I thought this piece rang with an element of lived experience! Well done! The pacing is excellent and the descriptions—the shoulder shrugs, the jig, the mouth-breathing! I can “see” him in your eye, and the sense of your relief when he is finally gone. The moment when you visit the eye doctor is excellent as the “aha” moment of this story.
Loved this one! Really liked the lines, "I know, the doctor said. Sometimes, it's like that" - that eerie teetering between the magical and the normal. And, adding my voice to the others - this should be published! In the meantime, very happy that it's lived here long enough that I got a chance to read it. (:
“Suddenly, I could see clear as a bell. No one was watching me or scrutinizing or rolling their eyes. I could do whatever I wanted. And just for a moment, I missed him.” Wonderful story! I really like these closing lines as well. Really a new beginning, about ten years later.
To begin with he was the quietest man I’d ever met. Then he listened. When he listened to me time stood still. At night the stars stopped moving in the sky. My words became everything to him. When I closed my eyes, I could no longer recall his appearance. I couldn’t see him. I could only hear my breath enter his ear, my whisper into his shirtless nape.
After that in a crowded room of Friday evening cocktail parties, I realized I could no longer recognize him. At first, I was discombobulated. I wandered from group to group of words hoping I would appear in his ear.
At last, I said here you are. I thought you’d never find me. And he would pull me to his side and claim me for the night.
In the end, he lost his voice, couldn't find it anywhere. Under my bed, in the closet, under the kitchen sink. We searched everywhere. I miss the sound of him listening to me.
This one is fabulous and deep. At first, it hit me as a beautiful, poetic description of an ideal, supportive and affirming relationship. Then, "he lost his voice" and I reevaluated the entire thing. As Sea Shepard noted, the end contains the first use of "we", followed by the final sentence: "I miss the sound of him listening to me", and I realized how self effacing "he" is, how "I" focused the narrator is. Even their loss and regret is framed in terms of how his lost voice impacts the narrator, and you realize he never had a voice. He is "all ears".
The whole story shifted around for me and I saw it as depicting an enormously needy, narcissistic person who, for awhile, had found the attention they required to feel defined and affirmed, and the damage that does to others. An arresting aspect is the sensitivity and delicacy of the narration which is precisely what lulls us into our initial delight on behalf of "I".
WOW! Your analysis is fabulous and deep. This just wrote itself as I was thinking about a relationship I have with a charming and unassuming friend. Thank you! ruth
The beginning was a pink camellia from your yard. You carried it over on the ferry, the stem neatly tucked into one of those plastic tubes filled with water florists use. That impressed me right there, the professionalism and care bringing the flower, which frankly put me aback a bit, the spirit of a beautiful flower on a first meeting.
After I got home I looked up camellia because I was curious. Turns out it means a lot of things.
A spirit of depth, self reflection, also loyalty, love and humility. Some of the connotations seemed a bit forward to express on a first meeting, so in my next email I asked if she knew what the camellia flower symbolized. She didn’t. I think I knew that.
On the followup phone call to our first date, lunch during Covid next to Puget Sound next to thundering mile long freight trains fifty feet away, after I said I had a good time she said we didn’t have fun, there was no spark, the conversation was dull and strained. Well, I said, Let’s just walk away right now. Let’s not, she said.
I still have the camellia, now a rust orange, oxidized, and I added a golf ball sized hornet’s nest to the stem a while back, not sure what the meaning of that was. At her end are dried red roses. I used to bring a single rose, stick it in a vase without saying anything and wait for her to find it. Oh. That’s really nice. There are four or five in a blue vase now, along with some very dry Japanese maple leaves I picked up off the sidewalk one fall and put in a vase, again, without saying anything.
We’ve had a few arguments. We’re separated by Puget Sound. She lives in a city I don’t much care for. She’s always lived in cities.The dog precludes things I would do. We’ve broken up, drifted apart and so on. Honestly, in bygone times, I had more sex in a weekend than we’ve had in three years, but here we are. Yesterday she drove over for a visit and brought three camellias from her yard. One fell apart completely on the drive. I put them in a jar of water next to the original, now rusty camellia, and this morning I found pink petals fallen to the floor.
i love my camellia tree/bush. it goes crazy when it blooms. And then--they all turn that fantastic rust color. I mean, the rust is somehow prettier than the flowers on the tree. And the way the flowers harden like that. Amazing.
In such a short story you get all the different flowers and leaves to do so much imagistic as well as emotional, narrative work! It creates a very affecting, evocative little world. Like the Symbology of Flowers is re-cast into a story-form!
It began with a thunderclap. The low-pressure system gave Titus a headache and wet socks. He ran out to meet the bus, but it just kept rolling by. A man shook a can at him. He didn’t say a word. Time is like an arrow, anachronistic and prone to misuse. Misunderstanding.
At four in the afternoon, when Titus finally made it to the funeral, the crowds had dispersed. The casket was gone. So was his mother. He wondered, are there any redos? Mulligans? Do some cultures not sit shiva for several days? Why was the funeral for a ninety-seven year old mother of seven, the youngest named Titus, a woman born on a farm, who clawed her way into nursing school, into the operating room of St. Augustine General Hospital, found a husband, a house, quit nursing, started a family, got bored, started an interior design business, went bankrupt, got divorced, started a fashion business that was eventually bought out by Everson Driselle which was eventually folded into LVMH which made her independently wealthy beyond her wildest dreams, which made her children, including Titus, uniquely dependent upon her schedule, why was this woman only given a two hour ceremony at the ass-end of a workday?
Decades later, Titus took a fall in the shower and cracked his skull on the black and white floor tile. His funeral was scheduled for 1pm to 3pm on a Thursday. At around four in the afternoon, his daughter, Rita, dashed into the funeral home, shaking off the rain from her umbrella. She caught sight of the casket, but didn’t get a chance to see the body, the face, the remains of the man who raised her, and cared for her, and warned her, with gentle words, that time is an illusion, and yet also, as precious a thing as life itself.
She shook her head and walked back out into the rain.
Not long ago Jenna gave up on the civilized world and fled to a tiny rental in the high lonesome country of the southern New Mexico Rockies. She’d never before felt so at home. Nothing special about the house itself, an elongated, stucco-walled box, but the countryside captured her imagination. Someone had lived, and died, in love with this land, planting and nourishing trees that bore sour cherries and apples, pears, figs, and dripping apricots, their love flesh melting in Jenna’s mouth. Standing in sunlight at the apex of the multi-grooved irrigation system she’d painstakingly created, she could see most of White Sands, a mile below her and fifteen miles distant, and beyond that the eastern ramparts of the Gila Wilderness, it’s basins and ranges undulating all the way to Arizona. She would open the tap that allowed the water, dropping from a spring an hour’s hike up the mountain, to flow to the trees, and she thought she could feel their joy and relief. She knew that while she slept the raccoons, porcupines, coyotes and bears prowled about her place, seeking their own nourishment, but she didn’t mind what they took as long as they left her cats alone.
Jenna worked nights waiting tables at one of the cafes in the village ten miles up the road atop the mountain. Her bosses, Carlos and Carmen, proved difficult and exacting, but she didn’t mind much, they were as rugged and beautiful as the land itself. They’d migrated south from Taos, their northern New Mexican cuisine making a splash in the midst of the more common Tex-Mex homogeneity. Their stews, steaks and enchiladas nourished Jenna and their patrons alike, body and soul.
Every night after getting off work and counting her proceeds Jenna would make a show of going home, only to move her truck a block up the hill near the park so she could sneak back unseen to the cafe. Carlos and Carmen always drew the blinds after closing, but Jenna had a place from which to watch them, where she had bent a slat at a nearly unnoticeable angle. Each night’s activities were slight variations on a pattern. It would usually begin with a quarrel, one spouse accusing the other of some trivial slight. One of them would rage while the other became visibly exasperated. When it seemed that a point of no return had been reached Carlos would put on music expressing a dark romantic yearning, and they’d make up by dancing in the restaurant, weaving among the tables for an hour or more. Likely as not the dance would culminate in a frantic tango of one partner undressing the other and having their way with them in an exhilarating display of athletic prowess. Outside in the cold darkness Jenna would be swooning, imagining herself first as Carmen, and then as Carlos, somewhat uncertain as to which one she desired more.
In the end it turned out they’d known nearly from the beginning of her vigils that she was out there. After tormenting her for several months they upped the ante by inviting her to join them. For Jenna it was as though she’d lived and gone to heaven, even or even more so when the mutual ravishing climaxed in her long, slow, somewhat agonizing death at their hands. They proceeded to incorporate her body into several specials that were added to their menu, and received more compliments on their exquisite culinary creations that week than they ever had before. Nothing went to waste. Their new server, Alexis, was astonished at the tips she was getting.
