Tags: keywords, bare feet, barefoot, search engines, INFJ, personality analysis, blog filler

I’m not a car person. I grew up with clunkers that didn’t tell you when it was time for an oil change, with gas gauges that didn’t work, or windshield wipers that flew off in fits of pique at the first drop of rain. Sometimes there was no car, so my mother and I walked or took the bus. For a short period of time she chugged around Smithburg on a yellow moped. No car is fine with me, though it would be a pain to live that way here, with the children and our various needs. Still, since I don’t drive, I should be able to live without.

Like the character John Self, Will drives a sporty wreck of a car, temperamental, expensive to maintain. Will's car is white. There are a lot of white cars around here, dirty white cars sooty and grey like city snow; white cars more cream than blank sheet of paper; white cars with mufflers pulled to the edge of uselessness. Shiny new ones. Scuffed and rusty old ones. Most of them look alike to me. It was only lately that I committed Will's car to memory. He drives a Fiasco.

The Fiasco is about seven years old, all rounded edges, a memory of aerodynamics, sad with former glory, the track star gone to seed. Until I memorized it (the tail end -- he is always driving away), I thought that every white car belonged to him, that he was waiting inside, that maybe he saw me as he passed, even though he never saw me at all, or maybe his vision was spotty, he saw parts of me so clearly that I might as well have been under a microscope, but the rest of me was covered over in fog, in a haze of want and assumption.

Apparently his white car is failing, along with the rest of his life. The women that don't show, the clotted business deal holding up his money, the child who ducks his phone calls -- they've taken their toll on his body. Stop telling me this, I tell my friends, I don't care anymore, but I still listen for the rumors, the updates. He's not looking well. His skin's gone yellow and he's returned to the annoying habit of pulling at his ear lobes. His belly hangs over his waistband. None of this seems to bother Will, who shuffles about with his usual sang froid, a man trapped inside his own head. I vacillate between sad and thrilled at his decline, remind myself of his tenderness in still moments, the way he took to my care.

He still invades my dreams, inserts himself into my sleep, though never in his car. He is just there, cagey, waiting, the knock at the door, the sudden appearance on my couch. He pushes his way into my space. He tells me how it should be.

I remind myself that the characters in our dreams are actually parts of ourselves, that we need to look at them for how they function in the dream, not what they may be in real life. Still, this morning at 2:15 a.m. I woke up angry, my psyche and emotions cut open from within, my composure slashed and my worries spilling out.

I left him in the shabby apartment with the crowds. They all wanted something from me without giving anything back and I decided I had had enough of that to last a lifetime. And then I woke up.



From the prompt "The car."

I stumbled into the Round Robin late this go round, replacing someone who dropped out. But I don't have the time to post daily (which is probably better), so the writing prompts will be occasional additions to the blog.

Image by a fool, a girl, a gullible dolt.

Tags: Round Robin, dreams, writing prompt, cars, Martin Amis, love lost

It didn't ring true.

Tags: dreams, sick kid, feeling stuck, fiction, self-forgiveness, change is possible, self-acceptance, the moment of change, truth, lies, self as fictional character

Tags: love, love is the drug, escape, living a fantasy, imagination, an amalgamation of men

Tags: A prompt a day until the Round Robin goes away, writing prompt, Round Robin

First it was the people, with their yammering, with their jabs and petty squabbles. Leaving them behind was no big deal, considering how little I interacted with them anyway. And I took it slow, stopped asking folks at work how they were or about their weekends, about their perfect children. I didn’t make eye contact when I walked the halls, the street, the parks, the supermarkets. People respond to feedback or its lack. They didn’t know what my game was, they didn’t care or notice or even think about it, until finally I lived in glorious silence, alone, unmolested.

I even turned the sound off on my television set. I watched the faces of the actors, the anchors, the grinning and grimacing idiots on the commercials, and tried to interpret the action without sound. This gave me the idea of walking around with earplugs. I practiced in my living room, my ears stuffed with a magical synthetic, pliable and complete in its blockage, a sound barrier. I danced to music by feeling the beat in the floor. I held my hand against the walls as they trembled with treble and bass. I watched the phone quiver in its cradle.

Living without using your ears is not easy. The cues we get from sound – the rumble of a car engine, the crash in the back of the house as a cat knocks over a plant – I had to intuit, to tune into the vibrations, the way movement disturbs the air and the waves of sound glide past one’s skin. It almost became too much, the soft touch of the small sounds – the cat licking its chest, the refrigerator’s sigh – intermingling with the macho waves pushing their way out of the garbage truck, the slaps from ambulances, a neighbor’s shrill screams at her daughter or her dog or her husband a nasty cut across my cheek.

But most of the disturbances came from cars. The highway, with its low rumbles and its pretensions to ocean waves, was a constant undercurrent. My insides felt like they were being jumbled by the trucks of San Pablo. I thought about constructing a suit out of sheets of aluminum, something to deflect the noise, but I knew that would have its own cadence and would rob me of my anonymity. I had to be like the rest of them. I had to stop noticing, had to let the sounds pass through me as if they didn’t exist, another way to erase the world, to stop containing it in my body.



From the prompt "A time you let go."

I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. LIghtly edited.

Image by lemasney.

Tags: A prompt a day until the Round Robin goes away, Round Robin, writing prompt

Tags: writing prompt, Round Robin, A prompt a day until the Round Robin goes away

Against graying tile the splashed remains of coffee create a Rorschach test, along with the grounds from last night’s bungle with the grinder. They play beside the ghostly circular outlines of a wine glass and a hardened brown remnant of a banana peel. Dirty dishes lie dormant in the dirty porcelain sink. Recycling, all bottles: beer, wine, gin (the odd duck in this household of soft liquor), a large caper container, waits for someone to walk with it in arms across the house, through the front door, and down the steps to the bin.

A knife lies ominously next to a partially autopsied peach, the fruit’s pit moldy and split, its juice adhering it to the battered cutting board and still on the knife, too, waiting for her to clean it off.

On the floor, the ridiculous Mexican tile that takes in every stain, every remnant of cat puke and the overflow from the animal’s water dish, every sticky watermelon drip (oh, that he would stop just ripping into it with his teeth right beside the refrigerator), there are crumbs from a late night attempt at a sandwich. And here’s the bread, too, left out, gone hard by the darkened cheddar and bleeding tomato.

Did she do this? She remembers a dinner without eating, the preparation in the kitchen that took too long, their impatience, the bottle of Zinfandel heavy on the grape (now in the recycling to-go stack). There was an argument, something about politics or was it love or the two of them combined, and she cried or maybe she made the kid cry, and then there was the sob over the sink. Later, after her coffee and her little pill, she will check the sent file in her email, will cruise Facebook for the trail of oddities, of strange comments and overwrought complaints, but for now, it is time to clean up.

Hot soapy water, coffee with soymilk, oatmeal with blueberries and maple syrup, the sink bubbling and steaming like a cauldron, the cleansing ritual, the soothing ritual. She will wait until they wake up to take the bottles outside. The dishes watch patiently as she rolls up her robe sleeves and gets to work, wielding her water and vinegar spray against last night's kitchen transgressions.



From the prompt "On the kitchen counter." Yes, the setting is my kitchen counter, but the writing is not about my life.

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.

Image by TimeMachine Sailing.

Tags: writing prompt, A prompt a day until the Round Robin goes away, Round Robin

Cool as the proverbial cucumber.

Tags: A prompt a day until the Round Robin goes away, Round Robin, writing prompt, Pet peeves

I remember the sharp object, the way it glittered under the kitchen lights, the nicks along the blade, the way you told me that it was more dangerous this way, blunted so that you had to use more power to cut. The blade could slip, it could jump from the red bell pepper on the cutting board (our sacrifice, still intact, unaware of the awaiting evisceration), jump from its flesh to your opposite hand.

“A sharp knife is your most important kitchen tool,” you told me. I watched as you straightened it against a steel, remembered a time when we couldn’t keep our hands off of each other, the panting across tables, the wanting and wantonness. Time and proximity had dulled us, too.

The nape of your neck looked cool, too cool for me to touch. The kitchen tile held my feet. I decided not to say anything, to let this lesson be without subtext, decided to ignore the dangerousness of blunted emotion. Straightening over, you took a thumb to the blade. You showed me the difference, held down the pepper, and sliced into its crispness.

Love, when it is sharp and new, when the couple is like a single knife blade, has its own dangers: the melding, the way the we are reflected in the metal, the way love's intensity threatens our core. Time dulls, and little pains do, too, and then you press too hard and someone gets cut, the sanctity of skin and blood vessels and self violated.

We ate salad that night, crisp romaine and bell pepper, the vinaigrette sharp, the olives a sour counterpoint to freshness. We sat across from each other, silent under the sounds of knife and fork, under the soft collisions between metal and ceramic and tooth. I watched you, the observer. I prepared myself for the cut, for the jagged gash, like I’d been preparing myself since the beginning.

