Friday, August 19, 2016

2 Minutes. Go!

Hey, writer-type folks. AND PEOPLE WHO JUST WANT TO PLAY BUT DON'T IDENTIFY AS 'WRITERS' - all are welcome here! Every Friday, we do a fun free-write. For fun. And Freedom!

Write whatever you want in the 'comments' section on this blog post. Play as many times as you like. #breaktheblog! You have two minutes (give or take a few seconds ... no pressure!). Have fun. The more people who play, the more fun it is. So, tell a friend. Then send 'em here to read your 'two' and encourage them to play.

She held the report card like it had been dipped in a urinal. I could see the heat rising, the slight twitch in her lip that seemed to pull in the corners of the room - she was a magician about to yank everything. But. I'd. Still. BE. STANDING!!! No audience, no matter. And it wasn't like this was new territory. So, I waited, choking on the smoke from the scented candles she sold and therefore felt compelled to use.

My purgatory smelled like cinnamon apples.

"Jimmy..."

And she let that ride. Held it like a high note on a Casio keyboard. And what was I going to say? Sorry, Mom, there's this girl in my class and she stole my brain, twisted it, and then put it back - the damn thing don't work right now. Can't sit still. Can't concentrate.

Sorry, Mom, I'm more worried about getting my ass beat in the bathroom. If they gave grades for holding your piss all day, you wouldn't be this kind of mad/sad that makes me wonder if it would be different if Dad hadn't died.

The light in the room flickered when Mom threw the report card on the table. Everything stopped. My heart. The world. Evolution. Probably satellite signals and animal migrations. I flinched. I didn't want to, but I did. And then I closed my eyes so hard I saw red.

When I opened them, her eyes were thick with tears. Voice, too.

"Son, it's been a hard year. I hated school. Did I ever tell you that? Got tired of being judged. And your father ... I don't know, do they make human report cards? I still miss him just as much as you do, though. He drove me crazy, but I loved him."

I couldn't move, and I didn't think I'd be able to speak until the words were already out of my mouth.

"Mom. Let's order pizza. I'll buy. I still have that birthday money from Grandma."

And that's just how it happened. The pizza was even good considering the journey it had taken. It had done it's best.

I would have given it an A+.

BREAK THE BLOG FOR ME! AND GIVE ME SOME STUFF TO READ! Get 'em! :)

#2minutesgo Tweet it! Share it! Shout it from the top of the shack you live in! I will be out most of the day, but I'll be back...

79 comments:

  1. This is just beautiful.... and this line? "My purgatory smelled like cinnamon apples." friggin' perfect!

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    1. That's so lovely. The cinnamon apples was my favorite line, too. And now I want pizza.

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    2. Nancy De Cilio GauthierAugust 19, 2016 at 2:27 PM

      How a death can affect a family. Evocative.

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    3. This is awesome Mister Mader! "...like a high note on a Casio Keyboard" Epic! Our "pizza" was a Border Collie named Jake. :)

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    4. Another of those pieces where you can sense a whole world behind the moment. Bravo, Mader.

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  2. Shakespeare's Sonata

    There were many things he wished he'd paid more attention to in school. Poetry and music were among them. But he was a farmer's son, and there was not time nor money for trips to the city for symphonies and plays. And now, an old man, he tried to understand the music that brought him to tears when he heard it on the radio. He struggled to understand how poems written by a man named Shakespeare could raise the spirit of his wife, dead these twenty years.

    He'd tried to talk about it with his own son about the words and the music, but his son was busy, a banker in the city, always in a hurry. The problem with youth, he reminded himself, all the hurriedness, all the frenzy.

    He rose early, the way a farmer always does, though he'd sold his farm to real estate developers soon after she died, and he reveled in the sunrises. The radio, perpetually tuned to the classical music station, came on by itself a few minutes after he awoke. And he'd choose between the Bible, King James Version of course, and the book of Shakespeare, depending on the object of his reverence.

