This mother was a sow named Greta. She was old and fat and had produced many a litter of pink squiggling piglets that latched on to her teats and sucked away for dear life. Because life is dear, Greta said to herself. When my little ones are scrambling all over me, I'm alive. If one of them isn't getting his share and is in danger of becoming the runt of the litter, I do all I can to help him get what he needs. It's not easy for a fat old sow to do that, but I try. Life is so very dear.
The next mother was a whale named Gudrun. She was young and didn't know what was happening to her when her calf began to move in her belly. She had heard old stories and thought it might be Jonah trying to get out, though she couldn't for the life of her remember when she'd swallowed him. The older mother whales gathered round and put her mind to rest. It's your little one, they boomed (whales do boom, but as gently as seaweed fronds waving in the flow). Afterwards, Gudrun kept her calf beside her. He suckled often and grew. He learned to boom. Gudrun was so full of her life and his that she called him Plenty.
Another mother was called Pirool. She was given that name because she was an oriole, and orioles do so pirool when they are twenty in a big cherry-tree laden with glossy fruit. She'd laid four eggs in a nest hanging from a branch – she'd built it with her mate – and now she had four youngsters to watch over and teach to stay out of sight in the deep leaf-cover of the treetops. Three of her birdies were males, and she knew their yellow and black plumage would one day draw the unwelcome attention of cats and rats and probably hunters too. Stay high, she told them. Keep calling me, as I call you, and we all flute and pirool together, singing in praise of black cherries bursting with juice!
Thanks, Kevin. Gudrun would have liked to be called something more evocative, but I quite like Gudrun. And she couldn't express her plenitude better than with Plenty.
Greta reminded me of the film “Gunda” that came out about four years ago. A documentary (no humans speaking, just animal sounds) about a sow raising her piglets and the clear love of a mother for her young. Unfortunately it has a very sad ending.
Unfortunately (also), mother-pigs may be kept in restricted circumstances due to economic necessity aka mass production of n kilos of meat per square metre. They may roll over and crush several piglets. They have to be constrained by means of iron cages.
"No choice," says A. Pigfarmer. "We don't do it for fun."
The film ends when the piglets (about two months old) are taken from the sow and loaded into a trailer to be fattened up with other piglets. Last frames of the film show mother in distress, alone in the farmyard.
1. In the first place, I've never lived in a four-story house. The first house I remember living in was a rented farmhouse with no running water, no electricity. It had a pond where I sat with my cat watching frogs. I was three years old.
2. In the second place, the house of my dreams has three stories. What I mean is I used to dream about a house in which I would wander from room to room. I loved that house. I was always finding something new to love about it. Then when I was in my fifties, I literally bought that house and didn't realize it was the house I always dreamed about until I had the dream while I was living in it.
3. In the third place, I've never lived above the second floor. In my house with three stories, the third story was actually an attic, but it had a tower, and I loved to go up there and look out. I wanted to convert the attic to an actual living space, but I had to give up the house when I suddenly became disabled and couldn't afford to keep it any more.
4. In the fourth place, I wouldn't want a four story house. Who wants to clean all those rooms? Not me. I'm happy in my little ranch house now. Although I would love to have a three-story tower built on the end of the house so I would. have a view of Mt. Hood. It's there, but there's a two story house across the street blocking my view.
I particularly love the second story--not the second story of the house, but the second story about the house, and the idea that you have the dream about it while you're living there.
Love this story, I feel like there are so many layers to it. It feels like a journey through time--growing up and growing old and all the emotions attached to that ride.
Story 3 reminded me of my own little perch I used to have during my college years when we would climb through a convenient window onto the roof of the house. It was technically only a 2-story house but I suppose climbing onto the roof counts as a makeshift third story!
LOVE THIS! Especially this part: "Then when I was in my fifties, I literally bought that house and didn't realize it was the house I always dreamed about until I had the dream while I was living in it." And what a great play on the word "story"!!
When Dad died she became Grief and we became her tears. Mother is in grief. She was in grief. We are three daughters. I being the middle one. The youngest is Baby and always will be. The oldest is incompetent and always was. I am ignored. She died and we being watchful and caring, carry her Grief as a memorial.
First of all, I loved both your stories - congratulations!
Four Stories About Kings
The first king seemed to believe that he had actually done something to to deserve the crown. He took great pride in the royal blood that ran through his veins. He was not cruel but he did enjoy bossing his subjects around. He was short and portly and his royal strut made his subjects snicker behind their hands. He had a bit of a Napoleon Complex hundreds of years before Napoleon, but the general verdict was - not a bad guy overall.
The second king was intelligent. Nobody would
deny that. He loved to read thick volumes about royal dynasties, especially the parts where a king or queen is revealed to have a fatal flaw that leads to their demise. He swore to himself that he wouldn’t fall prey to that. He died in an unfortunate accident while riding his prized stallion, Onyx. It was a tragedy that could have happened to anyone, no matter how intelligent or well read.
The third king was alternately ridiculous and hilarious. But it was the kind of funny where you’re laughing at the person, not with them. But here’s the thing: funny is funny. He drove everyone crazy with his ever-shifting moods and pronouncements, contradicting today what he said yesterday. Many of his subjects wished him dead but there was a sizable minority that wanted to see how long he could continue being irrepressibly bizarre. Final tally: 95 years.
The fourth king was a brooding introvert, neurotic and timid, but many people found that they liked him immensely once they got to know him. His friends called him an old soul. But the majority of his subjects thought of him as a non-entity and envied nearby kingdoms with confident, hypermasculine rulers. One day the fourth kind slipped away from the castle late at night and left a note reading, “Sorry, I wasn’t cut out for this.” A sigh of relief went out from the kingdom except for those who truly knew the fourth king. They would miss him for the rest of their lives.
The fourth king was a brooding introvert, neurotic and timid, but many people found that they liked him immensely once they got to know him. --what a lovely statement about looking below the surface. Nicely done.
My mother wants me to spend my senior year in high school in a French lycée, to gain total fluency. She thinks I am brilliant enough to pass the “Bac” at the end, which would count for 2 years of American college. She doesn’t know I am gay, and I agree to go because it will be easier to keep it a secret there. But I end up meeting a 28-year-old man, and when my mother comes to visit, all is exposed with maximum drama. I use that as the basis of my award-winning junior narrative at NYU Film school.
Road not Taken #1:
I don’t tell ridiculous lies in letters home that René is Renée, nor do I leave the cool (if crumbling) apartment in downtown Montpellier to live with him, and our relationship doesn’t screw me up for years. I stick it out in the lycée, staying a second year to eventually pass the Bac. When I return, I jump right to Junior year at Stony Brook, then get a doctorate at Yale and end up as full French professor at an Ivy League college. Coming out to my parents goes much more smoothly at 21 than it did at 17.
Road not Taken #2:
I push back against my mother’s plan and counter with one of my own. I will go to Yale, which I have the grades for, and improve my French in courses for two years, before doing my Junior Year Abroad in France in Aix-en-Provence. But I will major in Theater, and apply to the Yale School of Drama graduate program. I will teach French in the early, lean years, but eventually have a Tony Kushner-like career as a playwright and screenwriter.
Road not Yet Taken but Still Possible:
I write a novel premised on the fantasy that St. Peter gives me a do-over, in which I can relive my life aware of all the mistakes I made in this one, so I can avoid them. The fictional me lives a hybrid of Roads Not Taken 1 & 2. In my new life, I make just as many mistakes, just different ones, but I realize they feel foreign to me. So I start making as many old mistakes as I can over again, because I feel more myself with my old regrets.
This is really how I learned to let go of this alternative histories, which I've been known to fugue over. I had to make friends with my regrets, see them as part of my identity.
