writing

Sticks on Stretched Leather

The drums thud in time to her heart. She feels loud some days, her mouth as wide as the sticks she plays with. She runs and runs and runs and is always behind the other girls running to school. She can’t catch up. Her legs don’t let her. The girls don’t know what she does in secret. They don’t know she runs at night too. She runs and runs and runs at night to the valley. Her head thrums with rhythms and she falls asleep in lessons and there are no two ways about it, she won’t be going to school next year. She knows she is wasting her time and her father’s money. Her mother’s care. Her sister’s sacrifice. But the books in tatters at the school and the walls dripping with sweat and Teacher shouting when they forget their lessons – there is no reality to it. There is no tradition.

The rhythms. There is tradition in the rhythms. In the footsteps on the ground and the dances and the songs. She sees the way the women look at the elders. Even the elders who have forgotten how to eat by themselves and who don’t go far enough away from the river to do their business, even they get looked at with respect. Even the smallest elders with the biggest ears that the little children laugh at, even they remember the drumbeats when everything else is gone. It is soul, the rhythm. It is heart. It is mind and body and memory.

Everyone’s history is in that beat. She thrums to the story of them all and practices far from anyone who can hear, and waits until one day she will be able to show them, show them all, that she has learned their family names in the language of sticks on stretched leather.

Doing a Karenina

   Red wine goes wonderfully with steak, but Mimi is vegan now. This is her newest thing. Linda drinks the Cabernet in the kitchen, alone, facing the wallpaper she regrets getting now. It is tapestry-like, black and white threaded workers in rice-fields wearing round conical hats. What did she hear someone call it the other day? Coolie hats? She’s sure that’s not the right name. It was probably her husband. He sometimes comes up with racist shit that reminds her that he is, after all, the man who hid a coke habit from her for years, sinking them both into debt.
    Mimi doesn’t help. Her newest thing, gluten-free veganism, means that Linda and Greg are both starving all the time. They sneak out to get pizza in the middle of the night sometimes, giggling and pulling on jeans and baggy sweatshirts, like they’re having an affair.
    The phone’s ring is a pathetic approximation of Fur Elise. Linda’s shoulders tense. She hates the sound so much. Tinny and obnoxious, calls mean work or bad news, almost inevitably. No one calls the landline anymore anyway, except for some of the older people at the PR company she works at and Mimi’s therapists and psychiatrist.
    “It’s Allison!” Greg yells from the other room. Linda looks at the rice-field workers, at the waving bamboo patterns, at whatever nonsense it is on her wall that’s meant to look comfortingly exotic to her Western sensibilities. She picks up the portable out of its cradle and takes another sip of wine before screwing the top back and putting in the fridge. The phone is between her shoulder and her ear, the same spot it’s nestled since she was a teenager. Since she first met Allison.
    “Hey, Greg, you can hang up now.”
    “Okay. Bye, Alli!”
    “Bye! Hi Linda. You sound tired.”
    “I am. It’s been a day.”
    “Want to talk about it?”
    “No. Tell me how Noel is doing.”
    Linda regrets this immediately. As Allison begins telling her about her daughter, a senior in college who’s just returned from an academically rigorous year abroad and is doing great, wonderful, fantastic, all Linda can see is the image of Mimi lying on the subway tracks that time she jumped and survived.
    When your own kid has tried to commit suicide half a dozen times, Linda thinks, you don’t find 4.0 GPAs all that interesting anymore. She knows that if she told Alli that she’d rather not hear about her kids – Alli has two, and the other, the boy, is doing equally well, with a long-term girlfriend who lives with him and makes more money than him – if Linda told Alli she’d rather not hear about any of these fantastic things, Alli’d understand. That’s what friends are for, right? She’s asked before, and Alli’s accepted, keeping quiet about her kids until Linda asks.
            She always does, in the end. She wants to know. She wants to hear about college classes, about PhD programs, about how the daughter is getting published here and joining a singing group there, about how the son has finished his qualifying exams to get into his PhD program and how he’s house sitting for two cats. She needs to know these things. Otherwise she has no images to superimpose Mimi’s face into. And if she doesn’t try to cut-and-paste her daughter’s face into situations other than the thirty-and-home one she’s in, Linda will continue to see her lying in between the subway tracks, or inside her bed in the ward where she’s basically got a bed named after her by this point, or sitting behind the desk of Greg’s office, the only place she’s managed to hold down a job in years. Then again, Greg also employs his no-good, asshole brother, so Linda never knows how much work Mimi actually does there, despite the praise Greg lavishes on her.
    Linda listens, her right ear pressed to the phone, her left ear straining for sounds of an emergency. The worst part of her conversations with Alli is the resentment. Allison’s children had their moments, their years of therapy and fucked-upedness, but then they got over it. They got better. Mimi doesn’t get better. Mimi jumps from veganism to Buddhism to exercising everyday to playing the viola and deciding to join the circus as a trapezoid artist. Mimi stays a constant, unchanging. Allison’s kids get to change. Linda hears the change in Alli’s voice, too, and she knows that she, Linda, will have to remain a forever too. It’s almost worth the train having succeeded in its mission that day.
    Almost.