    This morning, though, it was not the sunrise which captivated him; it was the moon setting in the west. The announcer with a voice smooth and slow as molasses announced the Moonlight Sonata, and his own fingers fell to Sonnet CVII. "The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured..."

    He wondered why Beethoven never put words to his music, and then he wondered why Shakespeare never put music to his words. Or maybe they did. What would it have been like to hear them work together?

    The coffee maker stopped its gurgling, and he filled their cups, and sat down again at the table. If they had written together, the music and words would have set the world afire. Who would be able to listen to it and not fall in love?

    The book of poetry had been a gift from his wife. Their first anniversary. She told him he needed to round some of his hard edges, to let some magic in. At first, he didn't open it, and then she began to read to him, each night, one sonnet. And when the night came that he cried at the words she read, she looked at him and said it was his turn to read to her.

    And he did, every night from then on, until her last night in the cold white hospital room with spaghetti cables and tubes siphoning her life away.

    His last words to her, "it is the east, and Juliet is the sun."

    Her name was Juliet.

    He put his coffee cup down. When Mr. Rasmussen stopped by for a chat, the radio was still on, the coffee was half-drunk, and the book of sonnets was open. His body was cold by then, and his soul was dancing to the words and music of Shakespeare and Beethoven, and his wife was beautiful. The sun rose soft in the east, and the moon set red in the west, and they never figured out why there were two cups of coffee on the table that morning, that morning when he died.

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    1. Oh. This made me tear up. Stoppit, I tell ya. And this: "She told him he needed to round some of his hard edges, to let some magic in."

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    2. You're very good at lifting spirits with magic and then bringing them back to Earth with a gut-wrenching but eloquent crash. That's another box of Kleenex you owe me!

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    3. Oh snap. That gave me chills. I love this: "He wondered why Beethoven never put words to his music, and then he wondered why Shakespeare never put music to his words."

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    4. SO Lovely, Leland. So complete. I never quite get them done in so few words, but you always manage to!

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    5. Wow, real tears over here too. This is exactly why life is beautiful, the bitter and the sweet. All of this. Damn, Leland, you got me.

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    6. Thanks y'all... this was a fun one to write... and it was fun to remember Shakespeare's words about the moon, too.

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  3. I'm losing my ability to write. To fight, to get it right.

    The desire to sale makes my words seem stale and in my mind numbing crush to get it right, I fail.

    Sometimes, the joy I used to feel at getting the words to paper, the emotions, the storyline, the... the effects... I can't find the prose and nothing feels real.
    I drop the pen, unplug the electronic, let my soul twist and struggle, endure what makes my spirit sick... and then, I am me again.
    And I write.

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    1. Oh, I know that feeling... and you said (and wrote!) it well!

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    2. Oh wow...that's about as real as it gets. You got me.

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    3. Yup. I know it too, and you nailed it.

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    4. Yeah, pushing through. So relatable. I love it, Ey!

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  4. I feel like this wants to be part of something bigger.

    ====

    Even though Suzy woke with a ripping headache, that cockeyed feeling of something not quite right with the world, she forced herself out of bed, ate her cornflakes, brushed her teeth, slipped into her shiny Mary Janes, kissed her mother’s urn goodbye and walked to school on her own. As she rounded Bad Corner, which intensified the pain in her temples, she spied two cars on an inevitable collision course. As they approached the intersection, neither appeared to be slowing for the other. In fact, if anything, they looked to be speeding up.

    Please stop, Suzy thought. And, as if they’d heard her, one of them did. A squeal of brakes and some cursing later, nothing was hurt but a few feelings. But scared that somebody would ask her what had happened, Suzy hitched up her book bag and ran the rest of the way to school.

    Twice that morning her teacher snapped at her to pay attention, but Suzy couldn’t help but drift off and wonder about the two cars. Did she make them not have an accident? No. That was silly. Magical thinking, her father would have told her. They’d had this talk before. Cars have brakes; most drivers have quick reaction times; the intersection is notorious for its lack of visibility and its many crashes. All the thinking in the world could not have stopped what had happened to her mother.

