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Very Short Stories

Note : This story is a diary excerpt, written in Quebec City on June 14 1988,
when I wasn't quite thirty. I was living in a single room that I was renting.


As evening approached I finally got my room cleaned up and cooked some rice
and tofu, all I have left besides bulgar wheat. I was listening to music
as the new born evening turned golden red. I glanced out at the world
through the small open window.

Across the yard, by the big red house apartment block, clothes hung from a
line in the golden air. They were of light pastel colours; yellow, pink, blue.
Something came back to me, or was it me who slipped back, and I felt the
touch of the wild joy that saturated the warm and humid late spring sky.
A powerful and irresistable impulse urged me to get out there as quickly
as possible, to thrill in that air and explore like a child.

I turned off the music and approached the window; the ecstasy vanished.
I looked out to see a mostly cloudy sky and the same old grey buildings seen
so many times as to be almost invisible. I thought that if I were to go out
now, the demon of habit would force me to go the ways I always go and to
see the ways I always see. My heart had become heavy with discouragement.

I put the music back on, but in the little stillnesses between songs I heard
children, who were laughing, shouting, screaming, somewhere nearby
outside. Their cries were as clear-edged as bells, with subtle echoes around
them. And then two dogs were barking. One was obviously very close and
boomed with a viril bass voice, the other was farther and quieter. But both
dogs were barking emphatically, whole-heartedly, excitedly.

I stopped the music and it seemed that the rhythm of the dogs' voices
interplayed with those of the children, with the result that a strangely
beautiful, nameless and primitive music was created. Not an imagined music
that added itself to or was suggested by the barking and voices, but rather
it was the barking and children's voices.

It is not the first time that I've heard the music of children and dogs. Sometimes
the kids pick up sticks or other discarded objects to use as instruments of
percussion, which they beat with calmly detached and brilliant abandon on
garbage cans, the hollow steel posts of swing sets, or other natural drums.
And sometimes there are birds, or church bells, or the sounds of distant traffic.