Short Happy Stories

Volume 2 is now available! The book contains 50 stories. Order here, or inquire at a bookstore.

Snickerdoodle, Et Cetera

The grocery store down the street sells good cookies. Each cookie is fairly substantial, and wrapped in plastic. You can buy one cookie at a time, or two cookies at a time, or three cookies at a time, or more cookies at a time. Aspen usually buys one cookie, but sometimes buys two cookies. Those times he gives one of the cookies to someone else.

Aspen really admires the grocery store’s variety of cookies: Chocolate Chip Cookie, Peanut Butter Cookie, Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookie, Double Chocolate Cookie, Iced Ginger Cookie, Butterscotch Cookie, Snickerdoodle, et cetera.

But, actually, “et cetera” is just one cookie: Oatmeal Raisin Cookie. That’s the one type of cookie Aspen will never understand or buy. He doesn’t have a problem with oatmeal, and he doesn’t have a problem with raisins—but Oatmeal Raisin Cookie just seems like a stupid cookie.

While Aspen thinks all of the other cookies are great, two of the cookies actually surprised him. The grocery store’s Double Chocolate Cookie has a sui generis structure: it’s half cookie and half brownie. Magnificent! And then there’s Butterscotch Cookie. Aspen hadn’t known that Butterscotch Cookies even exist—and was delighted to discover a wonderful chew and dramatic flares of flavor.

The cookies, Aspen learned through inquiry, are made not by the grocery store itself, but by a mysterious local entity.

Though Aspen kind of feels like he shouldn’t get a cookie too often, he gets a cookie pretty much every day. His call-in radio show, Askin’ Aspen, can be quite stressful: the callers ask challenging advice questions that he, more often than not, doesn’t exactly know how to answer. As a kind of reward for completing another show, he exits the building for a cookie.

How many people, Aspen wonders as he walks along the sidewalk, go into the grocery store for only a cookie? I’ve never seen anyone else in the checkout area with only a cookie… But there must be others like me. Because the cookies are so good!

And now Aspen is in the grocery store, looking at the cookies. On the way over he’d thought he would choose a classic Chocolate Chip Cookie—but maybe this feels more like a Butterscotch Cookie day. But… Wasn’t yesterday a Butterscotch Cookie day? But… That doesn’t have to matter. There’s no law that says you can’t have a Butterscotch Cookie if you had a Butterscotch Cookie yesterday. That would be ridiculous. People wouldn’t stand for it. But when did he last have an Iced Ginger Cookie? That’s a cookie with tremendous character—and Aspen can’t seem to remember when he last had one… A month ago, maybe? Or maybe he should… There are those peanut-buttery cookies… Should he go for a simple Peanut Butter Cookie, or for a more complex Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookie?

On one hand it’s really great to have so many options; but, on the other hand…

Aspen grabs a Snickerdoodle—because, at a certain point, you must force yourself to stop thinking and actually do something. And “Snickerdoodle” is the silliest, best cookie name.

“So it’s a Snickerdoodle Thursday,” says the woman at the register.

“No cookie has a better name,” says Aspen with unusual certitude.

“You’re probably right. Snickerdoodle. Snickerdoodle. Yes. It’s very fun. I wonder how it got that name.”

And now Aspen wonders too.

Climbing Around On Rocks

The trail ambles along above the ocean. The space between the ocean and the trail is occupied by big rocks—jumbled; falling and rising; unpredictable. Natasha turns toward her companions on the trail and, pointing at a pointy rock from another age, says “Why don’t we proceed that way? Climbing around on rocks would be more exciting than this trail.”

The others say they’re fine continuing on along the trail—so Natasha steps off the trail alone.

The rocks go down and the rocks go up: there are many little cliffs: to keep moving in the right direction, climbing is required: Natasha climbs. With gentle waves in her ears.

The others turn around and look at her a few times—but she doesn’t notice, and when she takes a break and looks over, up, at the trail, the others are gone. The air is nice and cool, but she has started to sweat, and her breaths and the waves are now the same volume. She looks beyond the waves. A massive boat, barely visible, is going somewhere.

