We thought it a bit much, the way she dressed. Always the dresses and the chunky heels, her hair down her back and parted in the middle. Lips, painted. A belt at her waist. We thought she should take it down a notch. All of that poetry, the sadnesses, the wandering the halls alone. We knew where she lived, her house was just like ours. There was nothing special to see there. She had a brother, well so did we, we had brothers and sisters, and mothers having nervous breakdowns and dads who worked too much. We wore wide-legged jeans and boots. We made wisecracks in class. That time we had to make up a dance for gym class and we all knew how stupid it was, but then she showed up in a leotard of all things. A leotard! And she danced to I am a Rock I am an Island as if her life depended on it. Oh, how we roared and imitated and just could not get enough from that one. And when she shot herself in the mouth at a cabin in the Cascades, well, let’s just say no one was surprised. She always wanted to be Ophelia, someone said. And we went on with our lives. We turned thirty and then we were forty and suddenly we were fifty, and she had been dead the whole time, and we asked each other did you ever go to her house? Who did she eat lunch with? She was sweet, wasn’t she? She was so pretty. And that dance—she really could dance!
Man. This is an intense one. It captures how we look back at our self-absorbed teenage years, wondering how things could've been different. Could we have made a difference? So moving.
Thank you, Sea. We were SO self-absorbed back then. We were just learning who we are and how to act. Unfortunately, many of us weren't able to see the pain of others.
Woke up this morning to a question from Steve: do you ever think of the people from your small town and wonder what they are doing now? Made me sit down and write in my pajamas—right then. I don’t know about most of them, and your story really made me think about them some more! So well done—that person we could have reached out to.
Makes me think of George Saunder's commencement speech about what he regrets most -- the instances of having responded smally/appropriately instead of big-heartedly.
I just saw a death notice of a guy I went to HS with. He was like this girl, apart and different, stilted and way too serious for 15 and 16 and 17. He usually ate lunch alone. The death notice didn't have any details of his life, but he lived to 67 and I was glad for that, even moreso now reading this heartbreaking piece.
It's funny--i had no "kind" communal voice in my head. I guess I think of groups of having sort of mean group-think. We use the group to let us be mean.
Oh wow, this one really gets me - so many resonant, familiar, striking details. Actually I feel like I have to take a little pause before I dive into reading anything else - this one just asks for some time to let it reverberate!
The voice is great here. It's talking from within those teenage minds, but you can there's a distance there too, so that the reveal is clean but still surprising and then the regret and the pain is implied beautifully with the gentle irony in play.
Oh, Mary this really got me… :(( I recognise that awful envy, and then the end… heartbreaking. Masterfully done. I think this will stay with me for a while.
I could feel it in the writing! Maybe this is why it is so powerful and devastating. I had a friend in the kibbutz who was the outcast in our class. I never understood why. I was one of the two people who spoke to him. But then again, I was an “outsider” too. When he was in the army, he committed suicide. I was already living in London when the news reached me. So your piece here spoke to me on that level as well. The guilt of how we could have saved him from this terrible fate…
Weirdly, she wasn't really an outcast. I don't know how to explain her. She always had boyfriends and always seemed fine. That weird dance she did--well, she was the dramatic sort, you know? So i don't know if I could have helped her--I didn't know she needed help. She seemed, on the outside, just fine. That's one of the things that is so hard to think about. People who are lost to suicide--often we don't see it coming. I don't feel guilty about her--I was fine with her. I never bullied her or anything--though we did make fun of her for that dance (but behind her back--it was the 8th grade!). I think of her often because she makes me sad. Such a beautiful girl and she ended her life and missed out on all of these years. It's heartbreaking. I guess if there's guilt it's in the not knowing, not seeing the clues. But we weren't close, so how could I have seen them? And yet, I do wish that somehow I would have SEEN her and known. It's all a mystery. i see her face now and I see her in one of those dresses she used to wear. She is smiling. So sad to me now.
Even though it's not fiction, the voice and the mode give it both the heft and the lightness of fiction, and the subtle ironic detachment (I mean as in dramatic/internal displacement of feeling, not as in sarcasm, obviously! I am putting this in because I never quite know what irony actually is, or how wide it spreads its arms) allow it not to feel sentimental or purgative.
Yes, the detachment/voice somehow gives it more power, and allowed me to write it without sentimentality. (I took liberties with the "truth" in this one--though the girl is real, as is her death.)
We love this, we who get up late and wish we had gotten up earlier, love this prompt. We who have overslept again, like tomorrow and yesterday. We who will drink the coffee that was prepared hours ago by the early risers. Silent they were while we slept in the cobwebs of the attic among the spiders and the beasts of our dreams.
We thank those of the world who rise early to check behind the doors, under the beds, between the slats of the stacks of kindling. Those who clear the world of dangers. We thank you for your efforts and for the hot-strong-stale-coffee. We thank you all.
We each wanted the best for her, or what appeared to be the best, under the circumstances, covid and all. She had reached the end of her road. The guy finally died. We thought she would go first and we’d all say how grateful we were that he saved her, and loved her, and took her to Florida after the stroke. But wouldn’t you know, she outlasted him, the fourth one. Another husband who had been seduced, absorbed, drawn into the web, then left her, though this one left everything, the ultimate departure. Now it was our turn to catch her as she fell, to find her a home, a secure place, in a time of widespread panic and social shutdown. None of us wanted her in our homes. Arm’s length was close enough. We found a place two towns over, an opening, a port in that storm. And we got her there, through our combined efforts. Even though by then we all hated her for different reasons, we struggled to forgive. We felt proud of our selves and our selflessness. We had done it, stitched together a solution, a resolution. And of course she sabotaged the whole thing, whining and scheming until her friend the half assed therapist helped her leave and go back into the world, untethered, broke, old and angry, living alone, her scratchy voice piling up in multiple voicemails, blaming us all, but mostly me.
So well done, Kurt. And that switch at the very end to the individual voice gives it added power. It's about the community, but it's also about this one person who feels the anger.
Another sentence added on edit. I like how these stories let me know what they want to say. They definitely have momentum of their own, after you get me going with your prompts. Thanks!
This is not unlike my day job - architecture. There's a famous Louis Sullivan quote about asking a brick what it wants to be, and it says, "an arch." But the point is that as architects we do as much discovering of the design as we do creating it. It's very much like the writing process. The building starts to tell you what it wants to be and how it wants to unfold and present itself. Fascinating, for sure.
That's so interesting. I often look at a painting and wonder where the first brushstroke was, how planned it was, how did the canvas tell the painter where to begin.
Love the ending, but really the leadup is so real - "it was our turn to catch her as she fell" no matter what had happened before, not matter why everyone "hated her for different reasons."
