I knelt on the floor, sobbing, trying to fit the broken pieces of the lamp back together.
“Now aren’t you sorry you did that?” Phil asked.
“Am *I* sorry? Are you kidding me? You -”
But I was sorry. I could as well have thrown a frying pan at the wall. I didn’t have to throw this lamp that I’d always loved. The lamp we’d found in Spain, in better days. Midcentury modern ceramic, painted chalk white, according to the dealer, whose English vocabulary seemed to be limited to terms of the trade. We had both said “Yes, that’s it!” when we spotted it, hiding in a dark corner.
“I was always fond of that lamp,” Phil said.
“Don’t even – “
“I know,” he said.
Of course, if I had thrown a frying pan, unless I’d thrown it directly at him, it wouldn’t have hurt him nearly as much. That’s why the lamp called out to me, from its place of honor on the end table: Remember that time you thought you were happy, well, ha! Ha!
“What can I do?” he said.
I held a jagged piece of pottery out toward him, mutely. He stepped back as if I were threatening him with it, and then came and took it from my hand when he saw that I wasn’t.
He squatted down next to me and picked up another piece, saying, “It’s like a puzzle, isn’t it?”
“I’ll try,” he said. “I don’t know if I can fix it, but I’ll try.”
Ha! We were that neighbor with the completely dead lawn.....finally, tore it up and put in drought-resistant plants. So nice to no longer be the neighborhood eyesore!
The first time I told someone that I was adopted was just plain strange. I still don’t understand it.
I was 55 years old and getting bids on painting my house. Keith came one gray morning, and as we walked around the house discussing the proposed job, he remarked that something, I have no idea what now, about my yard put him in mind of Bath where he’d spent four years as a child. I asked him how he’d come to live in Bath, and he told me about his family moving there from the Midwest when he was ten. During his explanation, he mentioned that he’d been adopted as a baby. It was such a personal revelation, that I wanted to respond and next thing I knew, I said, “I was adopted, too.”
I couldn’t believe I’d done that. First, of course, because I was not adopted. And second, because I’d never told a lie like that before. Sure, I’d told little white lies. I’d dodged invitations that didn’t seem that inviting by making up prior commitments. I’d fudged my estimated income several times when doing so seemed advantageous. That sort of thing. But I’d never altered such a basic fact.
After that, I started telling all sorts of folks that I was adopted. I didn’t go on and on about it. I would just insert it into conversations whenever it seemed like I could do so with some sort of continuity. Usually, people would politely acknowledge my disclosure, perhaps ask a few questions, or make some kind remark and that was that. Sometimes, it led to intense and personal discussions about families and personal histories. As I repeated the story, it stopped feeling strange or even like a lie. I just was two people. The one with my old friends and family who was not adopted and the one with other people, sometimes new friends, often strangers, who was adopted.
The last time I told the lie was just before my 68th birthday. I don’t remember the details. I don’t even remember why I stopped. In a way, the end of the habit was as strange as the origin. I just lost interest. Every now and again, I still wonder at myself. Why would I do such a thing and why would I suddenly stop? How is it, that so far into this life, I still have no idea about who I am and why I do what I do?
I love when people suddenly become something they’ve never been before, which can alter their views about everything else in the world, at least for a time.
This is a gorgeous story. Laughed out loudly at "First, of course, because I was not adopted." Enjoyed it so much, the ending of the lie and especially the last line leave the reader pondering.
Oh! I’ve forgotten him. Forgotten his name, his hat size. Strange though, last week I found his Lucchese boots in the back of the closet. Dusty. I tried them on. He has such long narrow feet. I don’t know anyone who could wear them. Ryan Shark Cowboy Boots, $595. Not expensive but a bit more than I wanted to pay for his birthday. Why didn’t he wear them when he walked out on me?
He really wanted a pair of something-something California Gold. They were over $1500 and I couldn’t buy them and the hat. I loved that hat. When he reared back in his chair and put his boots on the porch rail with that hat on his head. Goodness, he was charming. Absolutely breathtaking.
And I learned to cook for him. He wanted three meals a day and I adjusted to his schedule and his needs. To perfection I learned the over-easy-egg-nearly-burnt-bacon- crispy-toast-with-real-butter. Why didn’t he drink his coffee strong and black? Strange that a man that particular about his food was satisfied with instant coffee.
To tell the truth, this was long before every little house along Cypress Walk had its forecourt of concrete or tarmac and a slew of vehicles, vans or cars, SUVs, 4x4s, quads, parked out there in a show of look-what-we've-got. And that is what it is, if you think that fences, walls, hedges, trees, etc, have all been stripped out, anything that might obstruct the passer-by's clear view of the family's laudable effort in favour of planetary heating. But once, before, each front yard consisted of a small, square lawn surrounded by a privet hedge that often outgrew the owners' efforts with the shears. And people liked that. They sat contented in their houses with lace curtains in the windows and a hedge out front. Nobody could see them, nobody could see if they mowed their postage-stamp lawns or not. Unless they had a set of garden gnomes to show off, in which case they trimmed the hedge.
But all the lawns could be seen to be green, along Cypress Walk, except one.
It was at Number 85, on the right going up. And it was yellow, brown, tawny, khaki, wheatstraw. Dry as old bones, but not dead. It grew that way, even when it rained twice a week which it generally did. Mr Gibbs came from his house in Walnut Crescent and mowed it every Saturday afternoon unless rain. They paid him at the back door. He never talked about it. It was just a job. And at Number 85, they never spoke to the neighbours.
So nobody knew, except me. At that time I worked for the Local Authority, and I had full access to all the files, even the ones marked "Confidential: Top Secret". And what I found in there, you won't believe.
Don't laugh, you there! I can see you, there at the back with your hand over your mouth, whispering stuff to everyone around you. I can see the smirks, don't think I can't!
What do you mean, I'm a liar? A little courtesy, please!
"May I please speak, please, sir?"
"Very well."
"I know Cypress Walk. There is no Number 85."
"Um... You mean no longer, there is no Number 85 any more. They pulled it apart brick from brick to dig out its secrets!"
"No, there never was! And you never worked for the Local Authority! You're just spinning a yarn!"
Someone from the Local Authority just whispered to me that Cypress Walk ended at Number 79, which was at the corner with Walnut Terrace. And had a vibrant green lawn. So vibrant it was almost mysterious...
I walked by Bow Lynn's schooner last fortnight and there he was the old tar sitting on the taffrail with a rusty anchor shackled to his ankle.
I said, Old Tar, he goes by that, that your last cigarette or what? Actually it was a cigar I saw when he raised it to his lips for another inhale.
It was afore you come by, he says, but I decided to live another day. And holding the cigar in his teeth he leaned over and unscrewed the shackle and threw the anchor over his shoulder onto the deck.
The bilge pump went off and sent a jetstream of ocean back where it belonged.
Don't know who'll sink first, he said, flicking the cigar into the drink. It landed with a fizz.
Next day Bow's hanging from the crosstrees with a bucket a hot tar slopping the stuff around waterproofing rotten rigging. Said he's getting shipshape and will ship out soon.
