Prompt #113
Things
Hello, everybody.
The summer I turned eighteen…
…I boxed up my lifetime of possessions, drove to the city dump, and threw everything in. Don’t ask me why, I really don’t remember. It seems I wanted to clear out my life and start over again. What I do remember is seeing one of the boxes turn over as it landed, the contents spilling out onto the great mound of garbage. And as I looked down into the chaotic jumble of throwaways, I saw my favorite black belt lying there, like a dead snake. I’d had that belt throughout my teenage years. It was slender and worn, with a big silver buckle, and had always looked nice with my levi five-oh-ones and a pair of converse all-stars. For a moment, I felt sad. Goodbye, oh, things of my youth! Then I got back into my mom’s Chevy wagon and drove away.
Here’s a little thing I wrote, where that belt makes an appearance:
Truths
By the time I was ten, I knew a man’s kiss was both hard and soft. I knew men had a special smell that marked them. I knew that if you only looked at a man, he would look back at you as though he owned you. I still know these things, still know they are true, though I also know that sometimes none of them are true. I have kissed men who did not know hard from soft, whose smell was the absence of smell, who looked at me with the boyish hope I’d be a mystery forever. I’ve known the heaven of being held, of being whispered to, of opening my eyes and finding someone there, eyes open. Also, the hell of being held against my wishes, of whispers in my ear that I didn’t want to hear, of opening my eyes to eyes open and wishing I could disappear. I didn’t see the mountain until I was nearly twenty, though it sat there all along, snow-capped and glorious. I once slogged through a moss-covered forest in the pouring rain, climbed over wet fallen logs, slipped on muddied rocks. And there was the red rock canyon opening to darkness, like the time I went to a landfill and tossed in everything I owned. Oh, wait, I remember thinking. That’s my belt. And over there, a box of who knows what.
This is from The School of Life website:
Mono no aware is a key term in Japanese culture. ‘Mono’ means ‘thing’ or ‘things’; ‘aware’ means ‘feeling’ or sentiment, and the particle ‘no’ indicates something an object possesses. So mono no aware signifies the deep feeling or pathos of things, the powerful emotions that objects can evoke or instill in us. It is often associated with a poignant feeling of transience, a beautiful sadness in the passing of lives and objects, like the glorious colour of autumn leaves as they are about to fall.
I’m not Japanese and I’m sure I’m missing some of the nuances of the term. Still, the idea that this idea exists makes me happy about my tendency toward sadness!
And with all of that introduction, it’s on to the prompt:
TODAY’S PROMPT
Choose an object to write about. Any object will do.
Now write a story in which this object plays a part. Inject some meaning or emotion onto the object as you write your story: happiness, sadness, a feeling of loss, a feeling of completeness, a fleeting moment of awe…
The object itself isn’t all that important—the feeling the object gives rise to is where the meaning comes from. You can write about your refrigerator, your dental floss, a car you used to drive, an old CD, a lost sock. Sky’s the limit!
SPECIAL NOTE: Recently, I came across a post by one of my favorite writers: Etgar Keret. In the post, he tells of a prompt that he gives to students—and his prompt is very similar to the one I’ve posted today. His goes like this: “Choose an object that carries special meaning for you, and write about it.” I asked him permission to use his prompt, and he very kindly said yes. You may want to use his prompt instead of mine—your choice! (To clarify: my prompt asks you to pick any old object and then inject meaning onto it, while Etgar Keret’s prompt asks you to write about an object that already holds special meaning for you. Same, but different! Mine lends itself more to writing fiction, I think…)
You can find his prompt and post here:
That’s it! Note: Stories posted in the comments section that run longer than 400 words may not be read by yours truly.
Funny you ask. Yesterday was another conversation about the dead. At this point these things come up often. See, at age 75 you are at the average life expectancy of the American male. This means, approximately, half of all the people you ever knew are already dead. The other half is falling fast.
Then you think about the houses where they all lived, for now we’ll stick with family. The grandparents and aunts and uncles and parents, all those homes we grew up in, ate meals, made love, wept, shouted, lied, laughed, drank, fought, sat in the summer sun with lemonade, smoked ten thousand cigarettes. A boat wrecked on the rocks, marriages on the rocks, writing into the dumpster, lovers dumped, most the entire goddamn picture show on the cutting floor.
And there you are. Nowhere. Nothing is left, everything you knew gonzo. The people, the places, the particularities of it all.
But it’s not all quite like that is it? It is and it isn’t. Here is a picture of the grandsons. Over there are some printed pages of something written only yesterday. Already updated this morning. Here is this screen I’m typing on and watching the words sprinkle across the page. The childhood homes are gone, but there are the dishes to be done, the crumbs of this morning’s waffles. Pending is the decision to make a second cup of coffee. I only drink instant now, like my mother did in her old age, to avoid the clean up, and really, the difference between instant and brewed coffee isn’t worth talking about. My coffee cup is white, and reliable, and when it’s empty it never fails, coffee has run from the rim where my lips were, to the bottom of the cup, as if a slug had crawled down and left its mark.
Amy licked her finger and thumb and ran them along the end of the thread. She picked up a needle and held it up close in front of her face. At the third attempt, she pushed the thread into the eye, then pulled it through. She felt next to her for the pair of scissors that she had used to unpick the name tag that had been sewn neatly into the jumper. That name tag had fallen to the floor by her knees and rested amongst short strands of thread exactly matching the jumper’s colour. It had on it a picture of a car, and next to that the name, Arthur.
Her phone buzzed. She placed the needle between her lips, leaned forward, and reached for her phone. She tapped the screen, scanned the notification, and flicked it away.
They had moved to the house six months ago and had barely unpacked anything. She had found the cotton reels, the needles in their round plastic case and the sewing scissors in a margarine tub labelled ‘Candles/Party Things’. On Jake’s birthday she hadn’t been able to find the candles. She thought, now, of how Jake had tried to smile as she sang to him.
Jake pushed the door open, shifting it against the boxes she’d had to move while searching for the sewing kit. Three of them were still taped up. He pushed through and said, ‘Why are you in here?’
She turned him around and held up the jumper to his back. He twisted back around.
‘That’s not mine,’ he said.
He looked down and saw the label.
‘It’s Arthur’s’
‘Is he one of your friends?’ she asked.
Jake shifted on his feet.
‘You’ve got to make friends, Jake. It’s been six months.’
He twisted his fingers into the curls that had come free when Amy tied her hair.
‘I don’t know how,’ he said.
‘Just ask them, say ‘My name’s Jake, can I join in?’ Just ask.’
Her phone buzzed, she bent away from his twirling fingers, scanned the notification.
She flicked it away.
‘Try this on,’ she said.
She pulled it over his head, he lifted his arms, she tugged the sleeves down his arms until his fingertips came through.
‘There,’ she said.
Later, Jake waited in the dining room. Amy flicked off the light, and brought from behind her back a plate with his dinner. Stuck into the jacket potato were seven lit candles. She placed it in front of him.