Welcome. We’re a little surprised that’s all. Your text said you’d be arriving on the 10th and here it is a whole week ahead of the 10th. But, welcome.
Let’s see. Uhm.
What’s that? You sent an update? Well, we didn’t get it. We go over our texts together each morning after we read interesting news articles to each other, and we haven’t seen anything from you. But, seriously, no worries.
What?
You don’t want to cause any inconvenience. Of course. And, of course, you’re always welcome, whenever you are passing through and think to stop by. Timing truly doesn’t matter. We love surprises.
It’s just that today is our day for coffee with the neighbors, and after that we take Mitzy to the groomer for her biweekly trim and bath, and usually after we drop her off, we stop by the Y to swim, and then we go for our biweekly couples’ massage. We could change some of that around if you’d like. The neighbors will probably understand if we bail on them, although they did tell us that they stood in line at the bakery earlier this morning for nearly an hour to get the special babka. We can’t really change Mitzy’s appointment because she gets pretty stinky. We’ll cancel the massage, although it is pre-paid with no refunds.
What? No. Absolutely. We will not have you stay in a hotel. We’ve been looking forward to seeing you for weeks. Even though, of course, our last visit ended awkwardly, didn’t it? Insisting on dinner at that dirty little restaurant by your house when you know that we hate it and then sitting there awkwardly when the bill came so that we eventually paid for everyone’s meal. Then putting us down in the unheated basement on that miserable sofa bed to sleep because you’d turned your guest room into an extra office space since our last visit without telling us. We just about ended the friendship after that. But then we remembered that you are our oldest couples’ friends. For heaven’s sake, we were in each other’s wedding parties. Even after we wound up in different cities, twenty years of regular long weekend visits. We’re not going to let one little bad weekend end that relationship.
Two bad weekends, yes. One, no. So, come on in. We’ll get you settled and then we can start having some fun.
Our mother’s voice shrieked over the noise of the lawn mower
Dad’s hobby was both productive and protective. His ear muffs a shelter from
Our collective female noise. Minus our father we were a family of yellers. One had to be in order to be heard and the loudest would win, whatever the challenge. A dinner debate over
The merits of bilingual education. Worst dress at the Oscars. Best Pizza in Chicago
In discussing the fracas at last night’s neighbors pool party we shouted over each other with a dog pile of accusations “Bacchanalia!” “Freaking orgy” “Naked old people with martinis.” “Perverts!” Our father wolfed down his dinner and fled to the garage, where he performatively tinkered with various small appliances while drinking beers and listening to baseball on his ear pods.
“I said Where is the rat poison?” Our mother, rubber gloved fists on hips, towered over us where we five lay curled into one another on the porch bed. It was an accusation rather than a question, as if hiding rat poison was a game we played like kick the can.
My sisters and I looked at each other. We were deciding whether or not answering the question meant the end to our lazy afternoon. And then Sally, the youngest tripped the wire
“Why Mom?”
“Why? Why? Because I found fucking-god-damn mouse droppings in the pantry is Why!”
“Are you sure it wasn’t raisins?” Sally asked. But we were already untangling our bodies, resigned to a scavenger hunt for rat poison.
Love this group of sisters, cuddled together on the porch bed. "collective female noise." And "where is the rat poison?" is such a hilarious question, like the sisters might know.
We rated her a ten as soon as she walked in the door. The subtlest of gestures, wrists raised slightly, fingers up, all in synch – no one would have noticed it unless they’d watched us watching the door for years. It wasn’t the short skirt or the boots or the tank top or the long blond hair, so much as the slow walk and the pouty look. You’d think she was walking down the runway at a fashion show, not that any of us went to fashion shows.
After she passed our table, we immediately began arguing about who was going to buy her a drink. Carl had just about declared himself the winner when the door opened again and in came Rod Albert. We all watched as she turned and flashed a big, wide, wet smile in Rod’s direction. Carl moaned slightly.
“Well, it was too good to be true,” Drew said, ever the pessimist.
“Not even a chance, guys,” Rod said as he walked past us.
We had a lot to talk about while Rod and the Ten finished their drink. Where did he meet her? Why had none of us ever seen her before? And, most important, were they really an item?
“Maybe she’s his sister,” Marlon said.
“I hope not,” said Drew, watching Rod’s hand traveling down her back.
Where were they going now, we wondered as Rod settled up with the bartender. There was the new superhero movie playing around the corner. Carl thought Rod would take her to dinner at the Bistro Marseillaise if he really wanted to impress her. A moonlight walk along the river would be romantic, Zach said. Or – no, we didn’t want to think about that.
Silence fell over our table as the couple walked past us again. We didn’t swerve to look at them until they were almost at the door. When the door closed on them, Pete asked, “Did you see that thing on her back?”
Loved this Mary! Here is a very rough first draft:
We were told that we were different. That we could never be like them. We were told that we carried the city’s smell. We came from the “outside” and we could never become part of the “inside.” We didn’t have our parents living with us. We had nowhere to go in the afternoon. No one to make us dinner. We had the dining room, luckily. For losers like us, without a family. Outsiders. And we had the groves of avocados, which we could mash and eat with some salt and pepper, topped with tomatoes, on a toast. We were told we would never know the feeling of being a true ‘kibbutznik’. No matter how many cows we had milked, or how many gallons of oranges, lemons and grapefruit we have filled. We were told that we would never make it in the outside world. That we were doomed. So, we learned that we had no place in the inside, but neither in the outside world. We lived in a sort of limbo. Somewhere between here and there, and nowhere. Until, we were forced to leave. Until we were expelled. And discovered that the outside world wasn’t as bad as they made it to be. That it was vast, and limitless. Bigger than the kibbutz, the city, and the country. And that in this world, us, as outsiders had a certain advantage. We had already learned how to find our inside in a world that seeks to make you feel like the outsider. In this world, we finally belonged. And they? They stayed. Inside.
(p.s. I have no idea why your prompts always take me back to my childhood in Israel. I don't know if you know this, but in Hebrew, a child that came to the kibbutz as one would go to a boarding school, was called an "outsider girl/boy" (yeled/yaldat hutz). So this exercise gave me great pleasure to play on this word. Of what it means to be an outsider, as opposed to an insider. Thank you for the inspiration, as always!)
I love that my prompts take you back to your childhood like this. So a yeled hutz is a kid who didn't grow up on the kibbutz, but came later? (I can look it up.) That feeling of being an outsider is so strong, it goes straight to the core, to our very identity--and it makes us artists! Love what you wrote here, Imola, as always.
And I love your thoughtful, generous prompts Mary! Yes, yeled hutz is a sort of “visiting kid”. At least that’s what I was called at the time. Just for you, in Hebrew: ילד/ ילדת חוץ ;)
Thank you J.D.A! Those avocados saved my life during those years :) Funny how as soon as I finished writing this I went to the kitchen and made myself… an avocado toast with tomatoes! It tasted so sweet and comforting.
