FUBARgenre: The Genre of Fubar

The following was a requirement for my “Creative Writing: Fiction II” (advanced fiction). This is flash fiction, or short short prose. My teacher was Third Paran. He gave me a flat one (or an A+) for my final grade, and I felt pretty smug. But a year after we graduated, he became involved with my friend Bon, and I started wondering if I really deserved that grade.

circa 1998

Everyone - these insatiable gourmands - had just ravished everything on the table. No course was left untouched. The corn soup, the steamed rice, the daing, the garlic chicken, the sweet and sour pork — all of my toil and most of my afternoon served in a heap — all disappeared within minutes.

My son licked his fingers with flourish, smacking his lips together in an exaggerated show of pleasure. My daughter was quietly tracing the outline of her plate with her fork, her expression distant and dreamy. An hour ago, these two had been at each other’s throats, shouting murder, redefining chaos in their own terms. Two little imps pacified by a simple dinner.

Across the table, my husband was contentedly rubbing his ballooned stomach. A toothpick dangled from between his lips. Traces of dinner clung to his face, lard coating his jaw. The folds of skin visible beneath his sando were glistening with sweat. From where I sat, some five feet away, I could almost smell his putrid stench.

“Where on earth are you going?” he demanded as I stood up for the first time in ten years of marriage without waiting for him to leave the table first.

Even the empty dishes seemed to sense my treachery as they waited in vain for me to pick them up and bring them to the sink.

“I forgot to make dessert. I’m going out and buying some.”

“Cool, Mom, bring us some ice cream,” Josh chimed in.

“NO, I want mousse cake Mom,” his younger sister Kate insisted.

I looked at them dreamily. “Sorry, dessert’s not for you, kids. It’s for me.”

Silence. In their lifetime, they had never thought me capable of wanting anything for myself.

“What are you talking about?” my husband bellowed in…um…confusion. Not anger, no. Just a pathetic show of rage to assert his dominance.

I didn’t even have the patience to look at him. I was halfway out the door when i answered.

“I have a craving for a big luscious piece of banana. Don’t wait up for me.”

Parting shots: I seem to love the banana metaphor, huh? I am not that fixated, not really. And oh, I’m not a Creative Writing major. Can’t you tell from my mediocre writing?