Btw if anyone wants to take a gander at the film, it ain't half bad.
Oh, I love, love, LOVE these!! Humorous, but kinda heart-breaking too. And so relatable!! Don't we all have roads untaken that we wish we had taken, but on a second thought... maybe not?
I always say there are regrets and then there are things which, if you were suddenly sent back in time, you would do differently. And it’s kind of fun to wonder what those different choices would have been and the different places they would have led. For example, Yale comes up in multiple scenarios of mine because I found out in this life how different things can be when you have friends who come from money —like getting a indie film financed, for example. (Not that all Yale students come from money, but a lot more than at Stony Brook and NYU in the late 70s.)
The thing about fuguing into these alternate scenarios is that you simply can’t factor in what other mistakes and bad choices they might have led to, perhaps far worse than the ones you actual made in your actual history.
In my short story, Mr Olmsted Regrets, when I imagine living one of these alternate scenarios, the most fun I had was imagining the serious “other” mistakes I might have made or bad events that might have befallen me. And how I might have still somehow ended up right where I am now. (A Sliding Doors scenario.)
I often wonder if we ever had a choice in our decisions or if they were the only decision we could ever make. Does the wind choose which way to blow or is it just the result of a long series of infinitesimal and untraceable factors?
That we could have made different choices than we did is only an idea we have in our head, whereas there is considerable evidence to the contrary - because what happened is indeed what happened. This is why I don't spend much energy on regret, and also because, like most of us, the choices I made made complete sense at the time and only seem questionable now because of things that occurred later that I couldn't possible have known would happen.
Meaning it's sort of a pointless exercise to wonder what could have been - unless one is using it to fuel fiction that feels grounded in reality. Then it's very useful.
I advised a friend of mine with a trans brain who never acted on it to try writing her autobiography as a woman. It could be great - and therapeutic.
This is about my family reunion Third day into it, and I’m asking who are these people? I’ve known for 67, 72, 74 years, part time, some time, I’m still the oldest, so far, and have read about the differences in personalities, mental health, life expectancies per birth order. So what? What’ya going to do about it?
We’ve discussed the price of gas, someone saw it at $6/gallon. I walked too far from the fish and chips takeout to find a place to sit in Astoria. Then after the complainer wanted to go for a walk. It’s like a car full of children, these seniors, getting in and getting out and taking too long to close the door after them so I can lock the car. How much longer are they staying? What is the range of your electric car? Here is a picture of my father with his arm around a neighbor, receiving an award for winning the paddle tennis tournament a year before he died. Really, that’s my father, twenty five years younger than me? He looks thin. Her son is a friend. All my parents' friends are dead. We said you never know, when will be the last time? Mushrooms and onions in the scrambled? Rain later. We share some genome, correct? Just not interests like books, a nerdy compulsion to write things down.
Somehow we hang together I’m not sure if it’s from lack or trying or not caring one way or another or what. Some strange strain of love. Someone coughs. Another detailed story about something that happened, so many details, echo too loud. Today we will visit Cape Pepetua, where one brother released some of our mother’s ashes into Devil’s Churn, but the wind blew her the wrong way.
That last line, Tod! "but the wind blew her the wrong way"--I love the details of the family reunion, the quirky characters, the in and out of the car and the way you weave "mushrooms and onions in the scrambled" in to this. It feels so real.
1. In the first story, two girls become friends in second grade. Sixty years later, they are still friends, however, neither likes the other anymore, though neither would ever confess to that. They continue to support each other. Weddings to divorces, birthing rooms to gravesides, rags to riches and back again, so on and so forth. The story carries on and on and is enjoyed by some and vilified as meandering and insipid by others.
2. In the second story, a lonely awkward child is given a tortoise who, for several years, is his only friend. As an adult, the child becomes highly self-actualized. He finds love, has many friends, and does important and brilliant work which improves the lives of people all over the world. Throughout, the tortoise remains at his side. Indeed, he takes the tortoise with him wherever he goes and, just as he did as a child, processes his emotions, thoughts, and world changing ideas through conversations with his reptilian companion. When he dies, his daughter adopts the tortoise who soon becomes her confidant and friend.
3. In the third story, two people are waiting. We think they are friends, but sometimes, we wonder. It’s not entirely clear, especially to younger readers, what or who they are waiting for. Oh, hell. That one’s already been done.
4. In the fourth story, two people meet on the internet. Doesn’t matter how. Could be Facebook, could be a group chat amongst a bunch of political terrorists or cat lovers or whatever. What matters is that their friendship is entirely silicon dependent as they live on opposite sides of the world and are very poor. In fact, maybe they do most of their communication on free computers in the local library because they can’t afford cell phones. Over the years, they move from Facebook or the group chat to long email messages to eventually daily Zoom conversations or whatever. They feel very close to one another. One day, through some unforeseeable good fortune, one comes into piles of money enabling them to finally meet in real life. The question to be resolved is whether they rejoice in their physical meeting and live happily ever after as each other’s dearest friend and soulmate, or does the meeting go horribly leaving both with wounds that take years to heal.
I don't have a good feeling that the couple in number 4 will live HAE (happily ever after). If wounded, I hope it means they will forsake the internet and devote themselves to the analog world.
Did you know that you can buy ladybugs from Amazon? Wow! What a fabulous gift! Unit price is great: less than a penny per lady. Imagine a thousand ladybugs showing up at your doorstep, ready for action. What would you do if I sent you a thousand ladybugs? If I set up a subscription plan so you received a thousand ladybugs twice a month, and couldn't cancel it? Would you move to avoid the next delivery? Would you set up a ladybug stand on the corner? Develop a ladybug stew recipe?
One winter we visited friends in the Catskills and arrived just as they turned up the heat. Our room featured really old single-pane windows, with really old storm windows. Between the windows: hundreds of ladybugs, legs up. Little piles of them. Dead, or sleeping? As the heat came up, they came to life, crawling, little hops, short flights. Before they could get too rambunctious, our host vacuumed them all up.
What do the spots on a ladybug mean? One spot equals what? A year lived? In ladybug years, or human years? A day? Baby ladybugs birthed? Imagine how tiny. Are they sexual signals? Do they indicate dietary restrictions? Too much sun? Do they even know they have spots?
Last night, a ladybug crawled across the floor. I stuck my finger in front of it and said, climb on, ladybug. It didn’t. I got a single sheet of paper (a sample ballot for our upcoming primary elections; our longtime Dem congressperson being challenged from the left) and placed it flat on the floor. The ladybug climbed aboard and crawled until it came to rest on the challenger's name. I imagine everyone in the whole world who has found a ladybug in their living room has done the same exact thing with a piece of paper. Haven't you? Ladybugs seem pretty uniform when it comes to their behaviour. I walked to the terrace, opened the door, and waved the paper. The ladybug flew, or fell. Anyway, it was gone. I live on the ninth floor. I wonder: Do ladybugs get altitude sickness?
that one ladybug who had a lost weekend. everyone thought it was having a fling with a centipede (also missing that weekend), but it was really training for the most secret of missions.
Kevin, this is so gorgeous!! I love all the questions, and that you don't try to answer them. I notice you don't wonder about the gender of ladybugs or if male ladybugs feel emasculated by their name. But maybe that's just me. The ending about crawling onto a ballot is clever and fun!
This put a smile on my face. A meditation on the lowly and lovely ladybug! I never see them anymore. Where did they go? (I am a tad bit worried about that ladybug on the ninth floor. Hopefully, she found another terrace to relax upon.)