Carlos and Carmen made a side trip down the mountain on their next run for supplies. They cleaned out Jenna’s cabin and brought her four cats back home with them, where ultimately they grew to be fat and happy and lived to ripe old cat ages. No one wondered any more than they already had about Jenna—whose real name was Chasity—since none of her family or friends had known she’d migrated out to New Mexico to begin with. The bears and raccoons gorged themselves on the fruit that dropped nightly from the well-watered trees. The bears may have paused briefly to wonder what had become of the human girl and her feline brood, but such was the cycle of life.
The following spring a young couple rented the house. Their children took on the irrigation duties, which resulted in the end in some of the best meals they’d ever had the pleasure of consuming.
I just found that if you search for "Donner Party Cookbook" you'll find there are at least 3 of them, plus a game entitled "Donner Dinner Party." :-) Tasty!
There's also a Donner Lake, Donner Memorial State Park, Donner Ski Ranch, and so forth. The area is quite "Donnered up," if you will allow the adjective form.
I'll have to look those up. So much for an original idea.
I read the story of the tragedy again a little while ago. There was a safe, tried and true route a little bit longer, through the mountains that they could have taken, and were advised to, but the leader made a decision to take the short cut that would become Donner Pass. And a blizzard came early.
First I'm thinking: I love new Mexico. Wait, are they in Alamogordo, or that town way up the mountain? Then, I'd like to have fruit trees. Then, oh sex. Nice. Then, WTF! Then, of poor Alexis. At least she's getting good tips in her final days. And I love how you continue the food / gorging / delicious meals all the way to the end.
Thank you. I’ve written about these characters before but this time thanks to Mary’s prompt I think they felt comfortable enough to reveal their true selves.
Not long ago; well, maybe thirty or so years ago I envisioned myself as a youthful Holden Caufield. I fancied writing a sequel to Salinger’s “The Catcher In The Rye.” In which our protagonist was getting closer to discovering his destiny, his raison d’être. After all, Courtney has learned him a little French in between the grunge and garage couches of sleepless nights.
Then, riding comfortably through my late thirties, I returned to the idea of a third Rye novel. In which Holden has legally changed his name to Anthony, fucking up the restaurant industry’s tables and then had the brilliance to film himself getting drunk on Vietnamese fermented berries, in a remote Indochinese village. But again, Asia (the new Courtney) betrays his trust in humanity, whilst the concept of celebrity drives him even farther from sanity.
Finally into my fifties and still swelling with angst towards adults, although the majority are younger than me now, I revisit the thought of Caufield getting older. His surname has altered slightly into Comstock and he now quietly goes about his middle class life of repetitive living. Day in, day out, a boring study of “money is the only god that can never fail.” Walking home at dusk I come to the realization that Orwell has already proffered his ultimate ending of this tetralogy with the simple act of placing an aspidistra in the flower box.
I finally decided against getting my senior-citizen library card. These days, I don’t like going to the library. They’ve let the building go down, needs paint, needs the windows cleaned. Then those plexiglass shields they put up everywhere. The librarians sit behind them like dazed zoo animals. Ask them a question and maybe an eye will flicker or an ear twitch. Better to look it up on the internet.
Besides, they don’t keep many books in the library anymore. My branch, anyhow. It used to be that the stacks would be filled. Those days, I’d shelf-read as part of my work-study duties, make sure Dewey’s decimals were in the right order. I’d think about how those numbers signified a particular bit of knowledge or kind of reading adventure. Someone wrote something that was good enough to be saved, in every one of those books, and now they’re waiting to be picked up and read. Back then I thought, I could spend my life in the library.
In the beginning, I’d sit on the carpeted floor with my junior library card safe in my shirt pocket. I might hear hushed voices nearby, but they’d disappear as story time began. We sat in a circle on the carpeted floor, the librarian on a red swivel stool in the center. A spotlight shone on her, her head bent as she turned the pages. She wore the same perfume as my mother. She read slowly — every word mattered — and her eyebrows would raise and lower and she’d rotate on the chair and show us the pictures and make faces and smile and ask questions. Where is the monkey? What word is that? What color is the firetruck? We’d point and giggle. Then we’d go to the little round tables and make our own drawings of the story, sometimes with crayons or, if we were lucky, with fingerpaint, and we’d write what we remembered, or what the story made us feel.
These days, I just wish they’d at least paint the place.
i was once on a library board. For about two years, we discussed the carpet. After I left the board, I think they finally voted to replace it. (Still, libraries are heaven on earth to me.) I like the way your third paragraph used "In the beginning" instead of your first one!
I loved the way the library smelled deep in the basement. Hardly any air, dim, miles of books. And yes those numbers were tricky. I have no idea if I understood them or if the shelves I checked were really in correct order. Hopefully fixed by now!
Libraries engage to no end. And they differ from country to country, perhaps even from state (US) to state. Ours was tiny by most standards, but the stacks were rich and carefully curated.
Some specificity here might spice up the narrative, the name of the library, the librarian’s name, a few of the books you checked out as a child. The smell of the plastic protectors over hardcover books—it’s all a richness.
Our town’s library, on Main Street, is now a Chinese takeout.
thanks for the ideas, Brian. You're right: each of the libraries in the piece is a specific environment, and personalities, both librarians and patrons.
Not that long ago, but also a million years ago, I was in my twenties and struggling along. I befriended an older woman, she’d just moved into a nearby apartment building, a one-hundred-year-old Queen Anne-Tudor-Revival hodgepodge with stained glass windows, huge crystal chandeliers inside the lobby, and two dark, life-sized stone lions on the front steps, the whole structure aping another time and place. She’d moved from Manhattan, seemed wonderfully eccentric, even the way she said the word schedule like “shed-jewel.”
Her face wasn’t over done with surgery or cosmetics, the eye tooth on her left side jutted out like a fang, and sometimes her lip stuck to it when she smiled, the tooth collected bits of berry-colored lipstick. She had vibrant green eyes, slightly hooded lids, one eye seemed to drift off center, giving her an unfocused gaze, but she noticed everything. She taught me how French women wear a scarf, how to tell if something is well made, and I began to pay attention to table settings and dress codes. I felt like Eliza Doolittle.
After a while, I noticed she didn’t know how to cook, often burnt food on the stove, smoking up rooms. When I went to get a glass from her cabinet, it was all sticky as if she didn’t know how to properly hand wash a glass. She told me that when she’d returned from living in France, she’d had her new car shipped, but there were problems, missing paperwork, so she just left it there at the port.
“You’re not going to try to get the car back?” I asked her, shocked that she didn’t seem all that upset. She said it all seemed too much, figuring out how to get the car, so she cut her losses.
Ultimately, she moved back to New York, inviting me to visit, which I did. She took me to her brother’s house in East Hampton, empty except for one weekend a year when he’d show up with his family. She took me to museums, plays, the Harvard Club for dinners. On my last visit I learned that her mother had died when she was a little girl, and she’d been raised exclusively by nannies and household staff, her father was rarely home and never remarried. She’d lost her trust fund to her ex-husband, a grifter from a well-known family. She had to learn how to do the practical things that had always been done for her.
Such an entrancing character.. really like the detail of the jutting eye tooth, the slightly hooded eyelids, the sticky glass, the pronunciation of "shed-jewel"!
Sometimes I wonder if cons who feel no guilt, and are not "kept up at night" actually live longer, while the rest of us angst over typos and something stupid we said at that one party seven years ago.
Initially we, or most of us, at least, basically all thought that we would be able to deal with them. Thought it would be a good thing, even — maybe, just possibly, a net benefit — because that’s one of the things you hear about worms, that they’re good for the soil. Soil is good. Good for soil, good for us, so went the thinking at the time. We thought we were all very environmentally conscious then. So: More Worms, hoo-ray worms. Up they came. I clammed up about the matter pretty quick, though, not complaining, but my mood soured. This was relatively early in the process. I have a distinct memory, from that first week, of waking up and finding the first few inside — nothing offensive, but this was like day four of More Worms Every Day Forever — and starting to reconfigure, mentally-speaking, while everyone — it seemed like everyone else — was still very gung-ho about More Worms. Not that I don’t get it — it was very impressive, giant letterforms in the sky, “More Worms Every Day Forever,” block letters in cirrus, lower-atmosphere, like particularly robust skywriting at an impossible scale.
In retrospect, much more dread than that would not have been inappropriate.
In fact, after awhile, once the subsoil overflowed with them, we couldn’t stop talking about the missed opportunity. Imagining how validated we would feel if we’d dreaded it, More Worms, the unavoidable squishing and trampling underfoot, more of them wriggling up through the pulp, the wine-colored viscera, treelines disappearing under worms — What if we’d dreaded it from the jump, dreaded it and been vocal about the dread, and then afterwards been right, sort of pragmatically or logistically in-the-right for having dreaded it? I suppose we thought it would distract us from the wormtide, only shin-high then, from the aforementioned unavoidable squishing, viscera, etc. We knew — it was too many, frankly, too many worms, yet we all felt sheepish about saying so. We wanted to complain but hadn’t found the words early enough. We hadn’t dreaded, and that’s what it would have taken.
