I want to remind everyone that I am in NO WAY asking you to reveal a REAL secret about yourself! Make something up! Have fun with it! Write a little FICTIONAL piece! And to all who read these pieces as they are posted: remember they are all fiction!
Who cares, fiction or faction, matters not a jot so long as these stories carry along on the narrative that flows from action?
"OK, so what, I made it all up, or maybe not quite so much as all... no, you don't mean to say, surely you can't think, you know, about THAT shower scene in Psycho, that Hitchcock made that up... he wasn't some sicko who dreamt up such a shocker, he was just a guy who, you might say, was given to reading The People and The News of the World after going to church early Sunday mornings. Wasn't he?"
Do well by her John, this respected Fiction in whom you delight and have good reason to hope that you'll continue to find inspiration to launch fresh stories out upon the realms of your readers.
Thank you, Rob. Unfortunately I was simply trying to curry favour with the goddess Fiction, whom In fact I take for a nasty old harridan with yellow teeth and the knuckles of a prizefighter. Fiction will now destroy any attempt I make to write anything any good for the next few hours.
So it seems that it is not only that fella who goes by the name of Damocles that wields a blade that cuts both ways... this Fiction is just such fine-edged force in this Creative Writing Realm whose highways and byways along we daily tread our way,,, choosing our words with care but not constrained by undue caution.
I had fun with this one. But coming up with the "big secret" was hard for me! Also, letting one sentence lead to the next--well, eventually you've got to edit and shape your draft into a story, which I haven't quite done here. But hey, it's just an exercise! Here's what I ended up writing this morning:
I never told this to anyone but perhaps I should. I’ve thought about telling my therapist, but we’ve got a good relationship going and I don’t want her thinking that I’ve been lying this whole time. I haven’t been. Well, I suppose it depends on your definition of lying. If lying includes leaving out certain details, then yes, I am a liar. But I’ve never out and out said untrue things. She’s not a very good therapist anyway. I swear there have been days when she has fallen asleep while I’m talking to her. Her eyes, they actually shut. Closed. I take it as a message that she’s tired of hearing the same-old, same-old. But I haven’t got anything new to tell her, unless I tell her the thing I do not want to tell her. She likes me. I know she does. And if I tell her what I don’t want to tell her, she won’t like me anymore. Or she’ll be afraid of me. Sometimes I test her to see what she remembers of what I’ve already told her, because over the years I’ve given her pieces, bit by bit, and if she was really paying attention and not falling asleep so much, I think by now she’d be able to put two and two together. But because she likes me—I’ve made sure she likes me—she doesn’t go there. She just sits across from me with those big round eyes, nodding, and every once in a while saying something like, “I know you’re a good mother,” or “I know you’re a kind person.” Things like that that show how little she knows me though I sit here week after week, giving her hints as to who I really am. Sigh. I’ll give her a little bit longer. I mean, I’ve put so much into this already, worked so hard, laid down the cards in such an obvious fashion, told her in my own way exactly who I am. Is it my fault she doesn’t see it?
i recently had lunch with a friend, a therapist, who referred me a long time ago to the therapist I saw for years. My friend and I talked about why I eventually stopped, and I admitted I never really got the point of the whole exercise, since my on-the-fly editing skills were far more exciting than truth-telling and fact-based.
I never really got the point of the whole exercise but not because of my on-the-fly editing skills. More because I just did not see any improvement in myself. Or relief. The only thing that helped me was time going by. The further away in time from the shit that put me where I was, the better. And now I'm old! It's all way back there! yay! (Though of course, I still have ISSUES.)
I love your dark humour Mary! We never find out what's the big secret, but we sure learn a lot about this therapist she's trying so hard to impress. Loved "we’ve got a good relationship going"... :)
It's a really great prompt. So relieved to read you found the initial secret tricky too. I found it hard to get past the thought, 'but is this a good enough secret', until I to just get writing and play with it.
I never told anyone about the affair with the engineer at the mining site near Kumasi. I traipsed through the smallholder plots wearing purple cowboy boots, their braided tassels swaying with my hips. He explained the company’s community outreach while the sweat beaded on his fragile neck tendons and ran down under his white cotton shirt. Later, we looked at each across the crowd of exuberant Ghanaians, across the platters of fufu and roasted goat, across the continents of difference between us.
I never told this to anyone before, but I used to play the accordion in a bluegrass band. I wasn’t much of an accordion player, but my boyfriend was the lead singer and I couldn’t master the guitar, perhaps because I had two fingers missing on my right hand, the result of an unfortunate incident involving the drummer. The rest of the band all threatened to quit because the accordion didn’t fit in a bluegrass band, but they came around when we made it big with our hit called "You Cannot Fuck Around with Love."
I never told this to anyone, but the man you all knew as my father – that red-cheeked fellow with the booming laugh and the suspenders holding up his Santa Claus belly – was no relation to me at all. He was, however, the only father I ever knew, since he won me in a poker game in Nebraska when I was only a few months old. As I heard the story, he went into the game with the intention of winning money, not an infant. The other players, he said, had him pegged as the loser, since he had just stopped into the bar for a bite to eat on his way to California.
After he cleaned out the other five, four of them paid up, and the fifth just sat there looking despondent. Then he reached down to the floor behind him, picked up a car seat with a sleeping baby – me – and put it on the table. “This is all I got,” he said, “and now I don’t have money to feed her.”
My father would have given the man all the money he’d won. He felt bad for me, and there would be other poker games along the road. But one of the other men – leaning forward to reveal the gun in his jacket pocket – whispered to him to take the baby, get back in his car, and drive away.
“Why didn’t you take me to the police station?” I asked once. “Or a hospital, or something?”
My father had his own reasons for not wanting to stop at the police station. The hospital didn’t occur to him, as he’d never been to one in his life. Also, he was doubtful about who I really belonged to. “For all I knew, that guy could’ve won you in a poker game, too,” he said. So he tended to agree with the gun-toter that he was best off getting out of town as fast as he could.
By the time he reached California, he had made up a whole backstory, one that he used fairly consistently for the rest of his life: His house in Maryland had burned down, destroying everything, including (conveniently) my birth certificate; his wife had died in the fire; and he wanted to start a new life somewhere that didn’t remind him of the old one. This last part, I think, was true.
Well, that got dark. Thanks, Mary! Great bit of Monday fun, as always.
————————————
I never told this to anyone, but I left my son on a bus once. Not that I didn’t try telling anyone – I did. I tried telling my wife but the words just wouldn’t come out. They were there, kinda swirling around in my mouth, but when I opened up, they seeped away somewhere. That was the day of. In the months and years that followed, the words slowly stopped coming into my mouth at all until one day, the words had completely gone. As if my mind was choosing to ignore or forget what happened.
