Just yesterday, just this morning, even, I was wondering why I bother to be good – what’s the point in it? If I wasn’t good, fair, faithful, wouldn’t my life be more exciting? Would I start to dress in flamboyant reds and  yellows, would wrap my body in stretchy, curve-revealing knits and dresses that are almost sheer? What am I afraid of? I imagine a trip to a different city, a clandestine meeting, the dark taste of red wine on our lips, the giving-in. But it’s a fantasy anyway, an impossible one. Not only would giving in cause pain to the people that I love and destroy the good life that I have but it's not who I want to be. I don't want to be untrustworthy, someone who hurts others for the sake of a cheap, temporary thrill.

I’ve thought about it with the Round Robin, too, my writing prompt class, how I faithfully respond to my partner every day, even when there are some that I know won’t do the same, even when what I get back isn’t what I put into it. Still, I treat others how I would wish to be treated and then feel vaguely resentful when they don’t follow through.

I’m good. I pay my bills on time. I remove myself from temptation. I follow the rules unless the rules seem foolish or would hurt someone else. I do my daily work even when it bores me and I understand that my son will only be a child once so I try to appreciate it all (not always possible of course), even when I’ve played the same game too many times to count.

The balance is off, though, and I’m not sure why. I’m hardening into marble, pock-marked and weathered, Mother Mary. Or a nun. This might be solved with a clothes-shopping trip or maybe I just need to take the next opportunity I have to flirt with a man. If I can find one in my travels. The world I live in is scented by estrogen and dirt. It’s skinned knees and snacks at 3:00 and is populated by mothers and babysitters.

I miss men, the tension they provide, the chance to pretend before I return to the safety of my husband's arms. But it could be that what I need is a day off where the only thing to pursue is pleasure and I don't have to keep track of the dirt, the stuff, and the meals, a day when I don't have to be the timekeeper.

Tags: Round Robin, writing prompt, feeling frumpy, isolation, mommy-frump

Mr. X left Takoma Park within four months for Columbus and I was out of the house by the next summer. There was nothing permanent about it. So now I struggle with my ideas about the past and houses and though I know buying this house is the right thing to do on so many levels, it scares me.

I look forward to thinking -- and writing -- about something else.

Tags: writing prompt, Columbus, OH, Washington, dc, exhusbands, Pets, Berkeley, CA, Round Robin, buying a house, houses

Tags: Yaz, "In My Room", boyfriends, writing prompt, Round Robin, secrets, 80s fashion, the 80s, paisley shirts, The Little House, 80s music

Tags: cartoon violence, writing prompt, Round Robin, Frankie Goes to Hollywood "War", What is it good for? Absolutely nothing.

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

Where it takes me:

*A hot Delaware day, late July or August of 1986, D. at the construction site. He wears cut-off shorts and a torn, sleeveless shirt, has wrapped a red bandana around his head to catch the sweat. Somehow on him sweat is sweet, necessary, like the damp of a spring rain. D. stands on a ladder at the roof line, swings his hammer. On the backstroke, the claw end meets his eyebrow, tearing a gash that requires fifteen stitches. I wasn’t there, but I can imagine it, the blood, the truck ride to the emergency room, the endless bowls of marijuana that he probably smoked to counteract the dull throb. Later I held my fingers above the stitches, lightly kissed the jagged rays of black thread.

*D. at the wheel of the Newport Custom, gunning it over 100 miles an hour on Town Point Road, the flash of grey-green cornstalks rushing past the window, the curve before we reached the woods, cool and dark, my heart pounding, the tape deck blasting Manic Mechanic. I cupped the wind, I caught it, let it flow across my body to his.

*Early on: waiting by the flicker of the television set in the Little House, falling asleep to Kung Fu or Fantasy Island reruns, waiting until 1 a.m.. Waiting even later. Just waiting, sometimes for nothing, a replay of my waits of early childhood.

*Still early on: The weekend he rode his bike home from college, logging almost 100 miles, to wish me a happy sixteenth birthday. Me, waiting. Him, appearing at 10:30 or so, a reasonable hour, with a half-consumed bottle of vodka. My present. He knew I would be leaving Maryland soon, but he didn't know why. He didn't find out until after the drama was over.

