Noise pollution

Posted on by February 25, 2020

“Turn it down.” Scott’s face loomed as my door swung open.

“I had that closed.”

“We can hear you in the kitchen.”

“Yeah, Mom, it’s too loud.” Caroline poked her head under her father’s elbow.

“You’re only complaining because it’s heavy metal. If I had the Beatles up, you’d be in here dancing.”

“You’ve got Beatles? I want the Beatles!” Sam joined the fray with enthusiasm unreasonable for someone who should have been zoned out in front of the TV.

I clicked around until my desk stopped shaking with the gunshots of “For Those About to Rock, We Salute You.”

Scott rubbed the back of his head. “Look, honey, I know you need to drown the house noise out so you can write, but there’s got to be a volume loud enough for you that doesn’t attack our skulls.”

“Or you could use earphones, Mom, like you make me do.”

“I think she just called me a hypocrite.”

Sam wormed past Scott and into the room.  “I like hippos. Do you have a hippo song?”

“Not hippo, Sam, hypo… oh never mind. It was just AC/DC. It’s not like I was blasting Nine Inch Nails.” We have an agreement about Nine Inch Nails.

“I want a hippopotamus for Christmas.”

“Stop! Stop! I’ll put on something else.”

“Beatles! Beatles!” Sam hopped on one foot.

“Or David Bowie.” Caroline wedged past Scott to bring her whole body into the office. “I want to hear ‘I’m Afraid of Americans.’”

“Ooo, I could do that! That one has Nine Inch Nails on it, too. Bonus!” Our agreement doesn’t cover collaborations.

“No!” Sam was adamant. “That one’s boring! And you had David Bowie on for hours last night when I wanted to sleep.”

“Fifteen minutes is not hours.”

“And I want the Beatles.”

“Yeah, but I really did have the Beatles on for hours yesterday. What’s wrong with AC/DC?”

“What’s wrong with turning it down?”  Scott’s voice was largely lost under the tumult of our children’s protests.

“Mom, you promised to play ‘I’m Afraid of Americans’”.

“I like ‘Why Don’t We Do It In The Road!’”

“The Black Keys!” I held up an arm for silence.

“Yeah! Lonely Boy!”

“Gold on the Ceiling! If I can’t have the Beatles, I want Gold on the Ceiling!” Sam stretched up like he thought he could get to the gold right then.

“Both! I’ll put it all on!”

Scott turned and walked out of the room. “I’m going out back.” He pointed over his own shoulder.

“Wait a minute. If you leave, how am I supposed to get any writing done?”

“Let me know when you turn it down, and I’ll come inside again.”

“Come on, Mom! Put them on! He’s missing the dance party.”

“Two songs. Two songs and then I’ll put on headphones. Mommy needs to get back to work.”

“And,” Scott’s voice floated down the hall, “Our next computer will not have a subwoofer. I’m tired of having this conversation twice a week.”

read to be read at yeahwrite.me  

Rebel

Posted on by February 25, 2020

 “You could do the job.” Charles had biceps to back up his orders.

“You could go to hell.” But Charles’ arms were twigs in comparison to David’s.

“So I’ve got to finish it?” Charles was already stripping out of his jacket.

“This job’s gonna do itself.”

“We gotta be sure.”

“He’s already dead.”

“Why you gotta be such a rebel?”

At the bottom of the trench, their quarry stopped crawling and drank shallow breaths. If either of the goons could have seen in the dark, they would have watched him cross himself and so known his heart was still beating.

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Of course, I’m always a rebel. But this week, Velvet Verbosity is, too, and I’m scheduling this so I can actually get myself linked up before the linky closes. (Kinda screwed that one up last week. Doh! This scheduling ahead messes with my wee brain.)

Ode to Popcorn

Posted on by July 12, 2023

Terms of an engagement: An ode to popcorn

I think I’ll make the popcorn on the stove
and melt a little Cabot on the side.
And if then through our pantry I do rove
I might grate us some dry jack to divide.