    “Suzy Mitchell!”

    She sucked in a breath and sat up straight. Her classmates catcalled and tittered around her. Please stop, she thought. And as if they’d all been struck mute, not one more syllable was uttered. Suzy sank deeper into her chair, her head thrumming like giants were beating on it with drumsticks, and she mumbled something about needing to go to the nurse’s office.

    A half-hour later, her father stepped through the door, a sympathetic tilt to his head as he spied her lying on the cot in the dark with a cool washcloth over her forehead.

    “Migraine again, poor dear,” the nurse told her father.

    He made some comforting noises, and knelt beside her, petting her arm. Then the nurse wanted to talk to him. Suzy didn’t hear all of it. Just a few big words she didn’t know. Psychosomatic. Therapist. Regression. The big words in their somber tones made her stomach pitch. Her father was upset, too, she could sense it. She didn’t know how. She didn’t know if it was related to the cars that didn’t crash. Or the classmates who couldn’t speak. All she wanted was to make her father feel better. Please stop, she thought, and the room felt suddenly cooler, brighter. The pain drew back from her head like an ocean wave sinking from the beach, and she sat up, and smiled at him.

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    1. ohmigosh! I really like the concept AND the execution, and yes, it NEEDS to be more! even though it's beautiful as it is!

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    2. Nancy De Cilio GauthierAugust 19, 2016 at 2:25 PM

      What child hasn't fantasized he can make magic out of thin air. At least the intelligent, curious ones. Loved it.

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    3. If migraines give you super-powers I'll be a wizard soon! Look at the bright side, right? I really liked this Miss Laurie. You're writing gives me that Twilight Zone feeling and I LOVE it. The real subtle episodes where you might miss what's really going on if you're not paying close attention.

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    4. This is dope. Excellent pacing and well presented. I agree, it needs to grow.

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    5. So wonderful. If only because we all feel that power, then find it impossible to believe. I've been havin a coupla Carrie moments myself lately, but you are clerarly a better person than I!

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    6. Everyone else said it all. Love this piece, Laurie. It's so immersive.

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  5. Those arroyos outside town, so precious. Their red dirt. The way they breathe so slow, ignoring roads, evoking shadows like the last wispy creeds of dying cults.

    "You got a better story?" she asks me.

    She ain't never satisfied. I could tell her about Jesus, Beyoncé, and Saddam motherfucking Hussein pooling their resources to solve the murder of a sexually ambiguous alien-dwarf hybrid by a vengeful sixteenth-century teenage Moorish prince in some English stately home, and she'd still ask, "You got a better story?"

    Sometimes feels like my life's a constant struggle to tell a better story. It surely can't be, but it might be, after all's said.

    So a man was found dead 'neath the cliffs, but there were signs he'd tried to climb them before whatever killed him came along, and he'd gotten two-thirds the way up according to the gouges in the red clay many people attributed to the toes of his boots, which also had remnants of the same red clay stuck to them. Maybe not open and shut, but hardly fucking unfathomable neither.

    Braless, she strips off her shirt and flexes her dorsals, a cetacean back like something lithe and fluid and strenuous you'd only see once in a lifetime of diving in a world of deep. The pendulous hint of her breasts sidelines me, makes me salivate through my answer.

    "Yeah, I got a better story." I taste salt, like blood, like tears.

    "Tell me."

    "You sure you ready?"

    "Yeah, go ahead."

    "A'right. This. Fuck you is a better story. How's that, goddamnit? Stop breaking my balls, will ya? Something's wrong here, and even if I only felt a surface ripple when there's maybe some kinda vortex, wait it out, let it fucking breathe, for chrissakes."