Afortnight afore that I walked by the creakin schooner and Bow Lynn's standin on the pinrail with the main halyard clove hitched round his neck, just a tippy toe between him and Davy Jones' domain.
Tar, I say, how 'bout a pint or two down at the Whale's Tail? And he undid the knot and we went down to the Tail and stayed all night. Darn if we both lived to see another day.
Then goddamn if next week ain’t the clincher. I’m walkin agin by Tar’s old schooner and she is very old, very very old his schooner and he so often say who gonna sink first him or the schooner ‘tic’larly when the pumps pumping so much ocean outta the schooner back into the ocean where it belong. But this time Tar’s head’s in the cannon, see? Yeah, his friggin head fits in the cannon and his right hands got this flaming torch, and he can’t see the fuse but it’s there and he’s groping and whatnot all around with the torch trying to light it and he does light it and I say, Tar, Tar, but he don’t hear me cause his head’s inside the thing. Well, it was, then it wasn’t if you know what I mean, after that cannon, you know what I mean.
Poor Old Tar. Schooner still floatin all these years, makes me wonder, it really does.
Finally, after hours of pointless nagging, they left the bar for home. He’d invited Chris and Jammie along.
She wasn’t happy about it but for now, had to keep her discontent private. She didn't want to create a scene. Not in front of the others.
At least she’d gotten him to come home with her this time. An important step in the larger scheme of things.
Once home, he took out their special box and rolled a joint. They opened beers. She was tired and would have loved to sleep, lay to rest her drunkenness, but for the mosaic of voices and music that kept yesterday pried open. She did a line from the back of a CD being passed around.
She tried to catch his eye.
She remembered a time when this was all he did—look into her eyes; the way water sees the sky. How resilient she had felt, then.
She wondered how could he do this so easily now—stay liberated from her thoughts and feelings—and how she couldn’t do it at all. That is, to stop thinking about him.
If he’d gone to Brownies they’d have to play the phone game again. She’d call and he wouldn’t answer. And then she’d keep calling till she wore his battery down.
After waiting a respectable amount of time, she would call Chris’ phone. Then Michael’s. And then, after the second day, when his friends couldn’t help any longer, she’d try anyone else’s number she might have had stored.
Once, when she was very angry, she’d thrown the remainder of her guacamole into the top drawer of his nightstand where he kept all the empty baggies and weighing scales and the Vitamin B he used to cut his stuff with.
Another time, she’d taken a pair of scissors and shredded his shirts. The first one she’d gone for was the blue button-down with ruffles. She’d wanted to hurt him. To take away what mattered to him the most.
Leaving wouldn’t be punishment enough.
It was an exhausting game. She was exhausted.
She didn’t ask much from him. All she wanted was that he come home like a normal person at a normal hour and they turn the lights off together like everyone else.
Those nights she stayed up waiting for him—she could hear whispers through the fine silence inside and count footsteps scatter on the streets below as she stared absently at the edge of a paper writhe beneath the fan. But she could tell no one. Her insides had been set on fire and she had to endure it with all the dignity she could scrape together.
She needed him home, desperately, if only to stop herself from going mad. He had to be there to help her cope with his own absence. Ironic, isn’t it?
Some time or the other, Chris and Jammie would inevitably have to leave. The beer would run out, even if the uncut stuff going around on the CD case didn’t. And then the two of them could go to sleep.
Resume life.
Till evening rolled in, ever faithfully, like a bewitched lover.
She couldn’t make out what time it was—the curtain was drawn. But she could see white light strangled by the thick cotton, through gaps.
Brownie’s would be closed by now.
Eventually, Chris and Jammie got up.
She realized she’d been holding her breath this entire time.
“Oh, are you leaving already?” she said, with tactful surprise.
“Can I go with them?” he said. May be asked.
“Where?”
“To Lucky’s.”
She’d forgotten it was Saturday morning in a city full of disenchanted people. There were always bars open at any given hour.
She just gave him the look and he looked apologetically at his two friends.
All of this felt too routine, too obligatory.
Sometimes, she felt she was keeping him hostage from doing all the things he wanted to do. Although, what those things were, was a mystery. At other times, she couldn’t help think she had rescued him from something despicable.
She didn’t think of what she wanted. She thought that if she could only sort out his life, their life together— that is, to get him to come home in a timely manner, cook, watch television, go to sleep, wake up and eat breakfast together, maybe, just maybe get a real job— then her own life would automatically fall into place.
It had worked—on a good week— now and then.
He said he was going down to put them in a cab.
She thought it was quite unnecessary, considering it was already daylight but again, didn’t want to cause a scene.
She waited by the window, which looked out into the courtyard and the narrow little alley through which you could see a sliver of the street.
She watched them walk out as though she’d let him go for good—with that impending sense of inevitability that had calloused her insides over time.
But she kept looking, trying to find all the reasons, any reason, that she might be wrong after all.
At some point in their seven years together she’d grown tired of expecting the worst and had started praying for the best instead.
Seven years that had dissolved like ice in luke warm water.
She watched through the alley as a cab stopped in front. He opened the door and the two girls got in. She could see the back of Chris’ dress go up slightly as the girl climbed in.
He shut the door behind them.
She let her gaze fall. For one second. Just for one second and in that moment, that little opening in time, the cab was gone.
She expected to see him walking back through the alley and courtyard. But perhaps, perhaps he had walked faster than her eyes could follow and was already inside the building, climbing up the stairs.
After all this time, she had earned that right to hope.
Colorful sign posted in the flowerbed he passed every morning. “Hate has no place here.”
“Hate.” What an ugly word. Ok, then: Fiendish. Unkind. Contemptuous. Plenty of potential synonyms. Was he being evasive?
Or just being a wordsmith? A lofty-sounding fire escape. He needed to own it. He hated the character he created. In fact, his fingers itched to sit down at his laptop and end her.
So why hadn’t he done it? Did he think Anna was somehow redeemable?
Ok, maybe. Maybe in some other universe, but he wasn’t going to write her pathway into that universe. No. Anna had to die. A bloody awful and painful death. Planning it would be fun. Jake would be sad, of course. Jake, who had spent the night in jail when she left him standing in the parking lot trying to explain why he couldn’t move her car out of the angry County Sheriff’s parking spot. She’d sailed off into the Coroner’s Office to get forensic information. Heedless of Jake left standing in the parking lot without keys and unable to call her back. “This your car?” the Sheriff had demanded. “No sir.” “But you just got out of it.” “No–it’s, it’s hers…” And Jake had pointed at her retreating backside. “Oh right. It’s your girlfriend’s fault, then?” “She’s not my–and it’s not my–”
And off he went to rot in jail overnight. Because she couldn’t be bothered to notice that he was missing from the parking lot. Well, she did notice, but she thought he’d gone off to get coffee, or just slack off.
Ok, this was all fun and games, and Anna was truly despicable. He hadn’t created her with one–not one–redeeming quality. She was a cardboard cutout Cruella De Vil.
Why had he never realized before that De Vil was…?
So his creation. Here he was, playing God, about to exact retribution on someone because…they were exactly the person he’d made them to be.