But it actually wasn't a photograph that brought this back, it was a poem from one of my Round Robin writing partners last week, something about the love of men who work with their hands. D. was (and still is, I presume) a talented carpenter, a man who framed houses and built furniture. Despite the endless nostalgia of my brain, the way the past rolls out of my fingers and clogs up my mind on a daily basis, I don't think about him very often. He's from the far-away past. I don't wish I was back in Maryland living the life I rejected when I was still a teenager, making the roundtrip from home to grocery store to liquor store and back again. And although I look back on him with sweetness, the pain I feel in writing this surprises me. It's a secondhand ache, pain at his early treatment of me that echoed my parents' treatment, sadness at how I ended up treating him ultimately.

I still puzzle over how people drift away after love, after the intensity of the burn is over. In early 2002, when my mother's boyfriend Kevin was in for his final hospitalization, I called D. to talk once or twice. I called him because he was there during the worst of my teenage years. He was my closest friend then, the only insider. He knew Kevin as a healthy, often cruel man. D. was there through nights heated by kerosene and electric heater, he held me when I cried, and he cried in my arms when he found out about my pregnancy after the fact. So I called him from Kevin's hospital after a particularly harrowing day. I was nervous, paced in front of the wall of windows in the Critical Care Unit hallway. We had an awkward, didn't-I-used-to-know you conversation. D. didn't remember much. Who can blame him? It wasn't his intense life, it was mine. I remain the only witness.

When old friends disappear, a bit of our memories go with them. I mourn the shared experience, the fading away. I wish I could gather them all up, friends long gone, the ex-boyfriends, the ex-husband. We would talk and laugh again, would remind each other of our once-live connection. I would pull them with me into the present, link the people we used to be to with who we are now. I would tell them, "Remember part of me is you."



Image: Pixelated D. in the Little House, Winter 1985/86. Some of my readers know this guy and I feel a little strange for putting his picture out there. Hence, the pixels.

Some of this is from a prompt, "Rectangular."

Tags: boyfriends, Loss, Nostalgia, Kevin, writing prompt, Round Robin, The Little House, Lyle Lovett "A Simple Song"

You know the type of dream:  the key doesn’t fit into the lock. It crumbles into dust before you even get a chance to try it. Or the door has a series of complicated bolts and attachments and there you stand, in the rain, in the snow, on a hillock of desert sand, holding this old-fashioned key. Or a roller skate key, which at first you don’t even recognize – does anyone use those things anymore?

But I’ve never had a key dream. There is nothing to unlock. I have no inaccessible thoughts, just a stream of consciousness and overflowing bins in the mind, intermingling. The kind of dreams I have are telephone dreams:  me in a phone booth, the phone an old-fashioned dial model, and I can’t quite get my fingers to pull the dial to the comma of metal, to the kissing point. Or I’m a dark room heavy with curtains and carved furniture, waiting for the pick-up, the throw-out, the end, fingers tangled in heavy plastic. I keep on trying to connect (the key word here, no pun intended), but never quite make it.

In these dreams I’m always trying to call my mother, which is funny, because in my waking life I talk to her on the phone every day (on the cell phone, where I have her various numbers linked to single digits:  the only possible mistake my fingers will make is hitting the wrong one and dialing my husband or my father instead). As I write about it, I remember that these dreams are more of a thing of the past, a symbolism my subconscious has rejected, perhaps as being too trite and obvious. I like to think that the connection between my mother and me, the path of communication, has opened, is free of static and complication.

Technology has changed as well. Maybe I’ll start having keyboard dreams:  me sitting at the old-fashioned desk on this chair with the pillow for comfort, cozy in a circle of light against the early morning darkness, my fingers unable to find the right letters. I turn the letter “a” into a semi-colon, type symbols when I want numbers. It could be the keyboard is against me or my own mind, that my fingers, trained in typing class in ninth grade, are starting to stumble, to forget, the muscle memory fading away. So I’ll return to the pencil, scratching out my thoughts onto a piece of paper, my grip loosening, until all I can write is a series of scrawls.



Image from Vitroid.
From the prompt "Write about a key."
And just in case you want to hear the Cheap Trick song, here's a link. After watching it once, all I can think about is how unhealthy they look.

