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: 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.