#23: Mad to Live, by Randall Brown
About the Author
Randall Brown teaches at Saint Joseph's University and holds an MFA from Vermont College and a BA from Tufts University—along with an MEd and a BS in education. His poems, essays, and short fiction pieces have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous literary journals, including Cream City Review, Hunger Mountain, Connecticut Review, Saint Ann's Review, Evansville Review, Laurel Review, Dalhousie Review, Cairn, upstreet, Clackamas Literary Review, Vestal Review, The King's English, and others. His essay on (very) short fiction will be appearing in the forthcoming anthology The Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction: Tips from Editors, Teachers, and Writers in the Field (Rose Metal Press 2009). As an editor with SmokeLong Quarterly, he has had the pleasure of publishing short shorts by Dan Chaon, Steve Almond, Stuart Dybek, Sherrie Flick, Robert Shapard, Melanie Rae Thon, and many other exceptional writers. He resides outside of Philadelphia with his wife and their two children.
About the Chapbook
"Randall Brown’s flash fiction collection, Mad to Live, exists at the intersection where quirkiness and originality blend into something entirely new: a new voice in fiction that’s rapturous and funny and daring, with many layers of depth floating beneath the lyrical and crystalline surface. This is work of certain genius, raw genius hammered and compressed into short short stories that move us like poetry, that make us long, like the oddball characters in Randall’s collection, to devour life with the gusto with which a pregnant woman crunches down bugs. Raw, beautiful, ugly, supremely funny: Brown’s fiction lures us in then mesmerizes us with its incredible siren songs of loss." —Terri Brown-Davidson, author of Marie, Marie, Hold On Tight and The Doll Artist's Daughter
"With a keen, witty eye and a sensitive heart, the author manages, in the deft brushstrokes of the very short story, to capture the dizzy array of life’s twists and turns, keeping us in wonder and rapture all the while." —Rob Davidson, author of Field Observations
From the Chapbook
Bats and Balls
I let a fly ball sail over my head, hit off the top of the fence, bounce over for a homer. If I’d have dropped it, my father might’ve showed some understanding. But my standing there, “still as a statue,” that was beyond his ability to comprehend. I was thirteen.
We won anyway, but Dad wouldn’t let me go to Dairy Queen. Instead he went to the Falcon and returned with the bat and basket of balls he kept in his trunk.
When I thought I loved him, I ran over the entire earth to catch his monster launches, hurdled over the shrubs at the property line, ducked under the tetherball, ran straight through crabapples that smacked against me.
Maybe his passion for physics explained his love of the fly ball and my intuitive gift to be under the ball no matter its trajectory. He took his AP students to baseball diamonds and pool halls. He’d smash drive after drive until he could whack them level, so that he could prove a dropped ball would reach the ground simultaneously with the hit one.
Baseball. My father’s love. They were entangled, like the webbing of a mitt.
My father stood at home plate and said I couldn’t leave until I shagged a hundred fly balls. But I was done with baseball. The first fly ball sailed over my head. I sat down, cross-legged. After a dozen, my father started to aim for me, long looping fly balls that thudded yards, sometimes feet away.
Dusk. Pink clouds. The type of light balls got lost in. Soon line drives whizzed left and right and over me. It was as if a shadow swatted the balls over third base, curved them toward me in left field.
I found my father’s collection of Playgirl magazines in his closet. They weren’t there when Mom lived with us. Bats looked like giant boners—and I pictured my father holding the bats of the men in magazines and heard the playground names for him, felt a deep fear, as if he had a sickness we had to keep secret.
I wish he had found me that night with his wild line drives, picked me up and carried me home.