    She won't challenge that. It's beneath her. I can't ordinarily find the words, but I pitch this just right. Like when you get absinthe just perfect, the thick green, the flame, the melted sugar, the voodoo, everything in its right place. Her name is every state we ever lived in, however brief. Right now, her name is Wyoming. Part of me wants her to stop changing her name and stay Wyoming. It suits her. It sounds like a query asked of a journey, which is everything we ever did.

    She's a tall female with wide shoulders. Rangy, I suppose. Like her mount. She looks like someone can only be happy astride that wide-eyed stallion galloping on a spit of glimmering sand; her golden silt hair streaming like a raging creek; its nostrils gaping like cave mouths; her haunches splayed and fulcrumed western style; its shimmering, filmy, velvet skin a platonic dream of musculature; her sweet hive eyelids tight as honeytraps; its citrus-leaf ears backstraining; her lone wild heart one violent stormshadow.

    Wyoming knows more than twice what she lets on, and maybe half of what she don't.

    But we're here now. Devils Tower looming like a sly insult from a quiet ground. Striated and dreamlike. Look but keep going. Big Timber. The Crazy Mountains stark and barroom blue against a lemon-apricot sky, cheap real estate, torn pleather booths, the interstate, power cables, smokestacks, the bright rails straight like arrows pointing someplace, some other place.

    So, the dead man, right? I truly want to honor his memory, find his killer, but my girl Montana insists we keep moving west.

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    1. You make beautiful writing look so effortless... "her name is Wyoming..." and even the anger is beautiful in this... will it grow? or will it remain pristine in its flash completeness?

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    2. Nancy De Cilio GauthierAugust 19, 2016 at 2:22 PM

      There's always a better story. Interesting: she changes her name in every State. Makes one think.

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    3. This. This is amazing! "It sounds like a query asked of a journey, which is everything we ever did." I really like that line!

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    4. This is marvelous. I love how she changes her name, I love the extension of the "better story." So good.

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    5. Agreed on all counts. You hit your stride perfect in this one. There's a bitten off quality - the dialogue is perfect. This is fucking awesome :) - I could tell her about Jesus, Beyoncé, and Saddam motherfucking Hussein pooling their resources to solve the murder of a sexually ambiguous alien-dwarf hybrid by a vengeful sixteenth-century teenage Moorish prince in some English stately home, and she'd still ask, "You got a better story?"

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    6. I wanna be your girlfriend! In fact, I'm feeling like your girlfriend. Signed, Miss Idaho!

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    7. Ha ha. It's odd how many states would make decent female names (Georgia, Virginia, the Carolinas). Maybe not New Hampshire. If they cross the border after Montana, Alberta would work fine, but British Columbia would be a damn strange name.

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    8. B.C. for short is kinda cute though David Antrobus! :)

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  6. It didn’t begin well, that journey of a thousand miles, its first step halting, the heel dragging, the knees knocking. The first day was its last, best day. Oh, maybe the sun shone upon it down the trail, when that fruit tree bloomed and its blossom staggered everyone, not just the lost travelers.

    That blossom pushed forth a stunning hybrid of the best of its strings of life, twisted gyres of things I cannot spell nor speak. But I know when they neatly tie a bow so perfect you don’t wish to open the present it secures from prying eyes, yet still entices you to set it free. Perhaps to see it fly.

    I worry about the day when this fruit unties itself from its tree. Will it have been cultivated with care to its potential perfection, not ignored and grown over-ripe, rotting from
    the ignorance of some failed husbandman who knows only what he thinks he knows?

    What he doesn’t know is what he’s missing

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    1. beautiful... and wise. Gyre is one of the most beautiful words in the English language, I think.

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    2. This is gorgeous. Your rhythms are amazing, Joe. Absolutely love it.

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    3. Yup. This does that thing the best track athletes and great poetry can do; it accelerates into the last straight, picking up momentum and beauty. (Sorry, been watching me some Olympics!)

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    4. "I worry about the day when this fruit unties itself from its tree."
      Beautiful!

