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

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