By then, things had gotten a little easier. Easier than when the police kept coming round and when we were brought in for questioning. Easier than when we had reporters and TV crews outside the house every day. Easier than when my wife kept asking me what happened and where the fuck is our son and I kept saying, well, nothing. I could have just said that I left him on the bus. I could have said it was an accident and I didn’t mean it and this had all gotten out of control.
But it wouldn’t have been exactly true.
Would it have been more truthful to say that his dad left him on the bus because he was being a pain? Because he was acting up and his dad had told him this was the last straw and that he’d regret it if he kept behaving like that? And then he did? – he kept behaving like that until he found himself alone on the X6 going south through the posh suburbs with walled gardens and black gates.
That might have been the truth at some point. But we’ve come too far now to go back.
I never told anyone. The children were little then. They don’t know and I will not tell them. Of the time when not even a fistful of rice was left in the house. When the crops had withered and the animals were gone. When late in the afternoons, I walked to the town to do what had to be done. When I came home, in the early light of dawn, clutching a few coins for a fistful of rice.
Now the children are grown and I am old. They don’t know of those times and let it be so. I will never tell them or anyone else.
So beautiful - so resonant and touching with this sense of real simplicity or economy to it, like something painted out of a finely restricted color palette -- so strong!
I have never told this to anyone, my dear, although your mother had to be told, of course. Nothing really, simply for reasons of protocol, or we wouldn't have been allowed to marry. You see, my own mother was the Princess Anastasia, daughter of the assassinated Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, though there's nothing for you to be worried about really. The Reds have long since given up seeking out and killing remainders of the Romanov line, even though Vlad "The Bad" Putin, as I'm sure you know, maintains at great expense a secret lodge of the Stalinist Good Ole Boys' Society. That was our joky name for them in the Secret Service, and that's another little thing I never told you about. When you were a girl at school, I wasn't just a City chap in bowler hat and pinstripes, I worked for MI99, the Elimination Squad, you know. Did I kill people, well, dear, only the ones that thoroughly deserved it – except when there was an operational cock-up, excuse my French, and some innocent people had to die for the general good. I wasn't involved with those, personally, but I did have a close call or two with the Popovs' tea-and-polonium boys in the days before Novichok. No real problems at all, except for an old lady who got in the way.
I do hope I'm not frightening you with all this talk, you do look a little pale, my dear. The fact is... The truth is, what I must tell you is that you're not my daughter at all. You're an orphan we drafted in to flesh out the family picture, so to speak. You do understand, don't you?
Eleanor – what's that thing in your hand?
Nothing to worry about, Daddy, just a little gift from Vlad. Be a good boy, sniff it up. It'll do you good.
The day he confessed “the big secret,” two things happened.: He threw up for an entire afternoon and Princess Diana of Wales was killed in a car accident. The mid-day news came while he was preparing his palm-sized chicken breast with his two cups of salad and fat-fee dressing. He had already constructed his place setting; triangled cloth napkin, plate from the trip to Puerto Rico and a fork and knife that held no significance save for the fact that they were the same fork and knife he used every day. He had been worried about her, Diana, so much so that he had written her a letter, letting her know that she had a friend should she ever be in Milwaukee. Obviously, it wasn’t meant to be serious, but as Dr. Kramer said at his last session, action begets possibility
Oh, i just love it when Dinah is in the house! This one's so good and so funny (though tragic)--and great idea to give the secret to someone else! The therapist in your story is even a worse therapist than the one in the little story I posted. Though I do like "action begets possibility." I think I should post that on the sofa cushion where I sit way too much.
Wow I love so many details in this, and how they all add up to such a specific and intriguing little world - 'his palm-sized chicken breast'... 'triangled cloth napkin'... 'action begets possibility'!
I’m off to walk the dogs, but I made a start: I never told anyone this, but Satan made a play for my soul when I was thirteen. I can see now why he chose the moment—I was at a religious retreat at the convent of the Sisters of Saint Joseph, filled with the Spirit and with Little Debbie snack cakes that had been included in my lunch.
I never told you it was Lionel organized killing the deer. I feel like I should say something since we’re, you know.. He just got back from upriver the second time, maybe third, and first thing Simmy’s all over him to do something about the deer eating her garden. She’s furious the town allows the cute deer to freeload all around and she hires Lionel for ten bucks less than the fence would cost to kill’em all.
Sure, says Lionel, that lippy way of his, bow and arrow he says. I’ll get the boys and we’ll do it at night won’t make a sound. Then we’ll go out to the lake and grill some venison.
A couple of days later Lionel tells Simmy everything’s set. Five guys ready to go five bows and arrows, maybe six or seven deer depending on the night. Something of a moon and partly clear sky. Temperatures mid sixties. Simmy doesn’t want to watch and after eating her salad goes to bed early. Sometime in the night she imagines lights flashing in the yard.
You won’t even know what hit them, said Lionel with that sneer on the left side. Something happened up river made him asymmetrical, you know.
So now here we are years later and it’s hard to tell, but Lionel’s back upriver for life this time. So Simmy wakes up and it’s foggy out there a little bit and first she can’t see nothing outdoors. She makes coffee and sits down to the crossword and gets three words right away and feels pleased because the day before she was skunked. She wonders what happened outside and the yard and everything and slips on her boots for the dew and takes her coffee.
The first deer, a spike horn, lies with an arrow through its neck not far from the porch. The sun has started to burn the fog, she sees more shapes in the grass. When she reaches the garden she looks down and sees blood on her boots, and then, toward the sidewalk another shape. She walks over and drops her cup, buries her face in her hands. It's Betsy Smith lying on her back with an arrow through her twelve year old heart. Her hobby horse, Daisy, still between her legs. So that’s what I'm telling you, and that's why things is screwed up here, and always will be.
Jeepers!!! Now that is one dark story, so well-told. I'm going through it more than once to put together all of the components. Can't quite grasp it, but I'm working on it.
Also, I'm not sure how "up the river" translates in the west. Since it originally referred to going to Sing Sing Prison, which was up the Hudson River from New York City. It turned into generally going to any prison.
I got "up the river" (after a moment). I'd heard that term before. I didn't understand the story the first time because the sentence about life in prison is immediately followed by Simmy waking up. I thought both events were in the present time. So it wasn't until you told me to do some time traveling that I realized i needed to go back in time with Simmy.
Oh, it's fine as is. I just needed more coffee, as usual. Lately, i'm getting very little sleep! Just too much happening in this world and my brain starts ticking....
