Hello, everybody.
Yes, that is a photo of a raging river. We’ll get back to that in a moment.
But first: Thank you for all of the well wishes last week. Unbelievably, I’m still a bit under the weather, but MUCH better than I was. I plan on returning to form any moment now! Okay, all done talking about it.
Moving on…
I’ve got the cutest little grandson. And let me tell you, he is a BIG boy. When he was little, I used to call him my little pumpkin. Sometimes a pickle. Now, I hear myself saying, that kid is a TRUCK. (The cutest truck ever, of course.)
We often call one thing something else in order to help us describe them. We’ll say, “he’s an open book.” Or “She’s got a loose screw up there.” Or some such. And yes, as we discussed very recently around here, those are all metaphors.
Some of you felt a bit confused about metaphors when we talked about them in the past, and that is understandable. It’s a concept that we use so much in our daily lives that often we don’t recognize that we are doing it. We’ll say, “My father just blew his stack!” without realizing that we just called our father a volcano in order to describe how angry he got at whatever it was that we did—or YOU did, I was a perfect child.
So, once again, the definition of a metaphor is:
“a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable.”
Here’s another one:
“a comparison between two things that are otherwise unrelated. With metaphor, the qualities of one thing are figuratively carried over to another.”
Calling someone a tall drink of water, or a broken record, or saying their love life is a long and winding road… well, these are all metaphors.
Okay, hopefully we’re all on the same page now, and I mean that metaphorically.
This week, I’ve got three stories for you that rely on metaphor, and one of them I’ve posted before (Prompt #36). In each of these stories, the author describes their mother as something other than human. In the first, the mother is described as an “abandoned K-mart,” and in the second the mother is called an “upright piano.”
Have a read and then come on back:
“My Mother is An Abandoned K-Mart” by Amy Cipolla Barnes, was published at Smokelong Quarterly.
“My Mother Was An Upright Piano” by Tania Hershman, can be found at Fictionaut.
“My Mother, the Water Monster” by Ariel Merillat can be found at Fractured Lit.
So you see what the authors did in each of these stories, right? They chose a person and then they compared that person to a thing, and then they wrote a little story. And that’s what we’re going to do this week!
TODAY’S PROMPT
Choose a person to write about.
Choose a thing that in some way describes that person. For instance, a person could be described as a raging river, an empty highway, a gin and tonic, a tsunami, an iguana, a traffic jam….
Whatever you choose, make that the title of your story: “My Father Was a Raging River in the Middle of Nowhere.” (Yes—this is the connection to the photo at the top of the page. Fifty points if you figured that out on your own!)
Write your story, letting that title take you wherever the story wants to go.
This is going to take some imagination. Just go with the flow of it and don’t worry about what appears on the page. If your story has little to nothing to do with your title, that’s completely fine! Anything goes!
But do try to connect your metaphor to your story. If your father was a raging river, you could write a story about trying to swim in that river and how you kept going under, etc.
Alternate prompt: Late-life romance gone wrong
As always, post up to 400 words in the Comments, even if you’ve written more. You are welcome to summarize the rest of your story if it goes over 400 words.
My Mother is a Trampoline
The last time I saw my mother, she was dead. She looked her same old self, except that she was no longer breathing. Or smiling. She wasn’t opening her eyes wide like an owl. She wasn’t saying anything, like, your thighs are so big. She wasn’t moving in her usual way, which was always bouncing up and down, up and down. I said to my mother, I love you, mom, and—as usual—she didn’t say anything in return. Well, she was dead. I paid a therapist a zillion dollars to answer me one question: did my mother love me? Well, sometimes yes, and sometimes no. Up and down, up and down. When we put her in the ground, I didn’t expect her to bounce back up, but here she is, most days, looking me in the eye, tutting at my thighs, asking me about my hair. I say, ma, I don’t want to hear it, but good luck with that. The dead mother is in my backyard right now. I’ve locked the doors, but I can hear her out there, jumping up and down.
My Father Was a Beethoven String Quartet
I was a lullaby, and then an eensy-weensy spider. I was bubblegum pop, followed by rock-and-roll with a whole lotta shaking going on, followed, gloriously, by the Beatles. I told my father to please just chill out, for god’s sake.
I was Dylan, waiting for the times to change, and then Dylan again, once the times had changed and everybody must get stoned. I was free because I had nothing left to lose. I gave peace a chance. My father asked me why I changed with every new day, and I asked him why he never did.
And then, oddly, I became Thelonious Monk and stayed there. Monk was enough for me. I was impressionist, I was shifting, fractured colors, I was stride and blues and bebop. I was spaces in between the notes. I was starting and stopping without warning. I was never knowing where I was going but ending up there just the same. There was so much change in Monk that I didn’t have to be anything else.
My father asked why I couldn’t be more serious, now that I was grown up. I asked him why he had to be so predictable. He denied being predictable; rather, he was consistent. Without consistency, he said, how could you get anything done? I said that consistency was only an illusion, and spontaneity was essential for creating anything.
I was wrong, though. Many years after he died, I listened to Beethoven’s late quartets, and in those muted and conflicting tones I finally heard my father's voice: dry, precise, intelligent, discursive, and profoundly sad.