You would not disappoint.



From the prompt "I remember."

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.

Image by GavinBell.

Tags: writing prompt, A prompt a day until the Round Robin goes away, Round Robin, love lost

, that we keep returning to it? I'm going to create a blog with romance prompts about car accidents, get people to write of their past traumas, the screech of brakes, the smash of metal, the fluttering of hearts. A type of therapy, right? Just go to, ummm, 'human skull writing.' It's on blogger."

And with that, you are out the door and back into the night.

Tags: search strategies, internet searches, keywords, this is not a birching blog

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

Tags: A prompt a day until the Round Robin goes away, Round Robin, writing prompt, sex, fighting off boredom in relationships

These are the things she lost: the desert highway, a single lane cracking the parched earth, her parents in the front seat, their voices not raised but tightened. Her brother is sleeping beside her, resting his head on her shoulder and her stomach wants to revolt. She wills it to stop. Tight words, short. Her father takes his eyes from the road, his fist shoots from his arm, a move of precision against her mother's nose. The car goes silent. By the time they get to the motel with the pool and the sheets translucent as onion skin, the blood has left a trail down her neck and into her cleavage.

The smell of sugar and butter and flour, the standing mixer going on the counter, her grandmother’s fleshy arm, her swollen hand cracking the eggs. It’s a birthday cake. Or is it cookies? The memory is slipping away. She is left with sweetness and powder in the air, the oven radiating heat, the sound of talk radio in the background.

The boy with the scar just above his lip who stared at her for two years before finally speaking, his body language suddenly confident, the proprietary lean over her locker, his breath of spearmint, the circles of underarm sweat on his polo. He fades, turns into a man, and then the man becomes mist as well, all because of the night she picked up the telephone to hear whispers and dirty words. She read the pauses, pictured the work of hands and imagination, the power of language. And now the boy is gone, every version of him, the memories sucked away.

Spring. The soft green leaves, how they feel like thin rubber between her fingers, the competing smells of flora and fertilizer and liberated earth, the year she and her daughter planted sunflower seeds by the front fence. Every morning they would tumble from bed to see if the seedlings had pushed to the surface yet, the girl pulling her mother towards the door. Her daughter's first word was flower, she remembers that, and the memory warms her skin, gives her the feeling of dirt under fingernails. She pictures the arc of a hose, watches a pair of chubby feet stumble across grass. Flower. What does it mean?

What if. What if we could erase the bad memories? It’s a movie plot, yes, and also the premise behind the development of a new drug (or, really, a new application for an old one). Why not erase the bad? But what are we without our memories, good and bad, those learning experiences that made us? And what about the integration of sense with event, the way we cross-reference smells and songs with our stories?

Ralph Lauren’s Polo cologne, the ubiquitous background scent of the 80s, reminds me of a boy I knew just long enough to suffer the consequences, The smell brings back his small lithe body, the dance where we met, the quiet bit of nothingness on a bed in the Little House that led to my ruin. If I couldn’t identify the source of distress – if the smell made my heart race, switched on my adrenals without me knowing why – then how would I interpret it?

Instead, I use this stuff, his wrist with the heavy gold bracelet, the swoop of hair over his sweet young Italian face, the inexperienced handjob in the back of a family car and the way the girl doesn’t give a shit but goes along anyway. There he is at the cousin's wedding, a plastic glass of champagne in his hand. There they are in someone's parents' house, sitting on the steps after another messy event. I see his tortured face hovering over her by the light of a television. She is silent, always silent, silent and enduring.



From the prompt "We finally did it." I know that this drug doesn't really erase bad memories, that it's more subtle than that, and I know this topic has been tackled elsewhere ("Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind"), but it got me thinking.

I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. I extended this one and it feels very much like a snapshot, a work in progress with lots of flaws.

Image by paulineRroupski.

Tags: A prompt a day until the Round Robin goes away, Round Robin, sense memory, Metyarpone, writing prompt, boyfriends, erasing bad memories

Tags: A prompt a day until the Round Robin goes away, Round Robin, reality TV, writing prompt, domesticity, housewife

Tags: A prompt a day until the Round Robin goes away, Round Robin, writing prompt, speed freaks

Tags: faction, writing prompt, A prompt a day until the Round Robin goes away, Round Robin, escape

Tags: A prompt a day until the Round Robin goes away, Round Robin, writing prompt

Tags: A prompt a day until the Round Robin goes away, writing prompt, Round Robin

Tina spent the rest of her nights that summer waiting in the dark by the flicker of the television set, listening for his knock, for the click-click-click of the bike as he wheeled it behind the house, for the whir and sudden stop of a skateboard in the street. She was waiting to rediscover the mystery, lost in the classic confusion where sex and love intermingled without cause.

Tags: writing prompt, faction, Round Robin, photo prompts

Tags: End of the blog, Round Robin, writing prompt

Tags: Round Robin, writing prompt

Tags: Round Robin, writing prompt

Tags: Round Robin, alcohol, writing prompt

What she noticed were his shoes. If you want to know how well-taken care of a man is, start from the bottom up. The state of his shoes would tell you whether he had a lover, a wife, a boyfriend who would tell him when it was time for a new pair or a shine. The socks were important, too -- were they holey or faded? -- but sock maintenance was the kind of caretaking that was hidden and intimate as underwear.

She had Owen, beautiful skinny Owen in chinos and plaid, with his knuckles banged up out of clumsiness, and his shining intelligent dome. They had been together for seventeen years now and most of the years had been good. Not sparkling, not crazy-in-love, but solid and generally competent. They had gotten most of their fighting out of the way in that first decade, fit each other comfortably now, two fading cushions on an aging couch. Natalie made sure that Owen's shoes were fresh. No one at work understood why she would want to give him a pair of shoes for Christmas every year, but she remembered that first spring, those wingtips that were a hand-me-down. How could you not love someone who thought it was OK to wear family heirlooms on his feet? He needed her.

The first time she noticed Stuart Basil was on a morning dog walk. Here was this muscular knob of a man with a head of wiry grey hair, calmly walking a great dane more than half his size. His steps were evenly paced, his running shoes newish, and he wore a pair of pressed khakis. His grip on the leather leash was loose but confident. The dog didn't pull, but stopped at every corner and sat patiently when a child and her mother passed by. Stuart saw Natalie staring and gave a quick flick of one of those confident hands, a flash of well-cared-for teeth. The man positively glowed.

Natalie began to time her morning dog walks around his, even though Schnookie, her rat terrier, was terrified of the bigger dog and exploded into a series of sharp barks whenever they saw him.  Stuart and Natalie would smile and wave from across the street, Natalie blushing, and yelling above Schnookie’s snarls:  Yeah -- she’s a vicious cur!

Finally, thankfully, she ran into Stuart one day downtown, saw him in the Walgreens with a basket full of vitamins. Close up, his hands looked large for his arms, but his handshake was firm, and she could still feel the crisp cut of his shirt sleeves on her fingertips ten minutes later. Back at work, she fell into a reverie, imagined those hands unbuttoning her shirt, pressing against her hips, pushing her against the cool wood of the desk.

Tags: writing prompt, Round Robin

Tags: Round Robin, writing prompt, confessions

Tags: stillbirth, Death, NPR, thin line between birth and death, teen pregnancy, three-minute fiction

Tags: prognostication, love, in the beginning, escape, night noises, insomnia, photo prompts, full moon over the city, writing prompt, Round Robin

The rope is going to break. It's inevitable. Why hadn’t he bought a new rope, something made out of synthetic fiber, white interwoven with blue strands, a miracle of modern technology? A rope that would never break, that you cauterize with a lighter or with a long match in order to melt the strands together forever. Something that would last through the apocalypse.

“This is an heirloom rope,” he told me, smiling as though he was joking but I knew he wasn’t really joking. “My grandfather gave me this rope when I was a boy.”

“So why don’t you put in a frame? You know, box it up and stick it on the wall? Why did you leave it on the boat?”

“The rope is fine. It’s a good rope. Strong enough. And if it breaks, what’s the big deal? We drift for a while. Our plans change. We adjust.”

He drove us here in a car the color of the sky before the storm, a car of no color, another heirloom piece passed down to him when he graduated from college twenty-five years ago. His shoes were hand-me-downs and I could see his heart beat, the quivering in the neck, underneath his frayed shirt collar. The man could throw nothing out, held on until the emergency, the car dead in the middle of the night, the sole of his shoe lapping up the rain.

I grasped the rope with both hands, pulled hard, willed the inevitable. The rope didn't break. It burned my palms, punishment for my lack of faith. I l waved them through the air, dipped them in water as absolution.

"See? Strong enough."