I went down a rabbit hole with your first question Kevin, “what would I do with a thousand ladybugs arriving on the doorstep?”. I’d start raising roses - ladybugs eat aphids that chew on roses, then I’d open a flower stand in a Farmer’s market that would attract people from miles around to buy the best roses they’d ever seen. But the ladybugs would keep arriving and I wouldn’t have enough roses to feed the aphids, to feed the ladybugs……
A baker's dozen ladybugs with each dozen roses purchased? Surreptitiously plant rose bushes everywhere there's an empty spot? Move to Pasadena and take charge of the Tournament of Roses parade?
The first one was a refugee from a country having a revolution. She had escaped with her baby, leaving her wealthy husband to bribe his way into the new regime. She complained that your tacky little house was nothing like her mansion full of servants. You had to tell her to leave, even though you needed the rent money, after she scared your kids by threatening you would abandon them if they didn’t behave better. After she was gone, you kind of missed the baby.
The second was a graduate student working on a dissertation about the mystic poets. He rarely appeared during waking hours, but you heard him pacing his attic room late at night. “What is that smell?” your four-year-old asked, wrinkling his nose, and you didn’t want to say weed, for fear he would repeat it at preschool and the child protection people would show up at your door. The student left after his adviser said his dissertation sounded like it was written by somebody on drugs.
Next was your former babysitter, whose husband left after she got pregnant. You were afraid she would kill herself, so you had her move into your house, because you knew she wouldn’t do it there. She spent months sitting at the kitchen window, watching the roses fade and the maple leaves fall in your tiny back garden. At least she cooked dinner for you and the kids.
The last one was a musician who had a three-month gig in your city. He let your kids try to play his trumpet and told jokes to make them laugh. After his girlfriend back home broke up with him, you invited him down from his attic room. He ended up staying for eight years.
The first neighbor chats when we meet up walking our dogs. Hers is groomed and looks quite spiffy. Mine is bedraggled but well loved. They sniff each other, but maintain a respectful distance, which is pretty much what happened between me and this neighbor when she invited us over for a drink one night and I realized that chatting in the driveway was preferable to watching other people drink white wine in her living room and watching tennis on TV.
The second neighbor lives next-door. Her name is Lisa. She has a husband and a fancy Mercedes convertible, white with red interior. Its hard top sometimes hangs from the ceiling of their garage, twinkling like an ornament on a Christmas tree. Her dog died. One year she brought me Christmas cookies on a Santa plate, but last year—nothing. We have a window box between our units, which I plant with petunias in the summer. The window box is one of those fences that make good neighbors.
The third neighbor doesn’t live here anymore. His name was Ricky. He had a golden doodle named Max who would cheerfully pop into my house if my door were open, run upstairs, sniff around and make himself at home. Max obediently followed Ricky when they went walking, but the neighbors complained because in my condo we have a leash law, so even though Max was well-trained and obedient, the neighbors couldn’t abide to see a well-trained obedient scroff-law.This made Ricky mad enough that he sold his unit and moved to a house in a nearby town where there is no leash law. I miss Max. In fact I bought my dog specifically because I fell in love with Max and then Max was gone. I have some experience falling in love with someone who takes off for another town.
The last neighbor is a bit of a recluse. We can’t get her to wave at us when she drives by, even if we wave wildly as if our car has broken down on the side of the road and our cell phones have run out of juice. Her name is Nancy. She has no dog. Nancy’s blinds are always closed, which means that Nancy lives in a house with no natural light. This perplexes me. Why would you buy a condo with 13 windows and then pull the blinds down on every single one of them? I surmise because Nancy’s husband 30 years ago was involved in a scandal involving cheating people on real estate investments and killed himself by entombing his body in a dry cleaner bag. Come to think of it, Nancy lives in her own kind of tomb. I might not feel like waving either. Or buying a dog.
Love this--neighbors are endless sources of interest. And their dogs! You have some experience falling in love with someone who takes off for another town. I've got the same--but with a woman, not a town... I feel bad for Nancy.
The gods play a game like charades where they assume the identity of earthly billionaires. They have to live as that billionaire until the muses guess their real identity. One rules an empire of data farms. One inherits money and marries the first one. Another invests in longevity research, close to a cure for death. One is a fireman. The muses guess he is Prometheus, and Prometheus is the only one, so far, who gets to be immortal again.
This prompt reminds me so much of “Happy Endings” by Margaret Atwood and “The Fifth Story” by Clarice Lispector.
Four Scenes from a Bedroom.
I.
Maude and Ambrose are asleep, the comforter pulled up to their chins. Maude snores, so Ambrose has his good ear turned to the pillow. Except. Maude isn’t really asleep. She’s peering at the bedroom door as a beam of light outlines the doorframe before it gleams in a steady shaft through the ever widening doorway. A figure, tall, broad-shouldered, and dressed all in black fills the doorway and Maude leaps from the covers. She advances on the figure, hissing,
“Clarence, you fool! Not here and not now!”
“But Maudie, you said–”
“Wassat?” Ambrose turns onto his back.
“Nothing, dear.” Maude pats his foot. “Go back to sleep.”
She pushes Clarence out the door and into the hallway.
From under the bed, a voice complains,
“Can you people hold it down? I’m tryna sleep!”
II.
Maude and Ambrose are asleep, the comforter pulled up to their chins. Ambrose snores, so Maude has crammed earplugs into her ears. Except. Ambrose is faking his snores tonight, and when he’s convinced Maude is out like a light, he slips from the covers, grabs his bathrobe, and tiptoes into the hall.
“I thought she’d never go to sleep!” Clarence mutters.
Ambrose, in a rush, trips over the trailing bathrobe tie, and lands in a heap on the floor.
“Are you all right?” Clarence squats beside him.
“Wassat?!” The bedsprings squeak as Maude sits up in bed.
“Nothing, dear!” Ambrose and Clarence chorus, and a third voice, off tempo with them, finishes “dear” and they stare at one another.
III.
Maude is asleep. Or at least Ambrose thinks she is. He’s pacing the hallway. Clarence is late.
Again. With each step, a squeaky floorboard complains, and Maude, fully awake and waiting for Clarence–so we assume–thrusts the door open and demands,
“What are you doing out here, Clarence?”
“I wish he’d stop making noise!” A voice calls from under the bed.
IV.
Clarence, Maude, and Ambrose are asleep. Or so we’re told. The comforter pulled up to their chins. All snoring.
A sneezy voice from under the bed complains,
“Don’t you ever dust under here?”
“Is that you, Maurice?” Maude peeks over the edge of the bed.
Hilarious, wonderful stories! (And you're quite right--this prompt is very reminiscent of the Atwood and Lispector stories. Brilliant minds....am I right?)
Here’s a story. First, there was a dream. In it a friend hands me two toothbrushes, tells me they love me, and departs the scene. I felt bereft. There I was, two toothbrushes in hand, quick words of love, and no one to share either with.
Here’s a second story, with another dream. In it, a woman with a slightly crossed left eye, someone I really cared about and hadn’t seen in 25 years, hands me two toothbrushes, a tube of toothpaste, tells me that she will always love me. I was speechless. I felt empty because I knew this was a dream.
There is a third story involving another dream. Here, a friend who I hadn’t seen in decades spoke to me and said she thought at one time that she loved me, but she no longer does. How can someone smile while saying these words? She handed me two toothbrushes, encased in a little purse, the kind you receive in an airline business-class cabin. Then, with a touch on my right shoulder, a quick touch of lips on my left cheek, she departed.