A Part

Spiraling light fixtures collapse the spectrum of the rainbow into single expressions of color. Mass. You are part of a moving mass. The snow in your veins is made up of each and every one of the lights flashing in front of your eyes. White is not the absence of color. Black is, like the holes in space that haunt your dreams on nights of dark sweats that crawl across the covers in teams of walkie-talkie communicating ants. Dance. Your body is one of a hundred thousand others in a stadium radiating with sweating sound. The screams are as distressed as any single body would be in the presence of such staged magnificence. Sorting out one scream from another is like seeing leaves on trees as individuals when you’re looking at the blotchy rendering three year olds make of the oaks in front of their suburban homes. It is an imaginary, purely self-serving process. Can you do it? Are you good enough? Can you see through the mediocrity into the art? Well. Can you? Hands tighten around your waist. Connection. Is that what it is? Skin on clothing woven by Taiwanese children lying on skin burned by yesterday’s oven mishap. All there is to it is to imagine that this contact is pure melding. The melting of whitened blood snow into your consciousness. Bodies bumping in the night. Carnality made spiritual. Spirituality made carnal. Does it matter which? You are an animal, your pulses tell you this, your sight tells you this. Each of your thoughts is rewarded when put into action, reinforcing the thought – your desire for contact pulses into your nether regions, pushing your back into the depth of a stranger behind you, bringing his arms around your waist. Thought. Action. Reward. Dionysus would be pleased. A spectacle of such end of the world beauty was rarely seen by his maenads.

Insurance

   Jarvis counts his fingers. He counts his toes. He gets to twenty-four and is pretty sure he’s made a mistake. He starts again. Mia is giggling in the corner. Her laughter makes him lose track. He forgot she was here. Now he remembers. She is pretty. So pretty. Grotesque. Noses are strange, bumptious organs, sticking out into the world, central to the face in that they can’t be ignored, can’t be gotten rid of. Jarvis has a sudden and itching desire to Google people without noses.
   “I need your computer.”
   Mia giggles at the wall.
   “Mia.”
   She lies on her back and giggles at the ceiling. 
   “Mia.”
   She turns her face and giggles at him.
   “I need your computer. Where is it?”
   “C’mere.” 
   Jarvis decides Google can wait. He crawls to Mia’s prone face, as it grows bigger in his sight, but the intensity of her separating features becomes too much to bear so he stops halfway across the complicatedly patterned rug. He flops on his stomach. Pancake-position, like the pandas in the Washington Zoo he read about. They don’t know how to have sex. Sex is very strange, if he tries to think about it. 
   “Let’s go to Washington and join the pandas, Mia.”
   “Okay.” She is serene now. Her voice is high and squeaky, Mickey Mouse in the old Disney cartoons when he looked creepy and long-legged, long-necked. Jarvis tries to remember what she normally sounds like, but there doesn’t seem to be a state other than this.
   Mia’s face is sharp-planed, her cheeks smooth runways, the line from her cleft chin up to the dip above her lip a perfect landing strip. Her eyes are luminous blue control towers, her forehead the arrivals hall of a thousand pock marks of adolescent zits, a once-chronic condition she hides with leafy bangs.
   Jarvis wants to fly away, somewhere. The yen for the journey hits him hardest in these moments, watching Mia. The only black girl in a small town, adopted by white-savior parents, she is beautifully innocent to him. He ruins her inch by inch, night after night, and she thanks him for it, making him feel more powerful than anything else could.
   He is an inner-city kid. He marched around, beat his chest, and proclaimed himself to be Trayvon just months ago. His father is in prison. His mother is on and off welfare. He is a stereotype he cannot stand. Going to college isn’t working. It isn’t escaping. His mom calls and makes him feel guilty. His father is no less in prison here than anywhere else. Mia is the one good thing.
   He sits up. It’s wearing off. He really wants to go see the pandas. Right now. “Mia, let’s go.”
   “Okay.” She’s still lying down. “But you have to get insurance. Travel insurance.” She rolls from her side onto her back and lifts her legs into the air. There is a scar on her left knee that was there when she was given to her folks. 
   “To get to Washington?” Jarvis starts to laugh and it honks out of him. So not entirely worn off. He can’t stop laughing. He can hear how silly he sounds, though. That’s something.
   “Mom always said to get travel insurance. Call-look-just-call.”
   Jarvis finds a number for a company on his smartphone – he realizes now he could have found people without noses right in his pocket but his phone is still new and he’s not used to it. He calls.
   “SmartFarm Insurance, this is Robbie speaking, how may I help you?”
   “Hi yeah, I want to go to Washington with my girlfriend to see the pandas and she says I need to call to get travel insurance? Like we’re going to just go in the car or something. Maybe take a train. A bus. A plane. A motherfucking canoe. I don’t know.”
   Robbie SmartFarm coughs. It’d been a long day. He knows that even with this kind of call, he is supposed to untangle what the customer wanted. But he doesn’t feel like it. His mother is ill, in the hospital, he doesn’t have a girlfriend to go to Washington with, and the vending machines are out of chocolate-covered pretzels. “Sorry, we can’t insure you for a journey like that.” He hangs up and waits for the next call to patch through.
   Jarvis looks at the red “call-terminated” bar on his phone’s screen. “The guy said we don’t need insurance,” he says. “Told you. Let’s go.”