Tags: Round Robin, writing prompt, dreams, rotary dial telephones, old-fashioned keys

Remind yourself that food is comfort, is nourishment. If you cook the right dish at the right moment, you could still save her. You could save yourself.

Tags: Round Robin, writing prompt, cinnamon, recipes using cinnamon, cooking

Tags: NPR Three-Minute Fiction, Round Three, writing prompt

Tags: Round Robin, Mind/body dualism, the ghost in the machine, body language, writing prompt

Tags: I want to be a horse when I grow up, Dupont horse farms, Maryland, childhood, feeding horses sugar cubes, Round Robin, writing prompt

Sitting in a cold doctor's office on a sunny morning, looking at my Moleskine notebook, discovering old writing ideas that I will never use. Please steal them. Give them life. Some of them have been trapped in my little notepad for years.

First the concepts

angel-in-residence

ritual explosives

liquidity of memory

drum-tight heart

fill it up with Ethyl

Then fill in the gaps

Message on our answering machine, 2003: Giovanni's got a package for you.

Conversation on a dry, dusty day at Children's Fairyland:
Father, very angry, to toddler: You got my shoes dirty right after I cleaned them!
Grandmother, placating: You know how funny he is about his shoes.

Finally, the Moleskine

Good luck reading my writing. I can barely decipher it myself. And I've been drawing the same doodles since I was twelve.

This post is written in homage to koe whitton-williams of the half-life of lineoluem and if the walls could talk. I've chosen to go almost all lower-case in this paragraph, but I could be wrong. I'm working without a stylebook.

Next post: a return to narrative.



Images above: Me, waiting, waiting, for the doctor or, err, the nurse-practitioner
Images below: What I wrote in my notebook while I was waiting

Tags: writing prompt, drum-tight heart, waiting forever for the doctor, Moleskine, steal these prompts, writing notebooks, notebook, koe whitton-williams

What is it about my son’s illnesses that plunge my life into despair, knock me into a pit for the duration? Four days at home with a sick four-year-old, four nights of not-enough sleep, his body sandwiched between my husband and me in the middle of the night, exuding heat, the constant bark of his cough punctuating my waking dreams.

“Just spit it out, cough it up and spit it out,” we told him Wednesday night as he hovered over the sink. His coughs have been from the center of his body, deep and hoarse. He let loose a fishing line of spit, coughed again, and threw up into the basin. It was very matter-of-fact, but he was concerned. "Will I need to go to the doctor now?" he asked. "That's not the bad kind of throw-up, is it?"

“I used to cough until I threw up when I was a kid, too,” I told him as I rubbed his back. “It happened to me all the time.” It did. I had a bum pair of lungs and was prone to bronchitis and middle-of-the-night asthma attacks. It didn’t help that my mother and I lived in a series of mildew pits, that I slept hemmed in by cats drawn by my little girl warmth. I was allergic to both mildew and cats and probably the cigarette smoke that twisted through my grandparent’s place. Used tissues would pile around me like snow drifts. I had a lot of “melodramatic” coughing fits.

The doctor said the asthma was nervousness or hysteria or some such nonsense. I remember turning it over in my mind, that these terrifying attacks, the desperate quivering of my lungs for breath as I sat up in the dark, were emotional. They were my fault, or maybe my mother's, for being a single Mom, for being a bit of a hysteric herself.

The unfortunate thing about running on fumes, about being stuck to the side of a sick boy for four days – I have no perspective. I wish I could tell you of the helpful doctor who helped me manage my asthma, who held out her hand for mine. There was no helpful doctor, though I did at least get an inhaler.

The truth is, I've never wanted to be helped, except maybe in my secret inner heart, and if you don’t want to be helped people generally don’t help you. Maybe it’s safer this way, but it’s also a drag, and when you’re in a funk it only drags you down further.

But give me two days of sunshine and maybe a week of health for the boy and the rest of us and I will leave the funk behind. I promise you that everything will be different, that I will smile back at strangers, will embrace friends and acquaintances. After the long gray winter, spring will come again and I will be filled with warmth and perhaps something resembling happiness. Or contentment. I'd settle for contentment, the absence of grayness.



