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LISP 4th Quarter 2020 Official Selection, Flash Fiction, 'The Trailer' by Bruce Meyer
'The Trailer'
He was certain he had lived his life before. His performance boiled down to a handful of brief scene where his best acting gave a taste of what the feature film would be. There were moments he felt Oscar-worthy and instances when the drama of life was too powerful to be contained in a trailer for the coming-to-a-theatre-near-you blockbuster.
A sonorous intoned, “This is the story of a man in search of love who finds instead…”
Between those short, punctuated bursts of reality cut together by the marketing department, he couldn’t remember what his life. There had to be more to it but production had wrapped ages ago.
He bought himself a trailer when he quit university and parked it deep in the bush. His only visitors were deer and bears. The bears tried the windows when they thought he wasn’t home. When they stood on their hind legs they reminded him of his aunts who found his remote location and peered in the windows.
“Couldn’t you do something better with your life?” they asked.
The full-length feature would connect all the scenes of dramatic tension – such as the time he ran from his girlfriend when she stood with her eyes closed and her lips puckered as moths circled the light fixture on her front porch. Her arms were open in a bear hug to hold him forever until her jaws clamped around his face and tore off his identity.
If he hadn’t seen the end that was cut from the trailer, he wouldn’t have gotten away. He wouldn’t have stopped to bend down and weep, breathless from running five blocks from her house, and wonder where his ball cap fell off, and who was wearing it now.