In a fourth story that also reflects a dream, another friend, a former lover, speaks to me kindly and tenderly. She was wearing white. A peasant dress made of a kind of homespun cotton. I loved seeing her in that dress, all loose and flowing, with that drawstring neckline. That was the part that really turned me on. She had a gap tooth that she didn’t bother to hide and a sunburned, peeling nose with freckles. Each time I saw her I felt lust for her. In this dream she offered me a lovely little purse. I noticed that it was white with brocade, to match her dress. It had a white zipper with a little white loop at the end. Dreams are strange. Sometimes time shifts, but in this one, I was able to open the purse. I noted how carefully I opened it. There were two toothbrushes. “For us”, she said. “We are a couple. Always have been.” Then as suddenly as the dream began, she disappeared. Sometimes I can make a dream come out the way I want it to. But not last night. Such are the ways of dreams.
It was known by the locals in the small college town as the “Shrink House” As in, take Second to the three-way stop, turn left and the Shrink house will be on your right. A pale yellow Victorian converted to accommodate professional offices, it was currently occupied by the firm of Carter, Stowe and Williams, licensed therapists.
Left of the small reception area was Evelyn Carter’s office, a room decorated in cool earth tones to create a sense of calm. Between two wingback armchairs was a table with a copy of the Times opened at the daily crossword. An upright piano sat against one wall. The opposite wall was occupied by a bay window that looked onto the driveway. Carter, dressed in a plain well-tailored suit, looked like the College Professor she was. Her clients were highly strung professionals who needed their therapist to understand their angst.
If you were there to see Basil Rowe you were directed into what had been the original dining room. Invariably standing at a pair of French windows would be Basil, sucking on an unlit pipe, a mass of black hair swept back from his forehead. Basil was an Anglophile from his tweeds to his vast collection of PBS coffee mugs and tote bags. He was a great admirer of Sherlock Holmes (Jeremy Brett version) and rather fancied his powers of deduction. In reality, he was more like Watson, affable, kindly and with an ability to notice the obvious. His clients enjoyed their “chats” in deep leather armchairs as in a London club. However, there was one thing Rowe shared with Holmes - he was a crack shot.
If your appointment was with neither Carter nor Rowe, you would be directed to the first floor to the office of the junior Partner, Kim Williams. The room was spare, almost clinical. There were two plain chairs on a Turkish Rug in the center of the room and a framed quote from Rene Descartes on the wall:
“It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well.”
Sitting in one of the chairs would be Kim who exuded a coiled energy. She was also fluent in six languages. Her clients often felt more comfortable sitting on the rug.
On March third at three p.m. all three therapists had an appointment with the same visitor.
Okay, that final sentence is very intriguing!!! Either a client has made 3 appointments and will decide which therapist to actually see when he or she arrives at 3 pm, OR there's some kind of magical realism thing going on here. Either way, it's a very fun story.
Or are they really therapists? One could be a code breaker, another an assassin, the third an interrogator based in a safe house………..the visitor their handler? Their enemy?
I remember exactly where I was standing when the news hit me: I would die, my family members would die, everyone would die. I was in the room with the coal fire, I remember the smell of it coming off the carpet and staring at the burned out patches by the grate. It was time to go to bed, I shouted and shouted and pulled backwards against the two arms trying to make me go, but bedtime was bedtime.
I learned to read. It was as if I’d always known how, and I was just remembering how and not in fact learning it for the first time. It went like this: I was out playing with my friend and her friend on the street. They shared a look when my mother drove past in the car. The meaning of that look between my friend and her friend, I read it easily, like I was just remembering how to do it not learning how to do it for the first time. I let myself in and went to bed without saying goodnight.
People’s eyes go glassy and loose when they leave their bodies for a bit. Their face goes loose and the eyes are made from something different for a while. I see it all the time, but the first time was watching a friend in school. He didn’t know the teacher was saying his name. I tried whispering to him, ducked my head, flicked my gaze from the teacher to him, hissed his name again and again. When he came back it wasn’t obvious whether it was still him, or a new one whose personality was similar because of the constraints placed upon it by the physical constituents of the body. That night I lay in bed but did not close my eyes.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote, ‘I see, not feel, how beautiful they are.’ I suppose that’s like the glassy eyed, I suppose that's how not to read the looks people share. I suppose you don't even remember things you never knew before.
This mother was a sow named Greta. She was old and fat and had produced many a litter of pink squiggling piglets that latched on to her teats and sucked away for dear life. Because life is dear, Greta said to herself. When my little ones are scrambling all over me, I'm alive. If one of them isn't getting his share and is in danger of becoming the runt of the litter, I do all I can to help him get what he needs. It's not easy for a fat old sow to do that, but I try. Life is so very dear.
The next mother was a whale named Gudrun. She was young and didn't know what was happening to her when her calf began to move in her belly. She had heard old stories and thought it might be Jonah trying to get out, though she couldn't for the life of her remember when she'd swallowed him. The older mother whales gathered round and put her mind to rest. It's your little one, they boomed (whales do boom, but as gently as seaweed fronds waving in the flow). Afterwards, Gudrun kept her calf beside her. He suckled often and grew. He learned to boom. Gudrun was so full of her life and his that she called him Plenty.
Another mother was called Pirool. She was given that name because she was an oriole, and orioles do so pirool when they are twenty in a big cherry-tree laden with glossy fruit. She'd laid four eggs in a nest hanging from a branch – she'd built it with her mate – and now she had four youngsters to watch over and teach to stay out of sight in the deep leaf-cover of the treetops. Three of her birdies were males, and she knew their yellow and black plumage would one day draw the unwelcome attention of cats and rats and probably hunters too. Stay high, she told them. Keep calling me, as I call you, and we all flute and pirool together, singing in praise of black cherries bursting with juice!
A mother's work is never done! And a mother's love....nothing quite like it. I adore these three animal moms.
This would make a beautiful illustrated book.
Agreed!
Bring it on, illustrators!
John, these are beautiful little pieces. Aside from the tales, the names are fantastic, especially Plenty.
Thanks, Kevin. Gudrun would have liked to be called something more evocative, but I quite like Gudrun. And she couldn't express her plenitude better than with Plenty.
I think Gudrun is a perfect name for a whale. I hope she learns to accept it.
In fact, she wanted to be called Barbie.
She's over it now.
we need to stage an intervention
I must agree. It is a weighty name, and whales are weighty.
It was only when she was small...
These are beautiful stories of motherhood, John. I can see that cherry tree, by the way. Nicely done.
It's a very big one. This year it was full of orioles gabbing away to each other. It's a lovely sound.
Greta reminded me of the film “Gunda” that came out about four years ago. A documentary (no humans speaking, just animal sounds) about a sow raising her piglets and the clear love of a mother for her young. Unfortunately it has a very sad ending.
Unfortunately (also), mother-pigs may be kept in restricted circumstances due to economic necessity aka mass production of n kilos of meat per square metre. They may roll over and crush several piglets. They have to be constrained by means of iron cages.
"No choice," says A. Pigfarmer. "We don't do it for fun."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunda_(2020_film) doesn't say what the sad ending is. Possibly Mr Pigfarmer gets stuck in a cage and crushed by a big fat sow?
The film ends when the piglets (about two months old) are taken from the sow and loaded into a trailer to be fattened up with other piglets. Last frames of the film show mother in distress, alone in the farmyard.
That's a dark thought that I'd say is too crazy to make up (except for writers).
Well, the cages are real. "Mr Pigfarmer" is not.
I loved these animal stories! Especially beautiful in spring. Thank you!
Thank you, Jeffrey!
Hurrah for Greta, Gudron, and Pirool; they make me happy --- knowing what mothers might want to do..
The penny just dropped on what mothers might want to do... Indeed.
Glad they make you happy, Ruth.
Beautiful!! I particularly liked the closing sentences to each mother. "Life is very dear" is my favourite one.
Thank you, Imola.
Four Stories about a House
1. In the first place, I've never lived in a four-story house. The first house I remember living in was a rented farmhouse with no running water, no electricity. It had a pond where I sat with my cat watching frogs. I was three years old.