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  7. Bobby’s afraid of the dark. He says there are monsters that hide in the shadows. I don’t understand. When I close my eyes at night, I see knights in glistening armor, dragons with smoky breath that smells like cotton candy, and ninja princesses who guard me. Sometimes in my dreams, we all play cards, and everybody is nice to each other. Bobby tells me to just wait, and I’ll see, but I’ve been waiting for a year and I still don’t understand.

    Then one weekend, Bobby’s mom asks my mom if I want to stay overnight. So I bring my sleeping bag over and even though we sleep in his room we pretend we’re camping. He tells me ghost stories, but I’m not afraid because I have my protectors with me. Ghosts haven’t got a chance against my ninja princess, or the dragon, or the knight.

    Bobby’s mom tells us it’s time to sleep, and she turns the light off, so there’s only a Mickey Mouse nightlight left on, and just as I’m about to go to sleep, I hear Bobby crying. And then the nightlight goes off.

    I hear the door to his room squeak, and my heart starts beating faster. Maybe Bobby does have monsters at his house. He should have invited me and my team of protectors earlier.

    The floor squeaks, too, and I don’t say a word, and Bobby doesn’t say a word, and then I feel its breath on my face. Awful, stinky breath, like it’s been drinking poison. I sense it leaning over me, it’s claw on the zipper of my sleeping bag, and then my ninja princess whispers to me to use the palm of my hand on its face, driving upward, and I wait for it to get closer and I do! I shove my hand hard where it’s nose is emitting foul odors, and it screams in pain. I feel something hot and sticky drip from its face onto mine, and then it flies to the door and slams it behind him. I get up and turn the lights on. Bobby’s got the covers pulled over his head, and I tell him it’s okay, the ninja princess got the monster, and he pulls the covers down and looks around.

    “You’ve got blood on your face,” he tells me, and when I look in the mirror, I see he’s right. A big splash of it on my cheek. The knight would be proud!

    We don’t sleep much the rest of the night. I teach him some of the moves my ninja princess showed me.

    When we go down for breakfast in the morning, Bobby’s dad isn’t there, and his mother won’t look me in the eye.

    I never get invited back to Bobby’s for a sleepover, but Bobby says the monster hasn’t come back. I’m glad.

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    1. Nancy De Cilio GauthierAugust 19, 2016 at 2:16 PM

      Wow. Kudos to the ninja princesses and a little boy with a lot of courage. Loved it.

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    2. "it’s claw " Proof that I don't edit my #2minutego fiction.

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    3. You make me smile Leland Dirks. Hurray for brave little boys who slay monsters for even smaller ones. :)

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  8. Nancy De Cilio GauthierAugust 19, 2016 at 2:32 PM

    You go to bed every night, vowing to wake up and do things differently. Stop looking at your phone, or FB, or TV news. Maybe step outside and breathe in the cooler morning air; really look at what's growing out there - even if it's weeds. Maybe you'll notice the BottleBrush has some red flowers and you make a point of checking for humming birds hovering. Maybe you'll notice that the two flowers that bloomed on the Magnolia over a week ago, have now turned brown with dessication in the hot sun. Yeah, you make these promises to yourself; but then morning comes....and nothing has changed. Maybe tomorrow, yeah tomorrow.

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    1. You nailed this - a subtle desperation without the drama. I love when writers can pin down a simple universal experience.

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  9. Smoke swirled, piling into a column.

    “So what do you think? Is he on the level?”

    Elodie narrowed her eyes, squinting at her friend. Maybe if she gave her the answer she wanted she’d stop asking her her opinion every half hour. Their smoke breaks used to be much more fun before Keith became a part of her co-worker’s life. They used to discuss magazines and television programs. They used to regularly go out together. It used to be that no man above the age of majority was safe in their town. Things had changed for them both so quickly. Janis had a man now and she’d now got nothing. Not even the friend she’d had since before they both left school.

    “He’s a man. Of course he’s going to be lying to you. But that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t mean well. They just can’t help themselves. Men, that is. He’s a shit but he’s a good one. A good one for you, at least.”