Image: Kid in between colds, disguised as a mummy.
Prompt: Write about a time someone helped you

Tags: sick kid, writing prompt, Round Robin, asthma, complain, complain, complain, never-ending winter, spring, endless days of rain bring me down, winter of many illnesses

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

The pavement was slick and there were potholes and too many trees by the side of the winding road. The first to go were two juniors who were cutting school, doing what teenage boys do, driving too fast, maybe drinking or passing a bowl while the tires screeched and the car fishtailed. They ended up upside down in the creek that snaked by the road. They died. There were others in high school who died in car accidents, too, though at this point I mainly remember the names of the survivors (thanks, Facebook, with your updated images of people from the past).

Since my grandmother died, I’ve developed a strong sense of mortality, of my own, of other peoples’, of the various cats and dogs that have been in my life. Sometimes it hits me more than others, generally when I’m feeling low and isolated, when the sun hasn’t been out in weeks. It doesn't help that I've been spending an hour or two a day writing out the details of illness and death for my novel manuscript. And I’ll have dreams about these people, the dead from high school, usually as represented by David Anderson, the last one to die, the one who made it into the yearbook, a ghost by the time the book was printed.

There are other “deads” as my son calls them, like Carolin, a friend from college who had some sort of birth defect that we never discussed. She’s been gone for seventeen years, sometimes still visits me in my dream version of our college dorm. My grandfather shows up less and less now as I deal with the past, though I am sometimes reminded of how much there is to deal with (another nod to Facebook, where people who knew me peripherally during one of the darkest times in my life show up, and I remember just how bad it was and I want to die with the memory).

As I was wrestling again with that long-ago past, something that I keep thinking should be a “dead” itself at this point, as I was having a good cry after washing the dishes Thursday night, Nora, our Russian squirrel hound, came clicking into the kitchen. She likes to comfort the sad and inexplicably lonely, especially if it involves a pat or two for her. I knelt down to stroke her chest and was struck again with memory. There I was, ten years old, in what used to be my grandmother’s room, petting Greta the miniature schnauzer. Greta's fur was warm and soft. She groaned as I scratched behind her ears, reached out a paw as if to say "Don't stop." At the time, I was struck with the exquisite transience of it all, the way a heart stops and the lungs give out, the vulnerability of our soft bodies and delicate skulls. Disease creeps in. A car slams into a tree and then into you. You ignore the deep cough until it is too late. No matter the trajectory of the story, we all know how it ends.

Greta was killed by a hit-and-run driver when I was in seventh grade, about six months after we left my grandfather's house for Wilmington. He let her out when he was getting the mail. As he limped to the mailbox, Greta trotted to a neighbor's yard. She was halfway across the street when a car came tearing past and knocked her into a ditch. Either the driver didn't see her or didn't care to stop and my grandfather caught only a glimpse of the car's tail lights. It was the violent conclusion of Greta's brief story.

I knelt in the kitchen, my arms around Nora, and added up the dead. I felt their hands in mine, the touch of a gentle paw, the sound of a meow. Greta and I sat together in the dusty sunlight, her eyes brown and serious, her heartbeat strong. Sidney played a game of capture, batted at the pencil I pushed under the door. Louise curled up on the dining room table, a dog pretending to be a cat. I brushed against a boy in a hallway as he ran by, late for class. And my grandmother croaked out "Tie a Yellow Ribbon" while I giggled from the swing that hung from the maple tree. Even the tree is gone now, but like the rest it exists in my memory, in the stories I tell.

I held Nora tighter, tried to appreciate the moment, knowing I would think about it when she was gone. And the sweetness of it almost killed me.

Top photo by Jane Underwood, Writing Salon mistress and photographer extraordinaire.
Bottom photo by Mr. T from Nora's first week with us in 2003.

After writing this prompt and struggling with various versions of it for the blog, I got out my senior high school yearbook (theme: "A Unique Blend." I had forgotten that high school yearbooks had themes), just to check on some of the facts. There was David Anderson, still in with the living seniors, but at the front of the book was a dedication to three other people from our class who had died, two of them in car accidents: Pat O'Donoghue, Rob Klaczkiewicz, and Joe Lombardino. There were others who died while I was at school, specifically those upperclassmen in the first paragraph of this post, though I could have some of my facts wrong about the accident. They died in the mid-80s, well before our lives were digitally monitored, before you could have a Facebook page even after death. The fact that there was no trace of these young men made me sad. It was almost as if they had never existed.

