“You’re not smiling,” she says.

“I’m smiling with my eyes,” he says, Ray Bans glinting in the sun.

“Come on, smile for the camera.”

“Like this?” He makes a monster face.

She starts clicking.

The Golden Gate Bridge looms behind him on a blue-sky day. San Francisco rises clean and crisp across the sparkling bay.

I’m parked in my psoriasis-riddled Prius at View Vista Point, reading his lips, and imagining what she’s saying—her back to me—as I listen to “Strawberry Fields Forever” on CD. Tourists pose for selfies and take photos of each other before this postcard view. I write stories about them in my head, imagining where they’re from, imagining texts sent to envious friends back home in cubicles or trapped by blizzards inside brick houses, imagining framed photographs of these moments on dressers and fireplace mantles someday.

I sip my mocha and eat banana nut bread with chocolate chips from The Richfield Café, as tourists stroll across the movie screen of my windshield exchanging intimate nods, sharing hand-holding joy, and forcing quick selfie smiles, while my Beatles soundtrack plays, wondering if this kind of witnessing is skewed, intrusive, a public privacy violation ... not exactly photo bombing, more like photo spying or peeking or yeah, maybe witnessing; wondering if it means that something is missing.

Well, never mind. I finish my mocha, lick chocolate from my fingers, and watch tourists pile back into their cars with their recorded moments, as a crowded double-decker bus arrives like a jackpot and starts to unload, me wishing for a pen, me seeing the magic in their faces as they stare at the bridge, the sea, the skyline across the bay, me remembering the magic of San Francisco that very first time as I fell under the spell of the beautiful City, recalling those early days with you—our apartment on 19th with the upright Royal; the row house in the Sunset where we shared first-draft novel chapters over spaghetti and red wine with friends from State; the mansion with retractable glass roof where we housesat for the ballet director and his wife—where I didn’t write—and we tried on their clothes and ate their frozen food and spent our entire advance the first week before they came home early; me remembering every flat we lived in, every magical place we called home, carving out stories with a Berol #1 at the sky-blue table that always sat by a window ... me here alone with the tourists now, looking at the city across the bay, trying to recapture that first-time feeling across the flying decades, the 10,000 poems, the teetering stacks of books, the open mics of two or three, me now smiling with my eyes behind my own Ray Bans, “Strawberry Fields Forever” playing for the fifth or sixth time, coming to an end. Me pressing play, again.

Guy Biederman

is the author of five books, among them Nova Nights (Nomadic Press, 2021), Edible Grace (KYSO Flash Press, 2019), and Soundings & Fathoms (Finishing Line Press). His latest collection, Translated From the Original: one-inch punch fiction, was published by Nomadic Press in December 2022.

His stories have appeared in many journals such as Bull, Carve, Flash Frontier, Flashback Fiction, great weather for Media, KYSO Flash, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Riddled with Arrows, The Ekphrastic Review, and Exposition Review, where he was twice a Flash 405 winner. His work has recently received a Publisher’s Choice Award and an Editor’s Choice Award, and has been nominated for Best of The Net.

Guy’s writing apprenticeship began in a goat herder’s shack during a civil war in Guatemala. He now lives on a houseboat with his wife and salty cat, and walks the planks daily.

Author’s website: https://www.guybiederman.com/

Author’s blog: This Day Afloat: Reflections of Life on the Water

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Quite, a prose poem by Biederman which was the winner of the “Triple-Q” Writing Challenge in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 11, January 2022); to hear him read this piece, see Recordings at his website.

⚡ Edible Grace: An e-Collection of 12 Micro-Prose in KYSO Flash (Issue 12, Summer 2019); click on Next Page at bottom left of each piece to access the next one.

Edible Grace is also available in print and offers bonus content, including six additional micro-prose and five more photographs by the author, plus a pen-and-ink drawing by Tula Biederman.