2. In the second place, the house of my dreams has three stories. What I mean is I used to dream about a house in which I would wander from room to room. I loved that house. I was always finding something new to love about it. Then when I was in my fifties, I literally bought that house and didn't realize it was the house I always dreamed about until I had the dream while I was living in it.
3. In the third place, I've never lived above the second floor. In my house with three stories, the third story was actually an attic, but it had a tower, and I loved to go up there and look out. I wanted to convert the attic to an actual living space, but I had to give up the house when I suddenly became disabled and couldn't afford to keep it any more.
4. In the fourth place, I wouldn't want a four story house. Who wants to clean all those rooms? Not me. I'm happy in my little ranch house now. Although I would love to have a three-story tower built on the end of the house so I would. have a view of Mt. Hood. It's there, but there's a two story house across the street blocking my view.
Well done, Sandra!
Story of a storied house! I turn the pages with pleasure.
I particularly love the second story--not the second story of the house, but the second story about the house, and the idea that you have the dream about it while you're living there.
I enjoy the math of it, as you subtract from old dreams to create new realities. It's very elegant.
Thank you so much.
Among others things, I love how you double on the idea of house with 'place' repeated.
Love this story, I feel like there are so many layers to it. It feels like a journey through time--growing up and growing old and all the emotions attached to that ride.
Story 3 reminded me of my own little perch I used to have during my college years when we would climb through a convenient window onto the roof of the house. It was technically only a 2-story house but I suppose climbing onto the roof counts as a makeshift third story!
LOVE THIS! Especially this part: "Then when I was in my fifties, I literally bought that house and didn't realize it was the house I always dreamed about until I had the dream while I was living in it." And what a great play on the word "story"!!
When Dad died she became Grief and we became her tears. Mother is in grief. She was in grief. We are three daughters. I being the middle one. The youngest is Baby and always will be. The oldest is incompetent and always was. I am ignored. She died and we being watchful and caring, carry her Grief as a memorial.
This is a perfect little story, Ruth!
Hardly ignored no more, my friend.
"When Dad died she became Grief and we became her tears." A perfect sentence.
So few words, so very vivid.
I love all the ways you use Grief in this short piece. "She became Grief" is especially poignant.
thank you
that's the way I remember her
Wow, this is great.
Ah, the baby!
middle children are invisible
First of all, I loved both your stories - congratulations!
Four Stories About Kings
The first king seemed to believe that he had actually done something to to deserve the crown. He took great pride in the royal blood that ran through his veins. He was not cruel but he did enjoy bossing his subjects around. He was short and portly and his royal strut made his subjects snicker behind their hands. He had a bit of a Napoleon Complex hundreds of years before Napoleon, but the general verdict was - not a bad guy overall.
The second king was intelligent. Nobody would
deny that. He loved to read thick volumes about royal dynasties, especially the parts where a king or queen is revealed to have a fatal flaw that leads to their demise. He swore to himself that he wouldn’t fall prey to that. He died in an unfortunate accident while riding his prized stallion, Onyx. It was a tragedy that could have happened to anyone, no matter how intelligent or well read.
The third king was alternately ridiculous and hilarious. But it was the kind of funny where you’re laughing at the person, not with them. But here’s the thing: funny is funny. He drove everyone crazy with his ever-shifting moods and pronouncements, contradicting today what he said yesterday. Many of his subjects wished him dead but there was a sizable minority that wanted to see how long he could continue being irrepressibly bizarre. Final tally: 95 years.
The fourth king was a brooding introvert, neurotic and timid, but many people found that they liked him immensely once they got to know him. His friends called him an old soul. But the majority of his subjects thought of him as a non-entity and envied nearby kingdoms with confident, hypermasculine rulers. One day the fourth kind slipped away from the castle late at night and left a note reading, “Sorry, I wasn’t cut out for this.” A sigh of relief went out from the kingdom except for those who truly knew the fourth king. They would miss him for the rest of their lives.
"Kings" was a great idea for this one! Love that last king, and I worry about who the people found to replace him.
"a tragedy that could have happened to anyone, no matter how intelligent or well read" - great line. Actually the story is full of great lines.
Brilliant! I laughed out loud many times. Especially loved these lines:
He had a bit of a Napoleon Complex hundreds of years before Napoleon, but the general verdict was - not a bad guy overall.
But here’s the thing: funny is funny.
And the fourth king certainly took me by surprise!
I want to hear more about that second king--intelligent, well-read, and aware of himself enough to be on the lookout for a fatal flaw.
The fourth king was a brooding introvert, neurotic and timid, but many people found that they liked him immensely once they got to know him. --what a lovely statement about looking below the surface. Nicely done.
Four Roads Taken/Not Taken
Road Actually Taken:
My mother wants me to spend my senior year in high school in a French lycée, to gain total fluency. She thinks I am brilliant enough to pass the “Bac” at the end, which would count for 2 years of American college. She doesn’t know I am gay, and I agree to go because it will be easier to keep it a secret there. But I end up meeting a 28-year-old man, and when my mother comes to visit, all is exposed with maximum drama. I use that as the basis of my award-winning junior narrative at NYU Film school.
Road not Taken #1:
I don’t tell ridiculous lies in letters home that René is Renée, nor do I leave the cool (if crumbling) apartment in downtown Montpellier to live with him, and our relationship doesn’t screw me up for years. I stick it out in the lycée, staying a second year to eventually pass the Bac. When I return, I jump right to Junior year at Stony Brook, then get a doctorate at Yale and end up as full French professor at an Ivy League college. Coming out to my parents goes much more smoothly at 21 than it did at 17.
Road not Taken #2:
I push back against my mother’s plan and counter with one of my own. I will go to Yale, which I have the grades for, and improve my French in courses for two years, before doing my Junior Year Abroad in France in Aix-en-Provence. But I will major in Theater, and apply to the Yale School of Drama graduate program. I will teach French in the early, lean years, but eventually have a Tony Kushner-like career as a playwright and screenwriter.
Road not Yet Taken but Still Possible:
I write a novel premised on the fantasy that St. Peter gives me a do-over, in which I can relive my life aware of all the mistakes I made in this one, so I can avoid them. The fictional me lives a hybrid of Roads Not Taken 1 & 2. In my new life, I make just as many mistakes, just different ones, but I realize they feel foreign to me. So I start making as many old mistakes as I can over again, because I feel more myself with my old regrets.
It becomes a bestseller.
Ha! Oh, those roads not taken! Though the road you took wasn't at all easy, you did get that short film out of it. And tons of fodder for stories.
This is really how I learned to let go of this alternative histories, which I've been known to fugue over. I had to make friends with my regrets, see them as part of my identity.
Btw if anyone wants to take a gander at the film, it ain't half bad.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7x27vmzFrg
Oh, I love, love, LOVE these!! Humorous, but kinda heart-breaking too. And so relatable!! Don't we all have roads untaken that we wish we had taken, but on a second thought... maybe not?
I always say there are regrets and then there are things which, if you were suddenly sent back in time, you would do differently. And it’s kind of fun to wonder what those different choices would have been and the different places they would have led. For example, Yale comes up in multiple scenarios of mine because I found out in this life how different things can be when you have friends who come from money —like getting a indie film financed, for example. (Not that all Yale students come from money, but a lot more than at Stony Brook and NYU in the late 70s.)
The thing about fuguing into these alternate scenarios is that you simply can’t factor in what other mistakes and bad choices they might have led to, perhaps far worse than the ones you actual made in your actual history.
In my short story, Mr Olmsted Regrets, when I imagine living one of these alternate scenarios, the most fun I had was imagining the serious “other” mistakes I might have made or bad events that might have befallen me. And how I might have still somehow ended up right where I am now. (A Sliding Doors scenario.)