Ultimately, though, as with anything, we got used to it. Worms are mostly water and protein, and that’s mostly what we need. There’s plenty to go around. (Obviously we don’t eat more than we absolutely need to, so we’re slimming down nicely.) And — it’s easy enough not to sink as long as you keep on your back.
To begin with, you know that I have always struggled with concentration.
As early as kindergarten, my mother regularly got notes about how I couldn’t concentrate enough to finish my coloring or do my daily assigned task, like put away the sand box toys after recess. And things failed to improve after that. Even in the last days of high school, Mom regularly fielded calls from my counselor cautioning that if I didn’t apply myself to the tasks at hand, I would never manage college, or a job, or a relationship. Like my mother could fix me at that late date.
Later, when I became an adult, my failure to concentrate persisted. I forgot things. I got lost. I didn’t show up when I was supposed to, and I did show up when no one was expecting me. I misplaced library books, paid my bills late or twice or not at all, lost my keys, and never managed to remember a birthday or a promise. But I was friendly and good natured, and people overlooked my deficits. They accommodated me. Friends would remind me of where I was going, what I was doing, and why I was doing it. Instead of being angry, they found me delightfully ditzy and endlessly surprising.
Which brings me to today. I have never misled you. You’ve known me for 35 years. I was the one who forgot to feed your beloved goldfish when we were roommates in 1989 and you had that big three-day weekend trip to Tahoe. I was the one who forgot to come to your wedding in 1991, despite being your maid of honor. I was the one who left the gas on while housesitting for you during your family’s dream summer in Europe and caused the big fire.
Yet, today, after all we’ve been through, you are angry. You are angry very unfairly. You know me. What in the world did you expect when you went and got yourself kidnapped by a drug cartel and then asked me to deliver the ransom money? Do you know how complex a task that is? I had to get the money. I had to not lose the money. I had to remember where to take it. I had to remember when to take it. No one in her right mind would have chosen me of all the people in the world to do this job. So, I was a little late and you’re a couple of fingers short. Really. What did you expect from someone delightfully ditzy and endlessly surprising? If you don’t change your attitude, I’m afraid our friendship will suffer for it.
I was ready for some serious angst, but then the line "they found me delightfully ditzy and endlessly surprising" set it up for a delightful and surprising situation. Well done!
At first we focused on survival essentials: shelter, food, warmth. Once we had established a basic living routine we worked on communications. There had been an operational distress beacon from the start, but we wanted to know more. What was happening “out there”? When would there be a rescue?
Even with the hyper-light-speed of mesh-beacon tech, there is a distance-sensitive latency in our communications, so messages from nearby colonies arrive sooner than those from farther away, particularly from Earth. We only recently learned of Earth’s destruction 27 years ago. Everyone knew there was a plant breaker-bomb, but no one believed it would be deployed. It was. Destruction occurred pretty quickly, a matter of hours after detonation. I never got coherent signals from earth after that, just random chatter. There were a few messages from Luna, but they quickly defaulted to auto-response, and then silence. Mesh-beacon messages from Mars indicated that Luna’s orbit destabilized once earth was reduced to rubble. They managed to launch three ships before tidal forces destroyed the Lunar bases. Mars refused to let them land, shooting them out of the sky on approach.
Mars had been in a state of cold war for centuries, focused on the two population centers at Elonburgh, AKA Blue Team, and Musk City, AKA Red Team. Earth’s demise began to affect Mars’ orbit as well, and the new isolation caused their cold war to go hot. Mesh-beacon messages from both sides became less frequent, and ultimately non-existent, as their interest in the remote colonies was replaced with more pressing local concerns.
Subsequently, after a period of a few years’ silence, the supply hub at Ceres and the Orwell Station research facility on Titan started to mesh-beacon to the colonies. Their signals were weak, but from what I could tell not much was left on Mars. The outer planet stations were never designed to be permanent human settlements. Over time they too became silent.
Ultimately the school of 26 Orion self rescue pods will complete their multi-century journey to the solar system. Their energy systems will be long dead and navigation will no longer function. Any unexpected gravitational perturbations in route will throw them off course and they may miss the solar system entirely, or transit without making a gravitational capture.
In the end, they will be 26 cold coffins in space.
Elonburgh, Musk City, and Orwell station - oh gosh. Thanks for sharing this story. We’d better figure out how to get along better together on Earth. I read the 26 self-rescue pods as symbolic of our language deteriorating as well, first into isolated letters and then eventually nonexistent. A good warning.
Thanks for the comments. The 26 pods were not meant to be an allusion to the alphabet, at least not consciously. It's always interesting to see how readers add to the story subtext.
it's so fantastic, though, that Erik pulled that out. As soon as i read his comment, I thought "he's so right." Half the time when people compliment something in one of my stories, I didn't realize it was there until they told me. The subconscious is amazing.
In the beginning, after I worked up the courage to look, I was greeted by a face that resembled the unlovable mug of unfinished plastic doll. It was as if somebody on the production line, where they pop-on the tiny hollowed-out arms and legs, had neglected to paint-on additional features that would have pulled the disparate features together: A matting of mousy hair that grew in no particular direction. The puckered lips that, in their natural resting position, assumed a gormless open-mouthed pout. The hooded eyes were embedded in expansive sockets that resembled partly filled-in craters. I was nine years old with pig-tails and librarian glasses, doing my best to make sense of what the good Lord had given me.
My saving grace was Henry Lester's House of Proteus on Coney Island. It was a corridor, lined with fairground mirrors, arranged so that each warped looking glass would bear the reflection of the one before it, twisting the initial image into more and more grotesque forms. The person standing before the first mirror in the chain was unable to see their reflection in the last. Gawkers were able to view the transitions from a raised walkway. You could hear their horrified gasps and the inconsolable weeping of the girls. It was not a place to take your date, that is unless your date happened to be me:
My face would shed its monstrous aspect and reveal a hidden beauty. It was Henry's cousin, Gary Lester, who first told me. He said the gallery was a reflection of my soul, then he ruined the moment by trying to touch me up. I told my only friend Peter Gagne. Yes, that Peter Gagne. We visited the gallery together. He presented me with a beautiful sketch of my reflection.
Subsequently, I modelled my 'look' on that drawing. I learned the art of make-up and applied it to what I had assumed was a hopeless cause. In 1986, when Peter was dying, he told me he had faked the image in the drawing. To give me hope.
You are not the first girl to call me a piece of work. The others are more right than they know. Two hours every morning. My husband, Bill Gannon, saw the awful truth. He was no picture either. Terrible scars on his face from Iwo Jima, that he buried under make-up. No woman with class ever shows her true face to anyone besides her husband and her undertaker.
Finally, after I am gone, there is a book I have written titled 'Make-Up Tips For Ugly Girls'.
For now, it's our secret, because I know things about you too, don't I darling.
I arrived at work before half eight, and Jack was already there. He looked like someone else had washed and dressed him, his mother you’d guess. I envied him that kind of love but you couldn’t dislike the kid. You could see in his smooth red cheeks that he wanted to please, and you can’t give someone hell on his first day.
To start off I gave him the tour and he listened with wide eyes and earnest nods. He didn’t catch my jokes, but I guess they went over his head. When we got to the shop floor, he began to ask questions about the machines we use there; it was like he wanted permission to be allowed to have a go on one, though he kept his hands awkwardly in his pockets the whole time.
At break, I poured him a coffee from the jug. It was pretty strong and sludgy and I reckon it was his first taste. I saw him look at the liquid in surprise when he thought I wasn’t watching, but I’ll hand it to him, he drank the lot. He dropped his empty cup and just as he was trying to retrieve it from behind the recycling bin, Julie from HR stopped in the doorway on her way past and pursed her lips.
Next, I took him on a tour of the floor upstairs. He had to take his hands out of his pockets as the guys shook his hand when I introduced them, though he put them right back in when Julie tugged at his tie and flicked her hair. He was sweating but he got through it all right, and made a good impression with the boss when we stepped into his office. I showed him the canteen and where to get the hot food, then left him with the secretary to finish off his paperwork while I got on with some work of my own.
Over lunch, I kept an eye out for him, but he never came in. I figured his mum had packed him sandwiches and he was too embarrassed to eat them in front of us or something. But when he came back forthe afternoon’s shift, his tie had gone and his top button was undone. He shook my hand firmly and we got to work straight away. I started to explain how to get the best out of the accounts software, but he just took his seat, rolled his sleeves up and got on with it.
As the afternoon wore on, empty coffee cups accumulated on his desk. Julie passed twice but the third time she didn’t even bother trying to catch his eye. When she’d gone, he threw down his pen, leaned back in his chair and stretched his hands behind his head. She’ll get over it, his look said, but right now these figures won’t analyse themselves.
At five thirty I clocked off. As I was unlocking the car, I looked up and saw him framed in his window, dark with stubble and a cigarette hung in the corner of his mouth, gesturing angrily at the computer screen.
