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February 20, 2020
Flash Dancers: Ekphrastic Singles - "Hey Nineteen" by Aimee Parkison
The Flash Dancers: Ekphrastic Singles series is curated by Meg Pokrass. Authors pair an original work of flash fiction with a song.
Hey Nineteen by Aimee Parkison
(inspired by the song “Hey Nineteen” by Steely Dan)
Because he didn’t know my name and I wasn’t going to tell, he asked how old I was.
I said, “Nineteen.”
After that, he started calling me Nineteen, as if I were a number.
“Hey, Nineteen,” he said. He laughed, so I guess he thought it funny. It got old real fast, the way he did.
“Seems like only yesterday I was your age, Nineteen,” he said, grinning and sweating in his designer shades while driving up to me in his shiny white convertible, top down, engine revving like a big cat’s purr.
“Hey Nineteen, we got zilch in common and can’t chat at all, but slide on in my car, and we’ll go for a long ride.”
“No,” I said, “no way, old man.”
And he said, “Come on, Nineteen, we can’t dance together, we can’t chat. So, let’s drive.”
“We can’t dance? We can’t chat?” I asked, knowing he thought the car could do the flirting for him. He revved it, again.
He said, “I mean, there’s nothing I can say that you’ll understand, and the dances I used to dance are nothing like the dances they have now, but we could spend time together tonight, on a long drive and have some fun. You like fun, don’t you, Nineteen?”
“Why?” I asked. “Where would we go? We can’t dance together. We can’t chat at all. We can’t even screw.”
He said, “Hold on! I said we can’t chat, and we can’t dance, but I could teach you a few things about a few things. Maybe tonight?”
That’s when I realized he thought he could screw me without dancing, without talking, without knowing my name.
Sometimes it sucks to be Nineteen, especially if you’re Thirteen.
Aimee Parkison is the author of Girl Zoo, Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman, Woman with Dark Horses, The Innocent Party, and The Petals of Your Eyes. Parkison has won the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize, a Christopher Isherwood Fellowship, and the North American Review Kurt Vonnegut Fiction Prize. She teaches in the creative writing program at Oklahoma State University and serves on FC2’s Boards of Directors.
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previous Flash Dancers stories
Book Notes (2015 - ) (authors create music playlists for their book)
Book Notes (2012 - 2014) (authors create music playlists for their book)
Book Notes (2005 - 2011) (authors create music playlists for their book)
my 11 favorite Book Notes playlist essays
Antiheroines (interviews with up and coming female comics artists)
Atomic Books Comics Preview (weekly comics highlights)
guest book reviews
Librairie Drawn & Quarterly Books of the Week (recommended new books, magazines, and comics)
musician/author interviews
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
Short Cuts (writers pair a song with their short story or essay)
Shorties (daily music, literature, and pop culture links)
Soundtracked (composers and directors discuss their film's soundtracks)
weekly music release lists