The conversational thread that your story evoked reminded me of how I imagine my Grandfather Sylvester would have sat with his pals in his butcher shop on Main Street in Sauk Center, telling stories. Yours would have been a whopper, and everyone else would have spoken up at the end of your storytelling with a reaction or recounted memory. Its a great example of how storytelling has always brought people together.
That's a nice observation, Joan. That's one thing I really like here, how folks pick up on a story and extend it. Often with humor. There have been times in my life where/when this happened in real time/place, but not now, so it means a lot it happens here.
So Sammi is eating salad while the garden-eating deer are getting killed. Nice touch. (Being in the city I don't have many deer problems, but just visited a friend who has what could be a beautiful garden that has been completely munched. So many tooth marks on leaves and flower stalks. Plants eaten RIGHT OUTSIDE the bedroom window. Bunnies are problematic as well.)
I got it immediately--maybe because I live where deer and elk are a constant nuisance if you garden. But I don't know anyone who's shot the deer eating their gardens, and if they had, they wouldn't tell anyone.
Well, this is fiction. Totally. though all the things that happen in this story have happened sometime, somewhere. In Maine it's common for certain Lionel types to jack lots of deer, sometimes a homeowner can get permission to shoot a problem deer bothering a garden, and people get shot accidentally every hunting season, and other times too. So, in my mind, the story is plausible, not that that matters . But this is more a story of the Northeast than anywhere else.
I didn't think it was a true story, but I understood the plausibility. Here where I live, Evergreen CO, I've heard that it is legal to hunt out of season on your own property (don't quote me on that). Once a friend complained of an arrow whizzing past. This is still the wild west. Only a few miles west of Denver, we've got cougars, foxes, bears, bob cats. I've seen a bear and fox right outside my door, and deer and elk many times, but don't care if I never see a wild cat. And the little fawns are SO cute.
Yes, the fauns are so cute ! In Port Townsend where I live now, or nearby, there are scores of tame deer that meander through the neighhborhoods any time of day. They're not at all intimidated by humans. If I was hungry I'd be tempted, though I have never shot a deer, so I don't know. I could have once when I hunted with my father, but chose not to. In Maine killing deer was so expected guys would ask me in the fall, "did you get your deer?" Well, no. Not yet. :)
we had SO many deer on Bainbridge. They were the enemy! Cute but they eat your garden. Deer and slugs. (One time, i had a bear in my backyard! It must have walked across the Agate Point Bridge.)
Bear are good swimmers. They would turn up on islands miles from the mainland in Maine. There was a Bainbridge Bear not long ago. My family lives on the south end on Lytle, a short walk from the beach. I don't love Bainbridge, but it's a cool spot.
Same here. The deer walk right up to my patio, and we look at each other. They are tame because they don't expect to be hunted here. If you began to fire at them, they wouldn't be tame anymore. Same, I think, with deer's fear of cougars, they think they are safe here, but I have no doubt that wildcats are out there. I live in a fairly built-up area, but we're surrounded by forest and meadows. Someone took a picture of a big cat, in front of the next-door building. Bears get into the dumpsters at the grocery store and on Main St. Everyone has a bear story to tell.
One morning before dawn, I looked out my window and saw an elk herd, possibly 100 elk, right outside the house. I had a light on inside, and one elk stared at me, just as curious about me as I was about her. Definitely, don't get too close to elk during rutting season. Occasionally people get gored. And I heard that someone was attacked by a mother elk when she deemed the person was too close to her baby.
I like how it conjures an image of physical asymmetry - for me what comes up first is a bent nose - but it's left wide open for a good wonder, what would it mean for a person to be asymmetrical?
Right, the nose comes first to mind. Crooked noses are common. Then what? If you look around, especially this time of year when people aren't wearing much, there's lots of asymmetry in bodies, especially in older people. One of my goals is to stay symmetrical as long as possible ! But it's starting to sound like fertile ground for stories, don't you think?
As an older person who is trying to maintain her symmetry, I understand the physical symmetry the phrase brings to mind, but the idea of mental or emotional asymmetry that one might develop "up the river" is even more powerful. [And I grew up one town north of Ossining so the Sing-Sing allusion made immediate sense.]
If I'd spent more time on it I probably would have tinkered with the time, but I was a day late, and impatient. Besides, it's fun to see how people respond to those kinds of things.
There were many secrets she didn’t teach her class.
She didn’t tell them about Darwin. She couldn’t bring herself to go into Special let alone General relativity, she didn’t have the heart to mention Descartes’ Cogito, and she shivered at the thought of interesting them in Wittgenstein’s logic and language. What worried her wasn’t just or even particularly that her class were only just 9 years old. It was the danger of presenting them with complete and successful ideas that bothered her. In fact, the only thing that frightened her more was the danger of not teaching these things.
So, she taught them entirely nothing, though you’d be a sharp parent or headteacher who noticed. She was, in many ways, a placebo. She didn’t tell them she was teaching nothing, she didn’t advertise the fact to parents, she simply guided every moment around from one observation to a question, then from that to a further question, and from there to another and another, until at the end of each day her students’ heads were so full of their own observations and questions that they had no space to realise there was nothing there to grab hold of at all. And, in accordance with what we know about a placebo, the children in her class got as smart, often even smarter, than the children in other classes who were fed a true diet of facts, theories, principles and knowledge.
Yow! Since I live in a state where it has become illegal to teach many things we know are true, this hit me like the wild, murderous heat and crazy flooding that. can't possibly be attributed to [shhh] climate change.
I never told this to anyone, but I walked away from myself. Back in 1981. I was 20-year-old Marty Jameson. I’d never known my father and my mother kicked me out when I was 17. I banged around until I got married at 18. A mean man. I ran from him twice, but he chased me down. By 1980, we were squatting in an abandoned trailer in Napa. Our pattern changed. Instead of me running, he’d come and go, mostly go. When he’d come home, it was terrible, so I always hoped he was going for good each time he left. Anyway, I was pretty much alone in the world. I started working part time in a store in Soda Canyon in December, but by June, I’d been told that if I didn’t shape up, I’d be fired. On June 22, all hell broke loose. A huge fire. I was working when we all realized we’d have to run for it. I got into the old Ford my husband had left behind and started following the others through the ash and smoke. Of course I ran out of gas. Stranded. I sat there thinking maybe the best thing to do would be to just let the fire have its way with me. But the idea of being burnt up was just too much. So, I cried. Then, I had a thought. I left my wallet in the car along with all the other junk in there and ran. The road was busy, everyone fleeing. The folks who knew me looked the other way. But a couple of tourists saw me. They pulled over and opened the back door. I hopped in. I told them my name was Amanda. I rode with them to San Jose. They offered me a place to sleep for a couple of nights, but I declined. Things were rough after that, and I don’t like to think about it. But, by December 1981, I was Amanda Bast. I had a job. I had a room in a rundown boarding house. I read in the paper that Marty Johnson was presumed to have perished in her car in the fire and that made me happy. What a thing, to be happy to read that you were dead. But that was what I was: happy. Anyway, here it is more than forty years on and I’m glad no one remembers Marty.
