Peevish
27 July 2011 10:28 AM Categories: Fiction | Writing prompts
I am eminently reasonable. So reasonable that you can’t fucking believe it. Problems don’t stick to me, to my Teflon psyche, my nonstick emotional surface. I am cool.
I have a neighbor, a woman who’s all stick arms and knee bones, her hips two spikes jutting through her clothes. You can count the woman’s ribs from fifteen feet away through her tight shirts. But her chest, this heaving thing, two solid breasts that truly do bring melon/tit comparisons to life! She sits out on a chaise in her yard – the front yard – her private bits barely covered with a shimmering swimsuit (though I don’t think she uses that bikini for swimming), eyes closed, body buttered, some surprising periodical at her side (the New York Review of Books? Come on, babe, we know that’s above your mental age, above your brain-stretching capacity).
Why the front yard? Does she enjoy the slowing of trucks, of cops, of the cyclists riding innocently to work, staring, not daring to honk or slam on the brakes, but taking all of her in? She stretches her delicate toes, the nails pale pink, her ankle accented with a golden bracelet so fine that I can’t see the links from the upstairs window. “Get a job!” I want to scream at her, I do scream at her, internally at least, and then I return to my computer, for my flipping around the Internet, to my Go Fug Yourself and my Gawker and my Facebook friends.
I read about bad men and drug habits, sneer at politicos who wax rhapsodic about their dicks to strangers. I IM with some dude in Toronto, tell him what I’d like to do to him while he sits passive as a blinking cursor. Sometimes we Skype, both of us silent and staring. I reach out to touch my computer screen – the surface of it is smeared with fingertip marks, with the juices of nectarines and plums, with bloody dots of cherry juice – when I want to touch him or for him to touch me, but the screen is as close as we get to touch.
In the store strangers give me a wide berth, but I don’t take it personally. My aura is dark brown, it’s black, I know it, and that’s bad, bad, but what am I to do? I watch. I message. I dream of the melding, of the veil between me and them dissolving. I forgive the people who ignore me, who brush up against me without knowing that I am there. I wake up and stare at the ceiling. I prowl the virtual streets of shame.
Cool as the proverbial cucumber.
From the prompt "Pet peeve."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. This one is lightly edited. And, despite the first person point of view, it really is fiction.
I have a neighbor, a woman who’s all stick arms and knee bones, her hips two spikes jutting through her clothes. You can count the woman’s ribs from fifteen feet away through her tight shirts. But her chest, this heaving thing, two solid breasts that truly do bring melon/tit comparisons to life! She sits out on a chaise in her yard – the front yard – her private bits barely covered with a shimmering swimsuit (though I don’t think she uses that bikini for swimming), eyes closed, body buttered, some surprising periodical at her side (the New York Review of Books? Come on, babe, we know that’s above your mental age, above your brain-stretching capacity).
Why the front yard? Does she enjoy the slowing of trucks, of cops, of the cyclists riding innocently to work, staring, not daring to honk or slam on the brakes, but taking all of her in? She stretches her delicate toes, the nails pale pink, her ankle accented with a golden bracelet so fine that I can’t see the links from the upstairs window. “Get a job!” I want to scream at her, I do scream at her, internally at least, and then I return to my computer, for my flipping around the Internet, to my Go Fug Yourself and my Gawker and my Facebook friends.
I read about bad men and drug habits, sneer at politicos who wax rhapsodic about their dicks to strangers. I IM with some dude in Toronto, tell him what I’d like to do to him while he sits passive as a blinking cursor. Sometimes we Skype, both of us silent and staring. I reach out to touch my computer screen – the surface of it is smeared with fingertip marks, with the juices of nectarines and plums, with bloody dots of cherry juice – when I want to touch him or for him to touch me, but the screen is as close as we get to touch.
In the store strangers give me a wide berth, but I don’t take it personally. My aura is dark brown, it’s black, I know it, and that’s bad, bad, but what am I to do? I watch. I message. I dream of the melding, of the veil between me and them dissolving. I forgive the people who ignore me, who brush up against me without knowing that I am there. I wake up and stare at the ceiling. I prowl the virtual streets of shame.
Cool as the proverbial cucumber.
From the prompt "Pet peeve."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. This one is lightly edited. And, despite the first person point of view, it really is fiction.
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