Now and then, as Natasha continues going somewhere, she’s forced to decide if she should jump from one rock to another rock, or climb down a little and go a roundabout way. A safer way.

Usually she jumps. To make this more like an adventure. The feeling in the air: I’m alive!

After deciding a certain jump isn’t worth the risk, she descends to a pocket of clear water. The pocket of clear water is a fine format for life: Natasha sees green anemones and a bright orange starfish.

And then she continues climbing around, going up and going down, at least once wondering what she and the others will do for dinner, and there’s something quite pleasing about how one cactus pops up here and another cactus pops up there and another cactus pops up over there, greenly punctuating the rocks. It’s actually amazing, how life managed to happen in this dry hot severe space. And that cactus over there even has a bright orange flower!

While moving with the instinctive focus required to avoid a fall, Natasha wonders if there are rattlesnakes around here, and wonders what here was like long ago, when this vast rocky desert was filled with water. What creatures used to swim above her head?

Though she wouldn’t admit she’s tired, her legs and arms definitely feel like they’ve been working. How many minutes have passed since she started? Twenty or a trillion? She pauses, looks at one hand, looks at the other hand; both are scraped; she puts her scraped hands on another rock and climbs.

She kind of feels like she’s in conversation with the land.

And the rare cactus flower is like a little gift. “Take a look at this!” the land seems to say.

Natasha jumps from one rock to another rock.

She’s alive—and doesn’t want to forget it.

As she brings her body up the most substantial cliff yet, her exhaustion becomes undeniable. But she remains inspired by a hope.

After God knows how long, she experiences an unsettling satisfaction as she secures a foot, as she straightens her body on top of the cliff, as she surveys the sparkling formations all around. These sparkling orange rocks and sparkling green rocks are quite different from anything she ever saw back on Earth. And, looking up, fine lines—orbiting ice and rocks and dust—curve across the lavender sky.

She places her eyes on the horizon.

What’s that odd form of life, bounding across the sparkling formations?

Three Views of T. E. Lawrence

Before T. E. Lawrence became Lawrence of Arabia, he was an archaeologist who participated in an expedition in and a bit beyond Sinai. The expedition’s archaeological function was designed to conceal military reconnaissance: the British were preparing for a possible major conflict. But Lawrence’s interest in that aspect of the expedition was dwarfed by his excitement about finally visiting, after years of reading and imagining, the ruins of the city of Petra. And on the expedition he did, indeed, visit the place—and found it wonderful for an entirely surprising reason: while the ruins themselves were certainly interesting, satisfactory, the surrounding nature seemed miraculous. None of the accounts he’d read had come close to adequately expressing what he now sees. The motionless rocks seem to be actively rising and falling, converging into points, forming mesmeric shapes. And the colors of the rocks! Yes, the reds had been expected—but not at this intensity. And how could he ever have been prepared for these strange lines of blue and green, zipping from here to there in brilliant streaks? And the dramatic narrow deep gorges, carved into sandstone by unknown millenniums of water… A single human life, by comparison, almost doesn’t even exist. But how nice, to see those fortunate spots, moments, of greenery and pink flowers. In a February 1914 letter, Lawrence described the place and stressed that no description could be enough. “Till you have seen it,” he wrote, “you have not had the glimmering of an idea how beautiful a place can be.”