Thank you for your application, Mr Jones. We have considered it, and have some points to go over. To start, Mr Jones, we realize that your optimism comes naturally, and that intrigues us. At some point, if we hire you, we’d like to explore that natural inclination. You think all can be made better by universal love and compassion, and you believe, whole-heartedly we see, that love and compassion can be coaxed from even the hardest stone.
Mr Jones, you mention as your heroes many of the usual practitioners of love and compassion. We won’t go through the whole list, but we’d like to linger on one example of someone who you say led with love and compassion. Alexander the Great. We realize that he’s widely admired by military experts, and it’s said that he brought together so many disparate cultures and that his happy influence spread from West to East, North to South, and his influence was benevolent, eventually. And, he was gay! So loving.
To us, Mr Jones, admiring Alexander the Great is like admiring the bear and forgetting the salmon. Yes, the bear is skillful at deploying its claws and scooping the water and swallowing its meal in one gulp. But what was swallowed was, after all, just a salmon out for a daily swim. How many salmon, if we can be metaphoric, did Alexander scoop up and swallow whole? Is that what you admire, Mr Jones?
As you know, we are in the business of discerning where we can be of influence and then applying that influence. Our presence is sometimes not requested or appreciated, at first, but eventually . . . well, we will be around a lot longer than Alexander the Great was, so we know that in the fullness of time we will be appreciated, and our presence will be requested by those even on the outer edges of our orbit. We’d like you to affirm, Mr Jones, that Alexander the Great is someone you would like to emulate, and if you think following his example would enhance our business.
So please reassure us, Mr Jones, that you do admire Alexander the Great. If so, then we feel you would be a valued member of our team. We are eager to work with you and to learn how to leverage your natural-born optimism and your desire to lean in to love and compassion to influence those as of yet outside our orbit.
he was a character, alright. I wanted to get Cleopatra in there (after A the G died his empire broke up and one branch, the Ptolemies in Egypt, eventually gave us Cleopatra) but I ran out of words. And once Cleo is in then Julius the C and Marc Antony and all of Rome would be close behind. Thank you for the word limit.
"Admire me, and understand me, just a simple bear, stood with me naked nethers all but dropping brittle off, simply scooping the fast flow of the gushing waters passing, in anticipation of my next raw flesh feely salmon in spate meal?"
We had just recently began doing our grocery shopping on Mondays, my lady and I, as this was a day off from work that we both enjoyed.
On this particular Monday, much like all the others, we stealthily cruised the parking lot looking for the nearest one to the doors
of the store.
We had trouble finding a close spot on this day and had to settle on one, way out in no man’s land.
As we readied ourselves to disembark, something from the car nearest us caught our eye.
Now, living in this small town most of our lives, we knew and understood that this man’s recently deceased father had been an automobile mechanic his entire life, but what was happening was, what waylaid us on this sleepy start to the week, was that his son was sprinkling the cremated remains of his dear father, on a random automobile oil leak in a Walmart parking lot!
Well after the initial shock of it all began to subside, we put our car in drive and crept slowly away not really feeling the need to restock our cupboards at home any longer.
Funny the way in which, what happens to us in the afterlife sometimes is brought to the forefront of our day to day …
We hadn’t done a thing like that before. We came from good homes. We strove to perform well for our teachers and to get some cooing praise at dinnertime. We passed the dishes when asked, and washed them afterwards, maybe standing on a stool, staring into the dark outside the kitchen window. To light a thing on fire, we knew, was an act that could have nothing to do with the people we were busy growing into. That made it seem, surely, we could not be the ones answerable for whatever might happen. It would have been impossible to anticipate exactly how far thin, licking flames could travel, whether the full distance to pine tree or deciduous, to telephone line or electric.
Every one of us had been singing paeans to conservation and recycling at least since we were pig-tailed or dinosaur-fascinated. During day camp, we all stood in a circle and threw a ball of yarn from one person to the next, weaving a web: This is the interconnectedness of nature. We made dioramas and on Fridays we received back our book reports that sagged with some extra heft at the corners, where there were bright, clean stickers that smelled, when we scratched them, like artificial berry or like bubble gum. None of the good works in the least diluted what we had done. None of it moved any one of us to make a report to the authorities.
In those days, every family played the same local news before Time for bed and toothbrushing, and every one of us would have watched the same footage from each den, mutely, with our bellies on the carpet. The wildness that moved in my own stomach must have moved, too, in theirs. But we would never speak of it again, maintaining an unspoken oath together until there was no more we to speak of. And then, scattered like ash into adulthood across a dozen states, could we really have done anything so bad?
I love this line: "To light a thing on fire, we knew, was an act that could have nothing to do with the people we were busy growing into." Introduces us to the deed, and also so good showing the knowledge kids have about their place in the world. But it's limited, because they couldn't know how themselves as adults would hold on to what they had done.
We think our sheepdogs and collies have gone insane. We watch them trying to herd everyone: bicyclists, children, their owners. We tire of their frenetic demands and grow resentful of the barks, the scratches on our doors, the way they strain our human relationships. We work on our spreadsheets for hours, organizing things that provide us with no deeper meaning in the grand scheme of the world. The realization begins to dawn: we have more in common with these poor sheep-less dogs than we care to admit.
We couldn’t believe it. Mom said yes. Our usual wheedling and whining didn’t result in a trip upstairs to our bedroom or worse an order to the kitchen to wash the dishes. Her sharp eyes were soft and there was a slight catch in her throat as she cocked her head and said softly, “Alright, but you be back by supper. Your dad and I need to tell you something.”
We bolted out the door and down the block towards Frankie’s house. We slowed one house away. Voices of children playing, perhaps up to no good, echoed from the back yard. We reached for each other’s hand. Our eyes urged each other to take the last few steps. We could do it together. The new kids. The ones that got tripped in the bus aisle. Teased in the lunch line. Together we were strong.
We entered the party and the kids stared. We stood kicking our toes in identical rhythm. Drawing a circle in the dirt. A ball rolled between us. We picked it up and tossed it to each other. A boy called out “Let’s play ball” and the others joined in. We melded into the crowd and soon drifted apart. But found each other at the table for the cake. You ate the frosting I couldn’t stand.
Back home. Voices murmured in the kitchen. The table was set. We ran upstairs to wash our hands, shoving each other from the sink to be the first one done. Giggles and pinches ended as we were greeted by solemn eyes.
The familiar tune played out. Dad had lost his job again. Another move. We smooshed our legs together under the table. We knew the drill. At least we hadn’t been here long enough to miss anyone.