Though maybe the air popper is enough
for those who do not like my stinky cheese;
the butter will melt smoothly in the trough
that sits above the greatest blast of heat.

But understand this now my love. I’ll give
up Roquefort, Camembert, and even Brie.
But pop  me no corn in that monster. Dine
alone if you engage that dread machine.

Pray don’t suggest it; I’ll turn a deaf ear.
No, I’ll not use the microwave, my dear.
______________________________________________

NB: I know perfectly well that my ‘ode’ is really a sonnet, but it DOES celebrate intellectually and emotionally the joys of popcorn. Who but a purist would care how the popcorn is popped?
For the Scriptic prompt exchange this week, Bewildered Bug gave me this prompt: Write a romantic poem ‘an ode to popcorn’.

I gave Michael this prompt: The shutters slapped against the house with every gust of wind, and I felt the house watching me. This was alone. This was bad.

 

Big

Posted on by February 25, 2020

Jack scrubbed his finger back and forth under his nose. Uncle Lew said, “Does the wee lassie want his Mummie?” in a very bad Irish accent.

“Shaddup and leave the kid alone,” said Aunt Mil. “He probably does want his Mom. Come on Jack, you can help me in the kitchen.”

Jack followed Aunt Mil through the French doors. Uncle Lew said, “What a sweet little girl he is.”

“No wonder nobody’ll marry you, Lew,” snapped Aunt Mil. “You’re a sloppy drunk and an asshole besides.” Aunt Mil shook her head. She asked Jack, “D’you want to punch down the bread?”

The tears that had been threatening at the corners of Jack’s eyes suddenly cleared. “Do I?!” He said. He punched down bread with his Mom every Saturday.

Aunt Mil pulled up a chair beside the counter, and Jack climbed up while she pulled the cloth off of the bowl. Inside, the dough had risen almost to the top of the rim, and Jack gleefully buried his fist in it.

“Somebody bring me another beer!” Lew demanded.

“Get it yourself,” said Mil. Jack heard his uncle grumbling out to the garage. He plumped his other fist into the sticky dough. Mil said, “Lew’s real problem is he never grew up. Your Mom and Uncle Mike and I all learned how to work in the kitchen. Lew just never had to do a thing for himself, and look where that’s left him. Still lives at home with Mom is where.”

“Where do you live?” asked Jack.

“Right now, I live here, too. But that’s a long story. I’ll be back on my feet again and in my own place soon enough. Him? He won’t ever find a woman to take care of his scrawny a…rear end.”

Jack ate a little of the dough off his hands while Mil turned the bowl out on a cutting board. “When will Mom come get me?”

“It’ll be your Dad, champ. And he probably won’t be here until sometime tomorrow. Your Mom’s still early days with that baby.”

Lew stumped back into the living room. Jack heard him slamming the garage door. “Is Uncle Lew always this mean?” Jack couldn’t remember if his uncle was nice or not when his Mom brought him by. He couldn’t remember even seeing the man much.

“Only when he’s drinking, and that’s all the time,” said Mil.

“I heard that!” Lew shouted.

Mil shook her head. “I’m damned… I’m sorry you’ve got to see him like this. It’s a crying shame.” She raised her voice on this last. “It’s no wonder your Mom keeps away.”

Before she could say anything else about Uncle Lew or Jack’s Mom, the phone rang. It was a corded model with a rotary dial. Jack had never seen anything like it elsewhere. Aunt Mil picked it up. “Yeah.” Not hello, but ‘yeah’. At Jack’s house, they answered the phone, ‘Hello’. “Hey, John, how’s everything?” When his aunt said his Dad’s name, Jack took a real interest in the conversation. Aunt Mil said, “OK, hang on, let me write down the number. Yeah, he’s doing great. You want to talk to him while I go get a pen?” Aunt Mil beckoned to Jack, who jumped off his chair and ran to the phone. Mil clamped a dishtowel into his doughy hand as she handed him the receiver.

Dad said, “Hey there buddy.”