Losing Her

To lose her is to actively admit that she is gone. To lose her is to fully understand that her cropped hair and blue jeans don’t dance around the kitchen table anymore. To lose her is to create a space that is still filled by her slamming door, her key in the lock, her shampoo bottle on the side of the wet bathtub – signs that she is there but not, a ghost made corporeal. To lose her is to push her beyond her comfort zone, it is to possess a vocabulary of words that she doesn’t wish to use when referring to the two of you. It is to say that you are there and she is not. It is to say that ‘busy’ is an excuse for ‘do not want’ and that ‘tired’ also means ‘bored.’ Losing her means connecting the dots between your collarbone and hers and seeing the height difference that used to be a comfort and is now an inconvenient bumpy road full of potholes in your ribcage where your heart has shrunken because she has taken away her part of it. Losing her means feeling your stomach roiling full of whiskey sours and late night sex with strangers, knowing she is held in the arms of one who loves her less than you do but who gives her what she wants, which is more valuable, in the end, than the abstract love that you express in emoticons and hugs. Losing her is accepting a fishing hook in your diaphragm that is more firmly lodged there than in any catch she makes on City Island. It is remembering the loping amble and seaside strut of her hips.
    Having lost her is a prospect yet unfathomed, a deep green sea unexplored. You take scuba diving lessons in preparation, consuming yourself in the hearty weekends of others and abandoning them to their pain, learning to punish your recruits as much as love allows and more. Stars align in the night as you ride out weepy-weary from your tent and gallop across a desert on four wheel drive. Having lost her you will be a series of little wrecks left on the road from where you will crash over and over again, each pile of rocks you choose bigger than the last, until there is no part of you that isn’t broken and bruised. You will never return to the ocean where she dwells with the sea creatures she has adopted, having lost her. You will become a cacti-eating desert dune of crumbled skin and sinew as she floats along the surface carried by the tides. You will grow your weeds in deep and keep the memory alive, the fairytale all deserts whisper after dark – that once upon a time, many aeons ago, the whole world was filled with the ocean, from end to end, and that one day in the future the seas will rise again and the desert will be reunited with the water and will drink deep, and you will drink deepest, deeper than ever before, even if it is only from the salty mix of your own once-shed tears.  

Exciting News!

I’ve been published in an anthology.

It’s titled After the Fall, and is a collection of a post-apocalyptic short stories.

I’ve known about this for quite a while, but it’s now been released on Amazon, and it looks lovely! So far, the anthology, published by Almond Press is only available as an e-book, but it will eventually be available as a paperback as well. If you’re interested in seeing it or purchasing it, click here.

 

Look forward to some more fiction posts during the coming days as well, as I’m queuing some up right now!

5 Years of This

This may be a bit of a sentimental post. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
It’s been five years. Five years since I opened this blog. In the past five years I’ve been diagnosed, medicated, enrolled, hired, accepted to, rejected, published – I’ve taken leave, applied, worked, written, studied, shared, departed, arrived at, met, said goodbye, recovered, relapsed, rerecovered, stuck to, made decisions, danced, drank, experimented, read, played, traveled, become. The actives outweigh the passives, all in all.

I don’t regret. It’s not easy, and it takes an active decision not to, but I don’t regret.