We knew, from first days in primary, that Francis was a cut apart and above us. Youngest of a large Irish family, reared learned, largely by his older siblings, he'd led the pack in reading.
The 'I' ,that was the individual apart from the 'we', benefitted so much - even at such a young age, I knew knowing him was benefiting me, big time - through the simple act of taking home each night, until we'd read the set, Hugh Lofting's Dr Doolittle books.
'Failure' - and btw what a totally pants word when applied to the burgeoning, early blossoming beginning of the becoming of young minds - between us was to turn-up next morning without having read, cover to cover, whatever The-Push-Me-Pull-You and any, mostly all, of Doolittle's Menagerie of Imaginary Speaking Animals, had been up to as we'd read them hard back front cover to hard back back cover overnight. Read that is, and prepared to be quizzed and counter-quizzed on the details, in the manner that I've lately learned to label as 'closely'.
And after reading, on the push upward and onward into Secondary School, we marvelled at Fran's easy mastery of mathematics in addition to his abiding, salient, literary prowess. Not too much surprise that a set of sporty sluggards, such as we rather tended to be, lost touch with the manifestly rather introverted, ever lengthening of hair, 'intemellectual' that Francis seemed, in our eyes, to become.
Further and farther out towards that upgoing - that was aka 'matriculatin' -to University, with matters Literary somewhat cracked, matters Mathematical significantly skewered, no surprise that Francis opted to 'read' Russian at University. Make no mistake this was while 'The Cold War' was no mere figure of speech, and terms such as 'Perestroika'and 'Glasnost' weren't even breaking dawn beyond the pale of even the most optimistic meaningful, diplomatic, vocabularies.
Shock was, no word of enlightening closure ever crossed my path since, why - and indeed how - he chose to step out and off a speeding carriage into the path of a hurtling Euston bound of out Birmingham London-Midland Mainline Express?
We came back from where our educations happened to have scattered us only to find out that Francis' - splattering and smattering of flesh and bones of a suddenly has been human - had made the local and regional news, back then in the days before the funeral that, we had had no knowledge of. We were scattered, in following whatever less travelled paths our lives had already taken us on, to a degree which meant we never, really, got to make mention of he who was longer there.
Oh Boy! What a moment, unphotographed but so etched. . . catching up with such news on homecoming, reading the print papers, past records as their lines already were.
P.S. 'Intemellectual' is, by no manner of means, a mere misspelling. Just because a word may not be found readily in a dictionary does not mean it does not have meaning or informed adherents. I write, as ever, as as The Rombler I have been these many years past.
This piece is really moving. That sentence about Francis stepping off the speeding carriage--so direct and so devastating. And i love intemellectual--whatever it means!
When, more likely if, I've worked out what the meaning(s) of 'intemellectual' might be you'll be amongst the first to know Mary. Probably more about sound and feeling than about dictionary specifiable meaning, and certainly triggered to being typed on a comment by the recollections of particular settings - place(s), time(s) and person(s).
Now here's the thing you could not be expecting. At a not too distant point along in time from Francis's stepping out of his arc of story we, that's people in the same neighbourhood (some still living there others moved away but retaining ties) had to field the grim news that an older guy, Jim, rather dour Scot, automotive assembly line worker took leave of his wife and brought his life to an end exactly same way that Francis had done.
No particular causation was clear in either case, nor was it likely that there was any correlation between these acts of suicide. They were both local to my growing up but they belonged in two of the separate tribes of 'we' that coexist in the mosaic of urban communities.
Fair to report that one consequence for me has been never to have bought the notion that "Lightening doesn't strike the same place twice."
{As ever a fine Monday 'what next' you've despatched to genially provoke us Mary. Thank you.}
It wasn't as if these two events, I've always felt them to be tragic, were in any way typical of what I thought was the post-war residential neighbourhood that I grew up in.
You may be right Mary there's material surfacing - or maybe I mean, more accurately, finding expression - in some of the posts I've made of late that could be the very stuff to catalyse a story.
We thought it a bit much, the way she dressed. Always the dresses and the chunky heels, her hair down her back and parted in the middle. Lips, painted. A belt at her waist. We thought she should take it down a notch. All of that poetry, the sadnesses, the wandering the halls alone. We knew where she lived, her house was just like ours. There was nothing special to see there. She had a brother, well so did we, we had brothers and sisters, and mothers having nervous breakdowns and dads who worked too much. We wore wide-legged jeans and boots. We made wisecracks in class. That time we had to make up a dance for gym class and we all knew how stupid it was, but then she showed up in a leotard of all things. A leotard! And she danced to I am a Rock I am an Island as if her life depended on it. Oh, how we roared and imitated and just could not get enough from that one. And when she shot herself in the mouth at a cabin in the Cascades, well, let’s just say no one was surprised. She always wanted to be Ophelia, someone said. And we went on with our lives. We turned thirty and then we were forty and suddenly we were fifty, and she had been dead the whole time, and we asked each other did you ever go to her house? Who did she eat lunch with? She was sweet, wasn’t she? She was so pretty. And that dance—she really could dance!
Man. This is an intense one. It captures how we look back at our self-absorbed teenage years, wondering how things could've been different. Could we have made a difference? So moving.
Thank you, Sea. We were SO self-absorbed back then. We were just learning who we are and how to act. Unfortunately, many of us weren't able to see the pain of others.
Woke up this morning to a question from Steve: do you ever think of the people from your small town and wonder what they are doing now? Made me sit down and write in my pajamas—right then. I don’t know about most of them, and your story really made me think about them some more! So well done—that person we could have reached out to.
Makes me think of George Saunder's commencement speech about what he regrets most -- the instances of having responded smally/appropriately instead of big-heartedly.
Yes, that's it exactly.
Thanks, Angela!
I just saw a death notice of a guy I went to HS with. He was like this girl, apart and different, stilted and way too serious for 15 and 16 and 17. He usually ate lunch alone. The death notice didn't have any details of his life, but he lived to 67 and I was glad for that, even moreso now reading this heartbreaking piece.
This one feels ominous. It grew inside my head. Nice job!
It's funny--i had no "kind" communal voice in my head. I guess I think of groups of having sort of mean group-think. We use the group to let us be mean.
Whoa Nellie. Terrific. We are THERE.
Thank you, Christine!
Oh wow, this one really gets me - so many resonant, familiar, striking details. Actually I feel like I have to take a little pause before I dive into reading anything else - this one just asks for some time to let it reverberate!
Thanks so much, Danielle.
The voice is great here. It's talking from within those teenage minds, but you can there's a distance there too, so that the reveal is clean but still surprising and then the regret and the pain is implied beautifully with the gentle irony in play.
Oh, Mary this really got me… :(( I recognise that awful envy, and then the end… heartbreaking. Masterfully done. I think this will stay with me for a while.