Put that in your Christian faith, and–!
Where had she come from? The man who claimed to…had he ever actually said the word love?
Thomas. He could map the stops on his partner’s streetcar of desire: Ignore, Taunt, Disparage, Wheedle, Ravish, Ignore. Rinse and Repeat.
If he was honest, and it was time for some honesty at last, he’d post his own sign:
She woke and without turning on the lamp reached out and clasped her husband’s hand. It was cold and stiff, which bothered her not a bit, as for these last, oh, 12 years, he’d been dead. She kept it in the drawer of her bedside, which she slid open as quietly as she could. While she found the bronze cast of her dead husband’s hand a comfort in the dark, it would likely bother her lover quite a lot. There would certainly be questions.
Resting her fingers onto the hand was usually enough to send her into a dreamless sleep, but tonight was different.
She had the idea about her husband’s hand after seeing a cast of Chopin’s hands just a month before her husband died. She was taken by the beauty of those hands, even cast and lifeless. Her husband’s hands too were elegant, they were his best feature, his only beautiful feature if she was honest, and she had noticed them even before she had seen his face for the first time.
He had been reading a newspaper across from her on a train, and she had found her gaze slide from the endless ploughed autumn fields back again and again to his long fingers. Such clean fingernails, such a commanding grasp upon the paper, surely a musician, perhaps even a conductor or composer, so fine were the fingers?
‘Do you have a light?’ she had asked.
She held her breath before he drew down his newspaper, considered her for a moment, then folded the pages neatly upon his lap and reached inside his jacket before leaning across to light her cigarette. Through all of this, she had been transfixed by his pianist’s hands.
Something was different about the hand. She slid quietly out of bed and took the hand with her to the door, one glance back at her lover in bed, then downstairs.
‘Do you play the piano?’ she had asked.
Again, his response was a little delayed as he took her in.
‘I am no musician at all, I am afraid. Why do you ask?’
He smiled at her out of puzzlement.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she had replied. And it didn’t, it really didn’t, not that day or any day since.
Tonight, though, she took his hand into the garden, turned it this way and that in the moonlight, and placed it upon the bird table. She couldn’t think where else to put it. He had loved to feed them every day, had longed for one to hop onto his hand and take the seed cupped in his soft palm, though none ever had. She sprinkled some seed into the hand, and stepped away, watching, barefoot in the wet grass.
Thank you for this prompt Mary. I love it. Maybe the most of all so far. It provokes such concrete thinking, I have found.
Even just the seeking for opposites, even just that process I found so grounding.
In the end I went for hand/feet, but I enjoyed also trying to sneak in some others: light/dark, sleep/wakefulness, old/new, memory/immediate sensation, grief/release, life/death, hope/acceptance... (actually, some of those only occur to me now after the writing is done, but it is such a great prompt, so full of motion, that I would guess the opposites just flow by themselves).
yes, i also love using verb opposites. it's such a simple idea--but it really gets the brain working. i finally tested negative but still feeling shitty. Tired of this, but i know I'll be back to my old self very soon. Thanks for asking!
This was a lot of fun. I haven’t done this since MFA days a decade and a half ago. Mind if I take another shot: I feel like Lydia Davis
“I want to throw acid on his face,” she told her friend, some weeks after she’d first met him. She’d been going to the bar at least twice a week now, on her own, and the last time, he’d taken her into the backroom. She had sat on his lap as he cut up lines with the back of a matchbook.
“Why on earth would you do something like that? Her friend had asked.
“Because if I can’t have him, I don’t want anyone else to, either.”
S with the shiny black pants and the long black hair and cowboy hat and a cigarette hanging from his pretty pink mouth.
Over time, she would learn that despite the fact that he showed up late to work, despite the fact that he could go days without sleeping—S liked a sense of order. It was in the way he weighed the pure stuff on his scale and mixed it with vitamin B; the way in which he packed each little black tinted bag with the mixture and patted them down; the way he would pack all the bags into a bundle and stuff them into his crotch (and pat that down as well) but never forgetting to keep a little for himself, in his front pocket. “The pure stuff,” he’d tell her. He made the calculations every night before he left home— two hundred baggies at twenty a piece. So technically he should come back with 4 Gs. Everything in S’s day was methodical and calculated; but nothing in his life was ever planned.
S took other women to the back room as well. He said they were ‘clients’. That it was all part of ‘business’. He said this with as much earnestness as her father would when he travelled around the world for meetings. Except here, no one flew First Class anywhere. They hid in dark corners, in bathrooms and backrooms and shuffled in the back seats of limousines.
That’s the way they lived— from hour to hour, from day to day—with no wives, no children, no bank accounts. Only pagers, matchbooks and phone numbers stuffed into their back pockets.
At first, during the early days, she would get edgy if he stayed back there too long with someone. Especially if the girl was attractive. How differently time moved for her, on the outside, watching the minutes dissolve like hot wax. When light, like the afternoon sun, fell on the wall to her side, she knew, without turning around, that the back-door had been re-opened. The women glanced at her briefly as they passed the corner bar stool, where she always sat.
Cooper, who for most of his life had avoided the masses by spending whatever free time he could create hiking alone in the most remote mountain ranges available, gazed from his perch at the kitchen sink at Anastasia and Francisco with an inconvenient mixture of affection and disdain. What in hell had possessed him, he wondered, seven years ago, when he’d gone and decided he’d spent enough time by himself? Now his life revolved around wilderness not at all, but around work and bills, and septic and roof repairs, keeping aspidistras in flight. No time or energy left over for sex, adventure, spontaneity, impetuosity, only for the grinding of life into fistfuls of dust.
He was contemplating digging his dilapidated backpack out from the pile of crap in the garage and hitchhiking to a trailhead from which there would be no return when Annie sprang from her chair and put on music, songs that had been famous ten years before she’d been born, back in the days when music and the ways it could make you feel were more important than anything else in the universe. She began dancing with Francisco with so much verve and abandon that Cooper began to lose track of his regrets. Before he had time to think he’d joined them, and towels and blankets floated in the air on all sides, spun by the child like so much gargantuan confetti. By the time they were all exhausted and ready to fall into bed he’d decided the backpack in the the garage could wait a while, perhaps for the day it was suddenly one of three.
The boss is being incredibly mean today. I come back to my cubicle after a soul-destroying 4 hour meeting and inhale deeply. Funny, how a deep breath can open up your senses (or sinuses). First it was the smell of my sweat, thick, musty, gag-worthy. Then I noticed hints of oakwood in Pam’s new perfume, the one that her boyfriend delivered straight to the office. The way the delivery man stood at our gate and called for Pam was enough to set off her fake shy energy. That entire afternoon went with the ladies queueing up for Pam’s love story. I think I smelt a small fart out of Mrs. Mitra. I don't blame her, all that radish she eats in her salad everyday can't be good for the stomach. I smelt the fear on the young intern’s face, the one who kept bobbing up in every cubicle to make herself useful. I was once like that, I remember. Full of the new hopeful energy, fed on the morning rice and fish stew by my mother and catching the bus with a gallant goodbye to our two-room apartment. I imagined Ma'am beaming face every morning, and her expectant glance every evening - “What happened at office, Bonnie?” These days that question is a clear anger trigger for me. I know Ma expects me to find friends from work to fill my lonely life. To go to more parties (no drinking shinking!) and meet more people. She is constantly telling me to “spill my secrets” the kind of which I have none. There it is, the scent of loneliness, emanating from me, pervading my whole cubicle - something that grows like a blackhole of sweat stains, armpit flesh, and awkward smiles.