I often wonder if we ever had a choice in our decisions or if they were the only decision we could ever make. Does the wind choose which way to blow or is it just the result of a long series of infinitesimal and untraceable factors?
That we could have made different choices than we did is only an idea we have in our head, whereas there is considerable evidence to the contrary - because what happened is indeed what happened. This is why I don't spend much energy on regret, and also because, like most of us, the choices I made made complete sense at the time and only seem questionable now because of things that occurred later that I couldn't possible have known would happen.
Meaning it's sort of a pointless exercise to wonder what could have been - unless one is using it to fuel fiction that feels grounded in reality. Then it's very useful.
I advised a friend of mine with a trans brain who never acted on it to try writing her autobiography as a woman. It could be great - and therapeutic.
i was going to comment that you'd (I, anyway) would miss the familiar old mistakes and go back to them on the sly. The devil you know, as they say.
Familarity is such a powerful draw for humans.
Another book, Mark! Write it.
It's about #5 on the list.
This is about my family reunion Third day into it, and I’m asking who are these people? I’ve known for 67, 72, 74 years, part time, some time, I’m still the oldest, so far, and have read about the differences in personalities, mental health, life expectancies per birth order. So what? What’ya going to do about it?
We’ve discussed the price of gas, someone saw it at $6/gallon. I walked too far from the fish and chips takeout to find a place to sit in Astoria. Then after the complainer wanted to go for a walk. It’s like a car full of children, these seniors, getting in and getting out and taking too long to close the door after them so I can lock the car. How much longer are they staying? What is the range of your electric car? Here is a picture of my father with his arm around a neighbor, receiving an award for winning the paddle tennis tournament a year before he died. Really, that’s my father, twenty five years younger than me? He looks thin. Her son is a friend. All my parents' friends are dead. We said you never know, when will be the last time? Mushrooms and onions in the scrambled? Rain later. We share some genome, correct? Just not interests like books, a nerdy compulsion to write things down.
Somehow we hang together I’m not sure if it’s from lack or trying or not caring one way or another or what. Some strange strain of love. Someone coughs. Another detailed story about something that happened, so many details, echo too loud. Today we will visit Cape Pepetua, where one brother released some of our mother’s ashes into Devil’s Churn, but the wind blew her the wrong way.
I fell right into this one and felt all of it all the way through.
The wind's a terrible thing with ashes, especially on mountains or seacliffs. (Of course I'm seeing Walter Sobchak...)
had to look it up but then GOT IT. So funny, that scene.
That name is graven in the tablets of my memory. The scene also.
i must be losing brain cells. i looked it up and... D'oh!
I've lost more brain cells than I'd care to mention. In fact, I can't remember how many.
My youngest daughter insists that this is what she wants done with her ashes! Likely, I won't be there to witness it. And that's the way it should be.
So was I, and the Dude covered in ash!
“How much longer are they staying? What is the range of your electric car?” Love the juxtaposition of these two unrelated questions.
"but the wind blew her the wrong way." What a rueful and poignant last line. Lovely piece overall.
Great last line.
"but the wind blew her the wrong way." What a rueful and poignant last line. Lovely piece overall.
getting in. getting out. Ouch!
Bittersweet, you are with a "strange strain of love."
Thank you for these words which say so much.
That last line, Tod! "but the wind blew her the wrong way"--I love the details of the family reunion, the quirky characters, the in and out of the car and the way you weave "mushrooms and onions in the scrambled" in to this. It feels so real.
Four stories about friendship
1. In the first story, two girls become friends in second grade. Sixty years later, they are still friends, however, neither likes the other anymore, though neither would ever confess to that. They continue to support each other. Weddings to divorces, birthing rooms to gravesides, rags to riches and back again, so on and so forth. The story carries on and on and is enjoyed by some and vilified as meandering and insipid by others.
2. In the second story, a lonely awkward child is given a tortoise who, for several years, is his only friend. As an adult, the child becomes highly self-actualized. He finds love, has many friends, and does important and brilliant work which improves the lives of people all over the world. Throughout, the tortoise remains at his side. Indeed, he takes the tortoise with him wherever he goes and, just as he did as a child, processes his emotions, thoughts, and world changing ideas through conversations with his reptilian companion. When he dies, his daughter adopts the tortoise who soon becomes her confidant and friend.
3. In the third story, two people are waiting. We think they are friends, but sometimes, we wonder. It’s not entirely clear, especially to younger readers, what or who they are waiting for. Oh, hell. That one’s already been done.
4. In the fourth story, two people meet on the internet. Doesn’t matter how. Could be Facebook, could be a group chat amongst a bunch of political terrorists or cat lovers or whatever. What matters is that their friendship is entirely silicon dependent as they live on opposite sides of the world and are very poor. In fact, maybe they do most of their communication on free computers in the local library because they can’t afford cell phones. Over the years, they move from Facebook or the group chat to long email messages to eventually daily Zoom conversations or whatever. They feel very close to one another. One day, through some unforeseeable good fortune, one comes into piles of money enabling them to finally meet in real life. The question to be resolved is whether they rejoice in their physical meeting and live happily ever after as each other’s dearest friend and soulmate, or does the meeting go horribly leaving both with wounds that take years to heal.
All four stories are palpable and wonderful. Number three--that cracked me up. And I loved the turtle with the long life. That's so beautiful.
Ha, that Godot! Never there when he's wanted!
But we are always waiting.
Bet he gets a kick out of it.
Still waiting...
I love the tortoise woven into this story! Hah, and the homage to Waiting for Godot--chef's kiss!
I don't have a good feeling that the couple in number 4 will live HAE (happily ever after). If wounded, I hope it means they will forsake the internet and devote themselves to the analog world.
Ladybugs
Did you know that you can buy ladybugs from Amazon? Wow! What a fabulous gift! Unit price is great: less than a penny per lady. Imagine a thousand ladybugs showing up at your doorstep, ready for action. What would you do if I sent you a thousand ladybugs? If I set up a subscription plan so you received a thousand ladybugs twice a month, and couldn't cancel it? Would you move to avoid the next delivery? Would you set up a ladybug stand on the corner? Develop a ladybug stew recipe?
One winter we visited friends in the Catskills and arrived just as they turned up the heat. Our room featured really old single-pane windows, with really old storm windows. Between the windows: hundreds of ladybugs, legs up. Little piles of them. Dead, or sleeping? As the heat came up, they came to life, crawling, little hops, short flights. Before they could get too rambunctious, our host vacuumed them all up.
What do the spots on a ladybug mean? One spot equals what? A year lived? In ladybug years, or human years? A day? Baby ladybugs birthed? Imagine how tiny. Are they sexual signals? Do they indicate dietary restrictions? Too much sun? Do they even know they have spots?
Last night, a ladybug crawled across the floor. I stuck my finger in front of it and said, climb on, ladybug. It didn’t. I got a single sheet of paper (a sample ballot for our upcoming primary elections; our longtime Dem congressperson being challenged from the left) and placed it flat on the floor. The ladybug climbed aboard and crawled until it came to rest on the challenger's name. I imagine everyone in the whole world who has found a ladybug in their living room has done the same exact thing with a piece of paper. Haven't you? Ladybugs seem pretty uniform when it comes to their behaviour. I walked to the terrace, opened the door, and waved the paper. The ladybug flew, or fell. Anyway, it was gone. I live on the ninth floor. I wonder: Do ladybugs get altitude sickness?
What I like about this crew of writers is you can always depend on one being more original than the other, always something surprising.
I love the idea of forcibly subscribing someone to receiving 1000 ladybugs a month. Very funny.
it's all fun and games until someone gets hurt. death by 1000 ladybugs.
