Baltimore pastoral

15 June 2011 05:51 AM Categories: Writing prompts | Fiction

On an alley street in Baltimore, the houses are connected by clothes line, thin veins of communication between the brick and formstone facades. In the early morning, women with reddened arms and calloused hands pin clothes to the rope, pull the rope through the wheel. They look at the sky and think about rain, about the heat that will radiate from the asphalt and the tiny cemented backyards lined with geraniums in pots, brightly colored things against the dun of cracked concrete. If they put their hands to the brick, to their marble steps, they can still feel the memory of yesterday’s scorcher.

Norm's father was a drunk and he is a heroin addict. His mother, Anna, took the beatings and she lives with two sons who don’t speak to her or to each other. One sits in his room, drinks beer and watches television, the other lives like an alley cat, thin and sly. He slinks between neighborhoods and drives other peoples’ cars. He hides his works under seat cushions and stows away the crack pipe in holes in the upholstery.

He says he is going to get clean. He doesn’t mean it. The life suits him, the cheap beer in boxcar bars, the in and out familiarity of Central Booking and the Baltimore jail. He gets arrested for stupid stuff, loitering, driving without a license, uses the jail time to detox, then goes back to it when he is released. You can go for a long time on heroin, years lost to its pleasures, the nodding in front of the TV set, the corner deals. His friends are prostitutes and homeless men and when the nice naïve lady moves in across the street, lonely on her stoop, the clothesline burning her hands as she wrenches it too hard, he sees an opportunity. She sees self-destruction incarnate, the desperate eyes and trembling hands.

He has an easy way, she tells herself, and easy way and a light touch. And when he’s sober, Norm has a talent for carpentry. He works with his hands and she’s always been a sucker for that, the three dimensional knowledge, the things of beauty that men can create. Wasted, wasted, wasted. She must reveal his goodness to him, save him from the streets.

From the prompt "Promises." We're repeating prompts this last week of the Round Robin, with various choices on how to go with the prompt ranging from a new approach, a rewrite, or the insertion of a new sentence every three sentences. I went with the new approach. Here is last week's take. This one is based in reality.

I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos. I'm working on fourish hours of sleep and have no idea about the quality of this one. A little too much tell and not enough show, but that's how it goes.

Image by ktylerconk.

Tags: faction, writing prompt, A prompt a day until the Round Robin goes away, Round Robin, Baltimore, drug addiction

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