Really enjoyed! As I read it, it seemed like it teetered just perfectly balanced between being an actual single day's account and a more fantastical compression of time - many years elapsed. Liked the uncertainty of that! (Though it may have been my own mis-reading, too?!) (:
First he was called James. Then later he became darling. Finally, if he was referred to at all it was by redirecting words around where his name would have been. In this way he stayed more possible.
Interested in the idea that it's not the person that reads the story, but the story reads the person. That is, the story has a look around inside the reader's head... 'hmm, what's in here, if I just pull that lever there and open that valve and just put the lightest pressure on that, what even is that, and look what we get. Ooh, interesting!'
I guess micro-fiction pushes this to extremes, but I think it's there in all writing. The story only has the material in the brain to work with. Then the story's job is to balance vagueness and ambiguity with enough in the way of specific hooks to generate images and feelings. Too vague and nothing really pops up. Too much detail and there's no act of creation left for the reading mind to enjoy.
In this short short, I just had a name, a gain and then a loss. I think it might just about be enough to give some sort of jolt. When I was considering different 'endings', every time I chose something specific (eg divorce, death, gone to war, son/husband/lover/pet) the story just seemed less interesting to me.
Maybe what was actually interesting to me was the way a narrator might use language to travel through love and loss, but that was certainly not in my head as I wrote it.
Anyway - apologies for going on about my own story. I just found it interesting to think about the idea of vagueness vs specificity and of who's doing the reading, the reader or the story.
Thanks for writing all of this. Yes, I think it's true that the story reads the person. If we have nothing in our memory banks or knowledge banks to fill in the implications, then the story will come to naught. But because we are humans and have our lived experiences, a story that implies instead of tells becomes a wonderful riddle. We are forced to slow down and both think and feel. The writer, then, has to have found just the right details, etc., for the riddle to work. I think i've just said exactly what you said, but in different words. I love that you had "a gain and then a loss." A future prompt of mine will have opposites like these as a way into writing a story. (No need to apologize for writing about your stories in these threads!)
Like the idea of opposites as a prompt. Reminds me of the famous lines from The Tempest:
We are such stuff as dreams are made on
Our little life is rounded with a sleep.
The first line, opposing matter and spirit, mind and body, is powerful, but the second line is sublime. In ten syllables there is life against death, many (our) against one (life), and miraculously the limited (little) with the infinite (rounded).
I love The Tempest. I see those lines like this: We awake to our lives and then die again (our lives are rounded at both ends by sleep). And while we are alive, we are living what we create, as we create our dreams--only to have it all disappear again with death. So yes, life/death, awake/asleep, dreams/reality. To me, those are the opposing forces in those lines.
At first, Magellan liked it. The feeling of the eggs ripening in his brood pouch. He felt his chest swell with the ongoing importance of tending to the next generation.
Later on, after the kids were born, there was so much to do, like trying to teach them how to catch copepods and enough camouflage and awareness to prevent them from careening into the mouth of a bluefish.
Whenever his partner came by to check on them, he wanted her to know he was doing everything exactly right. However, he always seemed to end up overcooking the Mysis and she would roll her eyes.
In the end, after the kids had left the seaweed clump they called home to go to school and he was finally left alone, he wondered where the time had gone.
Maybe he should have worried less and had more fun. But then things might’ve fallen apart.
Who was he kidding? Things had fallen apart just the same. His parents were long gone. His dear best friends? He wished he’d stayed in better touch so he would’ve had someone to talk with about all of it now.
He remembered a day at the jetty. He’d laughed with his friends so hard over a joke that bits of algae had sprayed out of his rostrum and they’d all turned sideways with mirth, wiggling their fins with no sound coming out they were laughing so hard.
He wondered how he’d let an entire year go by, a good chunk of his life, without calling back his best friends. There was really only himself to blame.
He wondered if they were even out there and whether there was still time to meet up again before his watery eyes closed over all briny and he died.
[Note: although male pipefish do carry the eggs until they hatch, they don’t actually tend to their young once they’re hatched as far as I know.]
What a great concept! Somehow, having a little fish go through all of this hit me in my core. I think we should all worry less and have more fun! And call those friends.
Thanks for adding the explanation at the end. I enjoyed the story but had no idea what the real life animal was, or even if there really was one at all.
At first, I didn’t think much about it.
[deleted]
I like how the narrator started overcooking the broccoli again once the ex appeared. She'd moved on, but has taken up old habits.
good catch!
Wonderful. That line from the doctor is perfect: "I know. Sometimes, it’s like that."
Thank you, J.R.!
Yep that line got me too
That's a really good one, Mary!
Good thing you only missed him "for just a moment", though. Gate-crashing your eye, indeed!
It was a long moment.
I thought this piece rang with an element of lived experience! Well done! The pacing is excellent and the descriptions—the shoulder shrugs, the jig, the mouth-breathing! I can “see” him in your eye, and the sense of your relief when he is finally gone. The moment when you visit the eye doctor is excellent as the “aha” moment of this story.
Agreed!
Thanks so much for the close read, Angela!
If this was your giant it must have been quite crowded in your eye!
ha!
I was thinking it was the giant. All shrunk down but looming large, as always.
ALWAYS
This is great, Mary! So clever and fun. Your imagination awes me! Why should he start listening now? HA! I can see this getting published.
Thanks Patti! I'm gonna mull sending it out somewhere...
Do it!
Loved this one Mary! The way the people who we have hurt and hurt us stay alive in us in so resonant, but told in a funny sweet way without acrimony
Thanks, Julie. It's a laugh or cry world.
I love this story! This has to be among my favorite short shorts of all time.
Oh, wow. Thanks so much!
Loved this one! Really liked the lines, "I know, the doctor said. Sometimes, it's like that" - that eerie teetering between the magical and the normal. And, adding my voice to the others - this should be published! In the meantime, very happy that it's lived here long enough that I got a chance to read it. (:
Thank you, Danielle!
This is so good!
Horrifying
hahahaha! Sorry to horrify you this morning.
The endearing old shoulder shrug, after all.
I like the way this contains multitudes.
The verbs in English-language storytelling are . . . telling.
At first, I didn’t think
I figured
I remember > oddly, brings us to the present, with the narrator, through the past
I thought
. . .
But when I woke up
things had only gotten worse
the splotch had taken on the shape
. . .
I said
he’d never listened
Why should he start now?
He looked
Sometimes, he’d do that little jig he used to do
Other times, he’d lay right down
. . .
He was always there
I’d overcook the broccoli,
the way I used to do,
and he’d roll his eyes at me.
he’d just do
I got used to him
I got so used to him
-----
These are like temporal acrobatics. Such small shifts which we, or I, can take for granted.
(The lines, out of context, are also poetry.)
I got used to him there.
vs.
I would get used to him there.
He was always there . . .
vs.
He'd (He would) always be there . . .
One small change, even one word or letter, and time's POV shifts.
Thank you for this!
“Suddenly, I could see clear as a bell. No one was watching me or scrutinizing or rolling their eyes. I could do whatever I wanted. And just for a moment, I missed him.” Wonderful story! I really like these closing lines as well. Really a new beginning, about ten years later.
Thank you! Maybe a bit on the nose to suddenly see clear as a bell. But in a story about eyesight being blocked, it manages to work, i think.
The voice is really nice here, reminds me a little of Grace Paley. Good job. I agree with Patti -it should be published.
Maybe I'll send it out then! Thanks for the support.
This is really good, Mary! Loved the different ways you have captured the passage of time.
Thanks, Vishal!
To begin with he was the quietest man I’d ever met. Then he listened. When he listened to me time stood still. At night the stars stopped moving in the sky. My words became everything to him. When I closed my eyes, I could no longer recall his appearance. I couldn’t see him. I could only hear my breath enter his ear, my whisper into his shirtless nape.
After that in a crowded room of Friday evening cocktail parties, I realized I could no longer recognize him. At first, I was discombobulated. I wandered from group to group of words hoping I would appear in his ear.
At last, I said here you are. I thought you’d never find me. And he would pull me to his side and claim me for the night.
In the end, he lost his voice, couldn't find it anywhere. Under my bed, in the closet, under the kitchen sink. We searched everywhere. I miss the sound of him listening to me.
oh, yes, this is beautiful.
This one is fabulous and deep. At first, it hit me as a beautiful, poetic description of an ideal, supportive and affirming relationship. Then, "he lost his voice" and I reevaluated the entire thing. As Sea Shepard noted, the end contains the first use of "we", followed by the final sentence: "I miss the sound of him listening to me", and I realized how self effacing "he" is, how "I" focused the narrator is. Even their loss and regret is framed in terms of how his lost voice impacts the narrator, and you realize he never had a voice. He is "all ears".
The whole story shifted around for me and I saw it as depicting an enormously needy, narcissistic person who, for awhile, had found the attention they required to feel defined and affirmed, and the damage that does to others. An arresting aspect is the sensitivity and delicacy of the narration which is precisely what lulls us into our initial delight on behalf of "I".