“Hi Dad. Did the baby come?”

“Not yet, not yet. We’re just getting settled into a room. Sometime tomorrow morning, probably.”

“Oh.”

“Everything OK at your end? You staying out of your Uncle Lew’s way?”

“Yeah.”

In the background, he heard his mother’s voice. Then, Dad said, “Hold on.”

Then his Mom came on. “Sweetie, if Lew gets mean, you wake up Gramma Addie, OK?”

“Yes’m.”

Jack wanted to ask Mom to tell him a story. He wanted to ask her for a hug. But Dad came back on the line. “OK, Champ, your aunt got that pen yet?”

Jack looked around. Aunt Mil was standing behind him, waiting. “Yeah.” His voice wobbled.

“That’s my boy. You’re a big kid now. Don’t be crying all night. Before you know it, morning will be here, and you can come meet your little sister. I’ll come and get you first thing.”

“OK Dad.” But by now, of course, he was crying. He handed the phone to Aunt Mil and sat in the middle of the floor with the dish towel on his head to hide the tears running down his cheeks.

“Sissy boy!” Uncle Lew called from the living room.

Jack heard the phone click back into its cradle, and he felt Aunt Mil’s arm around his shoulders. She sat beside him in the floor. “Listen,” she said. “I think we’ll have a camp out in my room, OK? I’ll bring in some blankets and kitchen chairs, and you can have a little fort in there in the floor. I’ll be up on the bed, and you’ll be right beside me, and you won’t even have to go out of my room at all. I’ve got the bathroom right there, and I’ll lock the hall door so nobody can get in. We’ll put on some cartoons on my TV and just hole up in there for the night.”

Jack said, “What about the bread?”

“World won’t end if we have to buy it from the store this week. You don’t need to be out here with that drunk, OK?”

“OK Aunt Mil. Thanks.” Jack let her pull the dishtowel off his head and take his hand. He tried to feel better as he followed her out of the kitchen. But all he really wanted was his mother. All he really wanted was to go home.

Protected: Songs from Divorce (e-mail me if you want the password)

Posted on by August 4, 2012

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The old ball game

Posted on by February 25, 2020

Ray threw the ball, and his dog Moose bulleted across the yard in pursuit. The ball hit the garden shed and ricocheted off to one side. Just before he, too crashed into the small building, Moose diverted with a stumbling skid and shot over the ball, which bounced to a stop. The dog leaped up, spun in midair, and came down on top of his helpless prey, which remained fixedly rubber and inanimate.

From the patio, Sharee asked, “Doesn’t he ever bring the thing back?”

“Yeah,” said Ray. “When he’s killed it dead enough.”

He drifted back to sit by Sharee. She said, “You want a pop?”

“Yeah, that would be good. Mine are on the right side of the door on the second shelf of the fridge.” He said it out of habit, as if her errand here wasn’t the thing preventing him from just going in and getting it himself. Like anybody else had beverages in the fridge anymore.

While she was inside, the ball appeared over Ray’s shoulder, soaked with slobber. The dog’s head soon followed.

“God, he’s big!”  Sharee returned and handed Ray his cola. “Why is he looking at me like that.”

Ray took the can in one hand and used the thumb and index finger of the other to collect the ball, which was peeling into three parts. He held it out. “He wants you to play.”

Sharee took the ball much in the same way that Ray had offered it, between pinched fingers. “Drooly beast, isn’t he?” She threw as best she could without slinging wet dog spittle all over the two of them. Moose hurtled off again.

Ray said, “She almost done in there?”

“I think so.” Sharee looked at her phone and showed Ray the blank text screen.

Moose skidded back to the patio to plop the ball directly into Sharee’s lap this time. She moved her cell phone out of the slobber zone and wiped it on her shirt.

And then Julia was standing in the doorway behind Sharee, and Ray half rose out of his chair. Sharee looked over her shoulder. “Hey woah, you’re supposed to do your thing inside and…”

Julia said, “I knew I shouldn’t have come when he was home. I can’t.”