Image by Jane Underwood.
The image was the prompt.
Note: As was brought to my attention by an experienced sailor, on a boat one calls ropes "lines." This sounds vaguely familiar (I haven't been on a sailboat or motorboat since 1990 and even though I grew up around water, I know zip about boats. Read Would you like bloodworms with that? to get a sense of the extent of my knowledge). I just can't bring myself to replace the word "rope" with "line" here. So my apologies if the use of it is grating.

Tags: writing prompt, rope versus line, Round Robin, I'm a frayed knot

Tags: fiction, Eastern Shore, boyfriends

Tags: writing prompt, three-minute fiction, NPR

Tags: Mother daughter relationships (fiction), aging, writing, writing notebooks, anxieties over writing and sounding like an idiot

Tanning butter. Warm sun, a plunge into comfortable water, like being in the womb, no difference between you and what surrounds you. Afternoon nap in a hammock with your hair giving off a touch of chlorine. Dinner by candlelight, light ocean breezes flickering the flame. The fish on your plate stares back at you with a dulled eye. Fish never tasted so sweet.

Creamy potatoes with a layer of crunch. Haricots verts steamed and tossed with sesame oil and ginger. You tap the skin on the crème brulee into shards, take a deep drink of Sauternes.

In the dark he comes to you, smooth muscles, breath underwritten by cigarettes and mints. It isn’t a surprise. It isn’t expected. It just is. You accept the gift, a kind of reawakening, the necklace of kisses, his rough voice, the burn of an unshaven cheek. You interlace fingers and he speaks of your beauty, your irresistibility, how you taste like papaya. He has been watching you all week.

Morning brings an empty bed, a freshly-plumped pillow, a trio of hairs tangled on the sheet. In the shower you sigh. Remember. Anticipation only lives once.



(Soundtrack: La vie en rose, sung by Yves Montand.)
Image by besia.
From a prompt: Just imagine.

Tags: escape, haricots verts, creme brulee, writing prompt, why do I keep mentioning cigarettes when I haven't smoked since I was fifteen?, Round Robin

Stained

I want a cylindrical room made of factory glass, the door a piece of carved mahogany salvaged from the She-Wolf, Lord's old boat, the one that is sitting on a trailer in the backyard, the hitch supported by a stack of cinderblocks. Against the cool glass, set into block, the mahogany will seem rustic, warm to the touch. I will rub my hand against it before I enter the room, think of the times we went waterskiing or just bobbed around in the muddy waters of the Elk, my wet ass spreading a dark stain on the boat seat.

Even then that boat was a piece of shit. Lord wasn’t paying attention to it. He let it sit in the water all winter long. The varnish wore off, the gleam melted away. Every year he bought cans of teak oil, stacked them in the shed, and let them sit. Barnacles coated the She-Wolf's hull. They were rough against my hand, cut into my feet as I pushed against the boat into the heavy water.

So, the room. It is lit from within, white light/white heat. Even the ceiling is made of factory glass. The floor, too. It is empty. I will go inside, lock the door, and remove my clothes. I will press myself up against the glass. See if you can tell me what you are looking at, my blurry image refracted in each square. I will light a cigarette, will snuff it out on the rounded wall, again and again. You will see flesh, the death of ember, the end of the spark.

Lord is dead now, too, washed away, though not in the way you would expect. It had nothing to do with water. It was emotion. The dike broke, his water wings deflated, a big hole opened in his roof and the house filled with rain. You want me to tell you about it, to be more direct, but I won’t. I have his boat and my plan. Every weekend I sand down the mahogany, try to remove the stains, think about my cylindrical factory glass room. I picture Lord on the other side, horn-rims slipping off his nose, one hand marking his place in the book. I mystify him and he likes that.

Image by Vinje.

Tags: Round Robin, boats, writing prompt, sick kid, writing, existential angst

I trace an outline of my daughter’s hand on thin tissue paper. The paper is pink as cotton candy and her hand is limp. She is asleep.
 
I’ve spent the last weekend tracing her limbs and torso while she sleeps, working my way up to her delicate head and wispy hair. I just want to catch an idea of that hair, a tendril here, a mass of frizz there. In her sleep her toes flex like a dancer en pointe. I follow the stretch of the arch of her foot, sweep up the ball to the tip of her big toe. Elizabeth stirs and tenses as the felt-tipped marker grazes her flesh, but I am stalwart and stay the course, capture the foot for posterity’s sake.
 
Elizabeth is three years old, red-haired and long of limb. Her knees are like mine were when I was her age, stretched and knobby all at once, awkward joints connecting leg bones. I can already see how her hips will jut out at thirteen, will buffer themselves in fat and muscle. Buying pants will become almost impossible for her, will become a source of frustration, and she will start to wear slimming flat-front trousers with wide legs no matter the going fashion. Her skinny legs will protrude from an ample rump, those now-slight hips will grow to temporarily house the wide skulls of ten-and-a-half pound babies. She will slap the first man who remarks on her child-bearing hips and then she will marry him and bear two children in three years.

They will exhaust themselves with fights over money and discipline. When she discovers that he's been sneaking out to Bible study meetings and is on the road to becoming born again, Elizabeth will leave him. I'll take the family in, my 26-year-old daughter and her two preschooler boys, will put aside my plans to redo the upstairs in preparation to sell the place. She'll be practically unemployable, her only experience being reproducing and windexing the glass off the windows, running a vacuum cleaner across the floor so thoroughly that you could eat off of it. It will be as though she were a teenager again, the petty little fights over who left what dish in the sink without washing it, her stealing my cigarettes and popping diet pills so she can stay up all night. I will wonder what happened to my golden years, my "me" time. She'll get an earful every night.

Eventually she will go back to nursing school, will find a new place to live and get a job. One of the night-shift orderlies, an atheist, rational and compelling, will seduce her with stories from his service in the Persian Gulf. He'll move in after their third date and will start whipping that fatherless household into shape. The boys, teenagers by this time, will be desperate to escape the two of them, sick of the discussions of Ayn Rand and the tyranny of other people's gods. There are other things that will keep them away, the sounds that leak from the too-thin walls of the tract house, the atheist's cries in the middle of the night followed by the low dove-coos of their mother soothing him. They will visit me for dinner almost every night and I'll serve them roast beef and potatoes, spaghetti and meatballs, fish sticks and french fries. Sometimes one of the boys will sleep on the pull-out couch, his brother in a sleeping bag on the floor.
 
But for now Elizabeth is a little girl with chubby feet and dimpled elbows. Her neck is thick, strong muscles leading to an unremarkable chin that dips out blandly from under her lower lip. Her dad and I are still debating about whose nose she will have. All children have cute button noses. It takes the hormones and stretching of adolescence to reveal the nose’s true nature.

Tags: Round Robin, writing prompt

Tom was pinned to the sea floor, staring into the gloom of pale green water, when his family started drifting past like surreal floats in an underwater parade. The first one to show was Faye, his father’s girlfriend, jammed into a one-piece bathing suit with a plunging neckline. It was the same suit she had worn on the Mexico trip and even in the murk he couldn’t stop staring at her cleavage, worried that something would pop out. Faye was bounteous, but untidy. She was a concern. He tried to speak, to get her attention, but his words came out as a giant bubble. Faye’s pale blue eyes were open and unseeing. Tom watched with increasing tension, staring into them, not noticing the pocket of air that contained his voice had winnowed its way to the surface. It was the same with all of them, his sister Veronica, his parents. They floated past one by one without purpose or reason, looking as they did in life. Except for their eyes. Unresponsive, flat and always open, their eyes were sightless. It was as if they were dead. Veronica, in her pajamas, wearing one of those high-necked flannel nightgowns their mother insisted on buying, clutched a leash with a stiffened hand. Tilly was on the other end of it, pulling in undeath as in life, stretching the girl’s arm past her head as she floated by on her back. From the look on his father’s face overhead – his eyebrows raised, mouth shaped like a giant O, as if he were in mid-shout – the man was surprised to find himself there with the rest of them. He was dressed for a pickup ball game, with catcher’s mitt and a ratty Phillies baseball jersey over a pair of running shorts and his legs, weighted down by over-technical sneakers, just missed brushing Tom’s face.

It was only once his father floated away, became a speck in the water, that his mother showed up. She was almost within touching distance, if Tom could have moved his arms. Her body slowly began to turn, the white terrycloth robe twisting around her legs and then spinning out again. With each turn the fabric fluttered and fanned in a slow motion dance. There was a beauty to it. For a second Tom thought he caught her eye, thought he saw a flash of recognition, but then she, too, was gone, carried away by the current.

He was emptied. Bereft. How could they leave him tied to the bottom of the sea where there was no air? But he was alive. The air just came. He became aware of the heaviness in his chest, how his lungs, thickened and clogged, would fill like balloons, suddenly buoyant. His chest would start to expand and his body, reborn, light, would pull against its tethers, and then his lungs would empty again. He would wait for the next breath to push into him, to refill his body with lightness.