Yehawes (YA)
WOW! Your analysis is fabulous and deep. This just wrote itself as I was thinking about a relationship I have with a charming and unassuming friend. Thank you! ruth
I've read this three times, Ruth, it's grabbed me. I like how at the end you through in "we" after using I.
Threw in. I can’t see on this dang iPhone
knew what you meant :)
I get more from this every time I read it... I'm not exactly sure what I'm getting, but it's hitting a nerve somewhere. Thanks, Ruth
feels like a mysticism of going out and receiving, and something agreeable.
Lovely, all the way through lovely.
This one has stopped me and made me think. And your last paragraph! This did not end up at all where I expected it to be. Nicely done!
The beginning was a pink camellia from your yard. You carried it over on the ferry, the stem neatly tucked into one of those plastic tubes filled with water florists use. That impressed me right there, the professionalism and care bringing the flower, which frankly put me aback a bit, the spirit of a beautiful flower on a first meeting.
After I got home I looked up camellia because I was curious. Turns out it means a lot of things.
A spirit of depth, self reflection, also loyalty, love and humility. Some of the connotations seemed a bit forward to express on a first meeting, so in my next email I asked if she knew what the camellia flower symbolized. She didn’t. I think I knew that.
On the followup phone call to our first date, lunch during Covid next to Puget Sound next to thundering mile long freight trains fifty feet away, after I said I had a good time she said we didn’t have fun, there was no spark, the conversation was dull and strained. Well, I said, Let’s just walk away right now. Let’s not, she said.
I still have the camellia, now a rust orange, oxidized, and I added a golf ball sized hornet’s nest to the stem a while back, not sure what the meaning of that was. At her end are dried red roses. I used to bring a single rose, stick it in a vase without saying anything and wait for her to find it. Oh. That’s really nice. There are four or five in a blue vase now, along with some very dry Japanese maple leaves I picked up off the sidewalk one fall and put in a vase, again, without saying anything.
We’ve had a few arguments. We’re separated by Puget Sound. She lives in a city I don’t much care for. She’s always lived in cities.The dog precludes things I would do. We’ve broken up, drifted apart and so on. Honestly, in bygone times, I had more sex in a weekend than we’ve had in three years, but here we are. Yesterday she drove over for a visit and brought three camellias from her yard. One fell apart completely on the drive. I put them in a jar of water next to the original, now rusty camellia, and this morning I found pink petals fallen to the floor.
This is the best short story you have ever written. The best!
Wow. Thanks Judy !!
She 's correct you know!
Tod. This is so good. (I have tons of rust-colored camellia flowers littering my front yard right now.)
Something more real about the rust, don't you think?
i love my camellia tree/bush. it goes crazy when it blooms. And then--they all turn that fantastic rust color. I mean, the rust is somehow prettier than the flowers on the tree. And the way the flowers harden like that. Amazing.
Brilliant, subtle, simple words resonating. A favourite line: 'We’re separated by Puget Sound.' Yet the piece is on about other forms of separation.
Lovely Tod
Compelling, as usual.
In such a short story you get all the different flowers and leaves to do so much imagistic as well as emotional, narrative work! It creates a very affecting, evocative little world. Like the Symbology of Flowers is re-cast into a story-form!
To begin with, I don't think you know a camellia from a rose.
You two!
"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet. ! "
It began with a thunderclap. The low-pressure system gave Titus a headache and wet socks. He ran out to meet the bus, but it just kept rolling by. A man shook a can at him. He didn’t say a word. Time is like an arrow, anachronistic and prone to misuse. Misunderstanding.
At four in the afternoon, when Titus finally made it to the funeral, the crowds had dispersed. The casket was gone. So was his mother. He wondered, are there any redos? Mulligans? Do some cultures not sit shiva for several days? Why was the funeral for a ninety-seven year old mother of seven, the youngest named Titus, a woman born on a farm, who clawed her way into nursing school, into the operating room of St. Augustine General Hospital, found a husband, a house, quit nursing, started a family, got bored, started an interior design business, went bankrupt, got divorced, started a fashion business that was eventually bought out by Everson Driselle which was eventually folded into LVMH which made her independently wealthy beyond her wildest dreams, which made her children, including Titus, uniquely dependent upon her schedule, why was this woman only given a two hour ceremony at the ass-end of a workday?
Decades later, Titus took a fall in the shower and cracked his skull on the black and white floor tile. His funeral was scheduled for 1pm to 3pm on a Thursday. At around four in the afternoon, his daughter, Rita, dashed into the funeral home, shaking off the rain from her umbrella. She caught sight of the casket, but didn’t get a chance to see the body, the face, the remains of the man who raised her, and cared for her, and warned her, with gentle words, that time is an illusion, and yet also, as precious a thing as life itself.
She shook her head and walked back out into the rain.
Really well done, William.
the "time is an illusion" question will keep you occupied for a long, long, time.
I couldnt help thinking of the Groucho quote I put onto at least twenty birthday cards.
‘Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana’
That’s a classic right there^
This is well done! and I love the description of "ass-end of a workday."
Nicely done, William! Love those long sentences, very effective.
I like your meditation on time.
Not long ago Jenna gave up on the civilized world and fled to a tiny rental in the high lonesome country of the southern New Mexico Rockies. She’d never before felt so at home. Nothing special about the house itself, an elongated, stucco-walled box, but the countryside captured her imagination. Someone had lived, and died, in love with this land, planting and nourishing trees that bore sour cherries and apples, pears, figs, and dripping apricots, their love flesh melting in Jenna’s mouth. Standing in sunlight at the apex of the multi-grooved irrigation system she’d painstakingly created, she could see most of White Sands, a mile below her and fifteen miles distant, and beyond that the eastern ramparts of the Gila Wilderness, it’s basins and ranges undulating all the way to Arizona. She would open the tap that allowed the water, dropping from a spring an hour’s hike up the mountain, to flow to the trees, and she thought she could feel their joy and relief. She knew that while she slept the raccoons, porcupines, coyotes and bears prowled about her place, seeking their own nourishment, but she didn’t mind what they took as long as they left her cats alone.
Jenna worked nights waiting tables at one of the cafes in the village ten miles up the road atop the mountain. Her bosses, Carlos and Carmen, proved difficult and exacting, but she didn’t mind much, they were as rugged and beautiful as the land itself. They’d migrated south from Taos, their northern New Mexican cuisine making a splash in the midst of the more common Tex-Mex homogeneity. Their stews, steaks and enchiladas nourished Jenna and their patrons alike, body and soul.
Every night after getting off work and counting her proceeds Jenna would make a show of going home, only to move her truck a block up the hill near the park so she could sneak back unseen to the cafe. Carlos and Carmen always drew the blinds after closing, but Jenna had a place from which to watch them, where she had bent a slat at a nearly unnoticeable angle. Each night’s activities were slight variations on a pattern. It would usually begin with a quarrel, one spouse accusing the other of some trivial slight. One of them would rage while the other became visibly exasperated. When it seemed that a point of no return had been reached Carlos would put on music expressing a dark romantic yearning, and they’d make up by dancing in the restaurant, weaving among the tables for an hour or more. Likely as not the dance would culminate in a frantic tango of one partner undressing the other and having their way with them in an exhilarating display of athletic prowess. Outside in the cold darkness Jenna would be swooning, imagining herself first as Carmen, and then as Carlos, somewhat uncertain as to which one she desired more.
In the end it turned out they’d known nearly from the beginning of her vigils that she was out there. After tormenting her for several months they upped the ante by inviting her to join them. For Jenna it was as though she’d lived and gone to heaven, even or even more so when the mutual ravishing climaxed in her long, slow, somewhat agonizing death at their hands. They proceeded to incorporate her body into several specials that were added to their menu, and received more compliments on their exquisite culinary creations that week than they ever had before. Nothing went to waste. Their new server, Alexis, was astonished at the tips she was getting.
Carlos and Carmen made a side trip down the mountain on their next run for supplies. They cleaned out Jenna’s cabin and brought her four cats back home with them, where ultimately they grew to be fat and happy and lived to ripe old cat ages. No one wondered any more than they already had about Jenna—whose real name was Chasity—since none of her family or friends had known she’d migrated out to New Mexico to begin with. The bears and raccoons gorged themselves on the fruit that dropped nightly from the well-watered trees. The bears may have paused briefly to wonder what had become of the human girl and her feline brood, but such was the cycle of life.
The following spring a young couple rented the house. Their children took on the irrigation duties, which resulted in the end in some of the best meals they’d ever had the pleasure of consuming.
I'd call this one a horror story. Someone tell Alexis to find a new job immediately.
Or to at least have a life outside of work.
By the way, did you know the Donner Party put out a cookbook?
you are hilarious
I just found that if you search for "Donner Party Cookbook" you'll find there are at least 3 of them, plus a game entitled "Donner Dinner Party." :-) Tasty!
