Flash Fiction by James A. Gollata

This is my friend James A.Gollata. After retiring from the University of Wisconsin-Richland he returned to his hometown.  James drives a boxcar and dislikes select Pillsbury products. If you meet James, be sure to ask for a calling card.  He lives in a castle where he  writes poetry, flash fiction and puns.  He drinks double espressos and shoots pool.

Here is a flash fiction piece by James A. Gollata. Hopefully we'll  hear from him again soon.

Schubert on the Dashboard

He had known her years and years before, but not well and not socially and he had moved away and now recently returned to near the place where she still was.  They started quickly this time  getting together now and then and in one languorous post-romp stretch-out she told him why she had never married in all that time, before and including up to now.  There had been a long long affair with a married man, that was it.  He assumed it was now over but didn't ask and didn't really care.

She invited him to the family lake cottage for a Sunday cook-out, and he went.  After all of the introductions and boating and drinking and eating and sun, he said farewell to her and headed out to the private road where he had parked his car.  Suddenly a Japanese fellow whom he hadn't noticed throughout the afternoon or ever before walked beside him and asked how he knew her and for how long and where did he live now.  The Japanese fellow said that he was finishing his PhD work on the nature of rights in the U.S. Constitution, mainly that they were all political and not meant to be ever about personal freedom.  This sounded like bullshit to him.

They arrived at his car, and the Japanese fellow asked about the little gray plastic statue of Franz Schubert that was on the dash.  He told him that it had been bought at a garage sale one time for a dime, and then set in the windshield and never removed, that the bust looked good there and constantly kept its eyes on the road.  Then the Japanese fellow began a conversation which went like this:

     "Schubert's not that good."

     "Really?  You don't think so?"

     "No."

Not on the drive home or later that night, but a long time later, embarrassing to say how long, he knew who the Japanese fellow was, had been.  And why he had said that about Schubert.