Kevin Campbell
marginal fictions
LvivI told you about Kurosawa’s Ikiru, partly because you were copying hiragana characters into a notebook at the bar when we first met.In the film, a dying bureaucrat seeks out legacy. He builds a park to find it.You told me of anxiety over disappearing time and the urgency to experience something other than this war.With enfeebled empathy, I considered my own disappearing time and the idle Western way of wasting it but dared not draw a parallel.Back home in the comfort and bustle, a year has passed. Yet I cannot see past you to the park.Published in The Dribble Drabble Review
From Wither MendCold altitude in Murghab, where sudden movements take your breath away. The most removed place I could find on a map, a retreat from the foreground.The coal stove in the corner belongs in a museum. Tonight will demand every ember. The walls dance with shadows of ambitions never faced and then forgotten.Question my neglect of family and work back home, but I am essential to neither. Truthfully, I am not made of that much.Under mismatched quilts, this is not the start nor the end, it is a dreary middle. Behind a sheet plastic window, I am disappearing.Published in The Centifictionist
Narva StaysJuri's legs hang over the riverwalk edge, the Ivangorod fortress a stone's throw across the water. His own castle provides shade from behind. Swelling obscures his left eye above a dripping lip.Juri's grandmother watched the television stations, now banned, where jackals clamour about a degenerate Ukrainian state. She won’t even attempt to speak Estonian.Twenty minutes prior, Juri scuffled with three other boys. He started the fight when he heard them curse out their own country. Smothered for centuries: Swedes, Teutonics, Russians, Nazis, and Soviets. He sees no reason for his country to be smothered again. His friends agree.Published in Friday Flash Fiction
The Last Tinsmith in KagoshimaThe old man rises from lunch to greet a cramped storefront for a tall tourist. Crafting so many vessels until there is no shelf left--a lineage realized but usually unsold. The hammered precision of two tin cups stored in a condominium cupboard an ocean away, a passing immortality.Published in 50 Give or Take
Shaken on Alder StreetIn an office of four on the main floor of a converted heritage house, soft ringtones hover over a hypnosis of tapping keys. Two speak of concern for the flooding one county over. Outside the landscaper snips, leveling the waist-high hedges to the porch entrance.Mr. Bleer, without appointment, raises his voice to demand his permit application be approved. He takes a threatening tone, then leaves, bouncing the door on its hinges.The staff circle together with some fresh coffee. The manager tells everyone it will be okay.The landscaper, paused by the commotion, snips and measures again for balance.Published in The Drabble
The Likeness of BolsheviksOver 1000 square feet to paint, to tug at the threads of the entire fabric. This will be no feckless mural, this will be history, present, and future.The artist’s patron furrows his brow. He imagines himself a patron for all things. But really all things within reason. For behind his quixotic gloss lies a fragile scion, built on the corpses of striking Colorado coal miners.The artist barks back “If you remove any of it, then destroy it all!”Published in Microfiction Monday
On The FloorMarty was a penny stock trader back in the 80s. A breathtaking collection of liars and cheats, everyone doing blow. Stock exchange officials were bribed. Client accounts were bled. It was something to behold.His supposedly statelier sales manager was all smiles but for the dead shark eyes. He would say, “If people want yellow ties, sell them goddamn yellow ties.”Once or twice a month, after market hours, Marty would go out and stick up random banks, his rickety scheme to salvage honour.His profession was put early to the silicon sword. Mercifully, Marty never saw the party end.Published in A Story in 100 Words