You've captured a feeling of oppression, of discomfort with other people, discomfort in life, discomfort within one's own body. All in one stifling breath. Troubling and very well done.
We accept stories that are 1000 words or less, have a general theme of the joy of autumn and are written in a captivating style. Please use Times Roman 12 font, double spaced, paragraphs indented. Please submit via Submittable at the following link.
I can do this. I ‘ll send them the story I wrote about the dread of going back to school. How I gagged when the bus pulled up and spewed its diesel fumes. I almost lost breakfast all over my first day or school outfit. The one I had to fight mom over to wear. She went on and on about the cost, the skirt is too short, yada, yada ,yada. But I digress. Wait a minute. It’s saying joy. That won’t work.
I know. I’ll send them the one about the day I met that boy. I was going to send it to the New York Times Modern Love but just couldn’t make it to the 1500 word limit. We met at the fall dance. Pumpkin decorations and pots of mums everywhere. My first kiss. The taste of apple cider on his lips. Yeah. That’s a good one. I’ll send it. Done.
Checked email again. No word from the journal yet. That’s good news. The rejections usually fly back. Maybe I should have chosen to put money in the tip jar. It says it doesn’t matter, but does it?
After careful consideration of your submission, we’re sorry to say that it isn’t a good fit.
You would think the 'rejectors' could come up with something a bit more trendy. The 'after careful consideration .... isn't a good fit' line must be half a century old!
Take it steady coming out of a bout of Covid Mary; now, before taking another step, stop a moment and perhaps resolve to allow your next steps to be a little shorter, less rather than more in number, and steadier still; just for week or so. Covid is great at being gone but not gone...
...so thanks for pitching out such a great prompt in spite of Covid and do enjoy the other things that you've got lining up on your personal what next agenda.
Thank you, Rob! I'm still at the stage of having no choice but to rest. Even walking to refill my coffee is too much. But at least i'm no longer asleep all day! Definitely looking forward to having my life back one of these days.
I am one of the Famous Five* and I just happened to overhear you saying "all the plans". I'll get the others in on it. Julian will say "This is IMPORTANT", and we'll start investigating. Yippee! A new adventure!
And stay there. Be good to yourself, and feel better. I love your full name for the stuff: it is a demon. But I seem to have devils and demons and hate and things that go bump in the night following me around this week!
You're welcome Mary. What wondrous things unexpected connections are. "Zing on MacDuff!" spoke Shakespeare aloud, allowed to in struggling to find words to fit and flow in an early draft of that Scottish play, and just as quickly shook hos head and said "Nah! Zing doth not have quite the right ring to it."
“Loosen up” was a thing he said. Worse was “don’t worry so much,” which my brain processed as: “Get angry at me, and suspect that you’ve actually always been angry at me.” He was a summer person, always kicking off his shoes. Always wearing shoes that could be kicked off. He liked to pronounce my last name in the correct German way, thinking it struck at the heart of something true about me that I was trying to deny. I would always want to stab back, indirectly poking the tip of a slender knife at what should have been his pain parts. Say, knowing German, and Latin too. Spending his ripest years penned in by walnut wainscoting. But then I would be the cruel one. Then I wouldn’t know what to hiss between sips of tea and rum.
We always went to the same place and we always ordered tea with rum. We started it when we were young and I guess thought it made us hard to peg. Later we did it because it would have been too painful to admit all at once and in any single moment that things had long ago changed irretrievably, as they always do. So we kept ordering it even after we had become people who used the phrase “higher welfare” and I began fasting intermittently.
I don’t know who had the idea to go right after the funeral. I should have gone to the memorial directly, as the daughter. But by that time, it was also commonly agreed there is no wrong way to grieve.
A new waitress finally walked over to our table, after long waiting for us to pick up our menus instead of just staring out the window like we were still waiting on someone. She was impatient. “What will it be?”
“Two teas - Darjeeling - and two glasses of rum,” We knew, as the words strung out as if I were speaking a foreign language or reading scripted lines, that we would not come back agin. What I would have given, right then, for him to shake me unexpectedly, manhandling a shoulder, shoving and pulling the torso at once. Some kind of destabilizing. Instead, in a gesture intended as loving squeeze, and unfairly the thing I’d remember about him for years, I felt how just for a moment his hand on my knee tightened.
I knelt on the floor, sobbing, trying to fit the broken pieces of the lamp back together.
“Now aren’t you sorry you did that?” Phil asked.
“Am *I* sorry? Are you kidding me? You -”
But I was sorry. I could as well have thrown a frying pan at the wall. I didn’t have to throw this lamp that I’d always loved. The lamp we’d found in Spain, in better days. Midcentury modern ceramic, painted chalk white, according to the dealer, whose English vocabulary seemed to be limited to terms of the trade. We had both said “Yes, that’s it!” when we spotted it, hiding in a dark corner.
“I was always fond of that lamp,” Phil said.
“Don’t even – “
“I know,” he said.
Of course, if I had thrown a frying pan, unless I’d thrown it directly at him, it wouldn’t have hurt him nearly as much. That’s why the lamp called out to me, from its place of honor on the end table: Remember that time you thought you were happy, well, ha! Ha!
“What can I do?” he said.
I held a jagged piece of pottery out toward him, mutely. He stepped back as if I were threatening him with it, and then came and took it from my hand when he saw that I wasn’t.
He squatted down next to me and picked up another piece, saying, “It’s like a puzzle, isn’t it?”
“I’ll try,” he said. “I don’t know if I can fix it, but I’ll try.”
Break/repair. Well done!
Oooh. This is a perfect metaphor for a relationship. "I don't know if I can fix it, but I'll try..."
That's just honest.
Lovely story. If they want to fix it, trying is The best way to start
I can't believe it! Mary G has walked our street and noticed our lawn.
Ha! We were that neighbor with the completely dead lawn.....finally, tore it up and put in drought-resistant plants. So nice to no longer be the neighborhood eyesore!
The first time I told someone that I was adopted was just plain strange. I still don’t understand it.
I was 55 years old and getting bids on painting my house. Keith came one gray morning, and as we walked around the house discussing the proposed job, he remarked that something, I have no idea what now, about my yard put him in mind of Bath where he’d spent four years as a child. I asked him how he’d come to live in Bath, and he told me about his family moving there from the Midwest when he was ten. During his explanation, he mentioned that he’d been adopted as a baby. It was such a personal revelation, that I wanted to respond and next thing I knew, I said, “I was adopted, too.”