I never told anyone this, but all the time you — and the rest — were thinking it was me in the corner that day, it wasn’t. I think you all thought I’d go straight to the corner, given my penchant for sulking there when confronted.
Here’s the thing. I never thought I’d been confronted. If I had felt confronted, I think I probably would have gone to sit in the corner. But the incident that morning didn’t rise to the level of confrontation. A confrontation would have been in my face every waking hour, but this, well, let’s just say I was over it before I finished my oatmeal.
I always figured the rest orchestrated the incident, such as it was, thinking it would have driven me to the corner. Then they’d have free reign. I figured that it might have worked if you had been part of it, because I thought you had my number. The rest never did, not really, so they could never truly confront me.
From where I sit now it’s sad to realize you never knew that it wasn’t me in the corner. I know it might have looked and smelled like me, wearing my clothes, my rings, my cologne, but I thought you would have known by the tilt of the head that it wasn’t me there in the corner. The rest were too busy laughing and singing to really look, thinking they finally had the run of the place. But I’d hoped you would have known, knowing me the way I thought you did. But you didn’t know it wasn’t me. I guess you didn’t know me the way I thought you knew me. And I’m sad about that. And I have to speak my truth, that I’m sad. And that’s why I’m finally telling you, that wasn’t me in the corner.
this is a great read, and here I am filled with mystery and wanting to know so much more! "my rings, my cologne...." Oh, Kevin, this world you've created! (multiple personalities, is all I can think....)
Thanks Mary. I don't know who these people are, and now you mention it, maybe they are one person, and that's a fascinating impression to leave. But they came in loud and clear when listening to an REM song (Losing my religion).
well, I'm glad it's not so glaringly obvious to everyone; i can't get the tune out of my head now. Sort of dangerous to use something that's hooky and maybe distracting from the story.
I never told this to anyone, but sometimes in idle moments I run through in my mind, with great attention to detail, what would happen if those close to me were to die. It’s not a fantasy, in the strict sense. I do this with people I love, and I do it with people whose existence is so stitched into my own life that their absence would mean I would also cease my being, somehow, by degrees. Occasionally, I have cooked up these scenarios when the person in question is just on the other end of a phone line. About those times in particular, I do feel a little badly. On the other hand, I usually conclude these imaginations, with a shade of contrition, considering just how glad I am that they are only imaginations after all and that the person is still there, on the other end of the line, maybe only present as a purr of breathing, as we have by this point likely come to a pause in conversation.
I used to do it about my parents, before they really did pass away. Of course, actual deaths have nothing in common with the imagined ones, except that it was impossible not to feel some sense of deja vu, during the actual unfolding of a memorial service, or when asked to share a few words. Or, call it inverse deja vu, suffused with surprise that the actuality falls so far from what has been scripted already, so many times over.
I wonder if you have also done this, during our phone calls together or when your eyes glaze up and I discover suddenly that I am also bored by whatever I have been saying. I think it would comfort me, somewhat, if I knew that you did this for me. I wish I could discover what words you have rehearsed saying, when you found out the news. I wish even that I could know about the heady melodrama parts of the play, where you find out I left everything to you after all, even after all the bad blood, that I really did keep caring. And you would practice tearing up with surprise, that you had never let yourself hope for such a thing, not really.
The way you led me to your third paragraph is so well done. It's like you snuck it in there--and yet, once I realized who this narrator was talking to, it seemed inevitable. Really amazing.
This is so cool to hear - especially because of the weirdness of not having known myself, at any point while writing, what each sentence would lead to next. It's really somehow oddly comforting to find oneself standing next to the reader, in curiosity, in that state of "hmm.. what's happening here?"
Can't say I imagined a friend dying when we were speaking on the phone, but once when I was a teen talking to my friend on a landline during a storm, she said a lightning flash came out of her phone. We hung up.
I want to remind everyone that I am in NO WAY asking you to reveal a REAL secret about yourself! Make something up! Have fun with it! Write a little FICTIONAL piece! And to all who read these pieces as they are posted: remember they are all fiction!
But are they really??
Who cares, fiction or faction, matters not a jot so long as these stories carry along on the narrative that flows from action?
"OK, so what, I made it all up, or maybe not quite so much as all... no, you don't mean to say, surely you can't think, you know, about THAT shower scene in Psycho, that Hitchcock made that up... he wasn't some sicko who dreamt up such a shocker, he was just a guy who, you might say, was given to reading The People and The News of the World after going to church early Sunday mornings. Wasn't he?"
Oh, I'm doing fiction all the way! ;)
And does Fiction manage to stand-up after you've gone all the way in doing him over Juan?
Rob!
Fiction is a delightful young lady for whom I have the greatest respect, Rob!
Do well by her John, this respected Fiction in whom you delight and have good reason to hope that you'll continue to find inspiration to launch fresh stories out upon the realms of your readers.
Thank you, Rob. Unfortunately I was simply trying to curry favour with the goddess Fiction, whom In fact I take for a nasty old harridan with yellow teeth and the knuckles of a prizefighter. Fiction will now destroy any attempt I make to write anything any good for the next few hours.
See if I care!
So it seems that it is not only that fella who goes by the name of Damocles that wields a blade that cuts both ways... this Fiction is just such fine-edged force in this Creative Writing Realm whose highways and byways along we daily tread our way,,, choosing our words with care but not constrained by undue caution.
Here John...
click https://africanyouthvoices.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/optical-illusion-image-post.jpg
and write an opening line sparked by what you see?