There's also a Donner Lake, Donner Memorial State Park, Donner Ski Ranch, and so forth. The area is quite "Donnered up," if you will allow the adjective form.
Go Donner, go Blitzen.
I'll have to look those up. So much for an original idea.
I read the story of the tragedy again a little while ago. There was a safe, tried and true route a little bit longer, through the mountains that they could have taken, and were advised to, but the leader made a decision to take the short cut that would become Donner Pass. And a blizzard came early.
Posthumously?
Let us know if you have any recipes to share, David.
Yes. They put out a book of New Mexico-French fusion recipes called Red Chile-Green Chile Jenna C’Qua.
Whoa. That took a dark and unexpected turn! Well done.
First I'm thinking: I love new Mexico. Wait, are they in Alamogordo, or that town way up the mountain? Then, I'd like to have fruit trees. Then, oh sex. Nice. Then, WTF! Then, of poor Alexis. At least she's getting good tips in her final days. And I love how you continue the food / gorging / delicious meals all the way to the end.
Thank you. Yes, up above Alamogordo: Cloudcroft.
Hmmm, what did I just read? I'm not sure.
I'll try again and see if you are making any sense at all :)
I'll never eat anywhere in the New Mexico Rockies again. ruth
Let me know if I’m making sense, please. (Wait…does anything make sense?)
It made sense!
All Donner Party jokes aside, it's actually quite good, with multiple twists.
Thank you. I’ve written about these characters before but this time thanks to Mary’s prompt I think they felt comfortable enough to reveal their true selves.
The Ghost Of Salinger
Not long ago; well, maybe thirty or so years ago I envisioned myself as a youthful Holden Caufield. I fancied writing a sequel to Salinger’s “The Catcher In The Rye.” In which our protagonist was getting closer to discovering his destiny, his raison d’être. After all, Courtney has learned him a little French in between the grunge and garage couches of sleepless nights.
Then, riding comfortably through my late thirties, I returned to the idea of a third Rye novel. In which Holden has legally changed his name to Anthony, fucking up the restaurant industry’s tables and then had the brilliance to film himself getting drunk on Vietnamese fermented berries, in a remote Indochinese village. But again, Asia (the new Courtney) betrays his trust in humanity, whilst the concept of celebrity drives him even farther from sanity.
Finally into my fifties and still swelling with angst towards adults, although the majority are younger than me now, I revisit the thought of Caufield getting older. His surname has altered slightly into Comstock and he now quietly goes about his middle class life of repetitive living. Day in, day out, a boring study of “money is the only god that can never fail.” Walking home at dusk I come to the realization that Orwell has already proffered his ultimate ending of this tetralogy with the simple act of placing an aspidistra in the flower box.
Love this!
"the middle class life of repetitive living," is a favorite boring topic of interest to me.
Keep it flying!
*in honor of National Poetry Month*
“Bergamot”
At first, bergamot
repelled me.
Any time
You made tea, I had to wonder
What was so great
About this cuppa?
What made you swear by this man?
What had he done to deserve
A beverage in his name?
Or perhaps it was an
Antiquated nod
To he who rises with the dawn.
An archaic brag
For the sophisticated chap.
Either way it is
So beloved
By you and so many others.
The pot would sing
And you would smile
Hum along
With Mr. Grey.
I wasn’t jealous
Just confounded.
Then one day
The kettle
Stopped singing
As if the water couldn’t bring itself
To boil
Knowing I was the only one
Around.
I didn’t judge it.
I felt the same
Way.
We sat there
In silence
For a long time.
The memory of
That strange posh aroma
Enveloping the two of us
Empty vessels.
After a while
I retrieved a tea bag
From the cupboard
And set it gently in a mug.
The ground
Leaves crunched
Against the ceramic
Sending a whiff
Of bergamot
Floating upward
And for a moment
An achingly
Long
Delicious
Moment
I could hear you humming
And the kettle sang.
oh! What a wonderful poem! Thank you!
Amazing how aromas can bring back such strong memories and feelings.
A warm delight.
Love poem
I finally decided against getting my senior-citizen library card. These days, I don’t like going to the library. They’ve let the building go down, needs paint, needs the windows cleaned. Then those plexiglass shields they put up everywhere. The librarians sit behind them like dazed zoo animals. Ask them a question and maybe an eye will flicker or an ear twitch. Better to look it up on the internet.
Besides, they don’t keep many books in the library anymore. My branch, anyhow. It used to be that the stacks would be filled. Those days, I’d shelf-read as part of my work-study duties, make sure Dewey’s decimals were in the right order. I’d think about how those numbers signified a particular bit of knowledge or kind of reading adventure. Someone wrote something that was good enough to be saved, in every one of those books, and now they’re waiting to be picked up and read. Back then I thought, I could spend my life in the library.
In the beginning, I’d sit on the carpeted floor with my junior library card safe in my shirt pocket. I might hear hushed voices nearby, but they’d disappear as story time began. We sat in a circle on the carpeted floor, the librarian on a red swivel stool in the center. A spotlight shone on her, her head bent as she turned the pages. She wore the same perfume as my mother. She read slowly — every word mattered — and her eyebrows would raise and lower and she’d rotate on the chair and show us the pictures and make faces and smile and ask questions. Where is the monkey? What word is that? What color is the firetruck? We’d point and giggle. Then we’d go to the little round tables and make our own drawings of the story, sometimes with crayons or, if we were lucky, with fingerpaint, and we’d write what we remembered, or what the story made us feel.
These days, I just wish they’d at least paint the place.
i was once on a library board. For about two years, we discussed the carpet. After I left the board, I think they finally voted to replace it. (Still, libraries are heaven on earth to me.) I like the way your third paragraph used "In the beginning" instead of your first one!
it's a prompt-in-reverse.
Well done. I like mixing it up.
Sure enough!
This reminded me of the hushed stale air deep in the library stacks at Syracuse U.
It also reminded me I never really figured out how all those numbers on the book spines worked.
I loved the way the library smelled deep in the basement. Hardly any air, dim, miles of books. And yes those numbers were tricky. I have no idea if I understood them or if the shelves I checked were really in correct order. Hopefully fixed by now!
As a kid I was intrigued by the Dewey Decimal system, the idea that all books could be categorized. I'm sure that is symptomatic of something.
Anyway, this makes me want to go sit in a library for a while...
Go! Go sit!
Woof! Woof!
Sorry, had to say it...
Libraries engage to no end. And they differ from country to country, perhaps even from state (US) to state. Ours was tiny by most standards, but the stacks were rich and carefully curated.
Some specificity here might spice up the narrative, the name of the library, the librarian’s name, a few of the books you checked out as a child. The smell of the plastic protectors over hardcover books—it’s all a richness.
Our town’s library, on Main Street, is now a Chinese takeout.
thanks for the ideas, Brian. You're right: each of the libraries in the piece is a specific environment, and personalities, both librarians and patrons.
Enjoyed this so - almost a love song - or rather a dirge? Liked the detail of "she wore the same perfume as my mother".
Thanks, Danielle. I'm particularly fond of the perfume line. A loving dirge? The reason for the dirge being that something loved has changed.
Not that long ago, but also a million years ago, I was in my twenties and struggling along. I befriended an older woman, she’d just moved into a nearby apartment building, a one-hundred-year-old Queen Anne-Tudor-Revival hodgepodge with stained glass windows, huge crystal chandeliers inside the lobby, and two dark, life-sized stone lions on the front steps, the whole structure aping another time and place. She’d moved from Manhattan, seemed wonderfully eccentric, even the way she said the word schedule like “shed-jewel.”
Her face wasn’t over done with surgery or cosmetics, the eye tooth on her left side jutted out like a fang, and sometimes her lip stuck to it when she smiled, the tooth collected bits of berry-colored lipstick. She had vibrant green eyes, slightly hooded lids, one eye seemed to drift off center, giving her an unfocused gaze, but she noticed everything. She taught me how French women wear a scarf, how to tell if something is well made, and I began to pay attention to table settings and dress codes. I felt like Eliza Doolittle.
After a while, I noticed she didn’t know how to cook, often burnt food on the stove, smoking up rooms. When I went to get a glass from her cabinet, it was all sticky as if she didn’t know how to properly hand wash a glass. She told me that when she’d returned from living in France, she’d had her new car shipped, but there were problems, missing paperwork, so she just left it there at the port.
“You’re not going to try to get the car back?” I asked her, shocked that she didn’t seem all that upset. She said it all seemed too much, figuring out how to get the car, so she cut her losses.
Ultimately, she moved back to New York, inviting me to visit, which I did. She took me to her brother’s house in East Hampton, empty except for one weekend a year when he’d show up with his family. She took me to museums, plays, the Harvard Club for dinners. On my last visit I learned that her mother had died when she was a little girl, and she’d been raised exclusively by nannies and household staff, her father was rarely home and never remarried. She’d lost her trust fund to her ex-husband, a grifter from a well-known family. She had to learn how to do the practical things that had always been done for her.
