A carbonated drink fizzed as the cap was screwed off the top of the bottle. A spoon scraped around the little cup made of styrofoam and cancerous chemicals. A baby cried. I stared out the window and listened to the cafe make the sounds of life behind me, and I wondered whether I should participate. My brain felt sluggish. I could move and think and speak, and had been doing so all day, but it seemed as if I needed to make a conscious effort to do these things. I needed to think “move” before I moved, “speak” before my lips opened. It was disconcerting, being so bossy towards myself.
The mug of tea in front of me had gone cold. My hands felt heavy with the weight of too much awareness. I looked at them, trying to see whether there was a visible difference in grams. Maybe they were actually heavier. But no, they looked the same, large palms, long fingers, the joints closer to the palm seemingly chubby and oversized to me.
I wondered whether a parade of Disney characters walking outside would energise me. No. Probably not. Maybe a spiritual experience, an Angels in America kind of revelation. Too much energy. The perfect thing, really, would be if the cafe disintegrated behind me and the chair I sat on turned into the foot of a bed and I could simply let my body go, entirely, all at once, and lie down. I would sleep for hours, maybe forever.
Author: slightlyignorant
Some Instincts
Shivering through space, Daley tiptoed across the library in her overcoat, gloves and woolen hat. Every cough ripped through her throat like ice chips going up rather than down, the reverse of her favorite summertime treat, crunching posicles in the yard before they melted.
Her body was a nesting place for germs and it made her uncomfortable to be around people who could catch her diseases but she had no choice. The world hadn’t stopped when her fever had risen to 102. The shelf she was searching for was being elusive, skipping around the library and purposefully evading her.
Terry’s blue and black coat flashed in her peripheral vision and warring instincts kicked in. She didn’t want him to see her like this but she wanted him to see her, to remember she existed outside the universe of beer pong and lax boys sucking on helium balloons for a laugh. Terry wasn’t above that sort of thing – Daley liked to think she was – but he had something to him that was more than that as well.
She couldn’t decide what to do quickly enough, and so he was gone, slamming out of the library like everyone seemed to do, as loudly and disruptively as possible. The sound reverberated in her head and she still couldn’t find the shelf mark she was looking for. She wished she could ask for help but her voice was reduced to a crow’s scratchy caw and whispering hurt even worse.
It was time to give up, she realized, surprised that her body had already figured this out and that she was falling to the floor, knees buckling, hands pulling some books off the shelf with her just to make sure that someone would hear and come running.
At least, she thought before everything went black, some instincts are still working.
Vacancy Filled
PHOTO / Marc van der Chijs
If it were possible to approach the subject of JK Rowling without discussing her previous work, I would do so. To mention the name “Harry Potter” is to bring up an entire slew of associations, whether positive, negative, or bored-to-tears indifferent. As a disclaimer, I must admit that I am a fan – the kind who always appreciated Rowling’s works on its own merits, first and foremost, and only then pinned a Hufflepuff badge on my backpack. I was, and still am, a devotee of the seven-book series, but I dislike the films, and stay away from the vast and – to me – frightening world of online fan-fiction.
It is as a writer rather than a celebrity that Rowling became a published author, and she wrote the Harry Potter books in a particular style. Her voice has always been uniquely hers, from the very first particularly, peculiarly, English sentence of the first book – “Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.”
The Casual Vacancy, JK Rowling’s first novel since she completed the Harry Potter series and its various offshoots, was promoted, disappointingly, as if it was an extension of the HP universe. The books filled the entire wall of shelves behind the Waterstones cash registers here in Oxford, the novel was promoted and given lengthy reviews in major magazines and newspapers, and it was generally treated as if it was going to be another merchandisable opportunity for the likes of Universal Studios and Sony (who each, respectively, runs the Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Florida, USA and the online virtual book-world Pottermore). While the reviews were very mixed, running the gamut from glowing to scathing, the book was generally treated as the work of celebrity rather than what it was: a first literary novel by an author who was (as she admitted to being) both proud of her book and wary of its reception.
Rowling has now proven that her voice is consistent. The language in the novel is simple and straightforward, while blindsiding the reader here and there with a brilliant observation or description that is shocking in its apparent clarity. Her vivid English-isms aren’t lost either: each section of the book opens with a quaint quote from a 17th century book of parish-council rules.
