Writing prompt: Bone tired
Two notes: This is fiction. And for a much more encouraging take on "Fake it until you make it," check out the post The Greatest Love from the fabulous Melinda Roberts Tyler of Melindaville.
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.
Writing prompt: There is grace in that direction
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.
Writing prompt: The visitors
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.
Writing prompt: Streetsweeper
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.
Writing prompt: talismans

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.
Writing prompt: Write about a box
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.