    “So, you’re not saying I deserve better? You think adequate’s good enough for me?”

    “No, it’s not that at all. He’s good for a man. At least, he’s better than most of the men I’ve had the pleasure of.!

    Janis’ mouth curved into a cruel smirk. Elodie knew she’d had her suspicions about her sexuality for years now. They’d thought nothing of sharing a room and a bed for most of the time they’d known each other. But that had finished too, now that she’d got Keith in her life.

    Maybe it was time to make some new friends.

    Elodie looked at her watch and then quickly stubbed her cigarette out. “Time’s over,” she said. “It’s time to go back in. We’ve people to massage and acupuncture needles to place. ‘A healthy body’s required to create the foundation for a healthy mind’, if you remember all the briefings we had. Now, fags out, everyone. We’ve people we need to make well again.”

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    1. This is a brilliantly constructed piece. And I love this sentence: "He’s good for a man." So perfect..

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    2. Eegads Mark! I can taste the nicotine in the air! That was REALLY good!

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    3. Good lord, this is so real... I love your writing...

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  10. You're right.  You're always right about these things.  

    Not because you're smarter than me, but because you've been done some of these back roads.  

    You've stood at this crossroad before.

    You leave me breadcrumbs instead of answers.  Never the easy answer.   I think you know that I won't believe it  until I figure it out myself.

    So you tell me to get outside.  Go walk the dogs and play.  Because you know...

    You know that as soon as my brain hits that trail I'll start to see colors and patterns and stories everywhere!

    And I'll remember how to breathe...not just with my lungs, but with my whole being.  I fill my soul...not just with air but with everything.   The blue skies...green leaves reacting out to kiss it...the hot dry smell of summer grass now starting to fade to an autumn grey...the high winds above the fir trees, winds that sound twenty years old.  The smell of wet dog and the feel of damp fur rubbing against my legs...

    I forget about these things...all of the time.  Nobody would believe me if I told them how often.  But you would.  Because you know.

    You could draw me a map, but you know I won't follow it until I figure out how to get there on my own, so you light candles for me so I can look up at them like stars.  

    A map?  Nay.  But stars...stars I'll follow.

    And I wouldn't be surprised to find that the stars are only the sun dancing on the creeks that I played in as a kid.

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    1. Oh my god, that last sentence! And I love the conversational feel of this, but that last sentence is FIRE.

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    2. I have something perilously close to worship going on

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    3. Gosh you guys make me smile! I really liked this, it's cool that other people can feel it. :)
      JD I struggled with that last line so much! I still think it feels heavy and awkward in my mouth...I think there's a smoother wording...I am really glad that some of the feeling still came across. Thank you guys!