After T. E. Lawrence became Lawrence of Arabia, he finished, in late 1919, a hand-written draft of a huge book about what had happened in Arabia—and lost the manuscript at the Reading railway station. He had conceived and executed grand outlandish ideas that altered the course of history, but failed in the simple transportation of a manuscript. Work began again; another draft was completed; he was tired of being Lawrence of Arabia and started to go by the name John Hume Ross and joined the Royal Air Force as an aircraftman; his true identity was found out; he started to go by the name T. E. Shaw. When he wasn’t developing speedboats for the Royal Air Force, he was often on his motorcycle, zipping from here to there—and every now and then he steers his motorcycle to Churchill’s house for a brief stay, which generally includes at least one meal that’s quite foreign to him in its ridiculous sophistication. So many utensils. Back on his motorcycle one morning, crossing the not insignificant distance to Clouds Hill, his cottage home, he finds himself in a snowstorm. Does this snowstorm remind him of years-ago sandstorms? Do any of his Arabian exploits fill his mind as falling snow fills his eyes? As he and his motorcycle press through white blankness? Obviously I can’t know what he was thinking; but I like to think that he wasn’t thinking about the past. Instead, he was thinking about the near future, about going into town for some newspaper-wrapped fish and chips—which he once described, in a letter to a friend from the Arabian days, as “Perfection.”

When T. E. Lawrence was dead, Peter O’Toole pretended to be him in a movie called “Lawrence of Arabia,” directed by David Lean. Lawrence as played by O’Toole sometimes seems to think of himself as a sort of god—which almost certainly would have annoyed the actual Lawrence had he lived long enough to see the movie. And maybe that god-complex stuff doesn’t quite align with the actual facts; but that god-complex stuff is, in fact, a great part of a great movie. One possibility is that Lean, when conceiving and executing miraculous visions for the public, considered himself a sort of god: maybe, with “Lawrence of Arabia,” Lean made both a historical portrait and a disguised self-portrait. Maybe that’s a stupid theory. In any case, O’Toole was a phenomenal version of Lawrence. And what commitment! He went to the desert early to learn how to ride a camel—and was apparently taught by the grandson of the guy played by Anthony Quinn. And when a terrifying pivotal moment arrived, O’Toole and Omar Sharif bravely did what destiny required: they got drunk and got on their camels and led hundreds of camels and horses in a charge on a flimsy Aqaba that had just been built in Spain. In a decades-later television interview, O’Toole said that Lean had said, at the outset, the movie would be an adventure—and so it was. When filming finally ended, after well over a year in various countries, O’Toole jumped into a car and drove over the Atlas Mountains, straight to a nightclub in Casablanca. Omar Sharif was already there. They had survived.

Reading The Letter

After writing the seven-page letter, intended for his older brother, he puts down his pen and goes back to the first page and reads what he wrote: “Sanity has always felt so delicate. Like a glass sphere balanced on the tip of a long needle. At any moment it could slide off and shatter.”

Though he senses that he should mail this letter very soon, and finally focus on his midterms, he reads those lines again, nodding. That’s a great image, he thinks. A glass sphere on a needle. It makes me seem complex. Interesting. Yes.

“Sanity has always felt so delicate.”

Is that, he wonders, actually true?

As soon as the question is articulated, the answer is obvious: no, it isn’t true. Sure, he has experienced… existential fear and… maybe some instability… But who hasn’t? There’s no reason for him to believe that his darkest moments are any darker than the average person’s.

With newly critical eyes he continues to read. He reads extremely exaggerated descriptions of his daily frustrations and thought processes. He reads pretentious statements about Art. He reads huge assumptions—cleverly disguised as Psychology—about human nature. He reads dismissive lines about classic books he hasn’t exactly read…

Now, finally, he clearly understands the main purpose of the letter: to convince his brother that he’s some kind of Genius. But the writer’s intense desire to impress seems so obvious, so pathetic…

The letter does not contain even one direct honest moment.

Why, he wonders, did I make such a big effort to be fake?

He tears the seven pages of the letter in half and lets the halves fall onto the floor. He puts a fresh piece of paper on the desk and picks up his pen and begins again: “College is going fine. How are you? I was just thinking about something you said at the New Year’s gathering—about how Teddy Roosevelt wanted to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.”

He pauses and wonders what to write next.

When he puts the letter in the mailbox it’s one page long and every word is true.

The King In The Wind

Each of The King’s last six predecessors designed and built a castle: The Summer Garden Castle, The Castle of Triangles (breathtaking, though there’s a lot of wasted space), The Hunting Castle, The Castle of Lutes (frustrating if you don’t enjoy hearing lutes at all hours), The Very Little Castle, and The Castle of Water and Boats and Frogs. Each of these castles is located in a different part of The Kingdom—and of course there’s also the humongous original castle, known simply as Castle, located close to the various stage sets of justice.