Sharee said, “You can’t what?”

“I can’t do this. I can’t stand it. I can’t listen to him out here playing with our dog and pack up my things and think of never coming back here again.” She was talking to Sharee, but she was looking at Ray.

Ray wanted to say she should have thought of that a week ago. He wanted to say it was a little late for can’t. But Moose was dripping all over Sharee, and the sun was too hot, and instead Ray said, “Then don’t.”

“Do you mean that?”

“I guess I do.”

She came out onto the patio then, and Ray got up and reached for her. But before he got there, Moose’s big head swiveled, and he clattered past Sharee and the ball to stand on his hind legs and lick Julia on the face. “I missed you too,” Julia said. “Now get down and get out of my way.” She shoved the dog gently back to all fours and Ray pulled her into his embrace.

“Moose,” Sharee held up the ball and pitched it across the yard. The dog yelped and chased after it while the people turned and went inside to start unpacking boxes.

Velvet Verbosity: Hurrying

Posted on by February 25, 2020

This week, Velvet Verbosity’s word is Hurrying!

_____________________________________________

“I’m hurrying!” Elsie ran past her Mama.

Mama turned around to shut the door, but Elsie pattered up the sidewalk. She didn’t pay any attention to the cracks that threatened to stub her toes. She arrived panting at the corner only moments before the yellow bus slouched into view. Finally, it hissed to a stop and the door screeched open.

Elsie screamed, “LISSA!” and then she threw herself at a bigger girl climbing down.

Lissa said, “You’d think I’d been gone weeks!” But she stroked Elsie’s brown head and smiled. “I’m back now duckface.  Let’s go home. I’ll carry you.”

 

 

Uncle Walt

Posted on by February 25, 2020

Nikki asked, “Did you smell Uncle Walt’s room?”

“Horrible.” I took another bite of cereal.

She turned to our mother. “I think he died last night.”

“Nichole Ann, that’s rude.”

“I’m serious Mom!” Nikki balled up her fists. You don’t have to walk past him every morning. Why did you even ask him to come?”

“Walter’s only been here three days, and he’ll be up soon. Show some respect.”

“Respect. Hah. He’s dead.” Nikki grabbed a bowl and sat beside me.

Uncle Walt always stank. He called himself a ‘bath optional’ kind of guy. My first memory of him is throwing up from the stench when he picked me up. Yesterday, he switched from some cartoon marathon, to the game console, to the DVD player all day. Everyone but Mom got tired of the odor and constant shifts and left.

Today, Mom had to work, and Nikki and I were supposed to entertain the old stinker. Nikki looked close to tears. “I’ll go check,” I whispered.

“Callie put your bowl in the sink!” Mom snapped as soon as I stood up.

“I’ll be right back.”

I darted out of the kitchen. Walt’s smell met me in the stairwell, and I nudged open the guestroom door. Walt lay on his back, the blankets all kicked to one side. A brown smear started at one side of the mattress and trailed over to his pajama bottoms. He shit the bed and died!

I drew a deep breath and screamed. But that infested my lungs with toxic air, and my freshly eaten breakfast rose in my gorge, gagging off my voice. I bolted from the room, still trying to shout. I heard Mom’s feet on the stairs as I reeled into the bathroom. As I threw myself down in front of the toilet, I realized my first memory of Walt was going to be the same as my last one. I would be an old woman, and I would have his dead stink in my nostrils.

____________________

This weekend, Trifextra claims houseguests stink after three days. What say you?

Mocafe Matcha Green Tea Sour Cream Cake

Posted on by July 12, 2023

I ran across a really fun blog opportunity a few weeks ago thanks to the awesome ladies at 5 minutes for Mom. Here’s how it works. The lovely people at Mocafe sent me a package of their Matcha Green Tea, and I got to try it in a recipe of my choosing.

