KEN

The woman that married a man so tiny that  he died in her pocket carried him around in a casket in her purse that sometimes she would carry loose change in as well and once when she was scrounging for the last of what she needed for a package of Pall Malls for the latest man, size average, fingers tapping against steering wheel, engine revving, eyes darting, she emptied the casket onto the convenience store counter, shoved a nickel and two dark pennies across the polished lacquered countertop, which so happened to match her polished lacquered nails, grabbed the Pall Malls and scrammed, leaving her small dead husband behind. The entirely unlacquered cashier picked gabardine lint from the moldy coins and placed them in the pockets of the miniature corpse. She dusted it off, straightened its tie, and posed it seated on the cash register right next to the posted names of bad check passers, including that of the average-sized engine-revver that had just carried away his wife. She called him Ken, and shined his tiny shoes, and years later, in another place entirely, she came across another Ken, and sent him a message that said, "You are a tiny dead man," after which their relationship was characterized by  frenetic hesitancies, awkward circles, and finally, the sort of smashing defiance that means forever in the case that sometimes rarely happens, that is, when forever means never.

(Cami Park writes things and hopes you like them okay. You can find stuff from her in places like Quick Fiction, Requited, Abjective, NOÖ Journal, > kill author, and Wigleaf. She blogs at: http://oddcitrus.wordpress.com)