I had fun with this one. But coming up with the "big secret" was hard for me! Also, letting one sentence lead to the next--well, eventually you've got to edit and shape your draft into a story, which I haven't quite done here. But hey, it's just an exercise! Here's what I ended up writing this morning:
I never told this to anyone but perhaps I should. I’ve thought about telling my therapist, but we’ve got a good relationship going and I don’t want her thinking that I’ve been lying this whole time. I haven’t been. Well, I suppose it depends on your definition of lying. If lying includes leaving out certain details, then yes, I am a liar. But I’ve never out and out said untrue things. She’s not a very good therapist anyway. I swear there have been days when she has fallen asleep while I’m talking to her. Her eyes, they actually shut. Closed. I take it as a message that she’s tired of hearing the same-old, same-old. But I haven’t got anything new to tell her, unless I tell her the thing I do not want to tell her. She likes me. I know she does. And if I tell her what I don’t want to tell her, she won’t like me anymore. Or she’ll be afraid of me. Sometimes I test her to see what she remembers of what I’ve already told her, because over the years I’ve given her pieces, bit by bit, and if she was really paying attention and not falling asleep so much, I think by now she’d be able to put two and two together. But because she likes me—I’ve made sure she likes me—she doesn’t go there. She just sits across from me with those big round eyes, nodding, and every once in a while saying something like, “I know you’re a good mother,” or “I know you’re a kind person.” Things like that that show how little she knows me though I sit here week after week, giving her hints as to who I really am. Sigh. I’ll give her a little bit longer. I mean, I’ve put so much into this already, worked so hard, laid down the cards in such an obvious fashion, told her in my own way exactly who I am. Is it my fault she doesn’t see it?
i recently had lunch with a friend, a therapist, who referred me a long time ago to the therapist I saw for years. My friend and I talked about why I eventually stopped, and I admitted I never really got the point of the whole exercise, since my on-the-fly editing skills were far more exciting than truth-telling and fact-based.
I never really got the point of the whole exercise but not because of my on-the-fly editing skills. More because I just did not see any improvement in myself. Or relief. The only thing that helped me was time going by. The further away in time from the shit that put me where I was, the better. And now I'm old! It's all way back there! yay! (Though of course, I still have ISSUES.)
You can put that "old" stuff out of your head.
time, and using all that as material, one way or another.
Sounds like therapy is good for your fiction writing.
But actually, I'm skeptical of therapy for artists. If you feel good, what's the point.
Yes, but it's the feeling good part that can be tough sometimes.
I love your dark humour Mary! We never find out what's the big secret, but we sure learn a lot about this therapist she's trying so hard to impress. Loved "we’ve got a good relationship going"... :)
Thanks, Imola!
It's a really great prompt. So relieved to read you found the initial secret tricky too. I found it hard to get past the thought, 'but is this a good enough secret', until I to just get writing and play with it.
I surprised myself with my own lack of imagination!
And we never get to know what that secret was. (I'm sure with all that build-up any kind of secret once revealed would be a let-down!)
(I never knew what the secret was....)
Whoa, Mary. I'm suddenly very afraid for that therapist with the big round eyes...
This is good.
"...giving her hints as to who I really am." Powerful, playful and a puzzle.
Or in the case of a friend who tells me she needs a third therapist because she's lying to the other two.
Wow. And that could be the beginning of "I've never told anyone this before, but I've been lying to my two therapists..."
hahaha! Yeah, people do it all the time.
I never told anyone about the affair with the engineer at the mining site near Kumasi. I traipsed through the smallholder plots wearing purple cowboy boots, their braided tassels swaying with my hips. He explained the company’s community outreach while the sweat beaded on his fragile neck tendons and ran down under his white cotton shirt. Later, we looked at each across the crowd of exuberant Ghanaians, across the platters of fufu and roasted goat, across the continents of difference between us.
This is so perfect.
Really, purple cowboy boots?
And nothing else, I'm wondering.
Control yourselves boys
We're old hands, Julie.
Though that may not be the best way of putting it.
And exactly where is the squirrel?^^
Streaking up the Kapok tree over to the right, with a mouthful of fufu.
I've wondered about the squirrel too.
From Julie's page regarding her Substack: "Better than Vogon poetry but best read alone in the woods to rodents."
The squirrel is panting with anticipation about what happens with the tassel …
The squirrel gets all the fun :(
Love it. Fufu and goat and continents of difference.
I never told this to anyone before, but I used to play the accordion in a bluegrass band. I wasn’t much of an accordion player, but my boyfriend was the lead singer and I couldn’t master the guitar, perhaps because I had two fingers missing on my right hand, the result of an unfortunate incident involving the drummer. The rest of the band all threatened to quit because the accordion didn’t fit in a bluegrass band, but they came around when we made it big with our hit called "You Cannot Fuck Around with Love."
Oh my god! Too funny!
Love this, particularly the unfortunate incident involving the drummer!
Thanks Janet. I've only recently begun to write fiction. I'm still learning how to make things up!
What a perfect final note!
That's the only true part. I had a drama teacher at Berkeley who "starred" in a musical in San Francisco. That was the anthem. Guess what year it was?
I would pay to listen to that song...!
[Well, this was interesting.]
I never told this to anyone, but the man you all knew as my father – that red-cheeked fellow with the booming laugh and the suspenders holding up his Santa Claus belly – was no relation to me at all. He was, however, the only father I ever knew, since he won me in a poker game in Nebraska when I was only a few months old. As I heard the story, he went into the game with the intention of winning money, not an infant. The other players, he said, had him pegged as the loser, since he had just stopped into the bar for a bite to eat on his way to California.
After he cleaned out the other five, four of them paid up, and the fifth just sat there looking despondent. Then he reached down to the floor behind him, picked up a car seat with a sleeping baby – me – and put it on the table. “This is all I got,” he said, “and now I don’t have money to feed her.”
My father would have given the man all the money he’d won. He felt bad for me, and there would be other poker games along the road. But one of the other men – leaning forward to reveal the gun in his jacket pocket – whispered to him to take the baby, get back in his car, and drive away.
“Why didn’t you take me to the police station?” I asked once. “Or a hospital, or something?”
My father had his own reasons for not wanting to stop at the police station. The hospital didn’t occur to him, as he’d never been to one in his life. Also, he was doubtful about who I really belonged to. “For all I knew, that guy could’ve won you in a poker game, too,” he said. So he tended to agree with the gun-toter that he was best off getting out of town as fast as he could.
By the time he reached California, he had made up a whole backstory, one that he used fairly consistently for the rest of his life: His house in Maryland had burned down, destroying everything, including (conveniently) my birth certificate; his wife had died in the fire; and he wanted to start a new life somewhere that didn’t remind him of the old one. This last part, I think, was true.
Fantastic, in all the meanings of that word.
thanks!
Wow, great one! I really like how the last line makes the whole thing ring.
Totally in love with this story! Well done!
And now the cat's out of the bag, I want to hear more.
I wish I knew more!
Well, that got dark. Thanks, Mary! Great bit of Monday fun, as always.
————————————
I never told this to anyone, but I left my son on a bus once. Not that I didn’t try telling anyone – I did. I tried telling my wife but the words just wouldn’t come out. They were there, kinda swirling around in my mouth, but when I opened up, they seeped away somewhere. That was the day of. In the months and years that followed, the words slowly stopped coming into my mouth at all until one day, the words had completely gone. As if my mind was choosing to ignore or forget what happened.