Tags: Facebook, Death, Pets, NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, school, car accidents, dying, grandfather, isolation, Round Robin, writing prompt

I miss the tall ginkgos with their rotting fruits, the way the berries felt beneath my feet with just enough crunch, a pleasure to step on. The sidewalk was covered with ginkgo leaves, too, bright yellow fans dampened with the rain. A storm had come through the night before, had knocked the leaves off along with the fruit. The air was full of the smell of them, acrid, rotting, sweet.

We were lost and I was defensive about it, but if you were going to be lost, this was the neighborhood to be lost in. The street was tunneled in by wide brick rowhouses, voluptuous Victorians with turrets and whimsical windows accented with stone. Each house had a set of black iron steps, shiny and slick, one-two-three-four, up to the entry. The steps made little caves over doors to English basements, a term which conjures up mold and damp and a view of other peoples’ ankles, the angling of a dog’s leg as it releases a spray of urine against low iron window bars.

He got angry with me after I got angry with him and we had an embarrassing fight in front Martha, a hissy fit that revealed more than we intended. A tense moment with the map revealed my mistake and our luck: we were three blocks from Adams Morgan, a short walk to a few cold beers and a platter of Ethiopian food. The three of us marched from Swann Street to 18th Street, walked uphill against a thin wind. It was getting dark, people were bundled up against the cold. We walked without talking, single-file past the homeless, the crazies, the young people with their know-everything attitude. And then we shared a meal with all the awkwardness of something being over, knowing we had years to go before it would really end.

This is from a Round Robin prompt this week, my (slightly edited) response to a very different photograph.

Photo by Antediluvial.

Tags: gingko trees, autumn, exhusbands, writing prompt, Round Robin

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

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

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

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

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

J. had a freezer full of goose breasts riddled with shot. His family owned property on Broad Creek with a duck blind right against the water, where the menfolk, clad in camouflage, would sit on brisk fall mornings, guns poised. He showed me the blind that first summer, took my hand and led me through a tunnel of cornstalks gone brown. We sat close on the austere bench, hidden behind grass that had become hoarse with whispering over the years. I am sure he kissed me in that humid July air because we did a lot of that then, sweet lingering kisses in between fights and sarcasm.

He’d told me that a former tenant of the Sugar Shack, the house he and his brother were renting from their grandmother on the far side of the property, had keeled over one afternoon in the back bedroom, dead from a heart attack. By the time they found the body, the man’s faithful dog had chewed off half of his face. It probably started with wake-up licks that progressed to nips and then frantic biting. But J. was often full of shit, and I’m not sure if he was just trying to scare me. If so, it worked. I’d spend the night there holding it, too nervous to walk the ten feet to the bathroom, picturing the gory scene, the spiritual remains of this lonely person floating over the room.

One muddy November night, when lingering kisses had turned into the fire of post-fight sex, I realized I was on the edge. J. and I had gone from chemical intensity to a kind of in-between thing that wasn’t satisfying but was just enough to keep me hooked. We’d spent the evening at the bar, drinking and picking at each other. By the time we shoveled into the Sugar Shack driveway, my brain was crackling. We had a fight about something ridiculous or something deep-seated and heavy, it doesn't really matter, and at some point I grabbed a shotgun from the gun cabinet.

As I write this, I can’t believe that I did such a thing, so dramatic, so serious. Could I be making this up? No. I was drunk and sad and teetering on the edge of the abyss, so I grabbed one of his (unloaded) shotguns and pointed at my face. Maybe we struggled. All I can remember is me stumbling in the shabby living room of the Sugar Shack where it was cold and damp. J. was lit from behind so that his face was cragged in shadow. I was hysterical with pent-up emotion, struggling to keep hold of this unwieldy gun. Eventually J. took it away and returned it to the cabinet. We went to sleep. I woke up the next morning barely able to move, felt around for his sleeping form and remembered that he was probably hunkered down in the duck blind with his cousins.