An eleven-year-old boy lies on a hospital bed, his body a pale thread under bleached sheets. A cap of greasy blonde hair clings to his forehead and underneath his sallow skin blue veins trace a map of the body. Sleep glues his eyes shut. White Velcro ties bind his wrists to the bed frame and his arms are so thin that the elbows jut out like smooth, rounded stones. Two lines run from a plastic port in his hand to an IV stand. A tube snakes from his mouth to a ventilator sitting to the left of the bed. The night nurse re-taped it a few hours ago, inadvertently placed the tube at a rakish (though more comfortable) angle, so that Tom looks as if he should be holding a candy cigarette between his teeth instead of a ventilator line. For the moment, his lungs are receptacles. They expand and contract at the ventilator’s bequest. Intake and outtake, the machine does the work with quiet hums and hisses. His breath is external. Electric.

The room is dark. His mother sleeps in a slate blue reclining chair by the window, mouth slightly open, head slumped against her shoulder. A copy of the New Yorker lies open on her lap. In this light the circles under her eyes look like shadows and her unwashed hair has the tousle of sleep. Because she keeps forgetting to brush, her teeth are mossy and her breath sour. When the respiratory therapist, a large square man named Joseph, walks into the room, she doesn’t stir, having become accustomed to the strange cadence of hospitals, where day and night are delineated by the migratory patterns of doctors and residents, the dominant physician leading his or her flock with authority during business hours. The way they trample! At night, residents travel alone or in whispering pairs, quiet in soft-soled shoes, not wanting to bring attention to their drawn faces and wrung-dry minds.

Joseph visits twice on his shift to check on Tom’s numbers and clean the vent line. He pulls a pair of gloves from the box by the door, struggling to get them on. Underneath the latex, his pale hands shimmer with a thin layer of sweat. He smells of cooking grease and baby powder. Tom’s vent tube is gummed up; he has pneumonia and the thick secretions interfere with his breathing. As the man bends over him and attaches the vacuum line to the vent tube, his body exudes heat. Tom feels the warmth of breath, of Joseph’s proximity, followed by the industrial pull of the vacuum. It sucks away thick clots of mucus. Every ten seconds or so Joseph dips the tube into a glass of clean water. The water rushes with the joy of movement, of life.

With each suction Tom’s lungs sag. They deflate, go limp, until they spasm in protest. He begins to cough. The coughs are productive and Joseph continues with his careful cleaning, until, satisfied, he leaves the room, nodding politely to the bleary-eyed mother who has just woken up. Exhausted, scraped clean, Tom falls into a deeper sleep while his mother adjusts his blankets and smoothes her hand over his forehead. She is grateful to feel his skin under hers, is even relieved by the warmth of a fever. Tom is still here and fighting.

The bottom of the sea is murky. Out of the green, a small shape moves toward him. It travels in a nimbus of light made blurry with disturbed silt. The slow movement is hypnotic and Tom is filled with a sense of calm. As the form emerges, he recognizes the fine long hair of his maternal grandmother, white as bone, a flash of brightness in the deep. The mud and sand, the irregularities in the sea floor slow her down. She catches his eye and waves. Tom feels warm, well-fed, almost satiated. Gram will catch up with him. Everything will be ok.

But someone is tugging on his elbow. His mother has returned with purpose and animation. Tom looks into her eyes, her face a series of hollows, furrowed brow over darkened eyes. Her dark hair floats around her head in crazy corkscrews. We love you. Stay here with us, she demands. Gram waves again, smiling, encircled by jaunty bubbles. There is no hurry. When it is all over, the end will only matter to the people left behind. He has infinity stretched out before him. His suffering will eventually be a memory and such memories are stored in the body, destined to rot.

Give the living a little more time.

Image: "Murky Water" by -Ebil-Bils.

Tags: NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, hospital, ventilator, Death

Because Frank Smith is an investment banker. A lawyer. A high-powered PR executive. Or so the rumors have it. He showed up in Bank Nile about a month ago, rolled into town in his ’49 Ford truck, which looks beat up but runs suspiciously well. Maya thinks he’s wearing a mouth piece. He talks like he’s been eating ice cream, his tongue slightly numbed, the words not totally clear, but there is no stink of alcohol or sign of the needle. There is no ice cream cone. She swears she’s seen him adjust those just-so nubs of his when he thought no one was looking.

His hand are smooth. Even though the palms are filthy and his fingernails blackened with earth and compost, those aren’t the hands of a man accustomed to hard work. He keeps a dust bowl hoe by the garden patch, makes a show of rustic tools, the rusted metal rake, a long pointed shovel. Frank claims to know about healing herbs, says he’ll fix you up with something for those migraines, will make a poultice for your aching back.

But don’t let that investment banker/lawyer/PR man sell you a goddamned thing.

****

Image from an online costume shop. This post was originally my response to a photo prompt. I keep on returning to it for the blog, but didn't want to use the original picture, for obvious reasons. And if you are in the market for a fake beard, I recommend the fine selection at the Etsy shop I Made You a Beard.

I've been struggling to write and hopefully will be back on track in the next week or two, writing, thinking, and visiting other blogs.

Tags: writing prompt, Round Robin, imposters

There’s a man with thick silver hair who will save me. I’ll run into him at Good Vibrations or while thumping melons at the Berkeley Bowl. Eyes quizzical, brow scrunched, I'll ask his advice as I peruse the erotica or the tomatoes. “How do I pick a ripe one?” I'll say, then press my lips together in anticipation, run a nervous hand through my own uncombed mane, worry the tear in my formless tee.

He’s capable, my man with silver hair, knows what I require. “I haven’t read this stuff in years,” I’ll tell him, batting my innocent eyes. “A girlfriend of mine recommended the selection here. Do you have any recommendations?” Or:  “My naturopath has finally given me the green light for nightshades, as long as I don’t combine potatoes and tomatoes in the same week. But how can you tell when a pineapple tomato is ripe?”

He’s firm, my man with silver hair. Turns out his name is Nathanial and he stays away from pornography and tomatoes. He scrapes a thin layer of coconut oil on his multigrain toast and makes his own organic soy milk. He lives in a house constructed of bales of hay coated in plaster, collects the rainwater and the grey water to pour over his lush, nightshade-free garden. In a far back corner of his yard, a former girlfriend has constructed a pyramid of empty television sets and we sit and watch in calming yogic poses, balancing our diminishing frames on iron loungers furred with ivy.

Nathanial leads me away from temptation. He slices layers of butternut squash, thin as sashimi, dries them in the sun, and layers them with nut cheeses and frothy cucumber juice:  lasagna! With him I learn the taste of a peach, the value of chastity, the length of my arms from fingertip to fingertip. During our monthly fasts, we see visions, hummingbirds like fairies in the passionflower, fabulous eagles, strong and formidable, emerging from sketchy fog. And my parents appear before me, penitent and humbled. They kneel at my feet and I dismiss them with a forgiving wave. The vision repeats and I never tire of it, my power, the moment of clarity.

When it’s over, when I am saved and clean and about twenty-five pounds lighter, after my visions start to wear thin, Nathanial will move on to the next orphan. He is evangelical, gathering souls away from processed foods and packaged T&A, a beam of light that moves from soul to soul. I want to warn them, the lady paused in front of the cornflakes, the college boy reaching for a six-pack of Milwaukee’s Best, the skittish dog-walker about to cross Dwight: It isn't us he wants. It's the karma.

From a prompt last summer: I am counting. Despite the first-person point of view, this is fictional. Just a reminder.

Image: The infamous Berkeley Bowl, from a 2005 New York Times article.

Tags: writing prompt, Round Robin

Every Saturday he and his mother make pancakes and he watches the drama unfold. The eggs, chilled in their container, ignorant of their fate. Then, she selects two. It is never random. She moves from the back of the carton to the front. Surely the last eggs know what’s up, though she shuttles them back to the refrigerator before destroying their brethren. This is when he insists on touching an egg, on holding it for a brief minute, transferring his warmth to its cold shell.

“Do you want to crack one?” she will ask and he always shakes his head:  No. The mess! Tom can tell she is relieved, even though she doesn’t let out a sigh or stretch her thin lips into a smile. It’s the way she angles her shoulders, the slight relaxation, the slump, when he returns the egg. He has become a master of the nonverbal, of the facial expression, trying to figure out the scene before inserting himself into it.

One Saturday, he did drop an egg, just let it go onto the kitchen counter to see what would happen. “Whoopsy!” his mother exclaimed in a too-bright voice as she hurtled herself across the kitchen to get a wipe. The clear white was oozing over the side of the counter, had just started to drip down the cabinets and onto the floor, and the dog, attuned to any utterance that sounded vaguely like “oops” had already honed in on the trail.