I couldn’t believe I’d done that. First, of course, because I was not adopted. And second, because I’d never told a lie like that before. Sure, I’d told little white lies. I’d dodged invitations that didn’t seem that inviting by making up prior commitments. I’d fudged my estimated income several times when doing so seemed advantageous. That sort of thing. But I’d never altered such a basic fact.
After that, I started telling all sorts of folks that I was adopted. I didn’t go on and on about it. I would just insert it into conversations whenever it seemed like I could do so with some sort of continuity. Usually, people would politely acknowledge my disclosure, perhaps ask a few questions, or make some kind remark and that was that. Sometimes, it led to intense and personal discussions about families and personal histories. As I repeated the story, it stopped feeling strange or even like a lie. I just was two people. The one with my old friends and family who was not adopted and the one with other people, sometimes new friends, often strangers, who was adopted.
The last time I told the lie was just before my 68th birthday. I don’t remember the details. I don’t even remember why I stopped. In a way, the end of the habit was as strange as the origin. I just lost interest. Every now and again, I still wonder at myself. Why would I do such a thing and why would I suddenly stop? How is it, that so far into this life, I still have no idea about who I am and why I do what I do?
This is SO interesting! What a premise!
Love the last line.
"it stopped feeling strange or even like a lie. I just was two people" - this just clinched the character and the premise for me! So intriguing.
What an intriguing premise for a longer story or even a novel!
I love when people suddenly become something they’ve never been before, which can alter their views about everything else in the world, at least for a time.
This is a gorgeous story. Laughed out loudly at "First, of course, because I was not adopted." Enjoyed it so much, the ending of the lie and especially the last line leave the reader pondering.
Liar.
Liar.
removed
Small brag. I re-worked my post from Week #29 (I Hate Sundays) and it appeared yesterday in Little Old Lady Comedy.
https://www.littleoldladycomedy.com/all-works/zeum-call-a-nearly-true-story
Such great news!!! Congratulations!!
Thanks! An how often do you get a Get Well card from 46 BC?
Congrats Mark! I enjoyed it then, and now again. Glad you got it published!
Thanks! It's nice to have a fan.
fun! thanks for sharing.
Great story! Congrats!
Congrats Mark ! Nice story
Yay! So cool.
There's a saying in the beery corners of nautical chatrooms.
"I spent most of my money on booze, broads, and boats. The rest I wasted."
FORGET/REMEMBER
Oh! I’ve forgotten him. Forgotten his name, his hat size. Strange though, last week I found his Lucchese boots in the back of the closet. Dusty. I tried them on. He has such long narrow feet. I don’t know anyone who could wear them. Ryan Shark Cowboy Boots, $595. Not expensive but a bit more than I wanted to pay for his birthday. Why didn’t he wear them when he walked out on me?
He really wanted a pair of something-something California Gold. They were over $1500 and I couldn’t buy them and the hat. I loved that hat. When he reared back in his chair and put his boots on the porch rail with that hat on his head. Goodness, he was charming. Absolutely breathtaking.
And I learned to cook for him. He wanted three meals a day and I adjusted to his schedule and his needs. To perfection I learned the over-easy-egg-nearly-burnt-bacon- crispy-toast-with-real-butter. Why didn’t he drink his coffee strong and black? Strange that a man that particular about his food was satisfied with instant coffee.
It just goes to show. I do remember him.
wonderful
lovely
To tell the truth, this was long before every little house along Cypress Walk had its forecourt of concrete or tarmac and a slew of vehicles, vans or cars, SUVs, 4x4s, quads, parked out there in a show of look-what-we've-got. And that is what it is, if you think that fences, walls, hedges, trees, etc, have all been stripped out, anything that might obstruct the passer-by's clear view of the family's laudable effort in favour of planetary heating. But once, before, each front yard consisted of a small, square lawn surrounded by a privet hedge that often outgrew the owners' efforts with the shears. And people liked that. They sat contented in their houses with lace curtains in the windows and a hedge out front. Nobody could see them, nobody could see if they mowed their postage-stamp lawns or not. Unless they had a set of garden gnomes to show off, in which case they trimmed the hedge.
But all the lawns could be seen to be green, along Cypress Walk, except one.
It was at Number 85, on the right going up. And it was yellow, brown, tawny, khaki, wheatstraw. Dry as old bones, but not dead. It grew that way, even when it rained twice a week which it generally did. Mr Gibbs came from his house in Walnut Crescent and mowed it every Saturday afternoon unless rain. They paid him at the back door. He never talked about it. It was just a job. And at Number 85, they never spoke to the neighbours.
So nobody knew, except me. At that time I worked for the Local Authority, and I had full access to all the files, even the ones marked "Confidential: Top Secret". And what I found in there, you won't believe.
Don't laugh, you there! I can see you, there at the back with your hand over your mouth, whispering stuff to everyone around you. I can see the smirks, don't think I can't!
What do you mean, I'm a liar? A little courtesy, please!
"May I please speak, please, sir?"
"Very well."
"I know Cypress Walk. There is no Number 85."
"Um... You mean no longer, there is no Number 85 any more. They pulled it apart brick from brick to dig out its secrets!"
"No, there never was! And you never worked for the Local Authority! You're just spinning a yarn!"
those people who always have to ruin a perfectly good story.... hate those kind of people.
But so fun!
You're very good at this unreliable narrator thing. I'm taking notes.
I'm flattered, Angela! This story needs to be longer to reach a "satisfying" conclusion, though.
Great build up! The best lies are very well crafted.
Now I don’t know who to believe! John, was there a number 85?
The story needs to be longer so I can find out who's the biggest liar.
Someone from the Local Authority just whispered to me that Cypress Walk ended at Number 79, which was at the corner with Walnut Terrace. And had a vibrant green lawn. So vibrant it was almost mysterious...
Ooh. A vibrant and mysterious green lawn. Ours only sprouts clover from some mystery source.
The Local Authority has a file on that: MysteryCloverSource045. Don't ask me what's in it, they won't let me near it.
Frightening, when you think about it, isn't it? All this going on under people's front lawns.
I walked by Bow Lynn's schooner last fortnight and there he was the old tar sitting on the taffrail with a rusty anchor shackled to his ankle.
I said, Old Tar, he goes by that, that your last cigarette or what? Actually it was a cigar I saw when he raised it to his lips for another inhale.
It was afore you come by, he says, but I decided to live another day. And holding the cigar in his teeth he leaned over and unscrewed the shackle and threw the anchor over his shoulder onto the deck.
The bilge pump went off and sent a jetstream of ocean back where it belonged.
Don't know who'll sink first, he said, flicking the cigar into the drink. It landed with a fizz.
Next day Bow's hanging from the crosstrees with a bucket a hot tar slopping the stuff around waterproofing rotten rigging. Said he's getting shipshape and will ship out soon.
Afortnight afore that I walked by the creakin schooner and Bow Lynn's standin on the pinrail with the main halyard clove hitched round his neck, just a tippy toe between him and Davy Jones' domain.
Tar, I say, how 'bout a pint or two down at the Whale's Tail? And he undid the knot and we went down to the Tail and stayed all night. Darn if we both lived to see another day.