By then, things had gotten a little easier. Easier than when the police kept coming round and when we were brought in for questioning. Easier than when we had reporters and TV crews outside the house every day. Easier than when my wife kept asking me what happened and where the fuck is our son and I kept saying, well, nothing. I could have just said that I left him on the bus. I could have said it was an accident and I didn’t mean it and this had all gotten out of control.
But it wouldn’t have been exactly true.
Would it have been more truthful to say that his dad left him on the bus because he was being a pain? Because he was acting up and his dad had told him this was the last straw and that he’d regret it if he kept behaving like that? And then he did? – he kept behaving like that until he found himself alone on the X6 going south through the posh suburbs with walled gardens and black gates.
That might have been the truth at some point. But we’ve come too far now to go back.
So dark. And so good. Wow.
This begs for a sequel.
I never told anyone. The children were little then. They don’t know and I will not tell them. Of the time when not even a fistful of rice was left in the house. When the crops had withered and the animals were gone. When late in the afternoons, I walked to the town to do what had to be done. When I came home, in the early light of dawn, clutching a few coins for a fistful of rice.
Now the children are grown and I am old. They don’t know of those times and let it be so. I will never tell them or anyone else.
beautiful.
So beautiful - so resonant and touching with this sense of real simplicity or economy to it, like something painted out of a finely restricted color palette -- so strong!
Thanks Danielle, for your wonderful comments. I am glad you liked it!
I have never told this to anyone, my dear, although your mother had to be told, of course. Nothing really, simply for reasons of protocol, or we wouldn't have been allowed to marry. You see, my own mother was the Princess Anastasia, daughter of the assassinated Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, though there's nothing for you to be worried about really. The Reds have long since given up seeking out and killing remainders of the Romanov line, even though Vlad "The Bad" Putin, as I'm sure you know, maintains at great expense a secret lodge of the Stalinist Good Ole Boys' Society. That was our joky name for them in the Secret Service, and that's another little thing I never told you about. When you were a girl at school, I wasn't just a City chap in bowler hat and pinstripes, I worked for MI99, the Elimination Squad, you know. Did I kill people, well, dear, only the ones that thoroughly deserved it – except when there was an operational cock-up, excuse my French, and some innocent people had to die for the general good. I wasn't involved with those, personally, but I did have a close call or two with the Popovs' tea-and-polonium boys in the days before Novichok. No real problems at all, except for an old lady who got in the way.
I do hope I'm not frightening you with all this talk, you do look a little pale, my dear. The fact is... The truth is, what I must tell you is that you're not my daughter at all. You're an orphan we drafted in to flesh out the family picture, so to speak. You do understand, don't you?
Eleanor – what's that thing in your hand?
Nothing to worry about, Daddy, just a little gift from Vlad. Be a good boy, sniff it up. It'll do you good.
WOW.
What a great voice! "tea-and-polonium boys"!
Now, that is a story I would read!!
I love all the threads you wove together to come up with that boom of an ending!
Thank you, Angela. I just followed prompter's instructions and let one sentence follow another. And ended up as John Le Carré chanelling John Cleese.
Oh, I like the idea of a Le Carré/Cleese mashup!
Okay heres my stab at this
The day he confessed “the big secret,” two things happened.: He threw up for an entire afternoon and Princess Diana of Wales was killed in a car accident. The mid-day news came while he was preparing his palm-sized chicken breast with his two cups of salad and fat-fee dressing. He had already constructed his place setting; triangled cloth napkin, plate from the trip to Puerto Rico and a fork and knife that held no significance save for the fact that they were the same fork and knife he used every day. He had been worried about her, Diana, so much so that he had written her a letter, letting her know that she had a friend should she ever be in Milwaukee. Obviously, it wasn’t meant to be serious, but as Dr. Kramer said at his last session, action begets possibility
Oh, i just love it when Dinah is in the house! This one's so good and so funny (though tragic)--and great idea to give the secret to someone else! The therapist in your story is even a worse therapist than the one in the little story I posted. Though I do like "action begets possibility." I think I should post that on the sofa cushion where I sit way too much.
Wow I love so many details in this, and how they all add up to such a specific and intriguing little world - 'his palm-sized chicken breast'... 'triangled cloth napkin'... 'action begets possibility'!
Hi there! Yes, you with the curious stare.
removed
Well done! I love the toe box line.
but what about the other one? When are you going to drop it?
So creative and so well crafted! Totally artisanal cobbling work! (:
I’m off to walk the dogs, but I made a start: I never told anyone this, but Satan made a play for my soul when I was thirteen. I can see now why he chose the moment—I was at a religious retreat at the convent of the Sisters of Saint Joseph, filled with the Spirit and with Little Debbie snack cakes that had been included in my lunch.
Yes, I'm with John. Love this start.
So those Little Debbie snack cakes...truly evil stuff.
Do finish it.
Above all tell us if he offered you even more Little Debbie snack cakes. Those Sisters can be stingy.
I’m an old lady now and wouldn’t sell my soul for a Little Debbie snack cake, but when I was thirteen…
Let's hear about it!
I never told you it was Lionel organized killing the deer. I feel like I should say something since we’re, you know.. He just got back from upriver the second time, maybe third, and first thing Simmy’s all over him to do something about the deer eating her garden. She’s furious the town allows the cute deer to freeload all around and she hires Lionel for ten bucks less than the fence would cost to kill’em all.
Sure, says Lionel, that lippy way of his, bow and arrow he says. I’ll get the boys and we’ll do it at night won’t make a sound. Then we’ll go out to the lake and grill some venison.
A couple of days later Lionel tells Simmy everything’s set. Five guys ready to go five bows and arrows, maybe six or seven deer depending on the night. Something of a moon and partly clear sky. Temperatures mid sixties. Simmy doesn’t want to watch and after eating her salad goes to bed early. Sometime in the night she imagines lights flashing in the yard.
You won’t even know what hit them, said Lionel with that sneer on the left side. Something happened up river made him asymmetrical, you know.
So now here we are years later and it’s hard to tell, but Lionel’s back upriver for life this time. So Simmy wakes up and it’s foggy out there a little bit and first she can’t see nothing outdoors. She makes coffee and sits down to the crossword and gets three words right away and feels pleased because the day before she was skunked. She wonders what happened outside and the yard and everything and slips on her boots for the dew and takes her coffee.
The first deer, a spike horn, lies with an arrow through its neck not far from the porch. The sun has started to burn the fog, she sees more shapes in the grass. When she reaches the garden she looks down and sees blood on her boots, and then, toward the sidewalk another shape. She walks over and drops her cup, buries her face in her hands. It's Betsy Smith lying on her back with an arrow through her twelve year old heart. Her hobby horse, Daisy, still between her legs. So that’s what I'm telling you, and that's why things is screwed up here, and always will be.