The castle-building tradition is nice because it’s nice to have different castles to go to. Going to different castles decelerates time. If you go to enough different castles, one year can feel like twenty years. But if you just stay in one castle, one year can feel like a month. The King hasn’t actually spent a whole year in one castle, but once spent six months in Castle, and those six months felt like two weeks.

While The King appreciates the fruits of the castle-building tradition, he has always felt very nervous about his own future castle, because it will be central to his legacy.

And he still doesn’t know how it should be.

The King also needs a woman to be The Queen. Since he’s The King he has numerous prospects—but since The Queen is one of the most important decisions he’ll ever make, he keeps delaying: he wants to proceed in exactly the right way—but which way is that?

Three days ago exactly three years had passed since his Coronation. So he finally decided, three hours before the Coronation Anniversary Banquet, to stop procrastinating. So he sat on The Throne and thought—ordered, really—INSPIRATION, COME!

Within three minutes Inspiration delivered an idea.

An idea whose brilliance seemed beyond doubt.

An idea The King was quite excited to share with The Royal Family. At one point during the Coronation Anniversary Banquet he leaned over to his sister and told her “I’ll be sharing some exciting news tomorrow.”

“So you’ll be wandering around my castle,” The King was telling his family the next day, “and eventually you’ll find yourself on the seventh story of the grandest tower. One second you’ll be admiring the view of the river far below—and the next second you’ll be in a cave! With stalactites and stalagmites! It’s a cave room! And maybe there will even be, in the farthest back and darkest part of the cave, an ominous lagoon.”

Every family member, except his younger brother, laughed and laughed. His younger brother, who has never not resented being the younger brother, outright ridiculed The King. The words were so hurtful that The King almost cried. Instead, he roared and sent his Vision-lacking brother to the dungeon. When a guard asked how long they should keep him in the dungeon, The King said “I’ll decide later.”

The King had made some rough sketches of the cave room, but his family’s response made him feel so stupid that he didn’t even pass the sketches around the table, as he’d planned.

So there’s the castle project, which is already so challenging and so exhausting… And there’s the question of a wife… And there are other humongous responsibilities…

Every year The Royal Family hosts a marvelous three-day feast, to which all are invited (though of course the very shabby poor, and the sick, are turned away at the drawbridge). The Royal Family has been hosting this three-day feast for more than a hundred years. If a commoner ever claims that The Royal Family doesn’t care about the commoners, The Royal Family can say “Would we have given you more than a hundred three-day feasts if we didn’t care about you?”

The King endeavors to make the three-day feast as marvelous as possible; and today he’s struggling with the main evening’s main entertainment. He wants to enrapture the commoners with something they never could have imagined. But figuring out that kind of entertainment is not so easy…

Maybe The King’s problems don’t seem, to the sophisticated modern reader, like serious problems. But they seem like serious problems to The King. Isn’t that enough? Because, really, whose problems don’t seem trivial when compared with being burned at the stake, or having all of your skin slowly removed?

Neither of those punishments, by the way, has yet been ordered by The King. He’s really quite benevolent.

More proof of his benevolence: only two days have passed since he sent his brother to the dungeon, but he’s already wondering if he should let him out. Maybe, as The King, he shouldn’t be so sensitive to insults from nonentities such as his brother and everyone else.

Yes: the release should be ordered.

The King pulls a bell pull and a liveried old man soon appears. The liveried old man is missing an eye because of a decades-ago brutal war initiated by The Then King after six months had passed without receiving a thank-you note. The fact that the neighboring king hadn’t acknowledged the wonderful hospitality he’d received during the summer solstice made The Then King confused and sad. His confusion and sadness turned into anger. His anger turned into war. The neighboring king and many others were killed. The neighboring kingdom stopped being the neighboring kingdom because it became part of The Kingdom. The Then King then built The Summer Garden Castle on the battlefield where the neighboring king was killed. Many summer solstices have since passed, and The Royal Family has spent the majority of those summer solstices at The Summer Garden Castle.