I love to cook, so this was a nobrainer, the samples were a plus, AND, when I paste my blog entry into the linky form, I’ll be eligible to win a really cool Blendtec Blender. (Hey, vote for me over here, will you? Just click the little thumbs up. I’d love a new Blender!) I call that win-win-win! When I got my samples in the mail, I starting planning.

First, to get myself thinking about tea, I went out and bought some coffee, naturally. We live within walking distance (um, when it isn’t a million degrees outside; I drove) of The Coffee Beanery. It looks like a SnoKone place that somebody built a wooden porch onto, and I totally want to have time to linger in there and drink. But. I needed my drink for inspiration, and so I took it home with me.

And then I got on the computer to start thinking about what to bake only to find that one of my favorite food bloggers had just made exactly the dish I needed. Lauren at The Gourmet Veggie Mama posts some of the most delicious recipes ever. I’m not a vegetarian, and yet I regularly troll her site for what-to-make-for-dinner. I never regret a single thing I try. So when she put up this one for a Pecan Sour Cream Cake, a little lightbulm went off in my head.

The tea sprinkles so nicely over the batter

I made a few changes to her recipe to work in my yummy Matcha Green Tea Latte. For instance, since the mix came with a lot of vanilla flavoring, I dropped the vanilla from the recipe as a separate ingredient. And since the tea was so sweet, I didn’t add the glaze on top. But one thing that I DIDN’T change was the sugar. Lauren substituted Coconut Palm Sugar for half the sugar in the recipe. She extolled the health benefits and swore nobody could taste the difference. I figured I was adding six eggs among other things, so I wasn’t overly concerned about ‘health’. But the name sounded SO exotic that I went out to the health food store and bought some. Excellent decision. It tasted great. We all noticed the difference, and we APPROVED.
I baked with my helpers, and even accounting for them, the whole thing went off beautifully.

Ahem

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ah! There you both are. So sweet.

If you’re looking to make this delight yourself, here’s what you need to have and do:

3 cups flour
½ tsp salt
¼ tsp baking soda
1 cup unsalted butter, softened
1 ¼ cups sugar
1 ½ cups coconut palm sugar
¼ cup Mocafe Matcha Green Tea Latte Blend
6 eggs
½ cup pecan pieces
1 cup sour cream

Preheat the oven to 300° F (148°C). Grease and flour a 10-inch bundt or tube pan. (this is a deep, heavy cake, so be prepared to fill the thing almost all the way.)

Sift the flour, salt, and baking soda together in a separate bowl.

In a mixing bowl, cream the butter and sugar. (The palm sugar wouldn’t cream for me. It got good n mixed, though.)

Add the Matcha Green Tea

Beat in the eggs one at a time

Add the sour cream and mix

Add the flour, ¼ – ½ cup at a time. (Note – I use a stand mixer. Lauren suggests alternating sour cream and flour as you add.)

Add the pecans (you can also sprinkle these around the inside of the pan for a topping.)

Bake for 75 to 90 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean (It only took ours 75 to be done).

Let cool in pan for 10 minutes, then turn out onto a cake plate.

Just try not to eat it all without help. Burp.

Malaise

Posted on by February 25, 2020

Renee woke from a dream about a bee swarm to find the temperature had gone up in the night and the kitten had become embedded in her left arm. “Get off, Tabby. I hate these pills,” she muttered. But she didn’t. Although they put her into such a deep sleep that she had twice now slept through kitty claws, the pills made it possible to get out of bed at all by the light of day. Groggy, she could manage.

As soon as she had peeled the little cat away from her forearm, she lumbered off to the bathroom. A series of pathetic and increasingly louder mewls followed her when she shut the door with the feline on the other side. She ignored it and shot back her morning dose with a little paper cup full of water. Then she cleaned the cuts in her arm.

But the moment she opened the door, Tabby shot up the leg of her pajamas, forcing Renee to strip out of them. She left Tabby snagged and meowing so she could close the windows (and hopefully shut out the rank odor she had just noticed) and crank on the air.

