Unlikely by Marc Isaac Potter

Unfortunately right out of the gate I have to tell you that I'm a disabled person

If I listed all the things that are wrong with me it would take up the 1000 words that go into a flash fiction story

You will not think of this as a story but it is a story

My eyes are impaired so I leave space between the sentences so that I can see what the hell I'm doing

This machine is putting the words down on the page using my voice but sometimes it puts the wrong words on the page

There were some chickens outside my window asking me if I would be their leader

I want to cry but I want to laugh but since I can’t laugh I don't cry either

This is a story about a man who lives in an alley and smokes Marlboroughs

This machine always misspells the word Marlborough

I'm afraid you're gonna think this is a poem because I keep skipping lines but I need to do that to see what I can do with it

1000 words goes by very quickly

There's no chance of me getting this published but at least perhaps one reader will read it and that will be one person in the world who has read something of mine

I've been writing for 55 years

Let me see how many words I've used so far

The machine says that I've used 232 words up to the last sentence before this one

Just so you know in real life I don't really smoke but I smoked for about 35 years and most of the time I smoked Marlboroughs

This poem is disgusting because it's not a poem. History is disgusting because it's not a story. This is kinda true

I hitchhiked from Ohio to California in the early 1970s

Sometimes I would be standing on the freeway, not the ramp but the freeway, night after night because I didn't know what the heck I was doing I didn't know anything I couldn't even open a can

I have 2 hard conditions

Something is wrong with my hands and I don't know what because they work part of the time but they don't work part of the time and they get cramps

I have diagnosed long-term nausea

I have arthritis in most of my body

And yet I'm able to take the chance to write this down so that one person might read it

The one person who might read it is probably a reader at a magazine

She will go home and tell her partner that she read something today that she couldn't possibly pass on to the editor but that she thought it touched her heart

I don't have anything more to say I get a little bit sad that I don't get published very much

And I don't mean to put a twist at the end because I know some magazines don't like that but I have been published in about 45 places

I think that honesty is important