I’m sure he chalked the night up to my overgrown sense of drama, another mark against me to go with my unfaithfulness and love of alcohol. Thank god I've tossed aside those crutches for the most part, though I miss the drama sometimes. Drama sparks up the night, shines a little light into the abyss. Without it, you have only darkness, have to bravely perch on the edge until the abyss slowly creeps away. And that's where I seem to be right now for reasons that are unclear to me, dirging it out until the fog lifts.

"Shoot him 'fore he run now," is a lyric to the song "Shotgun," originally by Jr. Walker and the All Stars. Click here for a danceable, levity-producing version from the documentary Standing in the Shadows of Motown. It features some of the original Motown sessions musicians and the late Gerald Levert as singer.

Image from the Washington College magazine.

Tags: love, writing prompt, Round Robin, College, hunting

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

Tags: The long goodbye, writing prompt, blogging, Joe Jackson, faction, blogging break, grandfather, grandmother, burn injuries, friends in the blogosphere

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

White

Can you think of anything more bland? White bread, white rice, white collar. Something devoid of detail; the absence of pigment, of nutrients, of personality. Or perhaps you think of purity when you see the colorless expanse, a bride in her virginal wedding dress, the priest’s collar, the petals of daisy. What’s that all about? Then there’s a blank page or screen, waiting to be filled, the background to the rest of our lives, the tabula rasa. Let’s smudge it or spill the ink, write dirty words or talk about sex, reveal all our secrets. Let’s sully the white.

Dirty snow. Image from TreeHugger.

White is too much pressure. Don’t you cringe when you see the white pair of pants? The white shoes that must come out after Memorial Day and go back into the closet at the conclusion of the summer? Suddenly I’m picturing a pair of white shoes I had in high school. They were Mias, 80s fashionable, flats with pointy toes that beat my feet into submission. How long were they white? By the time I tossed them aside they were scuffed, grey. They smelled like sweat. Inside, dirty imprints of my heel and toes.

“Do we really need these details?” you ask. “Do we really want the dirt, the skinny, on your white shoes? OK, we can move to other formerly white things, can see how writing about something muddies the page, dirties a secret life. Underwear stained with menstrual blood; t-shirts with their half-moons of brown under the armpits; ring around the collar.

I’m actually thinking about lies, though, secrets, the kinds of lives we say we have and the hidden world underneath. Everyone’s hiding something, is afraid to reveal certain details, has some shame. I say show it to the world, let go of your lily white fantasies.

They are totally unrealistic.

Tags: sick kid, writing, writing prompt, secrets, colors, white, whitewashing, shades of grey

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

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

Mom-mom, 1934.

My obsession with ghosts started in the sixth grade, though it had its roots in my grandmother’s death two years earlier. We were in the kitchen, putting groceries away when she suddenly clutched at her throat and started gasping for air, frantically motioning to the kitchen chair. I stood there, confused, scared. Finally, I moved the cat, and Mom-mom collapsed into the empty space.

It was up to me to dial 911. We waited 40 minutes for the ambulance to come all the way from Elkton. She was dead or close to it by the time it arrived. Congestive heart failure. In a couple of weeks, my mother, her boyfriend, and I moved in with my grandfather and tried to cope with her absence and our new living situation.

I’m not sure where the Ouija board came from. Maybe it was a Christmas present. I started carrying it around with me, taking it to school, begging my friends to help me contact my grandmother. They went along with it and I believed everything. Mom-mom had a friend named Sam up there in heaven. Everything was all right, and she was watching over me.

My mother took the death chair out of the kitchen, eventually storing it in the attic space over the garage. I was into sleeping in tight spaces, under picnic tables, in tiny tents I set up in the backyard. One night I convinced my best friend to spend the night in the attic with the chair. The space was hot and smelled of cut wood and roofing tar. I kept staring at the empty chair, waiting for my grandmother to appear.

Over the years, through neglect and hard times, I kept on waiting. When, as a teenager, I moved to the Little House adjacent to my grandfather’s place and felt totally alone, I wished for a sign of her presence, a sign that someone was watching over me.

Now I know that such hopes are false.

Tags: grandmother, Death, ouija boards, ghosts, grief, writing prompt

Tags: writing prompt, DC