Michael D. Davis.

In my head, I have two pictures of myself. One of the person I am, and one of the person I want to be. And more likely than not, when I make a decision, I am doing so based on the person I want to be. If I didn’t do that you wouldn’t be reading this right now.

So, many months ago, I started to get back into short story fiction writing. This is an endeavor that I haven’t been spending a lot of time on in recent years. Most of my writing time lately has been spent on lines like, ‘The resolution passed without further comment,’ rather than something sick and gory for a horror story.

Anyway, I ended up writing this story that I was really proud of called, ‘The Bird.’ I know, the title was rather lame, but I liked the story. It wasn’t like any of my other stuff. It didn’t fit into a set category. Since I felt so good about it, I decided to send it off to this literary contest I found online. A handful of months limped by and I didn’t win. I wasn’t surprised.

So, I decided to do something else with the story. A friend I made years ago in the writing community, named Cindy, participates nearly every month in this event called the F-Bomb. What started out as a poetry slam style flash fiction reading event at a bar in New York City transformed into a global reading via Zoom during the pandemic. I’ve joined many times on the Zoom event, having been invited by Cindy, merely to listen to the stories told. And with ‘The Bird’, I thought at least, I had enough courage to join in on the storytelling.

When my confidence was at its highest and I was just the perfect amount of sleep-deprived, I sent an email to Cindy about signing up. She sent me on to the woman who organizes the event, and next thing I knew my name was on the poster for the November reading. In the weeks leading up to the F-Bomb, I bounced back and forth between excited and nauseous like a cocaine-riddled rabbit. One minute I was purchasing a room partition to sit in front of so I didn’t have to clean the living room, and the next moment I was on the verge of tears. Cindy, Ma, The Old One, and my Sister all spoke encouraging words to calm me down, but little helped.

Finally, the day arrived. I set up everything an hour in advance. It was twenty minutes before I had to log on and my Father needed something outside. I helped as fast as I could while being as snippy as I could before telling him that short of him bursting into flames, I should not be disturbed.

I sit down in my spot, and the computer has a problem. Ten minutes of furious button hitting later I see a group of writers from around the world on my screen. I make sure to have my mic muted just in case. I don’t want any problems. The event starts and the home phone rings. I ignore it, the people on the screen don’t know it’s ringing. Then the automated call starts to leave a thirty-minute message. I start to panic. What if they call on me and this message is still being played, or what if the phone rings again? I stand up as nonchalantly as I can. Once out of camera view, I run to the phone, unplug the answering machine, turn on the phone to a dial tone, and throw it in a basket full of shoes.

The Zoom event gathers together diverse writers from all around the world to tell great stories. Some of those speaking were at their kitchen tables just a few states away, some were countries away, and one woman was as far away as New Zealand.

Finally, it’s my turn. Each reader got six minutes to read their work. I had one story and had read through it multiple times throughout the day timing myself as I did. Every time I was over six minutes except once. I picked up my printed version of the story and began to read. My head was down, staring at the papers. My only thought was, “Don’t screw up.” I stumbled on a word here or there, but I kept going and finished it.

The group seemed to like the story. Some thought it was sad, some thought it was funny. I was just grateful that I survived reading it.

The scenarios that went through my head before the event were ridiculous compared to what transpired. I am proud of myself for participating. I feel like if I hadn’t done so at that time, and had chickened out like I wanted to even in the seconds leading up to the event’s start, then I would never have done it all. It was a now-or-never situation. Will I read at the F-Bomb again? I don’t know, but I’m glad I did it once.

P.S. They posted the F-Bomb on YouTube if you’re curious, I’m the one part way through sweating bullets.