Then goddamn if next week ain’t the clincher. I’m walkin agin by Tar’s old schooner and she is very old, very very old his schooner and he so often say who gonna sink first him or the schooner ‘tic’larly when the pumps pumping so much ocean outta the schooner back into the ocean where it belong. But this time Tar’s head’s in the cannon, see? Yeah, his friggin head fits in the cannon and his right hands got this flaming torch, and he can’t see the fuse but it’s there and he’s groping and whatnot all around with the torch trying to light it and he does light it and I say, Tar, Tar, but he don’t hear me cause his head’s inside the thing. Well, it was, then it wasn’t if you know what I mean, after that cannon, you know what I mean.
Poor Old Tar. Schooner still floatin all these years, makes me wonder, it really does.
Aaaarrrghhhh! What a story!
Love these characters, Ol' Tar and Bow Lynn! Should be a Jack in there?
That opening : " sitting on the taffrail with a rusty anchor shackled to his ankle." anchor.. shackle... ankle. Pure poetry.
Great story this one! I can just see him—and then I can’t…of course.
Well, I do. I know what you mean. . . and it makes me wonder if this is the beginning or the end!
Shiver me timbers!
Love the language in this, the unspooling aforeplay, and the explosive climax!
Finally, after hours of pointless nagging, they left the bar for home. He’d invited Chris and Jammie along.
She wasn’t happy about it but for now, had to keep her discontent private. She didn't want to create a scene. Not in front of the others.
At least she’d gotten him to come home with her this time. An important step in the larger scheme of things.
Once home, he took out their special box and rolled a joint. They opened beers. She was tired and would have loved to sleep, lay to rest her drunkenness, but for the mosaic of voices and music that kept yesterday pried open. She did a line from the back of a CD being passed around.
She tried to catch his eye.
She remembered a time when this was all he did—look into her eyes; the way water sees the sky. How resilient she had felt, then.
She wondered how could he do this so easily now—stay liberated from her thoughts and feelings—and how she couldn’t do it at all. That is, to stop thinking about him.
If he’d gone to Brownies they’d have to play the phone game again. She’d call and he wouldn’t answer. And then she’d keep calling till she wore his battery down.
After waiting a respectable amount of time, she would call Chris’ phone. Then Michael’s. And then, after the second day, when his friends couldn’t help any longer, she’d try anyone else’s number she might have had stored.
Once, when she was very angry, she’d thrown the remainder of her guacamole into the top drawer of his nightstand where he kept all the empty baggies and weighing scales and the Vitamin B he used to cut his stuff with.
Another time, she’d taken a pair of scissors and shredded his shirts. The first one she’d gone for was the blue button-down with ruffles. She’d wanted to hurt him. To take away what mattered to him the most.
Leaving wouldn’t be punishment enough.
It was an exhausting game. She was exhausted.
She didn’t ask much from him. All she wanted was that he come home like a normal person at a normal hour and they turn the lights off together like everyone else.
Those nights she stayed up waiting for him—she could hear whispers through the fine silence inside and count footsteps scatter on the streets below as she stared absently at the edge of a paper writhe beneath the fan. But she could tell no one. Her insides had been set on fire and she had to endure it with all the dignity she could scrape together.
She needed him home, desperately, if only to stop herself from going mad. He had to be there to help her cope with his own absence. Ironic, isn’t it?
Some time or the other, Chris and Jammie would inevitably have to leave. The beer would run out, even if the uncut stuff going around on the CD case didn’t. And then the two of them could go to sleep.
Resume life.
Till evening rolled in, ever faithfully, like a bewitched lover.
She couldn’t make out what time it was—the curtain was drawn. But she could see white light strangled by the thick cotton, through gaps.
Brownie’s would be closed by now.
Eventually, Chris and Jammie got up.
She realized she’d been holding her breath this entire time.
“Oh, are you leaving already?” she said, with tactful surprise.
“Can I go with them?” he said. May be asked.
“Where?”
“To Lucky’s.”
She’d forgotten it was Saturday morning in a city full of disenchanted people. There were always bars open at any given hour.
She just gave him the look and he looked apologetically at his two friends.
All of this felt too routine, too obligatory.
Sometimes, she felt she was keeping him hostage from doing all the things he wanted to do. Although, what those things were, was a mystery. At other times, she couldn’t help think she had rescued him from something despicable.
She didn’t think of what she wanted. She thought that if she could only sort out his life, their life together— that is, to get him to come home in a timely manner, cook, watch television, go to sleep, wake up and eat breakfast together, maybe, just maybe get a real job— then her own life would automatically fall into place.
It had worked—on a good week— now and then.
He said he was going down to put them in a cab.
She thought it was quite unnecessary, considering it was already daylight but again, didn’t want to cause a scene.
She waited by the window, which looked out into the courtyard and the narrow little alley through which you could see a sliver of the street.
She watched them walk out as though she’d let him go for good—with that impending sense of inevitability that had calloused her insides over time.
But she kept looking, trying to find all the reasons, any reason, that she might be wrong after all.
At some point in their seven years together she’d grown tired of expecting the worst and had started praying for the best instead.
Seven years that had dissolved like ice in luke warm water.
She watched through the alley as a cab stopped in front. He opened the door and the two girls got in. She could see the back of Chris’ dress go up slightly as the girl climbed in.
He shut the door behind them.
She let her gaze fall. For one second. Just for one second and in that moment, that little opening in time, the cab was gone.
She expected to see him walking back through the alley and courtyard. But perhaps, perhaps he had walked faster than her eyes could follow and was already inside the building, climbing up the stairs.
After all this time, she had earned that right to hope.
Despair/hope? Both ring loud with longing here. Well done!
I was thinking admit/deny , arrive/leave inhale/exhale
Yes, I can feel all of those here.
So stark and lonely this one. Ripples off the page. Well done.
Glad you enjoyed.
The longing in this is thick as the world.
Colorful sign posted in the flowerbed he passed every morning. “Hate has no place here.”
“Hate.” What an ugly word. Ok, then: Fiendish. Unkind. Contemptuous. Plenty of potential synonyms. Was he being evasive?
Or just being a wordsmith? A lofty-sounding fire escape. He needed to own it. He hated the character he created. In fact, his fingers itched to sit down at his laptop and end her.
So why hadn’t he done it? Did he think Anna was somehow redeemable?
Ok, maybe. Maybe in some other universe, but he wasn’t going to write her pathway into that universe. No. Anna had to die. A bloody awful and painful death. Planning it would be fun. Jake would be sad, of course. Jake, who had spent the night in jail when she left him standing in the parking lot trying to explain why he couldn’t move her car out of the angry County Sheriff’s parking spot. She’d sailed off into the Coroner’s Office to get forensic information. Heedless of Jake left standing in the parking lot without keys and unable to call her back. “This your car?” the Sheriff had demanded. “No sir.” “But you just got out of it.” “No–it’s, it’s hers…” And Jake had pointed at her retreating backside. “Oh right. It’s your girlfriend’s fault, then?” “She’s not my–and it’s not my–”
And off he went to rot in jail overnight. Because she couldn’t be bothered to notice that he was missing from the parking lot. Well, she did notice, but she thought he’d gone off to get coffee, or just slack off.