This time his mother did sigh, gave out a loud sigh, before taking out her frustration on the dog. “Mandy! OUT OF THE KITCHEN!” She threw up her arms and stomped her feet, glared as Mandy slunk back to the living room. “I’m sorry, Mama,” Tom said, his heart fluttering, as she picked pieces of shell off the counter and attacked the remains with a sponge. The air around them, charged with anger, calmed as she looked up at him. Everything stopped. She reached out and cupped his cheek, leaned over to kiss his forehead.

It’s always the way, she thought, the anger that explodes out of nowhere, like an egg cracked into hot oil. The expression on Tom's face, the knowledge that she is her mother, that she will be apologizing forever for her lack of self-control, for the spark that she passes on unwittingly. Here's hoping he isn’t as delicate as an egg.

From a prompt: You hold it. As Anne told me recently, the prompts have been good to me lately. Though very shatter-focused.

Image by Petr Kratochvil.

Tags: writing prompt, Round Robin, eggs, anger

We kept on digging that night, pushed through soil rich and dark, encountered earthworms as long as Joe’s middle finger. He had a trowel and I had a pick-axe, but most of the time we used our hands, took off our gloves and did the dirty work directly.

Nobody had told the little one about what had really happened to Tristan. I mean, he knew he was sick and saw the old cat collapse on the kitchen floor, heard the pained meow. He saw me cry and hyperventilate and gather calming forces, but we couldn’t bear to tell him what was happening, what would happen. He hadn't known loss and I swore he wouldn't, not until I was old and sinewy, not until Joe's alcohol-pickled mind had gone south and his hands were blurry with the shakes. I had seen enough of loss myself by age eight, learned early to keep a tenuous hold on other people. My boy, he could remain untouched.

There wasn’t time or money for the vet, so Joe lifted up Tristan's lank body, bony at the spine but swollen around the belly, carried him off into the back yard. I tossed him a kitchen towel still wet from the dish rack. The boy, always his father's shadow, made for the door, but I knelt down and blocked him with a hug. "Tris needs a little privacy, that's all. It's like at the doctor's office. Daddy's giving him medical attention. Why don't we read a book?" We got through two stories when Joe finally came back in, eyes red, the towel clinging to his fingers. "Tristan's ready to see you, kid," Joe told him. I sent the two of them out there alone.

Joe told me later that Tris hadn't put up a fuss. He and the kitty had sat together by the corner of bamboo that Tris loved to hide in, where all you could see in the thick stalks was a pair of shimmering green eyes, maybe the hint of white whiskers. Joe had professed his love while the cat panted, glassy-eyed. Then, a little business with the damp towel. Tristan had even rested a paw on Joe's trembling hand. It was true mercy, over in a few heart-breaking minutes. Before he came back into the house, Joe had shaped him into a comfortable round, pressed his thumb gently against each eye to close it.

He told the boy that it looked like Tristan was taking a little rest now, sleeping off his fit. “Give him a quick pat like a good boy.”

That seemed reckless to me, letting the boy touch him. Didn't Joe remember the heavy quality of dead flesh? Once the heart stops, it's like petting wax. But the boy didn't seem to notice, came in dancing and told me Tris was better, was sleeping.

That’s how we ended up at Strawberry Creek Park, looking like grave robbers, sifting through the dirt in the dark, Tristan in a Teva shoebox tied with butcher’s twine. Fog had blotted out the moon and the damp had sunk into my bones, made me drop the flashlight more than once. Mid-dig, a mama raccoon and her kits peered at us out from the bushes, rustled the leaves with interest. Joe tossed a trowelful of dirt at them. "Git! Git! This isn't a midnight snack." They shambled off in the direction of the creek, looking like hunchbacked cats themselves, all the fur with none of the grace.

A half-hour later, we had a hole two feet deep and just wide enough to jam the Teva box into. Tristan's stiffened body shifted as we pushed him into the hole, hit the sides of the box. I hadn't looked at him since the collapse, but suddenly I had the urge. I made Joe cut the twine so that I could shine in the flashlight and take a final look, could stroke the tips of his fine orange fur.

The next morning we told the boy that Tristan must have taken off, shimmied through a hole in the fence, or through some miracle of will had scaled the nine-foot planks and taken off for a better place. He put his little hand in mine and asked, "Is he OK, mama?" There was only one way to answer it: Tristan was fine, perfect, whole.

Maybe he’s sitting on a rock by the Bay now, eyeing the ground squirrels, dipping a paw into the cold water as he searches for fish. Or he’s stalking a bird in a field of waving grass, tail quietly twitching before the final pounce. Tristan is somewhere out there, away from here.

This was from a writing prompt last summer: write about something you don't want to write about. I didn't want to write about our cat's death, at least not directly, so I wrote this instead. It seems to fit the theme around here these days. It was originally three paragraphs with very little spelled out, but as I expanded it the details it became more gruesome. Not sure what I think of it, but here it is.

Thanks to rcb for the advice to slow down. This one's slower than usual at least!

Image: Strawberry Creek, by Edwin Deakin, from Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association.

Tags: writing prompt, Round Robin, cats, Death

I flicked a career away as easily as I tossed down shots of vodka. The brown shoes and heavy overcoat, the thick wool suit in regulation blue, opaque hosiery that marked red rails around my waist, that made a serpentine path from my navel down: the uniform is all I remember, how the wool smelled alive in the rain, the flecks of mud that the shoes, too high for the job, splattered against my ankles as I walked.

If Robert hadn’t kissed me, I probably would have stayed. We were in the claustrophobic break room, sitting a little too close, but I liked it that way. He smelled like brandy and coffee, with a touch of rot underneath, the sweetness of the grave, reached out with his gloved hand to cover mine. I wanted him to kiss me, willed it to happen, just to breathe in the warmth, get a little taste of humanity. An exchange of knowledge. Or maybe it was the lure of touch, a desire for contact beyond a fatherly pat on the hand.

Sweat was forming on his forehead. I reached out with my handkerchief to blot it away, traced the scar above his right eyebrow. “Hunting accident,” he said mysteriously. I saw the flash of a Bowie knife, the wince of fists, felt tinny redness fill my mouth. Pouting in concern, I leaned in close, he leaned in closer, and we kissed. His delicate fingers, soft in their leather coats, relentlessly explored my nape. Obedient, I followed his lead. We went from peck to panting and pawing until the door opened.

Filler for NaNoWriMo, from a revised Round Robin prompt last spring. Impossibly short in the face of all the other words I've been tallying lately.

Image: Kiss V, 1964, Roy Lichtenstein.

Tags: writing prompt, Round Robin, flash fiction

Surely there are hidden meanings everywhere, waiting to be uncovered. This was my hypothesis when I started my latest self-improvement project “Barbara’s Weekly Epiphany.” All I had to do was approach the world with a childlike sense of wonder, to keep my eyes and mind open, maybe even wear my heart on my sleeve. All of that information that has beaded off my consciousness, repelled by my cynical attitude and “been, there, done that” grubby cliché-ridden approach was going to be captured now, in a mind as open as my VW sunroof on a light-pierced June afternoon.

I started a blog about the project, wanting to share my insights with others: epiphanyquota.blogspot.com. First epiphany? You have to sell your ideas, sell yourself, if you want to succeed. You have to believe in you, or no one else will. Second epiphany:  fake it ‘til you make it is more true than you think. Third epiphany? In the middle of a crowded public park, if you close your eyes and quiet your thoughts, you will hear the vibration of the world, the sound of its heartbeat.

The blog started getting a fan base, made up mostly of earnest young men drawn by the stock photo I’d put up that looked vaguely like me fifteen years ago. They were drawn by that and the supportive and slightly flirtatious comments I’d left on their own blogs, encouraging observations on the quality of their writing, the strength of narrative voice and character, how close I felt to them though we’d never met. These exchanges led to other epiphanies, ones that I didn’t share on the blog:  bullshit actually works; the reality of the online world both mirrors and denies the reality of the solid world; men will believe anything.

One of them -- let's call him Brad, a name that fits in its brevity and practicality, that matches his corny, Hemingwayesque writing style -- got a little too interested. How was I supposed to know that he would take my ego-stroking seriously? I thought I had covered my tracks (always cover your tracks, a too-late epiphany), but somehow he found my phone number. I have an old habit of letting the machine pick up and would stand over it, listening to these silences injected with anticipation, the light touch of breath, the occasional throat-clearing. The messages hovered in the air, sticky and thick, for hours after the caller hung up. Brad eventually told me he was responsible, in an email where he attached a photo of someone, I presume himself, in flagrante. I immediately moved the sordid pic to the trash, changed my number, and blocked his emails. There are some sick fucks out there.

I type this in my ratty old bathrobe, a mangy Pomeranian on my lap. But I could be lying. You never know.


*From a Round Robin prompt last winter ("my latest epiphany"). Every word of this is made up. Really. And I'm all for positive thinking, have spent years faking it and am on the cusp of making it.

