When you go to the ballet, sitting up in those nosebleed seats, don’t look up at the ceiling. You might find yourself dizzy with the height, lightheaded on the knowledge of the distance between you and the stage. The ballerinas are fleshy blurs, their tortured feet rustle and tap, sounding the effort of weightlessness. The chandelier, heavy with crystal and planetary glass, is so close you can practically touch it. Your bones flutter with the thought.

Your mother has put you between him and her, and you are wearing a floor-length skirt, a little quilted number that befits the time. 1973. His fingers are thick. You remember the marks they made when you were bad or weren’t, red welts across your bottom, three broken circles around your skinny arm. When you are three years old, it doesn’t matter who makes the rules or what it means to break them. To be a three-year-old girl is to be too much of everything: lower lip pout and high screech, pounding footsteps interspersed with tiptoes. You are flesh-and-blood will.

His hand kneads the bulb of the lacquered armrest. As he reaches across your back to touch your mother, the scent of underarm sweat, whiskey and Vitalis floats into the air. Below, the dancers’ feet hover above the wooden planks of the stage, hard legs defined under delicate pink.

His smell envelops the three of you.

From a prompt that morphed into a longer piece. The longer piece currently lies dormant on my computer, waiting for me to be ready again.

Image from DanceHelp.Com.

Tags: John the Murderer, memoir

I finished the first draft.

My husband defended his dissertation.

I am typing in a sun-filled room, buoyed by three sleeping, contented kitties.

The laptop has been around almost six years and is going strong.

My marriage is better than it ever was.

There is more than enough food to eat today, this week, this month.

Our son is happy, healthy, and full of imagination.

Nora-dog is curled up in a patch of sun, perhaps dreaming of chasing squirrels or nibbling on giant biscuits.

Blogging has brought me both friendship and readers. I am grateful for both.

We live in a lovely house.

Twenty-four years ago today, something terrible happened, but I survived intact. Enough.

I am a writer.

I can transcend.

I'm lucky. I'm lucky. I'm lucky.

Thank you for being a part of it.

Tags: Thanksgiving, luck, thankfulness, gratitude, Joan Armatrading, Pets

Part I: The visit

Look. I’m all out of words. They started drifting away from me this morning, when I woke up with the boy at six a.m. As the day continued – conversation with the visitors, trudging off to music class, trudging back, stopping at the store, fixing lunch for the visitors, making conversation with the visitors, entertaining my son, taking care of our various animals, fixing dinner, putting the exhausted child to bed, making more conversation with the visitors – the words just left.

I say I was making conversation with the visitors, but the truth is that by the end of the day I was mainly nodding and sighing sympathetically. It was all I had left. So here I am, bereft of creativity, my mind swimming with stories of thyroid nodules and nerves like tangled spiders’ webs, of early deaths and shattered psyches. What’s in store for me? Should I be so smug about my flexible back and thin, muscular legs? Should I be grateful that my mother taught me the proper way to eat? Or that I inherited her frame and general good health? Maybe I will fulfill my genetic heritage some day soon:  develop an autoimmune disease, succumb to the rot of debilitating depression, start to feel my legs tingle and fret as if they were plugged into the wall.

Part II: Resonance

OK, OK, OK, Part I was the result yet another prompt, from a family visit in September. It was a photo prompt that had nothing to do with the resulting piece. I was going through my old stuff, looking for something, saw this, thought: Aha! That feeling some of us get after too much family time on Thanksgiving. Except I haven't gone home for Thanksgiving in years, and if I did, it would actually be wonderful to be with my mother, though Kevin's absence would still be palpable.

Sometimes I'm afraid that you're getting the wrong impression. Maybe you think that I sit around immersing myself in the past, feeling sorry for myself and penning various memorials to the me who used to be. Or that I prefer to dance with darkness rather than frolic in joy and light.

I write about what resonates and I have a complex relationship with both happiness and the past. The past is always present for me; it informs the present, keeps me grounded. And it provides me with great material. Don't even have to think about it. As for happiness: I am capable of feeling great joy. I'm generally happy, except when I'm not. The hollows, shadowy, cold as falling snow, call to me. Light is meaningless without darkness. I need texture, a rough patch here and there, a little complexity and strife to make it more interesting.