Ok, this was all fun and games, and Anna was truly despicable. He hadn’t created her with one–not one–redeeming quality. She was a cardboard cutout Cruella De Vil.
Why had he never realized before that De Vil was…?
So his creation. Here he was, playing God, about to exact retribution on someone because…they were exactly the person he’d made them to be.
Put that in your Christian faith, and–!
Where had she come from? The man who claimed to…had he ever actually said the word love?
Thomas. He could map the stops on his partner’s streetcar of desire: Ignore, Taunt, Disparage, Wheedle, Ravish, Ignore. Rinse and Repeat.
If he was honest, and it was time for some honesty at last, he’d post his own sign:
“Love Has No Place Here.”
And move on, at long last.
Ha!
Clever effective reversal of the sign's mantra!
Thank you. The real one is in our perennial bed.
She woke and without turning on the lamp reached out and clasped her husband’s hand. It was cold and stiff, which bothered her not a bit, as for these last, oh, 12 years, he’d been dead. She kept it in the drawer of her bedside, which she slid open as quietly as she could. While she found the bronze cast of her dead husband’s hand a comfort in the dark, it would likely bother her lover quite a lot. There would certainly be questions.
Resting her fingers onto the hand was usually enough to send her into a dreamless sleep, but tonight was different.
She had the idea about her husband’s hand after seeing a cast of Chopin’s hands just a month before her husband died. She was taken by the beauty of those hands, even cast and lifeless. Her husband’s hands too were elegant, they were his best feature, his only beautiful feature if she was honest, and she had noticed them even before she had seen his face for the first time.
He had been reading a newspaper across from her on a train, and she had found her gaze slide from the endless ploughed autumn fields back again and again to his long fingers. Such clean fingernails, such a commanding grasp upon the paper, surely a musician, perhaps even a conductor or composer, so fine were the fingers?
‘Do you have a light?’ she had asked.
She held her breath before he drew down his newspaper, considered her for a moment, then folded the pages neatly upon his lap and reached inside his jacket before leaning across to light her cigarette. Through all of this, she had been transfixed by his pianist’s hands.
Something was different about the hand. She slid quietly out of bed and took the hand with her to the door, one glance back at her lover in bed, then downstairs.
‘Do you play the piano?’ she had asked.
Again, his response was a little delayed as he took her in.
‘I am no musician at all, I am afraid. Why do you ask?’
He smiled at her out of puzzlement.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she had replied. And it didn’t, it really didn’t, not that day or any day since.
Tonight, though, she took his hand into the garden, turned it this way and that in the moonlight, and placed it upon the bird table. She couldn’t think where else to put it. He had loved to feed them every day, had longed for one to hop onto his hand and take the seed cupped in his soft palm, though none ever had. She sprinkled some seed into the hand, and stepped away, watching, barefoot in the wet grass.
Thank you for this prompt Mary. I love it. Maybe the most of all so far. It provokes such concrete thinking, I have found.
Even just the seeking for opposites, even just that process I found so grounding.
In the end I went for hand/feet, but I enjoyed also trying to sneak in some others: light/dark, sleep/wakefulness, old/new, memory/immediate sensation, grief/release, life/death, hope/acceptance... (actually, some of those only occur to me now after the writing is done, but it is such a great prompt, so full of motion, that I would guess the opposites just flow by themselves).
I hope you are feeling a little better?
yes, i also love using verb opposites. it's such a simple idea--but it really gets the brain working. i finally tested negative but still feeling shitty. Tired of this, but i know I'll be back to my old self very soon. Thanks for asking!
i love everything about this one. That opening sentence! So good.
As someone who sleeps best with my husband's hand in mine, I can't stop reading this one.
This was a lot of fun. I haven’t done this since MFA days a decade and a half ago. Mind if I take another shot: I feel like Lydia Davis
“I want to throw acid on his face,” she told her friend, some weeks after she’d first met him. She’d been going to the bar at least twice a week now, on her own, and the last time, he’d taken her into the backroom. She had sat on his lap as he cut up lines with the back of a matchbook.
“Why on earth would you do something like that? Her friend had asked.
“Because if I can’t have him, I don’t want anyone else to, either.”
S with the shiny black pants and the long black hair and cowboy hat and a cigarette hanging from his pretty pink mouth.
Over time, she would learn that despite the fact that he showed up late to work, despite the fact that he could go days without sleeping—S liked a sense of order. It was in the way he weighed the pure stuff on his scale and mixed it with vitamin B; the way in which he packed each little black tinted bag with the mixture and patted them down; the way he would pack all the bags into a bundle and stuff them into his crotch (and pat that down as well) but never forgetting to keep a little for himself, in his front pocket. “The pure stuff,” he’d tell her. He made the calculations every night before he left home— two hundred baggies at twenty a piece. So technically he should come back with 4 Gs. Everything in S’s day was methodical and calculated; but nothing in his life was ever planned.
S took other women to the back room as well. He said they were ‘clients’. That it was all part of ‘business’. He said this with as much earnestness as her father would when he travelled around the world for meetings. Except here, no one flew First Class anywhere. They hid in dark corners, in bathrooms and backrooms and shuffled in the back seats of limousines.
That’s the way they lived— from hour to hour, from day to day—with no wives, no children, no bank accounts. Only pagers, matchbooks and phone numbers stuffed into their back pockets.
At first, during the early days, she would get edgy if he stayed back there too long with someone. Especially if the girl was attractive. How differently time moved for her, on the outside, watching the minutes dissolve like hot wax. When light, like the afternoon sun, fell on the wall to her side, she knew, without turning around, that the back-door had been re-opened. The women glanced at her briefly as they passed the corner bar stool, where she always sat.
S wouldn’t catch her eye.
—End—
some really nice writing here!
Thank you
Cooper, who for most of his life had avoided the masses by spending whatever free time he could create hiking alone in the most remote mountain ranges available, gazed from his perch at the kitchen sink at Anastasia and Francisco with an inconvenient mixture of affection and disdain. What in hell had possessed him, he wondered, seven years ago, when he’d gone and decided he’d spent enough time by himself? Now his life revolved around wilderness not at all, but around work and bills, and septic and roof repairs, keeping aspidistras in flight. No time or energy left over for sex, adventure, spontaneity, impetuosity, only for the grinding of life into fistfuls of dust.
He was contemplating digging his dilapidated backpack out from the pile of crap in the garage and hitchhiking to a trailhead from which there would be no return when Annie sprang from her chair and put on music, songs that had been famous ten years before she’d been born, back in the days when music and the ways it could make you feel were more important than anything else in the universe. She began dancing with Francisco with so much verve and abandon that Cooper began to lose track of his regrets. Before he had time to think he’d joined them, and towels and blankets floated in the air on all sides, spun by the child like so much gargantuan confetti. By the time they were all exhausted and ready to fall into bed he’d decided the backpack in the the garage could wait a while, perhaps for the day it was suddenly one of three.
oh, yes, the looking back and wondering how we got here. And then the realization that everything before is what brought us to this moment.