Image: "Epiphany," Henry Ascensio. From Tavistock Gallery.

Tags: satire, online identities, power of positive thinking, cliches, epiphanies, flash fiction

The story was that he and Willard were drunk when they poured the foundation. It was a hot day, unusual for May, and the sky was cloud-veiled, the sun nothing but a glowing round cloaked in grey. The men mixed the cement by hand in a wheelbarrow, kept taking slugs from the whiskey bottle. Vi and the girls started out planting flowers, then prepared a lunch of liverwurst sandwiches, sugary potato salad, and coleslaw. Finally all there was left to do was to sit on the metal lawn chairs and watch.

Everything went down so easily. The cement had a nice resistance, just yielding enough, like Vi on a good night. It was a perfect mix, Willard agreed, as he passed the whiskey bottle back. Running a trowel over it was soothing, could almost put you to sleep. Dusk was enveloping the neighborhood as they wrapped up. One of the girls had fallen asleep on a blanket on the dirt, and the other one glowered as she kicked up clouds of dust in the rutted driveway. Al struggled with the wheelbarrow until he decided the hell with it, it was just a rusty piece of shit anyway.

Vi finally had to drive everyone back to Delaware, the men singing a song she didn’t recognize, the girls bleary-eyed and hungry. When they returned the next weekend, excited to start building the cottage, Al ran his hands across the foundation and groaned. It didn’t take a level or a plumb line to figure out that they had to start all over again.

Image: The house at Hollywood Beach, August 1957.

Tags: faction, family, alcohol, family stories, flash fiction

But first, a preface to the crumb.

I haven't been here lately. My son is out of school until after Labor Day and we've had a series of pet-related good things and bad things. Cat dying: bad. Adopting a kitten and a new adult cat: good. Nora the dog passing a pea-sized bladder stone at the Emergency Vet: bad, though it could have been much worse. Attempting to dissolve remaining stones through antibiotics and diet: good, though if it doesn't work she will still need surgery. Me giving Nora cranberry extract pills with xylitol in them: potentially very bad, since xylitol can be fatal in small doses to dogs. Nora surviving xylitol exposure unscathed: amazingly, wonderfully good.

In between pet-things and kid-things, I'm still taking the Round Robin, a writing prompt-based class. So here is a crumb for those of you who are still reading this blog, from the prompt I remember.

I remember that her fingers were thickened by arthritis, were scattered with freckles. Helen’s nails were coffee-stain yellow, bitten down to the quick, and she kept fumbling at the wedding ring on the fine silver chain around her neck.

I looked at her hands because it was easier than looking into her eyes, or letting my gaze drift to her useless foot in its bright blue stocking. Sometimes after a visit I’d look at my own hands and realize that time is written on our hands the fastest of all. Already my knuckles are puckering in idiosyncratic ways and the backs are beginning to resemble the uneven surface of a barren planet, ropy with rocky veins and hairline fracture wrinkles.

Helen wasn’t a worker. The hardest work her hands had seen was the kneading of whole grain bread dough, maybe a bit of digging in the garden. She’d cracked open books, propped them up, her thumb and pinky keeping them open. Me, though, I’d scrapped carcasses in the field, held up splintery boards with the meat of one palm while I grasped a hammer in the other. Some jobs we worked all winter long, if we were lucky inside, but we weren’t always lucky.

I read a book once about men working on a tower, applying mortar and making repairs in the ice and slush of January. They were suspended from ropes attached to scaffolding, wore gloves with the fingers cut out as a symbolic act. Their hands were gouged and scuffed, palms smoothed by rough passes over granite, life and work written on the body.

Image: The kid, pretending to be a cat, because we don't have any good pictures of our actual cats being actual cats. Yes, he is holding an egg mold, which is this fictional cat's weapon of choice. It makes him fly or it's a bomb or he shoots it or something.

Tags: Nora, cats, blogging break, writing prompt, Round Robin, xylitol and dogs, flash fiction

For about eight months now, I've been taking a course at The Writing Salon called the Round Robin. Once a week the instructor, Jane Underwood, sends a class email with that week's writing prompts and partner assignments. Every day, for no more than twelve minutes, my partner and I each write on that day's prompt, sending the resulting "writes" to each other by email. Occasionally, the prompt is a photograph. Usually it is a phrase (yesterday's was "I feel exasperation tensing my face"), sometimes just a word.

The point is to just do it, to see what happens when we let our words flow without forethought or editing. Each partner responds to the other's work, pointing out the things that they like, encouraging the good. The process is exhilarating and a little scary. I read the prompt, gnash my teeth, and then start typing, not knowing where I'll end up.

And where I end up often surprises me. Mainly I divert my thoughts from real life, bored with the worn roads of me, well-traveled and devoid of wildlife. The words don't tumble, exactly, they waltz, softshoe onto the page, join me at a leisurely pace. I start with one sentence, join it with another, and before you know it, I have a story. A vignette.

Like this one, so different from what I write here.

Writing prompt: The test

It’s nothing. Just a blank sheet of paper, 8.5 x 11 inches. The doctor passes it to me. I stare at one of the desk legs, slit my eyes until the carpet and wood blend together, a fuzzy field of sand and tree.

Did she mention what I am supposed to do with the paper? Is that the whole point of this test, to see how I react? Origami isn’t my thing, doc. I can’t even fold a paper airplane. And I am not up to folding a cootie catcher. The idea makes me smile, though, a cootie catcher with various diagnoses hidden underneath the flaps, with pictures of clowns and crazies decorating the outside. Pick a number, say the riddle, figure out the problem.

The sheet of paper sits there, like a command: Do something. So I do. I grab it and growl, start ripping, take what I’ve ripped and rip through that as well, doubling, tripling the thickness of the paper until I can’t rip anymore. By now I’m stomping around her desk, going in circles. I take what remains of the paper and toss it into the air, cackling as the confetti drops around us.

I sigh, sit down. “I feel so much better. Thanks, Dr. Krapinski.”

She offers me a cigarette.

Image from here by way of I Am the Cheese.
More on cootie catchers.

Tags: writing prompt, tests, psychiatrists, cootie catcher, confetti, The Writing Salon, Round Robin, flash fiction

Illustration by Ed Harriss.

I was born with a stork bite on my neck, an egg-shaped mark pink as a salmon fillet. On some children this mark fades, but on me it spread down and around my neck, a two-inch wide necklace of permanent blush. “That’s a natural piece of jewelry,” Mom would say, “Some people pay good money to have that kind of thing tattooed on their skin.” Those people didn’t live in my town. The people in my town thought my neck band was the mark of the Beast. After twenty turtleneck winters and dickey summers, I finally had a plastic surgeon burn that thing off of me. It was worth every cent, every painful minute.

People think that calling them stork bites is cute. Like the stork doesn’t exist and, even if he did (yes, it’s the males that you have to worry about), he wouldn’t nip an innocent baby on the nape of the neck! What do they know about storks? Those birds are aggressive as hell. There’s nothing cute or funny about them or their predilections. That’s the brain stem, you know. One chomp there and you’re paralyzed for life. Dead before you even get a chance to give out a second wail of hello to the world. My parents turned their backs on me for five seconds … five seconds … and that nasty stork took his opportunity.

Still, I’m one of the lucky ones. My father had a younger brother, Cole was his name (they did name him). He was born at home. After the exhaustion of a 33-hour labor, his mother took a nap. The midwife was in the bathroom, and Grandpa — well, Grandpa wasn’t known for hanging out at the scene of a birth or death. By the time the midwife came back into the room, the stork’s work was done. Missy waved that bottle at Cole's face, tried to coax the nipple between bluing lips. When she turned him over, she saw it. This was no salmon mark, but a clear bloodless bite, a chunk of the baby’s neck gone missing.

So. You think the stork brings life, carries babies to their mamas in a soft muslin hammock, all pure and sweet and accommodating? No. Babies are born through blood and sweat and pushing, through exertion, the body like a machine that just keeps going until that thing is out. Then you have to keep watch, for the stork waiting to make his mark, for the death that can creep into the room on innocent-looking sleep, for the deadly cough that you can’t hear from down the hall.

Keep your babies close.

Tags: writing prompt, the stork, birth, birthmarks, Death, stork bites

chihuahua skull image from Skulls Unlimited.

Take John and Elise. John was in love with her, but clueless about the ways of women. Not as taciturn as his father, a slab of a man, thick and slow, who tended to talk only after having a few, John had learned little of relationships or communication. He tried, though, bought Elise a toaster oven. He researched and did price comparisons and found one that would fit over the counter. He matched it to her appliances, black and sleek, made sure Elise could cook those frozen tater tots that she loved so much in it.

“Happy Valentine’s Day!”