<sombre tone> It only takes one <sound of breaking glass, scream>
that one ladybug who had a lost weekend. everyone thought it was having a fling with a centipede (also missing that weekend), but it was really training for the most secret of missions.
The centipede went home with a broken heart?
limping.
Oh... that host vacuumed them up? I think I would set up a ladybug stand out by the little free library.
I thought about those bugs inside the vacuum multiplying and setting up societies with the dust bunnies. Interesting consequences ensue.
There’s a story…
Kevin, this is so gorgeous!! I love all the questions, and that you don't try to answer them. I notice you don't wonder about the gender of ladybugs or if male ladybugs feel emasculated by their name. But maybe that's just me. The ending about crawling onto a ballot is clever and fun!
I think it was George S. who said the writer's job is to ask the questions, not answer them. That said, I too wonder about the ladybug guys.
George was quoting Chekhov!
George, Anton, Anton, George. Who can keep them straight.
Hopefully, George's wife
This put a smile on my face. A meditation on the lowly and lovely ladybug! I never see them anymore. Where did they go? (I am a tad bit worried about that ladybug on the ninth floor. Hopefully, she found another terrace to relax upon.)
would you like your subscription to be filled once or twice a month?
I went down a rabbit hole with your first question Kevin, “what would I do with a thousand ladybugs arriving on the doorstep?”. I’d start raising roses - ladybugs eat aphids that chew on roses, then I’d open a flower stand in a Farmer’s market that would attract people from miles around to buy the best roses they’d ever seen. But the ladybugs would keep arriving and I wouldn’t have enough roses to feed the aphids, to feed the ladybugs……
A baker's dozen ladybugs with each dozen roses purchased? Surreptitiously plant rose bushes everywhere there's an empty spot? Move to Pasadena and take charge of the Tournament of Roses parade?
The possibilities are endless :)
Sounds like a great way to pick a candidate.
love. especially using the sample ballot! great way to bring in the tension of the outside world while lightly musing
Thanks, Dinah. We'll see how the election goes and how the ladybugs react.
Very funny, very inventive - loved it!
Four Housemates
The first one was a refugee from a country having a revolution. She had escaped with her baby, leaving her wealthy husband to bribe his way into the new regime. She complained that your tacky little house was nothing like her mansion full of servants. You had to tell her to leave, even though you needed the rent money, after she scared your kids by threatening you would abandon them if they didn’t behave better. After she was gone, you kind of missed the baby.
The second was a graduate student working on a dissertation about the mystic poets. He rarely appeared during waking hours, but you heard him pacing his attic room late at night. “What is that smell?” your four-year-old asked, wrinkling his nose, and you didn’t want to say weed, for fear he would repeat it at preschool and the child protection people would show up at your door. The student left after his adviser said his dissertation sounded like it was written by somebody on drugs.
Next was your former babysitter, whose husband left after she got pregnant. You were afraid she would kill herself, so you had her move into your house, because you knew she wouldn’t do it there. She spent months sitting at the kitchen window, watching the roses fade and the maple leaves fall in your tiny back garden. At least she cooked dinner for you and the kids.
The last one was a musician who had a three-month gig in your city. He let your kids try to play his trumpet and told jokes to make them laugh. After his girlfriend back home broke up with him, you invited him down from his attic room. He ended up staying for eight years.
Well done! Love that last one especially, though the comment about the dissertation cracked me up.
Great last sentence.
Almost makes me wish I had the opportunity for housemates. Have never gotten the nerve to try it on the boat.
You haven't missed anything. Two of these were fictional. The other two were terrible experiences.
Ha ha. i tend to romanticize the potential of these situations.
Four stories about neighbors
The first neighbor chats when we meet up walking our dogs. Hers is groomed and looks quite spiffy. Mine is bedraggled but well loved. They sniff each other, but maintain a respectful distance, which is pretty much what happened between me and this neighbor when she invited us over for a drink one night and I realized that chatting in the driveway was preferable to watching other people drink white wine in her living room and watching tennis on TV.
The second neighbor lives next-door. Her name is Lisa. She has a husband and a fancy Mercedes convertible, white with red interior. Its hard top sometimes hangs from the ceiling of their garage, twinkling like an ornament on a Christmas tree. Her dog died. One year she brought me Christmas cookies on a Santa plate, but last year—nothing. We have a window box between our units, which I plant with petunias in the summer. The window box is one of those fences that make good neighbors.
The third neighbor doesn’t live here anymore. His name was Ricky. He had a golden doodle named Max who would cheerfully pop into my house if my door were open, run upstairs, sniff around and make himself at home. Max obediently followed Ricky when they went walking, but the neighbors complained because in my condo we have a leash law, so even though Max was well-trained and obedient, the neighbors couldn’t abide to see a well-trained obedient scroff-law.This made Ricky mad enough that he sold his unit and moved to a house in a nearby town where there is no leash law. I miss Max. In fact I bought my dog specifically because I fell in love with Max and then Max was gone. I have some experience falling in love with someone who takes off for another town.
The last neighbor is a bit of a recluse. We can’t get her to wave at us when she drives by, even if we wave wildly as if our car has broken down on the side of the road and our cell phones have run out of juice. Her name is Nancy. She has no dog. Nancy’s blinds are always closed, which means that Nancy lives in a house with no natural light. This perplexes me. Why would you buy a condo with 13 windows and then pull the blinds down on every single one of them? I surmise because Nancy’s husband 30 years ago was involved in a scandal involving cheating people on real estate investments and killed himself by entombing his body in a dry cleaner bag. Come to think of it, Nancy lives in her own kind of tomb. I might not feel like waving either. Or buying a dog.
Love this--neighbors are endless sources of interest. And their dogs! You have some experience falling in love with someone who takes off for another town. I've got the same--but with a woman, not a town... I feel bad for Nancy.
Oh boy. Sometimes I like the way we do it NYC: live next door to someone for decades without knowing their name (or their dog).
I can confirm, from my paper-round days, that there are people who shut themselves off completely and never appear in daylight.
"dry cleaner bag". Way to go, as they say...
Death by dry cleaner bag. and I love the last two lines of this--
Four stories about gods.
The gods play a game like charades where they assume the identity of earthly billionaires. They have to live as that billionaire until the muses guess their real identity. One rules an empire of data farms. One inherits money and marries the first one. Another invests in longevity research, close to a cure for death. One is a fireman. The muses guess he is Prometheus, and Prometheus is the only one, so far, who gets to be immortal again.
Oh, Prometheus--of course, he's a fireman. Super fun tiny story (or four stories).
This prompt reminds me so much of “Happy Endings” by Margaret Atwood and “The Fifth Story” by Clarice Lispector.
Four Scenes from a Bedroom.
I.
Maude and Ambrose are asleep, the comforter pulled up to their chins. Maude snores, so Ambrose has his good ear turned to the pillow. Except. Maude isn’t really asleep. She’s peering at the bedroom door as a beam of light outlines the doorframe before it gleams in a steady shaft through the ever widening doorway. A figure, tall, broad-shouldered, and dressed all in black fills the doorway and Maude leaps from the covers. She advances on the figure, hissing,
“Clarence, you fool! Not here and not now!”
“But Maudie, you said–”
“Wassat?” Ambrose turns onto his back.
“Nothing, dear.” Maude pats his foot. “Go back to sleep.”
She pushes Clarence out the door and into the hallway.
From under the bed, a voice complains,
“Can you people hold it down? I’m tryna sleep!”
II.
Maude and Ambrose are asleep, the comforter pulled up to their chins. Ambrose snores, so Maude has crammed earplugs into her ears. Except. Ambrose is faking his snores tonight, and when he’s convinced Maude is out like a light, he slips from the covers, grabs his bathrobe, and tiptoes into the hall.