This narrative resonates warmth, something we definitely need more of.
Thank you!
Lovely.
Inhale/Exhale
The boss is being incredibly mean today. I come back to my cubicle after a soul-destroying 4 hour meeting and inhale deeply. Funny, how a deep breath can open up your senses (or sinuses). First it was the smell of my sweat, thick, musty, gag-worthy. Then I noticed hints of oakwood in Pam’s new perfume, the one that her boyfriend delivered straight to the office. The way the delivery man stood at our gate and called for Pam was enough to set off her fake shy energy. That entire afternoon went with the ladies queueing up for Pam’s love story. I think I smelt a small fart out of Mrs. Mitra. I don't blame her, all that radish she eats in her salad everyday can't be good for the stomach. I smelt the fear on the young intern’s face, the one who kept bobbing up in every cubicle to make herself useful. I was once like that, I remember. Full of the new hopeful energy, fed on the morning rice and fish stew by my mother and catching the bus with a gallant goodbye to our two-room apartment. I imagined Ma'am beaming face every morning, and her expectant glance every evening - “What happened at office, Bonnie?” These days that question is a clear anger trigger for me. I know Ma expects me to find friends from work to fill my lonely life. To go to more parties (no drinking shinking!) and meet more people. She is constantly telling me to “spill my secrets” the kind of which I have none. There it is, the scent of loneliness, emanating from me, pervading my whole cubicle - something that grows like a blackhole of sweat stains, armpit flesh, and awkward smiles.
Exhale.
What a paragraph--you've captured so much in this tiny space. I feel for Bonnie and her desperation.
Very well done - including the desperation of not meeting family expectations.
Gosh, the hopelessness in this story bruises the soul.
You've captured a feeling of oppression, of discomfort with other people, discomfort in life, discomfort within one's own body. All in one stifling breath. Troubling and very well done.
Thank you!
Accept/Reject
We accept stories that are 1000 words or less, have a general theme of the joy of autumn and are written in a captivating style. Please use Times Roman 12 font, double spaced, paragraphs indented. Please submit via Submittable at the following link.
I can do this. I ‘ll send them the story I wrote about the dread of going back to school. How I gagged when the bus pulled up and spewed its diesel fumes. I almost lost breakfast all over my first day or school outfit. The one I had to fight mom over to wear. She went on and on about the cost, the skirt is too short, yada, yada ,yada. But I digress. Wait a minute. It’s saying joy. That won’t work.
I know. I’ll send them the one about the day I met that boy. I was going to send it to the New York Times Modern Love but just couldn’t make it to the 1500 word limit. We met at the fall dance. Pumpkin decorations and pots of mums everywhere. My first kiss. The taste of apple cider on his lips. Yeah. That’s a good one. I’ll send it. Done.
Checked email again. No word from the journal yet. That’s good news. The rejections usually fly back. Maybe I should have chosen to put money in the tip jar. It says it doesn’t matter, but does it?
After careful consideration of your submission, we’re sorry to say that it isn’t a good fit.
Another rejection. Sigh.
Sigh is right.
You would think the 'rejectors' could come up with something a bit more trendy. The 'after careful consideration .... isn't a good fit' line must be half a century old!
“Wait a minute. It’s saying joy.” I think that could have been the moment when…
Take it steady coming out of a bout of Covid Mary; now, before taking another step, stop a moment and perhaps resolve to allow your next steps to be a little shorter, less rather than more in number, and steadier still; just for week or so. Covid is great at being gone but not gone...
...so thanks for pitching out such a great prompt in spite of Covid and do enjoy the other things that you've got lining up on your personal what next agenda.
Thank you, Rob! I'm still at the stage of having no choice but to rest. Even walking to refill my coffee is too much. But at least i'm no longer asleep all day! Definitely looking forward to having my life back one of these days.
I hope you’re all better in time for all the plans!
I am one of the Famous Five* and I just happened to overhear you saying "all the plans". I'll get the others in on it. Julian will say "This is IMPORTANT", and we'll start investigating. Yippee! A new adventure!
*I'm Timmy, if anyone's interested.
I'm George, obviously.
Woof!
I had named my dog Timmy (sometimes called Tim-Tim)! Huge Famous Five fan. And Secret Seven, Five Find Outers and all the rest.
Poor luv
Good news you're getting better, Mary, but Rob's word is a good one: "Covid is great at being gone but not gone". Take it easy..!
I've mastered the art of not moving off the sofa.
And stay there. Be good to yourself, and feel better. I love your full name for the stuff: it is a demon. But I seem to have devils and demons and hate and things that go bump in the night following me around this week!
Ah! So Zen.
To be a comfortable master of the art of not moving off the sofa in the certain knowledge that you are zero danger of morphing into a couch potato!
Zing go the strings of my 💘 Mary... Have you ever heard Darts do this number before https://youtu.be/pZ2_oC9AYHQ ?
First time for everything! Thanks for the sweet song, Rob.
You're welcome Mary. What wondrous things unexpected connections are. "Zing on MacDuff!" spoke Shakespeare aloud, allowed to in struggling to find words to fit and flow in an early draft of that Scottish play, and just as quickly shook hos head and said "Nah! Zing doth not have quite the right ring to it."
“Loosen up” was a thing he said. Worse was “don’t worry so much,” which my brain processed as: “Get angry at me, and suspect that you’ve actually always been angry at me.” He was a summer person, always kicking off his shoes. Always wearing shoes that could be kicked off. He liked to pronounce my last name in the correct German way, thinking it struck at the heart of something true about me that I was trying to deny. I would always want to stab back, indirectly poking the tip of a slender knife at what should have been his pain parts. Say, knowing German, and Latin too. Spending his ripest years penned in by walnut wainscoting. But then I would be the cruel one. Then I wouldn’t know what to hiss between sips of tea and rum.
We always went to the same place and we always ordered tea with rum. We started it when we were young and I guess thought it made us hard to peg. Later we did it because it would have been too painful to admit all at once and in any single moment that things had long ago changed irretrievably, as they always do. So we kept ordering it even after we had become people who used the phrase “higher welfare” and I began fasting intermittently.
I don’t know who had the idea to go right after the funeral. I should have gone to the memorial directly, as the daughter. But by that time, it was also commonly agreed there is no wrong way to grieve.
A new waitress finally walked over to our table, after long waiting for us to pick up our menus instead of just staring out the window like we were still waiting on someone. She was impatient. “What will it be?”
“Two teas - Darjeeling - and two glasses of rum,” We knew, as the words strung out as if I were speaking a foreign language or reading scripted lines, that we would not come back agin. What I would have given, right then, for him to shake me unexpectedly, manhandling a shoulder, shoving and pulling the torso at once. Some kind of destabilizing. Instead, in a gesture intended as loving squeeze, and unfairly the thing I’d remember about him for years, I felt how just for a moment his hand on my knee tightened.
What a nicely rendered scene!
Thanks, Mary! (:
Rituals are so interesting - how can you know when to let them go?
Yes! Their value exactly out of their repetition.. but still, an end or a change has to come in eventually.. interesting question!