Elise was expecting flowers, maybe even a dozen red roses or some sort of singing Valentine. She wanted the cliché, craved it after seven arid manless years. There was so much expectation that when she unwrapped the box (how many roses could be in such a huge box? And so heavy?) she burst into tears. What in the hell was this? John, bless his naïve heart, thought she was crying with joy, until Elise ran out of the living room, opened her kitchen window and flung the toaster oven, still in its box, out into the warm California air.

Start with a question. Focus on intent. For John, love. For Elise, unmet expectation, a dry spell Hallmarked to death, broken by this practical, this unromantic man. But intent no longer mattered to Gary Flanagan, whose chihuahua was crushed under a toaster oven flung from a third story window. As soon as Elise heard Taquito’s truncated yelp and Gary’s shouts, she knew something bad had happened. She looked at John, still in shock himself at the strange turn the afternoon had taken, through the kitchen doorway and held a finger up to her lips, her bloodshot eyes widening in warning.

And then, she didn’t know why, she felt a surge of lust. Elise marched over to the couch and starting ripping John’s clothes off, pinned him against the flowery cushions. Caution be damned, they consummated their two-week relationship right then and there without saying a word.

In the confusion of expedited passion, her underwear went missing. Afterwards, John went on a hunt, made a big show of it, checked behind the huge ficus in the corner, rifled through the china cabinet, lifted Elise's hair and brushed the nape of her neck with his chapped lips. “Nope. No underwear there, either. Guess you’re just going to have to go commando,” he told her and she laughed like it was the funniest thing in the world. Like it was the first time she heard that one.

Elise picked up a takeout menu from the coffee table. “I don’t know about you, but I’m starving. Chinese?” she asked, waggling a flyer from Mr. Chen’s Vegan Delites. “Chinese!” John responded with a jocular wink as he tossed her bra across the room, just missing the trash can.

Below, on Broome Street, a crowd had gathered. Tacquito’s hind quarters were barely visible under the box and a trickle of blood from his mouth had formed a dark comma on the sidewalk. Laura Falcon from Apartment 16 had heard the impact. She had poked her head out of her window and called the police right away. After putting down the phone, she went out to comfort the victim, that sweet and single Gary Flanagan from the sixth floor, handed him a huge mug of coffee and some chocolate chip cookies. Together they waited, stared up at the bank of windows, row after row of shiny glass with ominous gaps, windows cranked out to catch the breeze. Curtains flapped, blinds shuddered. Potted plants teetering on windowsills had taken on a dangerous quality. "Rows of terrabombs," thought Gary, newly enlightened about the pitfalls of gravity.

There were too many possibilities. “Not a peep from up there. Not a peep.” Gary kept repeating, and Laura would give him a reassuring pat on the shoulder. To Gary it felt creepy, like she was enjoying this chance to make herself useful. Indispensible. After the police took a report, took little Taquito away, she invited Gary into her apartment. He refused. Fred, the condo building's maintenance man, sprayed down the sidewalk as Gary watched, still holding on to the chihuahua's six-foot black leather leash. The comma of blood turned into a rusty cloud and slowly dissipated, washed into the gutter. Gary went back to his one-bedroom, determined to get totally drunk.

John and Elise have never told John, Jr. about the night he was conceived. They’ve grown quite comfortable with each other’s foibles over the last twelve years. He’s better about flowers, and she understands that you show your love in the best way you can. Sometimes she wonders what would have happened if John had brought flowers. How long it would have taken them to get beyond their assumptions? They couldn't stop talking that night, about the past, about how childhood confusion solidifies into adult surety. Elise is glad he gave her the toaster oven. She wouldn't change what she did that afternoon, wouldn't even alter it even by one second. Without the toss, the truncated yelp, the immediate intimacy of being partners in a crime of happenstance, she and John would never have gotten this far. There would be no John, Jr. It was fate, all around.

The day after the toaster oven incident, John left Gary Flanagan an anonymous apology note stuffed with twenties. The police said it was no use dusting for prints, and it was true, John had worn gloves just in case. Couldn't they have at least tried? Was Taquito's life worth so little? Gary has another dog now, a minuscule mutt from the SPCA who trembles in cold weather, whose barks sound like an infant with whooping cough. Nowadays, he tends to leave the building by the back door, shuffles Pepin past the dumpster and parked cars. He avoids the scene of the crime.

Tags: fiction, writing prompt, Chihuahuas, love, Valentine's Day

Shadowplay II (Gordana & Marko Zivkovic)

The professor wasn't home. Alonzo switched on a desk light, turned on the clock radio and reached for me. I could smell his cologne in the air. Polo. Not a good sign.

You know where this is going, right? It’s an old and very common story. I hesitate to call it rape, rape with its violence and violations and death threats and nightmares. This was more like coaxed coercion. Alonzo, all exploring tongue and crawling hands, used his knee to push me onto his thin camping mattress. I protested. He insisted, did what he brought me there to do. (I recently found out that Alonzo had been inducted into the college’s athletic hall of fame. The entry noted that he was so eager to get a U.S. education that he was willing to sleep on the floor. Yeah. That's right.)

Afterwards, the room damp with forced intimacy, I focused on the radio. George Michael was singing Faith. Martha loved George Michael. She also had a crush on Alonzo, similar in intensity to my crush on Carl. Now there was something between us. Another lie. I already had a moat of lies between me and my boyfriend, a series of flirtations and one night stands that I excused by thinking of his early treatment of me, as payback for the 1 a.m. visits, the nights he lost to bong hits and Elephant beer. It was getting uglier and uglier, wasn’t it? What was I becoming?

Alonzo the conqueror drove me back to the dorms in the professor's car. I headed for the showers. The coed bathroom was empty, no need to shout all-clear. Little blue toiletries bucket in one hand, towel tossed over the curtain, I turned the hot water on full-force.

I couldn’t wash the smell of him off me fast enough.

Tags: writing prompt, College, roommates, alcohol, smells, faction, date rape, Joy Division, guilt, lies, secrets

Image from It is Called Mount Cope.

I’ve been reduced to this, eating cheese crumbs out of my clothes, stepping over the cat puke on the rug, shuffling outside in a pair of de-elasticized boxers and a translucent t-shirt, ancient and holey, to get the New York Times at 10:30 a.m.

Yeah, I’ll wave at you, neighbor woman from across the street. Hello. Hello. I don’t know your name because you never gave it to me. The first thing out of your mouth when we moved here two years ago was “Don’t park your car in front of my house again.” OK. Thanks for the welcome, lady. That was when I cared, when my skirts were crisped by the drycleaners, when I ran a brush through my hair in front of a wiped-clean mirror, when I spent half an hour every Saturday wrestling with that damn morning glory vine on the fence to keep it in line. I cared what you thought then, Neighbor, but I don’t anymore.

No. I don’t give a fuck. I trace these two years gone and if I cared I might wonder what happened. He left, briefly, though he’s back now. We’re back to the marriage bed, so to speak. I still can’t stand the feel of his hand on my back, how his fingers trace their way down to my ass. Fake it until you make it, the expression goes. That’s his philosophy, anyway, and at least he’s here. Says he’ll stay with me through this little setback of mine. This emotional trough. He claims to know what love is. This is it, supposedly.

But I don’t believe him and wait for him to disappear.

Tags: writing prompt, depression, Neighbors, anger, indifference, cleaning, keeping up appearances

Photo from apartment therapy.

“If only I was drunk,” she thought, remembering those tales of drivers fueled by alcohol miraculously surviving car-totaling accidents, their floppy limbs and carefree attitudes rescuing them from death. Extricated from smashed tin-can cars, they get up and walk away with a sprained wrist or broken toe while their sober counterparts are Medivaced and rushed to emergency surgery. Then she remembered: she was drunk.

This wasn’t normal. “Really, this is an outlying event,” she pictured telling the paramedics. “This is not my standard Tuesday afternoon.” Her stressful weekend had bled into the week and she couldn’t stand the muscle tension, her shoulders pulled tight, the way her tendons held her limbs at awkward angles. Victoria couldn’t even hug her husband properly. Unconvinced by his warmth, by his beating heart so close and welcoming, her body maintained its stiffness. She felt like an impassive observer as her hands thumped him on the back, a prelude to withdrawal.

When Laura suggested sharing a bottle of wine with lunch, Victoria thought: why not? It beats valium. The crisp Sauvignon blanc complemented her crab salad. They each had a tiny glass of Port at the end of the meal over a shared piece of chocolate cake. She felt marvelous.

No. Not drunk. Just a little tipsy, a little loose. Maybe she wasn’t hurt after all. Victoria slowly raised her right arm, then her left. She moved her head from side to side, bent a leg. Sore. Bruised but not broken. Her tailbone ached, and her left hip was probably turning purple, the broken blood vessels leaking into her muscle fibers. She turned around, pushed herself up. How would she explain this one to Barry? Oh, it was easy enough. Chris was in the habit of leaving his toys right by the stairs and both she and her husband had almost tripped multiple times. Maybe this would convince her son to be more careful. Even though he had nothing to do with it.