“I thought she’d never go to sleep!” Clarence mutters.
Ambrose, in a rush, trips over the trailing bathrobe tie, and lands in a heap on the floor.
“Are you all right?” Clarence squats beside him.
“Wassat?!” The bedsprings squeak as Maude sits up in bed.
“Nothing, dear!” Ambrose and Clarence chorus, and a third voice, off tempo with them, finishes “dear” and they stare at one another.
III.
Maude is asleep. Or at least Ambrose thinks she is. He’s pacing the hallway. Clarence is late.
Again. With each step, a squeaky floorboard complains, and Maude, fully awake and waiting for Clarence–so we assume–thrusts the door open and demands,
“What are you doing out here, Clarence?”
“I wish he’d stop making noise!” A voice calls from under the bed.
IV.
Clarence, Maude, and Ambrose are asleep. Or so we’re told. The comforter pulled up to their chins. All snoring.
A sneezy voice from under the bed complains,
“Don’t you ever dust under here?”
“Is that you, Maurice?” Maude peeks over the edge of the bed.
Hilarious, wonderful stories! (And you're quite right--this prompt is very reminiscent of the Atwood and Lispector stories. Brilliant minds....am I right?)
Yes. Of course.
Ha ha ha! Sharp and well written. Does anyone get any sleep? Do they want to?
My brother-in-law says you can rest when you're dead.
When I'm there, I'll send you both a message.
Great build.
Thank you.
Here’s a story. First, there was a dream. In it a friend hands me two toothbrushes, tells me they love me, and departs the scene. I felt bereft. There I was, two toothbrushes in hand, quick words of love, and no one to share either with.
Here’s a second story, with another dream. In it, a woman with a slightly crossed left eye, someone I really cared about and hadn’t seen in 25 years, hands me two toothbrushes, a tube of toothpaste, tells me that she will always love me. I was speechless. I felt empty because I knew this was a dream.
There is a third story involving another dream. Here, a friend who I hadn’t seen in decades spoke to me and said she thought at one time that she loved me, but she no longer does. How can someone smile while saying these words? She handed me two toothbrushes, encased in a little purse, the kind you receive in an airline business-class cabin. Then, with a touch on my right shoulder, a quick touch of lips on my left cheek, she departed.
In a fourth story that also reflects a dream, another friend, a former lover, speaks to me kindly and tenderly. She was wearing white. A peasant dress made of a kind of homespun cotton. I loved seeing her in that dress, all loose and flowing, with that drawstring neckline. That was the part that really turned me on. She had a gap tooth that she didn’t bother to hide and a sunburned, peeling nose with freckles. Each time I saw her I felt lust for her. In this dream she offered me a lovely little purse. I noticed that it was white with brocade, to match her dress. It had a white zipper with a little white loop at the end. Dreams are strange. Sometimes time shifts, but in this one, I was able to open the purse. I noted how carefully I opened it. There were two toothbrushes. “For us”, she said. “We are a couple. Always have been.” Then as suddenly as the dream began, she disappeared. Sometimes I can make a dream come out the way I want it to. But not last night. Such are the ways of dreams.
The narrator will just have to fall asleep and dream once more. One of these nights, perhaps she will stay.
The Three Therapists
It was known by the locals in the small college town as the “Shrink House” As in, take Second to the three-way stop, turn left and the Shrink house will be on your right. A pale yellow Victorian converted to accommodate professional offices, it was currently occupied by the firm of Carter, Stowe and Williams, licensed therapists.
Left of the small reception area was Evelyn Carter’s office, a room decorated in cool earth tones to create a sense of calm. Between two wingback armchairs was a table with a copy of the Times opened at the daily crossword. An upright piano sat against one wall. The opposite wall was occupied by a bay window that looked onto the driveway. Carter, dressed in a plain well-tailored suit, looked like the College Professor she was. Her clients were highly strung professionals who needed their therapist to understand their angst.
If you were there to see Basil Rowe you were directed into what had been the original dining room. Invariably standing at a pair of French windows would be Basil, sucking on an unlit pipe, a mass of black hair swept back from his forehead. Basil was an Anglophile from his tweeds to his vast collection of PBS coffee mugs and tote bags. He was a great admirer of Sherlock Holmes (Jeremy Brett version) and rather fancied his powers of deduction. In reality, he was more like Watson, affable, kindly and with an ability to notice the obvious. His clients enjoyed their “chats” in deep leather armchairs as in a London club. However, there was one thing Rowe shared with Holmes - he was a crack shot.
If your appointment was with neither Carter nor Rowe, you would be directed to the first floor to the office of the junior Partner, Kim Williams. The room was spare, almost clinical. There were two plain chairs on a Turkish Rug in the center of the room and a framed quote from Rene Descartes on the wall:
“It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well.”
Sitting in one of the chairs would be Kim who exuded a coiled energy. She was also fluent in six languages. Her clients often felt more comfortable sitting on the rug.
On March third at three p.m. all three therapists had an appointment with the same visitor.
Okay, that final sentence is very intriguing!!! Either a client has made 3 appointments and will decide which therapist to actually see when he or she arrives at 3 pm, OR there's some kind of magical realism thing going on here. Either way, it's a very fun story.
Or are they really therapists? One could be a code breaker, another an assassin, the third an interrogator based in a safe house………..the visitor their handler? Their enemy?
Ha! Right. Well, you'll just have to keep writing this one!
I say Professor Rowe with the Times crossword in the Junior Partner's office.
Hmm, maybe Colonel Mustard is the mystery visitor…….
Oh I have to know what happens next. So intriguing. Love the characters you have described and the set up here!
Four Stories About Crow
In the first story Crow flies over snow at night, guided by stars.
In the second story Crow flies over meadows in full bloom.
In the third story Crow flies over open water.
In the fourth story Crow flies over mountains with trees, red and gold as days shorten.
In every story Crow searches for Other Crow, Its Crow, The Crow.
In every story Other Crow is not to be found.
Was not expecting the sad ending! Up until then, all was so beautiful. Guess that's sometimes how life goes.
Hoping against hope there's a fifth story where Other Crow is found.
Ah, but that would be a different story, yes?
Yes, of course.
Four stories about consciousness
I remember exactly where I was standing when the news hit me: I would die, my family members would die, everyone would die. I was in the room with the coal fire, I remember the smell of it coming off the carpet and staring at the burned out patches by the grate. It was time to go to bed, I shouted and shouted and pulled backwards against the two arms trying to make me go, but bedtime was bedtime.
I learned to read. It was as if I’d always known how, and I was just remembering how and not in fact learning it for the first time. It went like this: I was out playing with my friend and her friend on the street. They shared a look when my mother drove past in the car. The meaning of that look between my friend and her friend, I read it easily, like I was just remembering how to do it not learning how to do it for the first time. I let myself in and went to bed without saying goodnight.
People’s eyes go glassy and loose when they leave their bodies for a bit. Their face goes loose and the eyes are made from something different for a while. I see it all the time, but the first time was watching a friend in school. He didn’t know the teacher was saying his name. I tried whispering to him, ducked my head, flicked my gaze from the teacher to him, hissed his name again and again. When he came back it wasn’t obvious whether it was still him, or a new one whose personality was similar because of the constraints placed upon it by the physical constituents of the body. That night I lay in bed but did not close my eyes.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote, ‘I see, not feel, how beautiful they are.’ I suppose that’s like the glassy eyed, I suppose that's how not to read the looks people share. I suppose you don't even remember things you never knew before.
I enjoyed following the path this one took. In that last story, I see the narrator in bed, thinking the previous three stories.