In the next week or two, I will be published in my first ever book – e-book first, then physical book. I will be linking here, of course. I will also continue posting fiction as often as I can. I won’t promise to be less sporadic than I’ve been recently, because, well, I know it’s pointless to make a promise I can’t keep. I can promise to try to post more – but I have also just received an acceptance to an internship position, and that and three intense courses at school may keep me pretty busy. Still, I’ve got some posts from this month of writing challenges that I will continue letting out slowly, and hopefully you will enjoy the mediocrity that comes of play as well as the more shining moments that come of experimenting with bizarre prompts.

Five years. Hard to believe.

Quickie #3 – Uphill

She’d never experienced a more beautiful morning than the one on which her car broke down, her cellphone ran out of battery, and her period started while she was on the highway, waiting for the AAA people to come and get her out of the jam. She scratched her legs where they itched from the mosquito bites and thought, since she had nothing better to do, about how odd it was to stand there, on the side of the highway, with amenities that didn’t work. Even her own plumbing was betraying her, dripping uncomfortably into the expensive Victoria’s Secret underwear she’d gone to all that trouble to buy. Even with the fumes of the rush hour traffic creeping by, there was a natural beauty to everything. Even the man picking his nose in the car in front seemed particularly poignant on this of all mornings, as he dug into his nostril with a ferocity best kept to private spaces.
She leaned against her car, patted its hood, and told it that everything would be okay. “We can’t get any lower than this, baby,” she soothed the car. “It’s all uphill from here.”

Quickie #1

I had my teacher forward a photograph of a painter’s handwriting to a writer I’m reading. I hope that if she sees it, she will think well of me for reading so attentively. This has always been my strategy. Read close, read deep, read intimate, read older. Forty at sixteen, she and I have this in common: our ages play dissonant chords with our faces.

Wendy’s Call [Flash Fiction]

Another call, another disappointment. Wendy put down the portable phone with the numbers that were all rubbed off from the rubber buttons and sighed. She was sixty-seven, almost, and it was time for a kitten. It wasn’t proving easy to find. A young voice had just informed her that the two males she’d been interested in had already been snatched up by someone else, someone with two daughters who wanted them to each have her own cat. They don’t work that way, cats, Wendy knew, but she didn’t try to explain this to the girl on the phone. She tried to hide her disappointment. She tried to tell herself it was going to be alright.

Doctor Kendall was a nice man. He’d been looking. He would keep looking. He knows I’ll take good care of a kitten, Wendy thought.

She got up from the kitchen table, where she’d been drinking a cup of tea. Her dressing gown was tied tightly around her waist, broader now than her hips. Her whole family was like that, holding weight around their middles, like barrels of rainwater. Her feet were bare on the brown carpeting, and she wriggled her toes in it for a moment. The cleaning gentleman had been over that morning, and the carpet was fluffed from the vacuuming, and it felt soft and wooly. The way she always imagined it would feel to stand in a cloud, even though she knew, of course, that standing in a cloud would mean falling right through it and getting soaked to boot. It was moments like these that made Wendy feel silly about being sixty-seven, almost.

Her eyes, handsome gray and the only vanity she still had, would have to be made up. It was time to go out. She did the dishes first, only the tea-cup and saucer and a small plate where she’d been nibbling some melon rinds, and thought about the rest of her day. She worried about not being home. What if she got another call about the kittens? She needed to give Doctor Kendall her cellphone number. She had one, though she rarely used it, but this was important.

The too-wide bed was where she spread out her clothes. A pair of sensible black pants. A bra, which was important, because she sometimes left the house without one and got stared at. She wanted to tell people that she’d been a flower-child and that bras were for conformists, but she really wasn’t up to long arguments, so she just wore bras when she went outside of her neighborhood. Around where she lived, people knew her. They knew she wasn’t as old as life had made her look.

Over her aching back and shoulders she pulled a light sweater, a big one, that had belonged to a long-ago man who had been bigger than her. A lot bigger, back then, but now the sleeves were long and the middle fit just right, hugging her tummy like maternity clothes.

She brushed her hair with her fingers. She didn’t look in the mirror. Why look, Wendy reasoned, when she was always surprised? Always disappointed? So she’d stopped.

Lifting the portable phone up she replaced it in its cradle, so it could charge. She checked her handbag for her keys, her wallet, her tissues, her Tums, her Advil, her lipstick – not that she often used it, but just in case – and her cellphone, which she had remembered, for once, to charge the night before. It was all there.

Wendy locked the door behind her and took the elevator down. She resisted the urge to go back up when she heard a ringing from one of the apartments. It wouldn’t be hers, she knew. She couldn’t hear her phone from outside anymore.