Tabby freed herself long before the task was finished, and this time she attacked Renee’s head and became lodged in her hair. When Renee finally worked the kitten free, her alarm was finally bleating good morning, and her left arm was bleeding in two new places. She slammed the machine off with the right hand while she held Tabby up by the scruff of the neck in her left. It was the only pose that morning that made the little monster go limp.

“Today, we find you a home,” Renee said. Then she carried Tabby very carefully to the kitchen and tucked the cat into her carrier. As an afterthought, she snaked in some breakfast kibble. Now, Tabby did not mewl; now she howled. Renee had not known cats could howl, and she decided to skip her own breakfast in lieu of getting the creature to her vet that much sooner. They had known her for years at that office, and had promised to get a new home for this absurd little foundling who was not a replacement for the vast and sedate Petunia who had lived much of her life under Renee’s bed.

She dressed quickly, then picked up the carrier and went out front, pausing only long enough to lock her apartment door.Between the dream, in which a thousand hot bees had stung her flesh with burning needles, the kitten, which was positively wailing now, and the lingering smell, Renee found it impossible to escape a sense of malaise as she went down the sidewalk. She set the carrier down to unlock the car, then turned around to look at her building.

The roof was on fire. She saw smoke pouring up into the sky. “But the drugs were working!” she protested.  It had been months, and she was on her own again, and she would not see this fire. She willed it out of existence and climbed into the car.

The fire did not go away. She could still see the smoke out of her peripheral vision, and now she knew what the bad smell had been. She had known what it was all along. She had to call Dr. Archer. That was the responsible thing to do. But the caterwauling in the back seat changed her mind. Tabby saw it, too, or she wouldn’t be bleating this way. When she got out her cell phone, she dialed 911 instead of her psychiatrist. She told the dispatcher, “I think my apartment building is on fire, but I’m not sure. It might be a hallucination.” She had never hallucinated wounds before. And the kitten had been even more insane this morning than it had been yesterday. Surely she hadn’t imagined its attack to her head.

She hung up and got out of the car, replaying now the moments in the bathroom before she took her drug. Had it only been the kitten’s mewling she heard? Or had there been something else?  The couple upstairs had argued again last night. She remembered that. And now, she thought it might have been a woman’s distant moans, not just the frightened cat’s cries.

She couldn’t hear any sirens, and she felt almost sure she had heard her neighbor through the ceiling vent. (Of course, last Christmas, she was sure the tree was telling her to eat its needles, but that was last year, and the medicine was working now.)

She went back into the building. How could she have missed this haze? Had her open windows really kept her space so clear? She nearly went upstairs, but then instead detoured into her own apartment. She went back to the bathroom, throwing open windows along the way. “Hello!” she called. “Can anyone hear me?” The power went out just then, leaving her standing in the dark.

Yes. There it was. Faint. But human. Someone was trying to answer her. But normally, she could hear every word her neighbors screamed. This sound was barely audible. “I hear you,” she said. “But I don’t understand you.”  And that was when she knew it was real. Her hallucinations had voices. Always voices. But never this. Never muffled groans. “Never mind, I’m coming,” she shouted. Tied up. The upstairs neighbor was tied up. She had a gag in her mouth. Renee felt certain of it.

She dug under the sink for her toolbox and a hammer. She hoped it would be enough to pound through the door up there. As she stepped back out into the smoky hall, she made a mental note to cancel Tabby’s appointment with the vet. If she lived through the next half hour, she thought she saw herself with a long future of cat claws. “I owe that kitten some fish,” she said as she mounted the stairs, hoping she could pound faster than a fire.

____________________
For the Scriptic prompt exchange this week, Grace O’Malley gave me this prompt: Malaise..

I gave FlamingNyx this prompt: I didn’t mean to steal it. It just followed me home.

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The engaging kitteh up there is really named Cleo. She’s the newest house cat of my friend Jennifer, who is also mother to Socks (a giant compared to little Cleo) and Sophie (who is a dog). Oh and a couple of awesome human kids as well. Really awesome. Like two of the coolest humans on the planet awesome.