What is most amazing of all, however, is Rowling’s heretofore hidden talent for writing some truly despicable real-world characters. It is wonderful, exhilarating and endearing. A discussion that is still common in the writing and publishing world is the difference between men and women authors and their aptitude in writing unsympathetic characters. Women are often said to write too “nicely”, resulting in books of lesser merit or critical acclaim. Rowling strikes a blow for women authors everywhere in not softening her novel just because she is known also to be a children’s author (although, as an aside, anyone who claims that the Harry Potter books are for children may want to take a second look at them).
The Casual Vacancy’s characters are unflinchingly, unapologetically, and unabashedly nasty, one after another: Samantha, a middle-aged woman who ends up snogging a fifteen-year old boy while drunk at a party; Howard, the morbidly obese town bully who touches Samantha’s ass every time he sees her, though she’s married to his son; Simon, who buys stolen goods and hits his children and his wife but still thinks he’s one hell of a swell guy; Fats, a middle-class teenager who believes that it’s more ‘real’ to sleep with a girl from the slums he doesn’t actually like, because having a tough life is cool and enviable. Listing the characters like this makes them sound almost ridiculous, but Rowling’s superiority as an author is that each character is absolutely believable and has a motive and reason for acting as he or she does. Though the reader may end up hating them, she also ends up understanding and empathizing with them.
Rowling’s powerful novel deals with big issues – from ambition, loneliness and family to race, addiction and poverty – but it doesn’t shove any moral notions down the reader’s throat and it doesn’t offer idealistic, impossible, solutions. It portrays a slice of reality between its two covers, a story worth telling and worth reading, and, yes, (for those for whom this is the main the draw) it gives the reader the bizarre pleasure of seeing the word “fuck” written many times by the same woman who invented the snitch, butterbeer, and Dobby the house-elf.
The Sky
“Mama. Mama. Help me, Mama. I’m alone. I’m afraid. Mama.”
He is blonde. Dyed. He is black. Self-identified as. Father unknown, discounted. Skin’s dark enough, mother’s is too.
He is drunk.
He is standing on top of a table in the middle of a room. The table is ornate, but not old. It is expensive. The legs are carved with animals that cannot anatomically exist in this world. There is a tablecloth beneath his boots. Its red and white checks are stained with mud, stained brown and green and mauve from the flowers littering the grass outside that have fallen off the trees and get onto everyone’s shoes.
The music is loud. Louder than him. His lips move with his confession and his arms are stretched, pointing up, fingers touching the sky, he thinks, but it isn’t the sky. It is the ceiling. His nail catches on a splinter of paint and he pauses. He is shocked. The sky is falling.
The sky is falling.
He is bawling.
Discarded [Flash Fiction]
Discarding his jumper, Professor Bradley P. Lawrence did a few push-ups in his office. He remembered the exercise classes he used to go to with friends, back in the 80s, when it was all the rage to “feel the burn”. He missed those days, not because he particularly liked exercising (he didn’t) but because he had been fit and it hadn’t seemed to take so much effort. Now his lifestyle was too sedentary, his doctor said he needed to cut down on the red meat, and his body didn’t seem to belong to him. Those weren’t his white hairs on his chest, those weren’t his fingers that were so puffy and red every time he came in from the cold, and it definitely wasn’t his stomach that was jutting over his pants. Somebody else, some alien being, had performed on operation on him (he was sometimes almost certain of this, in his worst moments at the corner pub) over the years, replacing his body parts with those of his uncle’s.
He had a picture of his uncle that he kept in his desk drawer and took out whenever he was expecting distinguished visitors. He had smashed the glass against the wall once, in a fit of rage, and had never replaced it. He hoped it wasn’t too noticeable. Nobody had yet remarked on it yet, anyway. It was the kind of thing most visitors, if they were indeed distinguished, wouldn’t do.
After five vigorous push-ups, he felt he’d done quite enough exercise. He lay on the floor of his office, resting, and looked around. It was a marvelous view, one that he hadn’t seen since he’d slept with one of his students many years ago, and then he’d been far to absorbed in impressing her while simultaneously trying to enjoy the experience, and hadn’t particularly taken notice of his surroundings. He did so now. The light fell very nicely on the little rug he kept in front of his easy chair. There was a lot of dust beneath his desk that he ought to clean up.
A glint beneath a bookcase caught his attention and he shimmied forward and stretched his arm out to reach under it and see what it was. Pulling it out, he saw that it was a piece of glass. It must have been there since he’d broken his uncle’s picture. He turned the glass fragment over and over between his fingers, until it cut him and he had to get up to find a plaster to put on his hand.
