Saint Mark's Bookshop, prime East Village hotspot during those offbeat spike hair 1980s and early 1990s. I LOVED walking the East Village back then and always made a point to pop in the bookstore. I picked up Between C and D: New Writing from the Lower East Side Fiction Magazine and read Dirty Windows by the incomparable Peter Cherches, a microfiction told in twenty-six micro chapters. Here are a Cherches dozen as a sampler:
DIRTY WINDOWS
They met at a bookstore. She was thumbing through Finnegans Wake when he came by and said, "Nice weather." She like that, so when he asked her to join him for a cup of coffee she agreed. They started talking and he learned that she was a meteorologist.
Early on in their relationship they agreed to proceed cautiously, so they hired extras to do the stunts.
He went to take a look out the window. "Boy, your windows are dirty," he told her.
"My windows are clean," she said defensively, "It's your mind that's dirty."
He was dreaming that she was telling him that if he didn't stop dreaming about her she would wake him up when he woke her up.
They were singing "One Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall," when halfway through they forgot the lyrics.
He was imagining he was making love to another woman when he opened his eyes only to discover that she was another woman imagining she was making love to him.
"Your windows are dirty," she said to him.
"It's not my windows," he replied. "It's the world outside."
They went to a Halloween party as each other. The costumes were so good that nobody knew who they were.
"They each placed an ad in the personals for a third party to join them. They were disappointed when they showed up to answer each other's ads.
They made a self-immolation pact, but he got cold feet and chickened out.
She read in a newspaper that he had been taken hostage in the Middle East. She was very angry, so she confronted him. "You don't tell me anything," she said, shoving the paper in his face. "I have to read it in the news."
She had changed. she looked different to him. Odd, but she looked like him. It finally dawned on him what had happened - she had replaced herself with a mirror. So he did the same thing. Replaced himself with a mirror. Then he stood back and watched.
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