The King hears himself saying “Give my brother a whole potato today.” The one-eyed servant says “Yes, King” and bows and exits the chamber.

The King couldn’t quite order a release because… Is his brother right about the cave room idea? Maybe the cave room idea is, in fact, dumb. A path to failure, under the disappointed eyes of dead predecessors.

And would the commoners… Oh no!

Since his sister is such a gossip, the commoners may already know about the cave room idea. He wouldn’t care about them knowing if he still fully believed in the cave room idea’s brilliance, but…

Are the men and women of The Kingdom out there right now, making fun of him? Do the children fantasize about living in another kingdom, under the reign of a king or queen who’s actually worthy of respect?

If only The King could somehow discover the commoners’ thoughts…

Maybe…

Ah!

Less than an hour later The King does something he has never done before: he exits Castle unaccompanied, wearing a humble grey cloak.

And soon he’s moving among fine stonework and fine trees and fine breeze and fine evening sun. This really is a fine Kingdom.

A troubadour stands on a bench, performing for a small crowd. Since the listeners seem enraptured, The King stops—and wonders how often the true significance of a moment is missed. This troubadour, for instance, has no idea that The King is now one of his listeners, and that he’s thereby living the most important moment of his life.

The King finds the troubadour boring, and moves on.

The breeze, now more of a wind, guides him through cobbled streets he doesn’t recognize, to a square where commoners are talking and eating and drinking and playing delightful instruments and dancing. What a lively lovely scene! What a lovely lively Kingdom!

The King enters a part of the square dense with occupied wooden tables and, now moving slowly, listens. What are these commoners saying about the cave room idea? About The King in general?

Very soon he’ll know, for the first time in his life, what they actually think about him.

Before long he’s beyond the wooden tables. He’s standing under a big tree filled with wind. He can hear the wind in the tree. While moving among the commoners he didn’t hear anyone say “cave” or “King.”

What exactly is happening here?

He decides to take a different route through the wooden tables. And to move even more slowly.

The conversation fragments that enter his ears are very varied: The King never knows what the next individuals will be talking about. “And after all that,” says a hardy man who’s leaning forward with palms on wooden tabletop, “he still used that damn saddle!”—and laughs and the man opposite, looking very serious, reaches over and pours mead onto the laugher’s head; and now both men are laughing and the laugher with the mead-soaked hair shakes his head like a dog, getting several people wet, inspiring curses and more laughter. The King understands the curses, but not the laughter.

“So she finished the dress,” says a woman who looks vaguely familiar to The King, “and I thought it was beautiful—I really did—but she said that even though she’d done the best she could, it didn’t quite match what she’d seen in her mind.”

At yet another table a young man speaks with gravity, as though much depends on how he chooses to express himself. “Finally I understood that I was wrong about everything. And I was disgusted. And I was relieved. I was more relieved than disgusted. Then I ate all the strawberries.”

By the time The King finds himself back where he first entered the square, having completed a loop, he knows something he didn’t know before: these people are not constantly thinking about him. And… He’s happy! A final portion of sun is shining through one of the streets that leads into the square, and its intense color makes the faces it happens to touch seem, to The King, fleeting and transcendent.

As the sky gets darker and darker The King moves downhill, away from the square and the crowds, and the wind gets stronger and stronger and colder and colder, and blows directly against his face, and his thoughts—about the castles of his predecessors, about the true significance of his life, about being burned at the stake, about a mystery wife, about the faces in the square, about his brother in the dungeon, about worlds glimpsed through fragments of conversations—become increasingly disjointed as the sky turns black, and as The King reaches the black river the so strong so cold wind blows everything out of his head.

Instinctively he stops and looks at the black river, at water he can’t really see, and listens to it move. He’s no longer The King.

He’s just flesh and nameless spirit, exactly like everyone else.

Feel free to contact me at evanpellervo@gmail.com.