Stone Folly
Forgotten by generation after generation of men and women, the old stone building sat in the middle of the grassy meadow. Time, however, had not forgotten it, but had caressed it, each year adding to its predecessor. The stone turned browner in the summer and grayer when the rain and snow washed away the accumulating dust of summer. Vines grew and shriveled and grew again on the building’s walls, wrapping it like a comforting green blanket as the seasons and years passed.
The stone building had no doors. It had no windows. It had no chimney. It was entirely closed, impossible to get in. Eventually, when it was rediscovered by humanity, it was seen as a curiosity. When architects and historians tried to discover who had built it, they couldn’t find records of it. An old manor house had burnt down some miles from the site of the stone building, but there was no record of the wealthy family to whom the manor house belonged having ever built the structure. Farmers in the vicinity all said that they didn’t use the meadow because their cattle didn’t like grazing in it. They said they trusted the animals’ instincts and stayed away.
When it was written about in guidebooks, it was called a folly – a building constructed for decoration, for aesthetic purposes only, that had absolutely no useful value. The name commonly given to it was “The Stone Hut in the Meadow”, as if it was impossible to think up a more imaginative title that wasn’t strictly descriptive. The truth was that it didn’t really matter. Even now that the place was marked, mapped, written about and remarked upon, it didn’t draw many tourists to it. One or two hopeful tourists would stop by every couple weeks, hoping to find a picturesque spot to take photographs in, but they were usually disappointed by the simplicity of the house. There were teenagers who sometimes trekked to the stone building on a dare, hoping to be the ones to find a secret way into it, but they were always let down as well.
So it was that even though the stone hut was recognized, it was largely an empty, desolate spot.
**
Ruvy Ben-Shalom, a dark and grizzled man, walked along the highway and wondered whether he was going to reach a Denny’s or Dunkin Donuts at any point in the near future. At the last intersection, he’d managed to flag down a car. The woman had two small boys sleeping peacefully in the back seat, and she’d opened her window only a crack, to ask if he needed her to call anybody for him. She’d refused to give him a ride, but pointed him down this route as the best way to find the nearest rest-stop.
He knew he looked like a hobo. He wore black gloves that were two large for his small, delicate hands, and his eyes must look large, hungry and sleep deprived. Probably, he mused, because he was hungry and sleep deprived. Sleeping out in the open during the cold nights was no picnic, especially along these apparently endless highways that went from one nowhere town to another nothing town. He always arrived at inhabited places too late, when everything was already closed. Rest stops, though, had diners and McDonalds and bathrooms that were open all the time, and he yearned to sit town on a toilet and wash his face at a sink. He couldn’t wait to get a cup of coffee into his aching stomach, even though he was exhausted.
On his right, through the gloom of dusk, he saw a stone building. It was smallish, about the size of a two room house – he couldn’t help but compare it to the home he’d left two weeks ago – but it seemed to be pleasant enough. He wanted to go and see what was there, because it was beautiful. Something about it called to him. There was a great deal of grassy meadow to get through, first, and he walked into the grass rather unwillingly, getting his pants wet almost at once. He cursed softly, under his breath. The dew was collecting on the long stocks of overgrown weeds, and his cargo pants, which were already cold and too thin, got soaked, immediately. At least his boots were waterproof.
The little stone building’s walls were covered with ivy, except for a perfect square where the doorway was. Someone had very neatly pushed and tidied the ivy away from it, and it looked far newer than the rest of the house. The door was bright red and looked freshly painted and shiny.
Ruvy knocked three times, before thinking about it for long. The door opened, and he began to sob.
How to Avoid Awkward Airport Encounters
1. Walk around too fast. People at airports tend to dawdle, to meander, to amble. Avoid this at all costs. Walking slowly allows you to be caught by people you might know. Walking very fast and appearing to be late, frazzled, nervous or just weird will help to keep people from looking at you with too much concentration. Your face will also be blurrier.
2. Keep your gaze at far above or far below eye-contact level. Look for your flight on the screens repeatedly. Read your book while walking if you’re me.
3. Loiter in bathrooms. Peeing is healthy for you.
4. If you do encounter someone you know, have excuses at the ready. Make sure to have booked a seat in advance so that you don’t have to chummily sit together on the airplane. Drink lots of water so you can duck out and go pee during the conversation. Postpone any duty-free shopping until last possible minute for same reason.
5. In order to avoid steps 1-4, stop being a big baby and deal with the option of awkwardness. Remember that you are able to converse like an adult, that you are good at asking questions, and that you actually aren’t as anti-social as you sometimes think you are. Remember that you are ridiculous, suck it up, and take a deep breath. Things will be fine.
