Big
by Jack Swenson

My father died in the dead of winter. Went to bed one night and didn't wake up.

I booked a flight, then hitched a ride to my hometown with my father's boss, walked up the sidewalk of the house late that afternoon. At five it was already dark.

My aunt greeted me at the door. Her face was contorted. “I'm so sorry for your loss,” she said.

It was bitter cold the day of the funeral. I didn't have the proper clothes. My father's brother lent me a coat and a pair of overshoes. We sat side by side in folding chairs in a tent at the grave site. My uncle's eyes leaked tears.

That night, left alone with my mother, whom I didn't like, I listened to her laud my father with whom in life she didn't get along. I told her to stop it. My little mother, with big eyes, in her mouse-brown bathrobe, huddled in a corner of the parlor couch.

I went upstairs to my father's den and closed the door. I found the knife in a fishing box in the closet. The box was made out of varnished wood. My father's father had made it.

I took out the knife and unfolded the blade. I had given it to my father for his birthday some years before. It was the biggest jackknife I had ever seen. From butt to tip it was nine inches long. It was bigger than necessary, larger than life. It was the perfect gift.





Jack Swenson was a fan of short-short fiction since years before the terms flash & micro fiction were invented. His motto is less is more. He writes both fiction & nonfiction—often at the same time. He writes about sex a lot.

Naked Ladies
by Jack Swenson


Love Birds

I tell Max I don't remember what my wife and I argued about. We sit in the library and drink bourbon and listen to music. Later, Max tells one of his guests to show me her legs. She is a tall, dark-eyed beauty. I tell the girl that her laugh is full of sunshine. Max fancies that he can look into a woman's eyes and see her soul. Later the three of us lie on a bed in the moonlight, and I touch the nipples of her tiny breasts with the thumb and pinkie of one hand. The morning I leave Fargo to go back to sunny California it is twelve degrees below zero. That night when I get home, the bedroom is dark, and my wife is already asleep.


Post Time

"Who do you like in the sixth at Pimlico?" the fat man asked. I looked up at a black sky filled with stars and tried to spot my lucky one. After dinner we sat on the balcony until it got too cool, and then we moved inside. I mingled with the other guests, chatted with my wife's friend Peggy. I placed a glass of champagne in her hand. Missed opportunities: they follow you around, I said. She put her arms around my neck and whispered something in my ear. She said she wanted to find a man who could appreciate a woman who gave great head. I told her about my nightmares.


A Grave Matter

You nibbled a potato chip, peeled a grape. You said you were going to have a D & C, and you would need a ride home. At the table next to ours, a slender man in a suit and tie was commiserating with a balding man with a walrus moustache. Later you sat on my bed wearing nothing but your hat and rummaged through your purse. You told me that the score never interested you, only the game. At the gravesite the next day we stood far back and watched while they planted your lover. I scanned the mourners and wondered which one was his wife. That afternoon the fog rolled in early. In the morning my resentments were back. They were lined up on my window sill like fat little birds.




Jack Swenson writes only micro & flash fiction. Less is more is his motto. He is old, wise, and nobody’s fool. He is kind to animals. He loves to tell stories. He was born in Minnesota, but he moved to California many moons ago.