This is so vibrant! And i love that this is exactly the kind of person we would meet and be attracted to in our youth.
Such an entrancing character.. really like the detail of the jutting eye tooth, the slightly hooded eyelids, the sticky glass, the pronunciation of "shed-jewel"!
Thank you, 🙏 Danielle!
A very appealing story.
thank you Mark with a K!
Love "Not that long ago, but also a million years ago. . ."
and . . ." a grifter from a well-known family."
S.S., you have to watch those kind-of-men, they'll take everything you offer.
Agreed.
They seem to do well, these sketchy people, that's irritating!
Well, my take is they do well it ways that don't matter for much.
Sometimes I wonder if cons who feel no guilt, and are not "kept up at night" actually live longer, while the rest of us angst over typos and something stupid we said at that one party seven years ago.
My memory does not go back as far as that last party.
But Sea, no one remembers what you said anyway.
Thankfully!
Initially we, or most of us, at least, basically all thought that we would be able to deal with them. Thought it would be a good thing, even — maybe, just possibly, a net benefit — because that’s one of the things you hear about worms, that they’re good for the soil. Soil is good. Good for soil, good for us, so went the thinking at the time. We thought we were all very environmentally conscious then. So: More Worms, hoo-ray worms. Up they came. I clammed up about the matter pretty quick, though, not complaining, but my mood soured. This was relatively early in the process. I have a distinct memory, from that first week, of waking up and finding the first few inside — nothing offensive, but this was like day four of More Worms Every Day Forever — and starting to reconfigure, mentally-speaking, while everyone — it seemed like everyone else — was still very gung-ho about More Worms. Not that I don’t get it — it was very impressive, giant letterforms in the sky, “More Worms Every Day Forever,” block letters in cirrus, lower-atmosphere, like particularly robust skywriting at an impossible scale.
In retrospect, much more dread than that would not have been inappropriate.
In fact, after awhile, once the subsoil overflowed with them, we couldn’t stop talking about the missed opportunity. Imagining how validated we would feel if we’d dreaded it, More Worms, the unavoidable squishing and trampling underfoot, more of them wriggling up through the pulp, the wine-colored viscera, treelines disappearing under worms — What if we’d dreaded it from the jump, dreaded it and been vocal about the dread, and then afterwards been right, sort of pragmatically or logistically in-the-right for having dreaded it? I suppose we thought it would distract us from the wormtide, only shin-high then, from the aforementioned unavoidable squishing, viscera, etc. We knew — it was too many, frankly, too many worms, yet we all felt sheepish about saying so. We wanted to complain but hadn’t found the words early enough. We hadn’t dreaded, and that’s what it would have taken.
Ultimately, though, as with anything, we got used to it. Worms are mostly water and protein, and that’s mostly what we need. There’s plenty to go around. (Obviously we don’t eat more than we absolutely need to, so we’re slimming down nicely.) And — it’s easy enough not to sink as long as you keep on your back.
Wow. You really created a world here.
Wormtide!
I nearly commented the same! Whooa - a full nightmare packed in one word! Or for that matter, "the wormtide, only shin-high then...", oh lordy!
To begin with, you know that I have always struggled with concentration.
As early as kindergarten, my mother regularly got notes about how I couldn’t concentrate enough to finish my coloring or do my daily assigned task, like put away the sand box toys after recess. And things failed to improve after that. Even in the last days of high school, Mom regularly fielded calls from my counselor cautioning that if I didn’t apply myself to the tasks at hand, I would never manage college, or a job, or a relationship. Like my mother could fix me at that late date.
Later, when I became an adult, my failure to concentrate persisted. I forgot things. I got lost. I didn’t show up when I was supposed to, and I did show up when no one was expecting me. I misplaced library books, paid my bills late or twice or not at all, lost my keys, and never managed to remember a birthday or a promise. But I was friendly and good natured, and people overlooked my deficits. They accommodated me. Friends would remind me of where I was going, what I was doing, and why I was doing it. Instead of being angry, they found me delightfully ditzy and endlessly surprising.
Which brings me to today. I have never misled you. You’ve known me for 35 years. I was the one who forgot to feed your beloved goldfish when we were roommates in 1989 and you had that big three-day weekend trip to Tahoe. I was the one who forgot to come to your wedding in 1991, despite being your maid of honor. I was the one who left the gas on while housesitting for you during your family’s dream summer in Europe and caused the big fire.
Yet, today, after all we’ve been through, you are angry. You are angry very unfairly. You know me. What in the world did you expect when you went and got yourself kidnapped by a drug cartel and then asked me to deliver the ransom money? Do you know how complex a task that is? I had to get the money. I had to not lose the money. I had to remember where to take it. I had to remember when to take it. No one in her right mind would have chosen me of all the people in the world to do this job. So, I was a little late and you’re a couple of fingers short. Really. What did you expect from someone delightfully ditzy and endlessly surprising? If you don’t change your attitude, I’m afraid our friendship will suffer for it.
oh my god, i laughed out loud at this one. Great job! I love the slow build....
I was ready for some serious angst, but then the line "they found me delightfully ditzy and endlessly surprising" set it up for a delightful and surprising situation. Well done!
Excellent escalation!
I love this!
Very nice twist.
At first we focused on survival essentials: shelter, food, warmth. Once we had established a basic living routine we worked on communications. There had been an operational distress beacon from the start, but we wanted to know more. What was happening “out there”? When would there be a rescue?
Even with the hyper-light-speed of mesh-beacon tech, there is a distance-sensitive latency in our communications, so messages from nearby colonies arrive sooner than those from farther away, particularly from Earth. We only recently learned of Earth’s destruction 27 years ago. Everyone knew there was a plant breaker-bomb, but no one believed it would be deployed. It was. Destruction occurred pretty quickly, a matter of hours after detonation. I never got coherent signals from earth after that, just random chatter. There were a few messages from Luna, but they quickly defaulted to auto-response, and then silence. Mesh-beacon messages from Mars indicated that Luna’s orbit destabilized once earth was reduced to rubble. They managed to launch three ships before tidal forces destroyed the Lunar bases. Mars refused to let them land, shooting them out of the sky on approach.
Mars had been in a state of cold war for centuries, focused on the two population centers at Elonburgh, AKA Blue Team, and Musk City, AKA Red Team. Earth’s demise began to affect Mars’ orbit as well, and the new isolation caused their cold war to go hot. Mesh-beacon messages from both sides became less frequent, and ultimately non-existent, as their interest in the remote colonies was replaced with more pressing local concerns.
Subsequently, after a period of a few years’ silence, the supply hub at Ceres and the Orwell Station research facility on Titan started to mesh-beacon to the colonies. Their signals were weak, but from what I could tell not much was left on Mars. The outer planet stations were never designed to be permanent human settlements. Over time they too became silent.
Ultimately the school of 26 Orion self rescue pods will complete their multi-century journey to the solar system. Their energy systems will be long dead and navigation will no longer function. Any unexpected gravitational perturbations in route will throw them off course and they may miss the solar system entirely, or transit without making a gravitational capture.
In the end, they will be 26 cold coffins in space.
Sad and somehow so true. Great job!
Mark, "gravitational perturbations in route will throw them off course...."
Send only $56.98 and I will mail you my solution to the three-body problem.
Ultimately, this should save the school of pods and mankind. ruth
Yes, I'd like that solution, please. I'm a little short this week. Please ship COD, I'm sure my credit is good. No, really, I'm good for it....
Well I just love a story that drops this in midway: We only recently learned of Earth’s destruction 27 years ago.
Yes, that was great.
the universe is a complicated place apparently.
Sounds like life on Earth to me...
So I've been told...
Elonburgh, Musk City, and Orwell station - oh gosh. Thanks for sharing this story. We’d better figure out how to get along better together on Earth. I read the 26 self-rescue pods as symbolic of our language deteriorating as well, first into isolated letters and then eventually nonexistent. A good warning.
Thanks for the comments. The 26 pods were not meant to be an allusion to the alphabet, at least not consciously. It's always interesting to see how readers add to the story subtext.
it's so fantastic, though, that Erik pulled that out. As soon as i read his comment, I thought "he's so right." Half the time when people compliment something in one of my stories, I didn't realize it was there until they told me. The subconscious is amazing.
I find it quite humbling.
Which means you can write whatever because people make their own story out of what you write anyway. Well, sorta..
I always feel that a story is a collaboration between author and reader and so is different every time it is read.
For both of them.
This is so good!
Thanks! I've used this and last weeks' prompts to start an SF story. We'll see how the baking process goes...
The more it changes the more it remains the same.
True. There's a very limited number of original plots, right? And a certain circle of life that keeps on repeating.
And a certain cycle of self-destruction.
What?
