolate bars or ice cream. He didn't eat out of desire but only to create a working person and stop the aching that sometimes pained his gut. Sometimes, without his approval, his dreams would bring him to the skies, that is, he would fly. Once he dreamed he flew across America, seeing the delineated states as on maps pasted on high school geography walls, skimming over the topography of that U.S. map, seeing the sites that made America famous. That is to say: the Grand Canyon, the Twin Towers before they were exploded, Mount Rushmore, the hills of San Francisco, the ocean to each side, the sunsets from all angles the country afforded in the late Spring. In his dreams he felt a rushing uncomfortable strain on his chest, stomach and mind. Emotion. He wanted. He wanted to do stupid things like tear his shirt off, not caring about the falling buttons, and make love to a woman or climb a mountain and get a little hurt in the process. He wanted to be a kid and walk the neighborhood with other kids yelling, "trick or treat!" and smiling for no good reason. He wished, in these dreams, to be reckless, and was, in his dreams. Then he would wake up and enumerate the ways that he could stay alive that day, dreamless and careful and very very logical. 

Just under six hundred words and initially realized on 750words.com. It is what it is.