But maybe my next post will be about puppies. More likely about finishing NaNoWriMo. Or my husband wrapping up his dissertation. Or maybe it really will be about puppies, cute little fluffballs, good enough to eat.

Tags: family, family visits, holidays, NaNoWriMo, Round Robin, Thanksgiving, writing prompt

Tom cups his hands around the egg, his square palms and stubby fingers keeping it safe. He finds eggs fascinating, the weight they hold when they are fresh, uncooked, the way hard-boiling changes their heft. His mother handles them so gently, too, admonishes him not to dangle one over the hard kitchen tile. Yes, they are to be treated gently, unless you want to cook with them, in which case great violence is the key.

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

There was an oak tree just outside the back window. Brown leaves clung to it through the winter, unwilling to sever their ties until they were forced out by new growth. Some nights, when I was tired of waiting and had a little too much to drink, I would slip out in the dark and throw my empties at it. My mother did the same thing – tossed cheap wine glasses against rustic mantles, flung half-full bottles of Sangre de Toro against cracked linoleum. Broken glass every time. Me? I lobbed 7-ounce Budweiser bottles here, old jelly-jars-turned-cocktail glasses there. Every single one landed with an unsatisfying thud in the frosted grass or clinked against mildewed siding.

One night, frustrated, I drained a 12-ouncer and went outside. Two feet from the oak, I held on to the bottle as if it were a diminutive baseball bat, gripped its neck with my fingers, and slammed the tree with as much force as a slightly drunk sixteen-year-old girl could.



It’s harder to break a bottle than you think.

From a writing prompt last summer: Out the window. NaNoWriMo is beginning to drive me crazy. Sixteen days. 41,000 words. One messy and rambling novel very close to completion.

Bit of trivia: my mother now makes jewelry from pieces of broken glass she finds on the street or breaks on the cement slab in her own back yard, a picture of calm with a broom and dust pan.

Tags: The Little House, alcohol, anger, writing prompt, NaNoWriMo

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

It started with Maggie May's post on how one could possibly cope with losing a child. Or maybe it started before then, in my first grief at nine over the death of my grandmother, the grief that morphed into my obsession with Ouija boards, seances, and ghosts. Or possibly it was before even that, sparked by the hit-and-run death of the unpredictable feline Sheba, or the demise of acrobatic Regis, whose neutering stitches became infected, or the abrupt disappearance of Hector, my future ex-stepfather's dog who had to be put to sleep because of his epileptic fits.

The themes of death and grief and how we cope with them have been on my mind, simmering under the surface. I watched Kevin fade away in puffs of canistered oxygen and piped-in morphine. I've had my own sad mourning story, the first line written in the Little House when I became responsible for someone else's death, when what was left of my childhood was stomped into flatness.

So when I just started writing without a plot in mind for National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo), maybe I shouldn't have been surprised at what was coming out of my fingertips.

If I say anymore, I might just stop writing. I seem to be on a roll and I don't want it to stop. And I can't get A.S. Byatt's poem Dead Boys out of my head. She wrote it after her 11-year-old son was killed in a car accident. She had to go on living, because it was her only real choice.

An excerpt from Dead Boys by A.S. Byatt

One son is many sons.
A bundle, a putto, a grave
Boy with kind eyes. One blow
Cracks all their bones at once.
Pastes all the gold hair red.

Soft lip and toothless mouth
Drop blood on the breast.
A white-haired crawler on grass
Head like a dandelion-clock
Above daisy faces that come,
Yellow and white and green
Year after year after year
Stops like a toy wound down.
Like a doll dropped in the wet.

I am a cold grey house.
In every room a boy
Gestures and halts and falls
Again and again and again,
A boy with his hamster curled
On his trembling extended palm,
Like a rigid ammonite,
'Is he dead, is he asleep?'
And the boy who leaned his head
On my shoulder in a bus.
He slept so deep, he jerked
And lolled as the bus ground on
Like a puppet, like a sack,
But he was warm that week --
My cheek was damp with his warmth --
And five days later cold.

Image from Celestial Dome.

Tags: National Novel Writing Month, NaNoWriMo, grief, Death, A.S. Byatt, Dead Boys (poem)