Thank you, Imola. All these years later, I still think of her often.
I could feel it in the writing! Maybe this is why it is so powerful and devastating. I had a friend in the kibbutz who was the outcast in our class. I never understood why. I was one of the two people who spoke to him. But then again, I was an “outsider” too. When he was in the army, he committed suicide. I was already living in London when the news reached me. So your piece here spoke to me on that level as well. The guilt of how we could have saved him from this terrible fate…
Weirdly, she wasn't really an outcast. I don't know how to explain her. She always had boyfriends and always seemed fine. That weird dance she did--well, she was the dramatic sort, you know? So i don't know if I could have helped her--I didn't know she needed help. She seemed, on the outside, just fine. That's one of the things that is so hard to think about. People who are lost to suicide--often we don't see it coming. I don't feel guilty about her--I was fine with her. I never bullied her or anything--though we did make fun of her for that dance (but behind her back--it was the 8th grade!). I think of her often because she makes me sad. Such a beautiful girl and she ended her life and missed out on all of these years. It's heartbreaking. I guess if there's guilt it's in the not knowing, not seeing the clues. But we weren't close, so how could I have seen them? And yet, I do wish that somehow I would have SEEN her and known. It's all a mystery. i see her face now and I see her in one of those dresses she used to wear. She is smiling. So sad to me now.
I feel you Mary. Maybe there is more writing?
This is so sad.
Yes, it really is. It's sad and it's awful.
Lots of pent up emotion/ energy in this one. Phew!
Thank you, Tod. I still feel terrible about this girl--this one's not fiction.
Even though it's not fiction, the voice and the mode give it both the heft and the lightness of fiction, and the subtle ironic detachment (I mean as in dramatic/internal displacement of feeling, not as in sarcasm, obviously! I am putting this in because I never quite know what irony actually is, or how wide it spreads its arms) allow it not to feel sentimental or purgative.
Yes, the detachment/voice somehow gives it more power, and allowed me to write it without sentimentality. (I took liberties with the "truth" in this one--though the girl is real, as is her death.)
didn't see it coming. So good Mary!
Thank you, Dinah!
We love this, we who get up late and wish we had gotten up earlier, love this prompt. We who have overslept again, like tomorrow and yesterday. We who will drink the coffee that was prepared hours ago by the early risers. Silent they were while we slept in the cobwebs of the attic among the spiders and the beasts of our dreams.
We thank those of the world who rise early to check behind the doors, under the beds, between the slats of the stacks of kindling. Those who clear the world of dangers. We thank you for your efforts and for the hot-strong-stale-coffee. We thank you all.
Love it.
This was such a joy to read Ruth. I'm still smiling (as that early riser on her second coffee...)
So well written!
thank you
We each wanted the best for her, or what appeared to be the best, under the circumstances, covid and all. She had reached the end of her road. The guy finally died. We thought she would go first and we’d all say how grateful we were that he saved her, and loved her, and took her to Florida after the stroke. But wouldn’t you know, she outlasted him, the fourth one. Another husband who had been seduced, absorbed, drawn into the web, then left her, though this one left everything, the ultimate departure. Now it was our turn to catch her as she fell, to find her a home, a secure place, in a time of widespread panic and social shutdown. None of us wanted her in our homes. Arm’s length was close enough. We found a place two towns over, an opening, a port in that storm. And we got her there, through our combined efforts. Even though by then we all hated her for different reasons, we struggled to forgive. We felt proud of our selves and our selflessness. We had done it, stitched together a solution, a resolution. And of course she sabotaged the whole thing, whining and scheming until her friend the half assed therapist helped her leave and go back into the world, untethered, broke, old and angry, living alone, her scratchy voice piling up in multiple voicemails, blaming us all, but mostly me.
So well done, Kurt. And that switch at the very end to the individual voice gives it added power. It's about the community, but it's also about this one person who feels the anger.
Thanks! Interesting, I added the last part as an edit. It carries some power I think.
"None of us wanted her in our homes." Man. This is potent.
Yes, i noticed the power in that line, too.
Another sentence added on edit. I like how these stories let me know what they want to say. They definitely have momentum of their own, after you get me going with your prompts. Thanks!
Yes, the momentum and then you look back on them and see what you've got, and see what to add or subtract. The whole thing is actually fascinating.
This is not unlike my day job - architecture. There's a famous Louis Sullivan quote about asking a brick what it wants to be, and it says, "an arch." But the point is that as architects we do as much discovering of the design as we do creating it. It's very much like the writing process. The building starts to tell you what it wants to be and how it wants to unfold and present itself. Fascinating, for sure.
That's so interesting. I often look at a painting and wonder where the first brushstroke was, how planned it was, how did the canvas tell the painter where to begin.
Thanks Sea!
Love the ending, but really the leadup is so real - "it was our turn to catch her as she fell" no matter what had happened before, not matter why everyone "hated her for different reasons."
Thanks Janet!
Powerful. Loved the line we all say how grateful we were he saved her. Or maybe he rescued all of you.
Hi Noreen. No kidding. He did save US as much as her.
I can just see her: “untethered”—great descriptor and her “scratchy voice piling up in voicemails”— what great images!
Welcome. We’re a little surprised that’s all. Your text said you’d be arriving on the 10th and here it is a whole week ahead of the 10th. But, welcome.
Let’s see. Uhm.
What’s that? You sent an update? Well, we didn’t get it. We go over our texts together each morning after we read interesting news articles to each other, and we haven’t seen anything from you. But, seriously, no worries.
What?
You don’t want to cause any inconvenience. Of course. And, of course, you’re always welcome, whenever you are passing through and think to stop by. Timing truly doesn’t matter. We love surprises.
It’s just that today is our day for coffee with the neighbors, and after that we take Mitzy to the groomer for her biweekly trim and bath, and usually after we drop her off, we stop by the Y to swim, and then we go for our biweekly couples’ massage. We could change some of that around if you’d like. The neighbors will probably understand if we bail on them, although they did tell us that they stood in line at the bakery earlier this morning for nearly an hour to get the special babka. We can’t really change Mitzy’s appointment because she gets pretty stinky. We’ll cancel the massage, although it is pre-paid with no refunds.
What? No. Absolutely. We will not have you stay in a hotel. We’ve been looking forward to seeing you for weeks. Even though, of course, our last visit ended awkwardly, didn’t it? Insisting on dinner at that dirty little restaurant by your house when you know that we hate it and then sitting there awkwardly when the bill came so that we eventually paid for everyone’s meal. Then putting us down in the unheated basement on that miserable sofa bed to sleep because you’d turned your guest room into an extra office space since our last visit without telling us. We just about ended the friendship after that. But then we remembered that you are our oldest couples’ friends. For heaven’s sake, we were in each other’s wedding parties. Even after we wound up in different cities, twenty years of regular long weekend visits. We’re not going to let one little bad weekend end that relationship.