6. If step 5 doesn’t work, repeat 1-4 until step 5 becomes necessary once again.
Balm
On the deck of a ship made of stars and woven by the magic of dreams, you and I stood together. It was a cruise ship, and we were surrounded by other people. I always start conversations about important things when there are other people around. I wondered whether he actually listened anymore. Whether it mattered at all, that there were others there to hear. Maybe I created them as witnesses to my downfall, to my humiliation.
“It’s his birthday,” I told you. You nodded, and you smiled.
“He would have been sixty-six,” I told you. You bowed your head, and frowned.
“Yeah,” I said. You rubbed my arm a bit, a cursory gesture, a symbolic one with nothing behind it except the weight of a history that I remembered and you didn’t.
There was a cord tied around my chest, making it hard to breathe. It was tied to your wrist. I remembered how, when I was little, my parents would tie balloon strings to my wrist so that I wouldn’t let go and lose them and cry. But they’d tie them tightly, making a red stripe in my flesh. The cord on your wrist was so loose that it was almost falling off. Had it ever been tied tightly? I couldn’t remember anymore.
A wave rocked the ship, making me jump. You stayed calm, collected, cool, even though there were tears in your eyes. You said there weren’t. But there were. I wished they were there because of me, but I knew they weren’t. They never had been, even though once, a long time ago, I had convinced myself that they were.
When I woke up from the dream, I found that I had wet the bed. There were still strangers all around me. They were asleep, thankfully. I was on the bottom bunk, and I got up and stripped the sheet as quietly as I could. I hadn’t done anything like that since I was five or six years old. The smell of urine was as familiar as your scent but far less pleasant. I tip-toed out of the twelve-bed room, into the hallway, down to the back and out the hostel door to the courtyard. I threw the sheet in the industrial-sized garbage cans there. I was too embarrassed to leave it on the bed to be stripped and washed. I decided I’d rather be charged an extra four euros for stealing it.
The night was balmier in this foreign country full of guttural voices. Barefoot, I stretched out my arms and felt the wind cool the sweat on my body. It was the nicest thing I had felt on my skin ever since your fingertips had traveled the same soothing route when I used to have bad dreams.
On Being Freshly Pressed
I started writing when I was fifteen. Oh, I don’t mean that I learned to write then. I learned to read and write at a pretty typical age. But an important part of the process for me has to do with the fact that I am bilingual. Although I was born in Los Angeles and my parents had no idea, at the time, that we’d end up moving to Israel, my father wanted his children to grow up speaking Hebrew and so from the time that my brother and I were born, he spoke Hebrew – and only Hebrew – to us, while my mother spoke English – and only English – to us. This doesn’t always work, apparently. It very nearly didn’t, with me. I understood my father, but until I was three years old, I would answer him in English, even though he spoke to me in Hebrew.
We moved to Israel when I was three, and I began to be immersed in the Hebrew language. I had to speak it, whether I wanted to or not, because I wouldn’t be understood otherwise. So I did. I first learned to read and write in Hebrew, although my parents both read me stories constantly, every night, in either Hebrew or English, depending on which parent was doing the reading.
My mother had to teach me how to read and write in English, on her own, with the help of little brown books with stick figures in them. I hated the lessons, for some obscure reason. I hated learning to read and write in Hebrew at school, as well. Curious, really, as I loved books and stories. I went to bed every night listening to audiobooks, and I loved being read to.
I did learn to read. And to write. First in Hebrew. Then in English. The reason this is important, is that I think that this order is connected to the fact that I also started writing creatively in Hebrew first. I wrote poems, as many an angsty teenager has. I wrote poems about burgeoning lust, love, trials and tribulations, about friendships and desires and disappointments, about my low self esteem and the way I felt I didn’t have a voice.
When my father died, when I was sixteen, I shifted over to English. Though I had become a voracious reader at the age of nine, with the discovery of the Harry Potter books, I began to read far more than ever before – my need for solitude and escape made me turn towards the imaginary worlds inside books. I began, tentatively, to write bits of things. Poems. Stories. Bits of characters. Nothing particularly coherent, though.
There was a self-discovery to this. When I was eighteen, I started this blog. This very blog, the same one that I have now, four years later. I had written in many diary-like blogs before. I had written and abandoned too many paper-based diaries as well. But this blog, I decided to use strictly in order to practice my writing. I didn’t know what I was going to do with it. I didn’t know what kind of writing I was going to stick to, if any, though for some reason I thought at first that I was going to try to be funny and witty. I thought I was going to try to comment on my life and write anecdotes about it. I have, and I still do, at times.