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  11. Aurelia Jenkins lived with her grandmother at the end of Dayton street. It was a big old barn of a house; painted stubbornly brown, with turrets and stained glass and wrought iron railings, all the survivors of earlier time. Looming above the surrounding prairie styles and the bland midcentury ranches, it was a place that populated the imaginations of children all around. And the old lady who lived there, a woman who wore her white hair piled high and a stole of snapping fox heads to church on Sundays, came into our dreams as a witch or a goblin, even as we rang her bell on Halloween, only to run screaming into the night, delirious with our bravery.
    There were some who said that Aurelia was not her granddaughter at all, but rather some orphan she’d somehow kidnapped from Paris or Russia or Spain. But whether by guilt or association, by the time she was grown, Aurelia had a reputation of being strange.
    She was bookish I know, and incredibly smart with a blonde, frail, almost translucent beauty that had the sense never to call attention to itself. Instead, she waited to be seen and once she was, managed to never entirely exist again.
    I have snapshots of her in my head. She learned to drive before any of us and is in dungarees rolled to her calf, leaning against the old lady’s Turquoise Cadillac with its white leather insides and impossible fins, smiling at something, looking like a dream. She is nodding quite seriously at Sister Theresa somewhere during our sophomore year. We were given a test for our thinking skills: “If you are flying over Lake Michigan, and the exit door opens, and out flies a box of nails, and a box of silk, which hits the ground first?” Her supernaturally white hand goes up in the air. “Neither one.” She answers. “You are flying over water, so neither hits the ground.”
    Sister claps her hands together. “Correct!”
    “No, it isn’t” says Aurelia, without a trace of rancor. “If you are flying over anything and the door to the plane is open, you have far greater problems than that.”
    So as much as she resisted it, draw attention she did. In our town, in those days, it was as easy as it is now to tell the good boys from the bad ones. Only in those days, the good boys shaved their heads and went into uniform and tried to look strong, while the bad boys grew their hair till they looked like Jesus; did acid and dope and rioted in the streets. I liked the bad boys myself, but she? She dated only the good ones. Miley Francis of the Green Berets, Randy Tompkins of the Marines; Billy McKenzie, and George with the green eyes, and Phillip Alonzo of the infantry and Evan McConell of the Air Force; the ones who came home without any eyes.
    We never knew the gifts she gave them, before they went away. We only knew they never came back, and we blame it on her to this very day.
    Eventually she left us. The war ended after. And that old house was dozed to make way for some mansion and the secrets it housed we never discovered, though she populates the imagination still.
    We never did learn what happened to Aurelia, or what service she offered, or where she went. Some said she made off to Paris or Russia, some said to hell; some said heaven sent. She was there; she was gone, and exists now only in old snapshots and memories as we try to make sense of it all.
    Whatever happens to a girl like that?

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    1. Love this. Your writing is always so good. Because the prose is good, but it's such confident story telling, too. Powerhouse shit.

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    2. I'm a ditto head... AND I like Aurelia as a name!

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  12. Oh man, I'm rusty. There's a spark of something here, but it needs a lot of work yet.

    ===

    My lawyer said everything was set. He had negotiated a plea bargain and, due to the mitigating circumstances of my case, I wouldn’t have to serve any jail time. There would be a facility, of course, but not a prison.

    When the time came, however, I couldn’t do it. Allocuting to murder would feel disingenuous. Ha! She never would have imagined my vocabulary included such a word, not while she was feeding me tranquilizers and poison to convince everyone — including me — that I was chronically ill and cognitively disabled, with the mind of a seven-year-old.

    Was I now claiming that I hadn’t stabbed her seventeen times, the judge asked. No, I explained, I had done that — but in self-defense. I had to kill her before she finally killed me.

    I didn’t get away with murder. I got away from murder.

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    1. I like it, too. Especially hot it tightens up at the end. There is definitely something here and I don't see any rust. ;)

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    2. yep, it's good! and the only way to get rust off is to keep at it!

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  13. I see the slick oil-skin, sweat desperation on him. I see it and I shudder and I think, holy fuck, that guy is dying. Not really. He wishes he was dying. I know. And I know I could fix it just by buying his story. Literally. Car broke down, need money for a cab.

    I could end the misery. But I'd extend the trajectory - who the fuck am I to make these kinds of decisions? These sorts of things should be left to the Gods if there are any. To heroes and philosophers.

    I just want to do the right thing, but the wrong thing is the only option. I see him and I shrug and think: it's doable. If you try.

    But I can't do it for both of us.

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  14. What do I want? It's really quite simple. I don't want you to hurt me anymore. I don't want you to say things we both know are lies and expect me to feel sorry for you. Because I know that's what you want. Because it works.

    Goddamn, the sounds in my head. I'm not even yelling internally anymore. It's like this constant roar. Hurricane pain.

    I want you gone. I want your stuff gone. I want your stories gone. I want your car gone. I want your smell gone. I want you to feel bad. I want you to wake up alone and think about all the fun you had.

    Me? It was fun for about the first five minutes.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Damn Mister Mader! So short but so...knocked me off my friggin feet!

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