Two bad weekends, yes. One, no. So, come on in. We’ll get you settled and then we can start having some fun.
hahahaha! Oh, i bet these two couples have a real fun time.
Love the details you wove into this!
Yes, particularly the special babka!
I loved this. We can't have a stinky Mitzy,
Where is the rat poison?
Our mother’s voice shrieked over the noise of the lawn mower
Dad’s hobby was both productive and protective. His ear muffs a shelter from
Our collective female noise. Minus our father we were a family of yellers. One had to be in order to be heard and the loudest would win, whatever the challenge. A dinner debate over
The merits of bilingual education. Worst dress at the Oscars. Best Pizza in Chicago
In discussing the fracas at last night’s neighbors pool party we shouted over each other with a dog pile of accusations “Bacchanalia!” “Freaking orgy” “Naked old people with martinis.” “Perverts!” Our father wolfed down his dinner and fled to the garage, where he performatively tinkered with various small appliances while drinking beers and listening to baseball on his ear pods.
“I said Where is the rat poison?” Our mother, rubber gloved fists on hips, towered over us where we five lay curled into one another on the porch bed. It was an accusation rather than a question, as if hiding rat poison was a game we played like kick the can.
My sisters and I looked at each other. We were deciding whether or not answering the question meant the end to our lazy afternoon. And then Sally, the youngest tripped the wire
“Why Mom?”
“Why? Why? Because I found fucking-god-damn mouse droppings in the pantry is Why!”
“Are you sure it wasn’t raisins?” Sally asked. But we were already untangling our bodies, resigned to a scavenger hunt for rat poison.
Love this group of sisters, cuddled together on the porch bed. "collective female noise." And "where is the rat poison?" is such a hilarious question, like the sisters might know.
We made peanut butter sandwiches, remember?
With that soft oaty bread from the farmstand, some brand of super chunk
Glass bottles of water, drawn from the cask in the cellar,
We were determined to get up before the sun and walk the cliffs
How in love we were to rise and make peanut butter sandwiches by candlelight,
Dress to the moor’s pale frost, the ocean’s cold murmur.
We used the same old wax paper used a hundred times to wrap them
Slipped into the inside pockets of our oiled coats.
What a comfort we say aloud, this repetition of sea air, the nearness of cliff edge
trod before daylight, above the wheeling murres and their nests
Perched on sheer precipice of rock. Dizzying, and how incomprehensible.
Just the two of us in the world, no otherwise thoughts for the moment,
Just the rising and falling of sea air caressing the grass at the edge.
We carried water and our peanut butter sandwiches, keeping things simple.
Such subtlety, until the raven touched the top of your head
Oh, we’re not alone are we, and are in fact hungry but keep walking.
We thought about finding a place to sit, stopping to eat our sandwiches,
Imagining the peanut butter squeezed between the bread,
Pressed between our jackets and our breasts, stuck to the wax paper,
But we didn’t do that, we didn’t stop in the dark but kept going.
Minding the nearness of the immense sea,
Pulled our jacket collars higher, swung our arms and kept going
Walking all those miles without talking, remember that,
us, our days of glory between the moor and the sea.
So beautiful.
"Dizzying, and how incomprehensible."
I don't see how it's incomprehensible, just a couple of peanut butter sandwiches and a cliff going down the sea. What could be simpler?
:) :)
This is beautiful!
Beautiful.
We rated her a ten as soon as she walked in the door. The subtlest of gestures, wrists raised slightly, fingers up, all in synch – no one would have noticed it unless they’d watched us watching the door for years. It wasn’t the short skirt or the boots or the tank top or the long blond hair, so much as the slow walk and the pouty look. You’d think she was walking down the runway at a fashion show, not that any of us went to fashion shows.
After she passed our table, we immediately began arguing about who was going to buy her a drink. Carl had just about declared himself the winner when the door opened again and in came Rod Albert. We all watched as she turned and flashed a big, wide, wet smile in Rod’s direction. Carl moaned slightly.
“Well, it was too good to be true,” Drew said, ever the pessimist.
“Not even a chance, guys,” Rod said as he walked past us.
We had a lot to talk about while Rod and the Ten finished their drink. Where did he meet her? Why had none of us ever seen her before? And, most important, were they really an item?
“Maybe she’s his sister,” Marlon said.
“I hope not,” said Drew, watching Rod’s hand traveling down her back.
Where were they going now, we wondered as Rod settled up with the bartender. There was the new superhero movie playing around the corner. Carl thought Rod would take her to dinner at the Bistro Marseillaise if he really wanted to impress her. A moonlight walk along the river would be romantic, Zach said. Or – no, we didn’t want to think about that.
Silence fell over our table as the couple walked past us again. We didn’t swerve to look at them until they were almost at the door. When the door closed on them, Pete asked, “Did you see that thing on her back?”
“That mole thing? Yeah, and her hair?”
“Not a good dye job,” Carl said.
“So – nine?”
“Eight.”
“Seven.”
“Six,” we all agreed.
Hhahahaha! That's what envy will do. Nice job here.
Loved this Mary! Here is a very rough first draft:
We were told that we were different. That we could never be like them. We were told that we carried the city’s smell. We came from the “outside” and we could never become part of the “inside.” We didn’t have our parents living with us. We had nowhere to go in the afternoon. No one to make us dinner. We had the dining room, luckily. For losers like us, without a family. Outsiders. And we had the groves of avocados, which we could mash and eat with some salt and pepper, topped with tomatoes, on a toast. We were told we would never know the feeling of being a true ‘kibbutznik’. No matter how many cows we had milked, or how many gallons of oranges, lemons and grapefruit we have filled. We were told that we would never make it in the outside world. That we were doomed. So, we learned that we had no place in the inside, but neither in the outside world. We lived in a sort of limbo. Somewhere between here and there, and nowhere. Until, we were forced to leave. Until we were expelled. And discovered that the outside world wasn’t as bad as they made it to be. That it was vast, and limitless. Bigger than the kibbutz, the city, and the country. And that in this world, us, as outsiders had a certain advantage. We had already learned how to find our inside in a world that seeks to make you feel like the outsider. In this world, we finally belonged. And they? They stayed. Inside.
(p.s. I have no idea why your prompts always take me back to my childhood in Israel. I don't know if you know this, but in Hebrew, a child that came to the kibbutz as one would go to a boarding school, was called an "outsider girl/boy" (yeled/yaldat hutz). So this exercise gave me great pleasure to play on this word. Of what it means to be an outsider, as opposed to an insider. Thank you for the inspiration, as always!)