But that is not what this blog, or my writing, is really about. Of course, I cannot claim my writing is about any one particular thing, because it’s not. I am young, ridiculously so, and though I am continuing on my path to become a working writer, I also know that there is no single definition to that term.
What I do know, however, is that I cherish stories. Stories, to my mind, are where people can find empathy and relate to others. Stories are the way we communicate with one another on a daily basis, they’re the way we pass things along from one generation to another, and they’re the way we define ourselves. Stories are my lifeblood, they are the way mind works, and they are the reason I love language and words and books so fiercely.
Being chosen to be featured on WordPress’s “Freshly Pressed” page is an honor that I can’t really understand or contain, especially as the story chosen was one that – when I wrote it – I didn’t think was particularly good. It was okay, but it wasn’t one that I was (or am) very proud of. But a writer doesn’t get to choose what others see in her work. Part of what publishing my stories online is about is allowing them to be seen for what they are and to stand alone.
I want to welcome all the new followers I’ve garnered and to thank you for deciding to accompany me on my continuing quest to practice writing. What you’ll find here, most of the time, will be short stories or flash fiction. I will also occasionally write posts about my life, or things I see, although oftentimes I choose to explore those things in story-form as well.
Heave ho
“Ladies and gentlemen, family and friends, we are gathered here today to say our farewell to the dearly departed-“
You hold your jaw closed tightly in order to stifle a yawn and the rushing sound in your ears makes the priest’s voice sound like a badly-tuned radio. You let your mind wander and stop listening to him. You’ve never been to a church before. You never thought that a funeral would be your first time attending.
You watch the ladies in the front row, dressed in black, like evil witches in their lace and wraps and drapes, their fancy shoes scraping against the stone floor whenever they move. You wonder whether they will miss him. He never complained much about them, his ladies, but whenever he talked about them he looked at their pictures with regret and his lips would lose their perpetual upturned points.
You remember him the way you first met him. He seemed so much younger than you then. Hard to believe that he was only a few years your junior. You were both taking flying lessons at the airport. Zippy little planes, they were. You had to learn how to turn the engine off, to let the plane begin to swirl down-down-down-down-down, as if it was going to crash. It is a common misconception that planes just fall from the sky, like they do in cartoons. They don’t – the way the wings are built, the wings catch the air, the thermals or something, and so planes always go in spiraling loops on the way down. It was the scariest thing you’d ever done, turning off that engine. You both met at the edge of the vandalized playground later that week, and you talked about that. About how scary it was. That was the first time you realized he wasn’t a pukey little high school kid. You thought he may have some brains on him and you deigned to speak to him. You were such a putz when you were in college.
It’s such a laugh, thinking of those flying lessons now, when you haven’t navigated a plane for forty years and your old friend is lying dead in a coffin in front of you. It’s ridiculous on another level, too – as if anyone could get flying lessons so easily now. You bet that just to get to the airstrip, now, if anyone could even afford to get flying lessons, you’d need to take your damn shoes off and scan your bag. You think of how you used to pay for airfare on the plane itself. No passports or IDs or anything. How the world changes.
One of the ladies is talking about how her uncle was such a good man, a noble man, and you wish you could get up and shout “Objection, your honor!” But this isn’t court, it’s church. The dead man in the coffin would have loved the joke, though. He wasn’t noble, and while sure, he was good in his own fashion, he would have been horrified to have been described that way.
The service is a blur. You wonder at one point whether you’ve fallen asleep. Your joints hurt on the wooden benches, and you wish you hadn’t agreed to be one of the pallbearers. You want to curse at him, but you know that people will look at you strangely if you do. It isn’t fair. When you die, you think, you’ll stipulate in your will that your funeral is to be strictly casual dress and that people aren’t allowed to be all fake-sad like this. If they’re sad, that’s fine, but if they want to shout at you and curse you out, that’s fine too. You’d prefer that, really. Heck, there are coffins that come with sound-systems today, people could have a party at your expense. They could choose the playlist you’ll listen to for all eternity. You wish he were around to laugh about that with you. You could have told him that you think your kids will choose to make you listen to their awful youtube teen stars for all eternity, just to get back at you for making fun of them.
The coffin is heavy, heavier than you expect. You tell him, silently, telepathically maybe, that he needed to go on a diet, and that death will probably help him lose weight real quickly. You wonder if you can feel him laughing somewhere but then you realize that it’s your own shoulders, heaving.
Slightly Ignorant 