That’s not what this story is about. I would never watch porn with my mother. I wrote the title just to get your attention. Besides, my mother’s dead, so…
I think this story will be about Nazis. In particular, a Nazi couple, husband and wife. Before they became Nazis, they ran a small shop. He was a tailor. She was a seamstress. You would think that the Nazis would keep them doing that once they were brought into the party because you always need someone skilled at alterations and fittings, especially with those uniforms they wore. But they didn’t. They sent them to Poland, to an extermination camp, where he unloaded people from box cars and she emptied women’s handbags and sorted through the contents. Of the two, she was the cagier one, and she was able to sneak valuables she found in the handbags out of the camp and to sell them on the black market. Her intuition was so keen that she knew even before things fell apart for the Nazis that theirs was a failed operation and that if she and her husband were going to survive, she would need to get them out of Poland as soon as possible. With the money she made selling to black marketeers, she was able to procure new identities for them as Jewish refugees. She even arranged for them to receive tattooed numbers on their forearms. When the opportunity arose, they fled to Norway and then made their way to the United States through Canada. They settled in Baraboo, Wisconsin, and became model citizens.
This isn’t the story, either, but it could be a good one, I think, if you don’t mind stories where Nazis are redeemed despite their having contributed to the death of millions.
Maybe I’ll write about a man who raises ducks that are hunted by sportsmen at a private club, but that seems to require a lot of research about raising ducks, etc., and I’m not interested in that much extra reading, but a better idea might be a story about a man who studies owls because he has insomnia. Having suffered from insomnia myself over the years, I know what that’s like. Owls, though, are a mystery, which, now that I think of it, might be the point of the story.
Or there’s a young child (boy or girl, I’m not sure yet) who—no, that’s not going to work. I have no idea how to write about a young child, other than myself, and other than the time my father had a nervous breakdown and spent a couple of weeks in a mental hospital, nothing has ever happened to me worthy of a story.
The story should start in the morning, just after dawn, when the character wakes up. Even though the action of the story doesn’t begin until late afternoon, the narrative will meander through his/her day, providing a lot of unnecessary exposition and shallow reflection. Although this is usually the sign of a weak writer, it will be purposeful here, a deliberate choice, meta-ironic.
Repatriation of remains is an interesting topic. A man dies in Mexico (murder, maybe?) and his brother has to go down there to bring back his body. The two have been estranged for years because of an incident involving the dead brother and the live brother’s former fiancée. The extant brother, who still hates his deceased sibling (making them twins would add something else to their relationship!), travels to the seacoast village where the body is being stored in an ice chest normally used for fish, freshly caught. Getting Philip (the dead one) back to the states proves to be a bureaucratic and logistical tangle for Peter (the live one) until a local character, a shady fellow to whom Peter has expressed how much he loathes his brother, suggests a different solution to the problem. Introducing the local character into the story will, of course, require me to incorporate some Spanish into the dialogue—hombre, muerto, hermanos, cortar—to add verisimilitude.
In the Nazi story, the wife finds three loose diamonds wrapped in a piece of velvet at the bottom of a purse. She swallows them.
At a dinner party or a barbecue, a stranger shows up asking to talk to Douglas Montgomery, but no one at the event has ever heard of Douglas Montgomery. Undaunted, the man begins to tell a story about everyone there, stories that reveal a secret about each person and include Douglas Montgomery as a principal player in every one of the tales. I think this was already a story by Agatha Christie.
Years ago, I wrote a story about a convenience store clerk who is robbed at gunpoint one night—which his wife said would happen before she left him because the only job he could get was at a convenience store at night—and who later recognizes the robber at a diner by the man’s outfit, including the ski mask, which was on the table next to a bowl of chili. When the clerk confronts him, the thief admits it was him and convinces the clerk that he should become a convenience store robber, too. They could be partners. At the time, I thought it would make a good movie or television series, but I could never come up with a title catchy enough.
As I said earlier, nothing in my own life is worth a story, which is why I spend so much time thinking up ideas. But they never amount to anything.
I guess what I’m trying to say is I miss my mother.
Patrick Parks is author of a novel, Tucumcari, and has had fiction published in a number of journals, including Chattahoochee Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, Clockwatch Review, Sledgehammer and elsewhere. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives near Chicago. For more, go to patrick-parks.com.