I love that my prompts take you back to your childhood like this. So a yeled hutz is a kid who didn't grow up on the kibbutz, but came later? (I can look it up.) That feeling of being an outsider is so strong, it goes straight to the core, to our very identity--and it makes us artists! Love what you wrote here, Imola, as always.
And I love your thoughtful, generous prompts Mary! Yes, yeled hutz is a sort of “visiting kid”. At least that’s what I was called at the time. Just for you, in Hebrew: ילד/ ילדת חוץ ;)
Todah rabah!
This is so well expressed!
Thank you Angela!
Thank you J.D.A! Those avocados saved my life during those years :) Funny how as soon as I finished writing this I went to the kitchen and made myself… an avocado toast with tomatoes! It tasted so sweet and comforting.
I like your writing.
sorry bout deleting that comment saying so earlier- Thought you hadn’t read it -I should’ve refreshed ph-
Suddenly thought I might’ve used the word ‘I’ about 55 times- spun out and hit delete :)
they make skin look great, avo and his pals🥑
I had it yesterday! ❤️
Thank you for your application, Mr Jones. We have considered it, and have some points to go over. To start, Mr Jones, we realize that your optimism comes naturally, and that intrigues us. At some point, if we hire you, we’d like to explore that natural inclination. You think all can be made better by universal love and compassion, and you believe, whole-heartedly we see, that love and compassion can be coaxed from even the hardest stone.
Mr Jones, you mention as your heroes many of the usual practitioners of love and compassion. We won’t go through the whole list, but we’d like to linger on one example of someone who you say led with love and compassion. Alexander the Great. We realize that he’s widely admired by military experts, and it’s said that he brought together so many disparate cultures and that his happy influence spread from West to East, North to South, and his influence was benevolent, eventually. And, he was gay! So loving.
To us, Mr Jones, admiring Alexander the Great is like admiring the bear and forgetting the salmon. Yes, the bear is skillful at deploying its claws and scooping the water and swallowing its meal in one gulp. But what was swallowed was, after all, just a salmon out for a daily swim. How many salmon, if we can be metaphoric, did Alexander scoop up and swallow whole? Is that what you admire, Mr Jones?
As you know, we are in the business of discerning where we can be of influence and then applying that influence. Our presence is sometimes not requested or appreciated, at first, but eventually . . . well, we will be around a lot longer than Alexander the Great was, so we know that in the fullness of time we will be appreciated, and our presence will be requested by those even on the outer edges of our orbit. We’d like you to affirm, Mr Jones, that Alexander the Great is someone you would like to emulate, and if you think following his example would enhance our business.
So please reassure us, Mr Jones, that you do admire Alexander the Great. If so, then we feel you would be a valued member of our team. We are eager to work with you and to learn how to leverage your natural-born optimism and your desire to lean in to love and compassion to influence those as of yet outside our orbit.
I had to look up Alexander the Great after I read this one!
he was a character, alright. I wanted to get Cleopatra in there (after A the G died his empire broke up and one branch, the Ptolemies in Egypt, eventually gave us Cleopatra) but I ran out of words. And once Cleo is in then Julius the C and Marc Antony and all of Rome would be close behind. Thank you for the word limit.
hahahah! The Wikipedia page on him was as long as a novel!! What a life!
Great idea for the 'we' narrative voice, and very interesting to link in A the G. Well done!
Thanks, Niall. It was a lot of fun putting it together. Never thought of salmon, bears, and A together before. Amazing how they find each other..
Knock, knock.
"Who's there?"
"Acolytes of Alexander."
"You?"
"Yes. Indeed us. We the A of A."
"Admire me, and understand me, just a simple bear, stood with me naked nethers all but dropping brittle off, simply scooping the fast flow of the gushing waters passing, in anticipation of my next raw flesh feely salmon in spate meal?"
I never stopped to think of the poor bear's nethers in the icy stream. ouch. Noone gets off unscathed.
Reconsidering my last rites
We had just recently began doing our grocery shopping on Mondays, my lady and I, as this was a day off from work that we both enjoyed.
On this particular Monday, much like all the others, we stealthily cruised the parking lot looking for the nearest one to the doors
of the store.
We had trouble finding a close spot on this day and had to settle on one, way out in no man’s land.
As we readied ourselves to disembark, something from the car nearest us caught our eye.
Now, living in this small town most of our lives, we knew and understood that this man’s recently deceased father had been an automobile mechanic his entire life, but what was happening was, what waylaid us on this sleepy start to the week, was that his son was sprinkling the cremated remains of his dear father, on a random automobile oil leak in a Walmart parking lot!
Well after the initial shock of it all began to subside, we put our car in drive and crept slowly away not really feeling the need to restock our cupboards at home any longer.
Funny the way in which, what happens to us in the afterlife sometimes is brought to the forefront of our day to day …
This is both funny and really touching.
We hadn’t done a thing like that before. We came from good homes. We strove to perform well for our teachers and to get some cooing praise at dinnertime. We passed the dishes when asked, and washed them afterwards, maybe standing on a stool, staring into the dark outside the kitchen window. To light a thing on fire, we knew, was an act that could have nothing to do with the people we were busy growing into. That made it seem, surely, we could not be the ones answerable for whatever might happen. It would have been impossible to anticipate exactly how far thin, licking flames could travel, whether the full distance to pine tree or deciduous, to telephone line or electric.
Every one of us had been singing paeans to conservation and recycling at least since we were pig-tailed or dinosaur-fascinated. During day camp, we all stood in a circle and threw a ball of yarn from one person to the next, weaving a web: This is the interconnectedness of nature. We made dioramas and on Fridays we received back our book reports that sagged with some extra heft at the corners, where there were bright, clean stickers that smelled, when we scratched them, like artificial berry or like bubble gum. None of the good works in the least diluted what we had done. None of it moved any one of us to make a report to the authorities.
In those days, every family played the same local news before Time for bed and toothbrushing, and every one of us would have watched the same footage from each den, mutely, with our bellies on the carpet. The wildness that moved in my own stomach must have moved, too, in theirs. But we would never speak of it again, maintaining an unspoken oath together until there was no more we to speak of. And then, scattered like ash into adulthood across a dozen states, could we really have done anything so bad?
Yeah, this one is amazing.
Aw, thanks!
I love this line: "To light a thing on fire, we knew, was an act that could have nothing to do with the people we were busy growing into." Introduces us to the deed, and also so good showing the knowledge kids have about their place in the world. But it's limited, because they couldn't know how themselves as adults would hold on to what they had done.
We came from good homes
Such a simple, ominous, pregnant start. Straight from the off you can feel the scales ready to tip.