Jeepers!!! Now that is one dark story, so well-told. I'm going through it more than once to put together all of the components. Can't quite grasp it, but I'm working on it.
Ha. You may have to do some time traveling. Don't look too closely. No editing on this one.
oh, i just got it. Wow. Great story!!!!
Also, I'm not sure how "up the river" translates in the west. Since it originally referred to going to Sing Sing Prison, which was up the Hudson River from New York City. It turned into generally going to any prison.
I got "up the river" (after a moment). I'd heard that term before. I didn't understand the story the first time because the sentence about life in prison is immediately followed by Simmy waking up. I thought both events were in the present time. So it wasn't until you told me to do some time traveling that I realized i needed to go back in time with Simmy.
I do work at trying to make time non linear in stories, but realize this one could be tuned up.
Oh, it's fine as is. I just needed more coffee, as usual. Lately, i'm getting very little sleep! Just too much happening in this world and my brain starts ticking....
The conversational thread that your story evoked reminded me of how I imagine my Grandfather Sylvester would have sat with his pals in his butcher shop on Main Street in Sauk Center, telling stories. Yours would have been a whopper, and everyone else would have spoken up at the end of your storytelling with a reaction or recounted memory. Its a great example of how storytelling has always brought people together.
That's a nice observation, Joan. That's one thing I really like here, how folks pick up on a story and extend it. Often with humor. There have been times in my life where/when this happened in real time/place, but not now, so it means a lot it happens here.
So Sammi is eating salad while the garden-eating deer are getting killed. Nice touch. (Being in the city I don't have many deer problems, but just visited a friend who has what could be a beautiful garden that has been completely munched. So many tooth marks on leaves and flower stalks. Plants eaten RIGHT OUTSIDE the bedroom window. Bunnies are problematic as well.)
I could probably put your friend in touch with someone who could take care of it
Do you know a bunny hitman?
it'd have to be an interstate task force, NY into PA, back and forth across the Delaware River. No hosta is safe anywhere within 300 miles.
I got it immediately--maybe because I live where deer and elk are a constant nuisance if you garden. But I don't know anyone who's shot the deer eating their gardens, and if they had, they wouldn't tell anyone.
Well, this is fiction. Totally. though all the things that happen in this story have happened sometime, somewhere. In Maine it's common for certain Lionel types to jack lots of deer, sometimes a homeowner can get permission to shoot a problem deer bothering a garden, and people get shot accidentally every hunting season, and other times too. So, in my mind, the story is plausible, not that that matters . But this is more a story of the Northeast than anywhere else.
I didn't think it was a true story, but I understood the plausibility. Here where I live, Evergreen CO, I've heard that it is legal to hunt out of season on your own property (don't quote me on that). Once a friend complained of an arrow whizzing past. This is still the wild west. Only a few miles west of Denver, we've got cougars, foxes, bears, bob cats. I've seen a bear and fox right outside my door, and deer and elk many times, but don't care if I never see a wild cat. And the little fawns are SO cute.
Yes, the fauns are so cute ! In Port Townsend where I live now, or nearby, there are scores of tame deer that meander through the neighhborhoods any time of day. They're not at all intimidated by humans. If I was hungry I'd be tempted, though I have never shot a deer, so I don't know. I could have once when I hunted with my father, but chose not to. In Maine killing deer was so expected guys would ask me in the fall, "did you get your deer?" Well, no. Not yet. :)
we had SO many deer on Bainbridge. They were the enemy! Cute but they eat your garden. Deer and slugs. (One time, i had a bear in my backyard! It must have walked across the Agate Point Bridge.)
Bear are good swimmers. They would turn up on islands miles from the mainland in Maine. There was a Bainbridge Bear not long ago. My family lives on the south end on Lytle, a short walk from the beach. I don't love Bainbridge, but it's a cool spot.
Same here. The deer walk right up to my patio, and we look at each other. They are tame because they don't expect to be hunted here. If you began to fire at them, they wouldn't be tame anymore. Same, I think, with deer's fear of cougars, they think they are safe here, but I have no doubt that wildcats are out there. I live in a fairly built-up area, but we're surrounded by forest and meadows. Someone took a picture of a big cat, in front of the next-door building. Bears get into the dumpsters at the grocery store and on Main St. Everyone has a bear story to tell.
‘If I was hungry I'd be tempted’
Elk!? Yikes.
One morning before dawn, I looked out my window and saw an elk herd, possibly 100 elk, right outside the house. I had a light on inside, and one elk stared at me, just as curious about me as I was about her. Definitely, don't get too close to elk during rutting season. Occasionally people get gored. And I heard that someone was attacked by a mother elk when she deemed the person was too close to her baby.
Oof a tale that knocks the wind out of you! Loved the turn of phrase "Something happened up river made him asymmetrical"
I've wondered what that really means since I wrote it. Most likely a crooked face.
I like how it conjures an image of physical asymmetry - for me what comes up first is a bent nose - but it's left wide open for a good wonder, what would it mean for a person to be asymmetrical?
Right, the nose comes first to mind. Crooked noses are common. Then what? If you look around, especially this time of year when people aren't wearing much, there's lots of asymmetry in bodies, especially in older people. One of my goals is to stay symmetrical as long as possible ! But it's starting to sound like fertile ground for stories, don't you think?
As an older person who is trying to maintain her symmetry, I understand the physical symmetry the phrase brings to mind, but the idea of mental or emotional asymmetry that one might develop "up the river" is even more powerful. [And I grew up one town north of Ossining so the Sing-Sing allusion made immediate sense.]
Understood. We might even want to put mental symmetry in the forefront :)
T,
This is a bit of a shocker!
And the time travel is eccentric, but that's you!
Really?
If I'd spent more time on it I probably would have tinkered with the time, but I was a day late, and impatient. Besides, it's fun to see how people respond to those kinds of things.
There were many secrets she didn’t teach her class.
She didn’t tell them about Darwin. She couldn’t bring herself to go into Special let alone General relativity, she didn’t have the heart to mention Descartes’ Cogito, and she shivered at the thought of interesting them in Wittgenstein’s logic and language. What worried her wasn’t just or even particularly that her class were only just 9 years old. It was the danger of presenting them with complete and successful ideas that bothered her. In fact, the only thing that frightened her more was the danger of not teaching these things.