Once she was off the floor, Victoria inched her way up the stairs, favoring her left leg. To better assess the damage, she went into the bedroom, stripped down to her underwear and stared at her battered image in the mirror. Years before she had fantasized about taking up boxing as a way to get out built-up anger. Intrigued by the idea of sanctioned violence, she wanted the thrill of knocking her fist into another human being, but had never worked up the nerve to sign up for lessons. Victoria balled her freckled hands and took jabs at the mirror as she danced and swayed. Her hip was as dark and soft as a ripe plum. One of her cheeks was yellowing and there was a thin line of clotted blood coming from her nose. Her back ached. But the tension was totally gone.

Tags: writing prompt, falls, stairs, cleaning, boxing, violence, alcohol, wine

Photograph from Wired New York

Many in the park are reading the white butterfly. Or worshipping the wrinkling God, exposing their winter-white limbs to the sun. Backs against thin towels, resting on hodgepodge quilts or supported by near-dead grass, they lie among the remains of dog shit and crushed beer cans. Four months of relative darkness, of travel wishes: the sea and sky clear, the beach unpeopled, a tropical drink supported by sand. Stuck in the city for the long haul, they celebrate the coming of spring.

They travel from studio apartments, from many-windowed penthouses, stream in from the train station, form in groups released from grubby cubicles. Maybe they are cutting school, calling in sick. It could be that they don’t have anywhere to be in the first place.

She props herself up on her elbows, surveys the landscape of bodies. Across a line felled by desire, a white butterfly floats, a promise fulfilled.

Tags: writing prompt, Tomas Transtromer, Streets in Shanghai, Poetry, sunbathing, Central Park

Image from promotional materials for 2005 animated film, Kontrol Eskape.

Daniel came with a backpack full of canned cat food and Max, a fluffy grey tabby artfully splotched with patches of orange, on a leash. As he kissed my cheek, his toothbrush nudged me in the chest. It was tucked into his front shirt pocket alongside a container of floss and a ballpoint pen. He had a change of clothes in the car and had packed a tent, too, just in case.

“I don’t know how long I’ll be staying,” was the first thing out of his mouth. Max, unleashed, threaded my legs and dashed into the living room. Later we found a small disc of cat urine on the floor by the ficus, Max’s lament, his only accident.

I made a crimini mushroom omelet with muenster cheese and served it with a side of crisp potatoes roasted with whole shallots and rosemary sprigs. When Dan emerged from the bathroom, freshly showered, he opened a bottle of Pinot. We sat in eating in silence until the second glass, when he rolled up his left sleeve and showed me the marks, a neat imprint of fingers wrapped around bicep.

“Eric’s at it again.”

His boyfriend was a brute, a nasty sort who was attractive if you didn’t know his back story, didn’t know he was a sweet manipulator that could turn maniacal. Daniel turned and lifted his shirt, revealing an archipelago of bruises on his lower back, a long bloodied scratch across his spine. He never had a mark above the clavicle or below the groin: Eric was strictly covert.

“I forgot to take out the recycling.”

Suppressing a sigh, I reached for his hand, tamping down my guilty urge to blame the victim, give him a hard time for sticking around with beautiful Eric, the work acquaintance I’d set him up with. Eric of the deceivingly kind brown eyes and silken hands, of the long fingers of bendable steel and the high-pitched staccato laugh, a machine-gun guffaw that was as hairtrigger as his rage. I didn’t want to know about it, didn’t want to provide sympathetic catharsis.

“I forgot to take out the recycling, so he dragged me to the bin.”

“I’m so sorry, Daniel.”

A story of kicks by wingtip, recycling carefully sorted and dutifully delivered to the curb, Daniel’s attempts to keep his expression flat and his apologies genuine – Eric wanted simple obedience and sincere contrition, not a melodramatic man-beating scene. Last time it was about dry cleaning, though neither of us can remember whether the issue was overstarching (Eric has very sensitive skin) or Daniel’s forgetfulness, the shirts that weren’t picked up in time for the conference.

“He’s so . . . quiet about it, have I told you that? He doesn’t yell or scream. But his face is terrifying, Janine. It looks like it’s going to collapse on itself. Someday his brow will fold into his mouth and he will reveal himself to be the alien I know he is. Max always runs under the guest bed before anything happens. He’s my early warning system.”

Daniel took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. I knew tonight wasn’t going to be the beginning of his redemption story, just another painful, repetitive chapter, the time before the revelation. He would be back there maybe even tonight. The reunions were the best part of this, weren’t they? Max would stay with me this time and I would stay out of it.

I leaned back and grabbed another bottle of wine from the rack.

Tags: writing prompt, Domestic violence, cats, friendship

Photograph by Jane Underwood.

Janine had been passing him on her way to the drugstore for weeks now. She never went into the diner – too much saturated fat, not enough green stuff, unless the dye they used in their mint chocolate chip ice cream counted – and, to be honest, she had other reasons not to go in, too.
 
Ever since returning home to pack up her mother, she’d been stepping inadvertently into the past. The town itself seemed stuck in a time warp, with all that neon and the thriving Mom and Pop stores (who would have thought that northern New Jersey was so retro?). It was the kind of  place where people stayed, aged in place. The pharmacist at the corner drug store was a high school acquaintance, a former football cheerleader who was brainier than anyone knew. The guy who pumped her gas was the brother of Janine’s best friend from elementary school. The clerk working at the library circulation desk was the person who introduced Janine to marijuana, that first secretive toke during a school trip into New York.
 
Janine was tired of going through the dance of friendly interrogation. Over time she developed a willful blindness and only saw the path ahead of her. That was difficult enough, considering the state of her mother's apartment, the tangled and rotting neurons clogging her mind. This time he saw her. “Janine! Janine Rickenbacher?”
 
It was Tommy. In the same job he’d had since high school, handyman/janitor for Zorba's. Some things never change, but Tommy had. He’d hardened, his eyes had darkened a shade, were brassy and brittle. He took off a glove and reached for her, his hand calloused, the fingernails bitten to nubs.

Tags: writing, Janine, fiction, New Jersey, hometowns

Image from The Heart Chronicles. "Vintage" (presumably long dead) rabbit's foot from the Etsy shop marytofts: antiques and curiosities.

Do the talismans protect you? They do not.

Do they bring on a creative rush, make you joyous when you are bereft, give you the courage and faith to love when your heart is stony and withdrawn? They do not.

Then why carry them around? Why write on the bathroom mirror each morning “I will have a great day,” in perky cursive with mauve lip liner if it doesn’t really work? The coffee will overflow, the bus will be late, someone will eat your sandwich from the communal refrigerator.

I knew a girl who used to carry around a rabbit’s foot – lucky for her, unlucky for the rabbit, the joke goes. Whenever she was called on in class, she would pull the foot out of her pocket, would worry worry worry the soft fur. Later she dropped out, ended up as an exotic dancer in that sex shop strip by the airport. Some luck.

I’ve opened umbrellas in the house, I’ve stayed on the thirteenth floor, I’ve watched frozen as a black cat crosses my path. Still here to tell about it, and to say: luck is often random. Sometimes we bring things upon ourselves, the good and the bad, we court the accident or flirt with the firing. Or we pave the way for happiness, work hard, make intelligent choices, drop the bad friends.

It’s not quite a crap shoot. It isn’t hocus pocus. But if your talismans bring comfort, well, that’s ok.

Tags: writing prompt, talismans

Photo from Columbia News Service

It wasn’t just one box. It was twenty. Or probably more than that – thirty or forty at least. Her mother was a pack rat and a compulsive shopper. In between this visit and the last she had acquired a juicer, a new microwave, an iPod (did she know how to program the thing?), and a set of wooden spoons from a charity based in Africa, in addition to countless other things that Janine couldn’t identify. Some of the boxes were opened and empty; others sat waiting for the knife, their contents in darkness.

It wasn’t just the boxes. It was the newspapers. The books. The bills. There were piles obscuring the windows. Her mother had beaten down a path back to the rest of the house, like a deer makes a path through the brush and undergrowth, to get to the kitchen, the bathroom, the bedroom. Could she get to the bedroom? The couch -- the only piece of furniture without boxes and papers on it -- had been made up like a bed, with a soiled set of sheets and a blood-stained pillowcase.

Janine followed the trail back to the bathroom, walking carefully, one foot placed in front of the other because there wasn’t enough room to walk normally. Willow, her mother’s ancient grey tabby, all bones and croaked meows, darted in front of her. Janine didn’t respond in time and her fall triggered an avalanche of boxes, a flurry of papers as her mother watched from the kitchen.

“Find the birth certificate?” her mother asked. Oblivious.

Tags: writing prompt, Janine, flash fiction

Tags: writing prompt, DC