In the beginning, after I worked up the courage to look, I was greeted by a face that resembled the unlovable mug of unfinished plastic doll. It was as if somebody on the production line, where they pop-on the tiny hollowed-out arms and legs, had neglected to paint-on additional features that would have pulled the disparate features together: A matting of mousy hair that grew in no particular direction. The puckered lips that, in their natural resting position, assumed a gormless open-mouthed pout. The hooded eyes were embedded in expansive sockets that resembled partly filled-in craters. I was nine years old with pig-tails and librarian glasses, doing my best to make sense of what the good Lord had given me.
My saving grace was Henry Lester's House of Proteus on Coney Island. It was a corridor, lined with fairground mirrors, arranged so that each warped looking glass would bear the reflection of the one before it, twisting the initial image into more and more grotesque forms. The person standing before the first mirror in the chain was unable to see their reflection in the last. Gawkers were able to view the transitions from a raised walkway. You could hear their horrified gasps and the inconsolable weeping of the girls. It was not a place to take your date, that is unless your date happened to be me:
My face would shed its monstrous aspect and reveal a hidden beauty. It was Henry's cousin, Gary Lester, who first told me. He said the gallery was a reflection of my soul, then he ruined the moment by trying to touch me up. I told my only friend Peter Gagne. Yes, that Peter Gagne. We visited the gallery together. He presented me with a beautiful sketch of my reflection.
Subsequently, I modelled my 'look' on that drawing. I learned the art of make-up and applied it to what I had assumed was a hopeless cause. In 1986, when Peter was dying, he told me he had faked the image in the drawing. To give me hope.
You are not the first girl to call me a piece of work. The others are more right than they know. Two hours every morning. My husband, Bill Gannon, saw the awful truth. He was no picture either. Terrible scars on his face from Iwo Jima, that he buried under make-up. No woman with class ever shows her true face to anyone besides her husband and her undertaker.
Finally, after I am gone, there is a book I have written titled 'Make-Up Tips For Ugly Girls'.
For now, it's our secret, because I know things about you too, don't I darling.
This one! So much depth. I need to read it a few times to take it all in.
Intrigued by the interplay of the surface and the depths.
I arrived at work before half eight, and Jack was already there. He looked like someone else had washed and dressed him, his mother you’d guess. I envied him that kind of love but you couldn’t dislike the kid. You could see in his smooth red cheeks that he wanted to please, and you can’t give someone hell on his first day.
To start off I gave him the tour and he listened with wide eyes and earnest nods. He didn’t catch my jokes, but I guess they went over his head. When we got to the shop floor, he began to ask questions about the machines we use there; it was like he wanted permission to be allowed to have a go on one, though he kept his hands awkwardly in his pockets the whole time.
At break, I poured him a coffee from the jug. It was pretty strong and sludgy and I reckon it was his first taste. I saw him look at the liquid in surprise when he thought I wasn’t watching, but I’ll hand it to him, he drank the lot. He dropped his empty cup and just as he was trying to retrieve it from behind the recycling bin, Julie from HR stopped in the doorway on her way past and pursed her lips.
Next, I took him on a tour of the floor upstairs. He had to take his hands out of his pockets as the guys shook his hand when I introduced them, though he put them right back in when Julie tugged at his tie and flicked her hair. He was sweating but he got through it all right, and made a good impression with the boss when we stepped into his office. I showed him the canteen and where to get the hot food, then left him with the secretary to finish off his paperwork while I got on with some work of my own.
Over lunch, I kept an eye out for him, but he never came in. I figured his mum had packed him sandwiches and he was too embarrassed to eat them in front of us or something. But when he came back forthe afternoon’s shift, his tie had gone and his top button was undone. He shook my hand firmly and we got to work straight away. I started to explain how to get the best out of the accounts software, but he just took his seat, rolled his sleeves up and got on with it.
As the afternoon wore on, empty coffee cups accumulated on his desk. Julie passed twice but the third time she didn’t even bother trying to catch his eye. When she’d gone, he threw down his pen, leaned back in his chair and stretched his hands behind his head. She’ll get over it, his look said, but right now these figures won’t analyse themselves.
At five thirty I clocked off. As I was unlocking the car, I looked up and saw him framed in his window, dark with stubble and a cigarette hung in the corner of his mouth, gesturing angrily at the computer screen.
I guess my day was done.
Love this tale. Life passes by before you know it.
Really enjoyed! As I read it, it seemed like it teetered just perfectly balanced between being an actual single day's account and a more fantastical compression of time - many years elapsed. Liked the uncertainty of that! (Though it may have been my own mis-reading, too?!) (:
Sentence
First he was called James. Then later he became darling. Finally, if he was referred to at all it was by redirecting words around where his name would have been. In this way he stayed more possible.
The meaning i see in this one--well, it got me in my heart. Really a wonderful micro story.
Interested in the idea that it's not the person that reads the story, but the story reads the person. That is, the story has a look around inside the reader's head... 'hmm, what's in here, if I just pull that lever there and open that valve and just put the lightest pressure on that, what even is that, and look what we get. Ooh, interesting!'
I guess micro-fiction pushes this to extremes, but I think it's there in all writing. The story only has the material in the brain to work with. Then the story's job is to balance vagueness and ambiguity with enough in the way of specific hooks to generate images and feelings. Too vague and nothing really pops up. Too much detail and there's no act of creation left for the reading mind to enjoy.
In this short short, I just had a name, a gain and then a loss. I think it might just about be enough to give some sort of jolt. When I was considering different 'endings', every time I chose something specific (eg divorce, death, gone to war, son/husband/lover/pet) the story just seemed less interesting to me.
Maybe what was actually interesting to me was the way a narrator might use language to travel through love and loss, but that was certainly not in my head as I wrote it.
Anyway - apologies for going on about my own story. I just found it interesting to think about the idea of vagueness vs specificity and of who's doing the reading, the reader or the story.
Thanks for writing all of this. Yes, I think it's true that the story reads the person. If we have nothing in our memory banks or knowledge banks to fill in the implications, then the story will come to naught. But because we are humans and have our lived experiences, a story that implies instead of tells becomes a wonderful riddle. We are forced to slow down and both think and feel. The writer, then, has to have found just the right details, etc., for the riddle to work. I think i've just said exactly what you said, but in different words. I love that you had "a gain and then a loss." A future prompt of mine will have opposites like these as a way into writing a story. (No need to apologize for writing about your stories in these threads!)
Like the idea of opposites as a prompt. Reminds me of the famous lines from The Tempest:
We are such stuff as dreams are made on
Our little life is rounded with a sleep.
The first line, opposing matter and spirit, mind and body, is powerful, but the second line is sublime. In ten syllables there is life against death, many (our) against one (life), and miraculously the limited (little) with the infinite (rounded).
I love The Tempest. I see those lines like this: We awake to our lives and then die again (our lives are rounded at both ends by sleep). And while we are alive, we are living what we create, as we create our dreams--only to have it all disappear again with death. So yes, life/death, awake/asleep, dreams/reality. To me, those are the opposing forces in those lines.
And there's more:
audience/actor, we not including you/we including you, imagination/real-life
Love how these four spare sentences keep dilating the meaning more and more open, with more and more possibility - till the final words are just that!
This is a great little story on its own. It also would be a very effective intro to a longer story.
At first, Magellan liked it. The feeling of the eggs ripening in his brood pouch. He felt his chest swell with the ongoing importance of tending to the next generation.
Later on, after the kids were born, there was so much to do, like trying to teach them how to catch copepods and enough camouflage and awareness to prevent them from careening into the mouth of a bluefish.
Whenever his partner came by to check on them, he wanted her to know he was doing everything exactly right. However, he always seemed to end up overcooking the Mysis and she would roll her eyes.
In the end, after the kids had left the seaweed clump they called home to go to school and he was finally left alone, he wondered where the time had gone.
Maybe he should have worried less and had more fun. But then things might’ve fallen apart.
Who was he kidding? Things had fallen apart just the same. His parents were long gone. His dear best friends? He wished he’d stayed in better touch so he would’ve had someone to talk with about all of it now.
He remembered a day at the jetty. He’d laughed with his friends so hard over a joke that bits of algae had sprayed out of his rostrum and they’d all turned sideways with mirth, wiggling their fins with no sound coming out they were laughing so hard.
He wondered how he’d let an entire year go by, a good chunk of his life, without calling back his best friends. There was really only himself to blame.
He wondered if they were even out there and whether there was still time to meet up again before his watery eyes closed over all briny and he died.
[Note: although male pipefish do carry the eggs until they hatch, they don’t actually tend to their young once they’re hatched as far as I know.]
What a great concept! Somehow, having a little fish go through all of this hit me in my core. I think we should all worry less and have more fun! And call those friends.
Thanks, yes! Your story inspired the eye rolling at overcooked dinner part.
I knew it sounded familiar....
Absolutely loved those first two sentences - and then it only built from there, so beautifully!
Poor little pipefish has so much on his mind, never a chance to just relax and be anymore.
Thanks for adding the explanation at the end. I enjoyed the story but had no idea what the real life animal was, or even if there really was one at all.