So, she taught them entirely nothing, though you’d be a sharp parent or headteacher who noticed. She was, in many ways, a placebo. She didn’t tell them she was teaching nothing, she didn’t advertise the fact to parents, she simply guided every moment around from one observation to a question, then from that to a further question, and from there to another and another, until at the end of each day her students’ heads were so full of their own observations and questions that they had no space to realise there was nothing there to grab hold of at all. And, in accordance with what we know about a placebo, the children in her class got as smart, often even smarter, than the children in other classes who were fed a true diet of facts, theories, principles and knowledge.
I like this teacher and I think I'd like to see where she goes next, but for now her day is done.
maybe she stays up at night wondering if we have free will
This is so good!!!!
Yow! Since I live in a state where it has become illegal to teach many things we know are true, this hit me like the wild, murderous heat and crazy flooding that. can't possibly be attributed to [shhh] climate change.
I never told this to anyone, but I walked away from myself. Back in 1981. I was 20-year-old Marty Jameson. I’d never known my father and my mother kicked me out when I was 17. I banged around until I got married at 18. A mean man. I ran from him twice, but he chased me down. By 1980, we were squatting in an abandoned trailer in Napa. Our pattern changed. Instead of me running, he’d come and go, mostly go. When he’d come home, it was terrible, so I always hoped he was going for good each time he left. Anyway, I was pretty much alone in the world. I started working part time in a store in Soda Canyon in December, but by June, I’d been told that if I didn’t shape up, I’d be fired. On June 22, all hell broke loose. A huge fire. I was working when we all realized we’d have to run for it. I got into the old Ford my husband had left behind and started following the others through the ash and smoke. Of course I ran out of gas. Stranded. I sat there thinking maybe the best thing to do would be to just let the fire have its way with me. But the idea of being burnt up was just too much. So, I cried. Then, I had a thought. I left my wallet in the car along with all the other junk in there and ran. The road was busy, everyone fleeing. The folks who knew me looked the other way. But a couple of tourists saw me. They pulled over and opened the back door. I hopped in. I told them my name was Amanda. I rode with them to San Jose. They offered me a place to sleep for a couple of nights, but I declined. Things were rough after that, and I don’t like to think about it. But, by December 1981, I was Amanda Bast. I had a job. I had a room in a rundown boarding house. I read in the paper that Marty Johnson was presumed to have perished in her car in the fire and that made me happy. What a thing, to be happy to read that you were dead. But that was what I was: happy. Anyway, here it is more than forty years on and I’m glad no one remembers Marty.
Fantastic tale! An entire saga in a single paragraph.
Breathtaking! So good
I never told anyone this, but all the time you — and the rest — were thinking it was me in the corner that day, it wasn’t. I think you all thought I’d go straight to the corner, given my penchant for sulking there when confronted.
Here’s the thing. I never thought I’d been confronted. If I had felt confronted, I think I probably would have gone to sit in the corner. But the incident that morning didn’t rise to the level of confrontation. A confrontation would have been in my face every waking hour, but this, well, let’s just say I was over it before I finished my oatmeal.
I always figured the rest orchestrated the incident, such as it was, thinking it would have driven me to the corner. Then they’d have free reign. I figured that it might have worked if you had been part of it, because I thought you had my number. The rest never did, not really, so they could never truly confront me.
From where I sit now it’s sad to realize you never knew that it wasn’t me in the corner. I know it might have looked and smelled like me, wearing my clothes, my rings, my cologne, but I thought you would have known by the tilt of the head that it wasn’t me there in the corner. The rest were too busy laughing and singing to really look, thinking they finally had the run of the place. But I’d hoped you would have known, knowing me the way I thought you did. But you didn’t know it wasn’t me. I guess you didn’t know me the way I thought you knew me. And I’m sad about that. And I have to speak my truth, that I’m sad. And that’s why I’m finally telling you, that wasn’t me in the corner.
this is a great read, and here I am filled with mystery and wanting to know so much more! "my rings, my cologne...." Oh, Kevin, this world you've created! (multiple personalities, is all I can think....)
Thanks Mary. I don't know who these people are, and now you mention it, maybe they are one person, and that's a fascinating impression to leave. But they came in loud and clear when listening to an REM song (Losing my religion).
Oh, man, I feel so slow. Of course. Me in the corner.
well, I'm glad it's not so glaringly obvious to everyone; i can't get the tune out of my head now. Sort of dangerous to use something that's hooky and maybe distracting from the story.
The song came through to me all right.
The "you didn't know it wasn't me" theme is very compelling.
By the way, before you got to "oatmeal" I was wondering if you were personifying a dog. That would be a different story.
great idea. i can certainly see how you thought that.
I never told this to anyone, but sometimes in idle moments I run through in my mind, with great attention to detail, what would happen if those close to me were to die. It’s not a fantasy, in the strict sense. I do this with people I love, and I do it with people whose existence is so stitched into my own life that their absence would mean I would also cease my being, somehow, by degrees. Occasionally, I have cooked up these scenarios when the person in question is just on the other end of a phone line. About those times in particular, I do feel a little badly. On the other hand, I usually conclude these imaginations, with a shade of contrition, considering just how glad I am that they are only imaginations after all and that the person is still there, on the other end of the line, maybe only present as a purr of breathing, as we have by this point likely come to a pause in conversation.
I used to do it about my parents, before they really did pass away. Of course, actual deaths have nothing in common with the imagined ones, except that it was impossible not to feel some sense of deja vu, during the actual unfolding of a memorial service, or when asked to share a few words. Or, call it inverse deja vu, suffused with surprise that the actuality falls so far from what has been scripted already, so many times over.
I wonder if you have also done this, during our phone calls together or when your eyes glaze up and I discover suddenly that I am also bored by whatever I have been saying. I think it would comfort me, somewhat, if I knew that you did this for me. I wish I could discover what words you have rehearsed saying, when you found out the news. I wish even that I could know about the heady melodrama parts of the play, where you find out I left everything to you after all, even after all the bad blood, that I really did keep caring. And you would practice tearing up with surprise, that you had never let yourself hope for such a thing, not really.
The way you led me to your third paragraph is so well done. It's like you snuck it in there--and yet, once I realized who this narrator was talking to, it seemed inevitable. Really amazing.
This is so cool to hear - especially because of the weirdness of not having known myself, at any point while writing, what each sentence would lead to next. It's really somehow oddly comforting to find oneself standing next to the reader, in curiosity, in that state of "hmm.. what's happening here?"
i'm so glad you did the exercise and felt how that worked.
Can't say I imagined a friend dying when we were speaking on the phone, but once when I was a teen talking to my friend on a landline during a storm, she said a lightning flash came out of her phone. We hung up.
Wow, what a thing to happen! Stranger than fiction!
I've heard landlines carry a small amount of electricity. An electrical engineer could probably explain it.