Thanks, Niall!
ah....wow and double wow
Thanks so much (:
We think our sheepdogs and collies have gone insane. We watch them trying to herd everyone: bicyclists, children, their owners. We tire of their frenetic demands and grow resentful of the barks, the scratches on our doors, the way they strain our human relationships. We work on our spreadsheets for hours, organizing things that provide us with no deeper meaning in the grand scheme of the world. The realization begins to dawn: we have more in common with these poor sheep-less dogs than we care to admit.
Right. Who's the insane one now?
We couldn’t believe it. Mom said yes. Our usual wheedling and whining didn’t result in a trip upstairs to our bedroom or worse an order to the kitchen to wash the dishes. Her sharp eyes were soft and there was a slight catch in her throat as she cocked her head and said softly, “Alright, but you be back by supper. Your dad and I need to tell you something.”
We bolted out the door and down the block towards Frankie’s house. We slowed one house away. Voices of children playing, perhaps up to no good, echoed from the back yard. We reached for each other’s hand. Our eyes urged each other to take the last few steps. We could do it together. The new kids. The ones that got tripped in the bus aisle. Teased in the lunch line. Together we were strong.
We entered the party and the kids stared. We stood kicking our toes in identical rhythm. Drawing a circle in the dirt. A ball rolled between us. We picked it up and tossed it to each other. A boy called out “Let’s play ball” and the others joined in. We melded into the crowd and soon drifted apart. But found each other at the table for the cake. You ate the frosting I couldn’t stand.
Back home. Voices murmured in the kitchen. The table was set. We ran upstairs to wash our hands, shoving each other from the sink to be the first one done. Giggles and pinches ended as we were greeted by solemn eyes.
The familiar tune played out. Dad had lost his job again. Another move. We smooshed our legs together under the table. We knew the drill. At least we hadn’t been here long enough to miss anyone.
This is such a sad one. Sigh.
We we we we, all the way home!
Sorry , computer in the shop today.
I’ll try again later.
Didn't we all learn This Little Piggy?
We knew, from first days in primary, that Francis was a cut apart and above us. Youngest of a large Irish family, reared learned, largely by his older siblings, he'd led the pack in reading.
The 'I' ,that was the individual apart from the 'we', benefitted so much - even at such a young age, I knew knowing him was benefiting me, big time - through the simple act of taking home each night, until we'd read the set, Hugh Lofting's Dr Doolittle books.
'Failure' - and btw what a totally pants word when applied to the burgeoning, early blossoming beginning of the becoming of young minds - between us was to turn-up next morning without having read, cover to cover, whatever The-Push-Me-Pull-You and any, mostly all, of Doolittle's Menagerie of Imaginary Speaking Animals, had been up to as we'd read them hard back front cover to hard back back cover overnight. Read that is, and prepared to be quizzed and counter-quizzed on the details, in the manner that I've lately learned to label as 'closely'.
And after reading, on the push upward and onward into Secondary School, we marvelled at Fran's easy mastery of mathematics in addition to his abiding, salient, literary prowess. Not too much surprise that a set of sporty sluggards, such as we rather tended to be, lost touch with the manifestly rather introverted, ever lengthening of hair, 'intemellectual' that Francis seemed, in our eyes, to become.
Further and farther out towards that upgoing - that was aka 'matriculatin' -to University, with matters Literary somewhat cracked, matters Mathematical significantly skewered, no surprise that Francis opted to 'read' Russian at University. Make no mistake this was while 'The Cold War' was no mere figure of speech, and terms such as 'Perestroika'and 'Glasnost' weren't even breaking dawn beyond the pale of even the most optimistic meaningful, diplomatic, vocabularies.
Shock was, no word of enlightening closure ever crossed my path since, why - and indeed how - he chose to step out and off a speeding carriage into the path of a hurtling Euston bound of out Birmingham London-Midland Mainline Express?
We came back from where our educations happened to have scattered us only to find out that Francis' - splattering and smattering of flesh and bones of a suddenly has been human - had made the local and regional news, back then in the days before the funeral that, we had had no knowledge of. We were scattered, in following whatever less travelled paths our lives had already taken us on, to a degree which meant we never, really, got to make mention of he who was longer there.
Oh Boy! What a moment, unphotographed but so etched. . . catching up with such news on homecoming, reading the print papers, past records as their lines already were.
P.S. 'Intemellectual' is, by no manner of means, a mere misspelling. Just because a word may not be found readily in a dictionary does not mean it does not have meaning or informed adherents. I write, as ever, as as The Rombler I have been these many years past.
This piece is really moving. That sentence about Francis stepping off the speeding carriage--so direct and so devastating. And i love intemellectual--whatever it means!
When, more likely if, I've worked out what the meaning(s) of 'intemellectual' might be you'll be amongst the first to know Mary. Probably more about sound and feeling than about dictionary specifiable meaning, and certainly triggered to being typed on a comment by the recollections of particular settings - place(s), time(s) and person(s).
Now here's the thing you could not be expecting. At a not too distant point along in time from Francis's stepping out of his arc of story we, that's people in the same neighbourhood (some still living there others moved away but retaining ties) had to field the grim news that an older guy, Jim, rather dour Scot, automotive assembly line worker took leave of his wife and brought his life to an end exactly same way that Francis had done.
No particular causation was clear in either case, nor was it likely that there was any correlation between these acts of suicide. They were both local to my growing up but they belonged in two of the separate tribes of 'we' that coexist in the mosaic of urban communities.
Fair to report that one consequence for me has been never to have bought the notion that "Lightening doesn't strike the same place twice."
{As ever a fine Monday 'what next' you've despatched to genially provoke us Mary. Thank you.}
There's a story to be written in all of this, Rob. No clear causation, no correlation--but so affecting to those left behind to ponder what happened.
It wasn't as if these two events, I've always felt them to be tragic, were in any way typical of what I thought was the post-war residential neighbourhood that I grew up in.
You may be right Mary there's material surfacing - or maybe I mean, more accurately, finding expression - in some of the posts I've made of late that could be the very stuff to catalyse a story.
Thanks for the feedback, as ever appreciated.
The Limits
We have boundaries, imaginary lines we cannot see but know exist. This
imagination keeps us safe. Assures survival. For example a handshake is OK. That
touch is appropriate for the grocery store, sidewalk, in the church pew. We relish a good
solid handshake from anyone, of any gender.
But a tap on the shoulder or a pat on the head is a No-No. We can be sent into a
panic if that touch occurs more than once a day, and it offends propriety if from an
opposite gender. We scare easily.
It’s been said that boundaries, edges are growth centers. Where opposites of
sun, shadow, dryness, dampness, meet and mingle. Where newness blooms.
We find this terrifying. Not to be tolerated.
This is some really nice writing. I feel like you could keep going with this one.
I love the image of dampness in touch being terrifying.