Stories by Jeff Friedman
Pain Therapy
I tell my therapist, in his dimly lit office with a small basket of Kind Bars and trail mix packets, “I’ve got pain.” “Everyone does,” he says. I tell my therapist, “I’m forgetting my pain, but I’m remembering it also. “That’s good,” he says and tells me to relocate my pain, so I relocate it to a small town in the Midwest, one I’ve never visited, with windmills and clean streets. I’ve sent it far away. I imagine my pain feels a little lost in a small town with only two main blocks, two churches and three German bakeries. Maybe a cop stops my pain because it looks homeless and cuffs it, locks it up in a sunny cell at the station, also very clean. “How do you feel without your pain?” If I’m not thinking about it, it still hurts and I’m a little lonely without it. If I do think about it, it hurts even more. My therapist says that I should imagine killing my pain. How would I do that? I wonder. An axe? A knife? Electric Chair? Poison? I decide on a firing squad, just my pain against a stone wall, slumping to the ground, its body riddled with bullets. “How did that feel?” he asks, “Empowering?” I nod, but I’m now in worse pain. My therapist tries to hypnotize me, but he needs more training in hypnotherapy. My firing squad takes aim at him.
A Note of Delirium
He called it delirium. He could hear a single note echoing in a vacant house. He could hear it whistling like a bird plunging into the dirt. He could hear the note in a monotony of voices. Sparrows sung the note from the branches of trees and from windowsills. Dogs on porches growled the note as a warning. Cats meowed it, tugging at curtains or peering out windows. He put on headphones, but then he began to see the note: a gnat flying into the sun’s rays through the window, a barred owl with a stoic face. Then he could see it in the eyes of the cop who stood at the corner each day. He could see it spinning on the asphalt, a dangerous dreidel, picking up speed, bashing into cars and kids on scooters, pushing off with their legs. He wanted to stop the note, to kill it off before it did any more damage, but it vibrated in his brain, leaped from his lips, told its own story to anyone who would listen.
Jeff Friedman has published eleven collections of poetry and prose, including his most recent, Broken Signals (Bamboo Dart Press, August 2024). His work has appeared in Best Microfiction , New Republic, Flash Fiction Funny, Poetry, and American Poetry Review. He has received an NEA Literature Translation Fellowship and numerous other awards.
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