Winning

Posted on by February 25, 2020

I hurled down the Norton Anthology of American Literature. It was an undergraduate text, but heavy, and I had hopes. No. It ricocheted harmlessly off my windshield. Next, I tried the MLA Handbook. One bounce and it fell onto the pavement.  A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory, Critical Theory Since Plato, The Heart and Stomach of a King, and The English Language: A Historical Introduction. All of them thumped against the glass. Some of them lodged at the top of the hood or caught in the windshield wipers. The rest cascaded down into the parking lot. But none of them started so much as a hairline crack.

I wasn’t up high enough. My second story balcony was just too low. “OK, the roof then.” I collected my remaining graduate school textbooks into a Kroger bag and hauled myself up onto the railing.

“What are you doing?”

I hadn’t even seen Scott drive into the lot, even though his car had surely passed right in front of me, just beyond my own undamaged vehicle. “I’m trying to break my windshield.”

“Lock yourself out?”

“No. If I have to go to that fucking English 600 class today I’m going to lose it.”

“And so you are…”

“Making an excused absence.”

Scott looked up at me poised on the railing as if I meant to jump. He looked at the detritus surrounding my car. He looked back at me. And he started picking the textbooks up. I watched him collect them. He carried them up to the balcony. He walked into my apartment.

I followed.

“Mortensen piss you off again?”

The Kroger bag’s plastic handles, stretched to the limit with my six tomes, gave way entirely, tumbling its contents onto the floor. “Goddamn it, why didn’t he listen to me? I told them… I told him Cynthia Sheard was a shit-for instructor. How dare he act so supercilious now that she’s gone. All I want from that fucker is a ‘you were right’. Is that so much to ask?” I threw myself on the couch.

Scott set the books he had rescued on the table that passed for a computer desk. “You have to admit that it’s pretty uncommon for a professor to walk out in the middle of the semester.” He sat beside me and found the remains of my phone’s handset embedded in the cushions. He started putting it back together.

“No I don’t. It doesn’t matter how often it happens. It matters that I knew it was coming six months ago, and I called it, and now he has to teach her class, and he hasn’t issued more than a generic blanket apology.”

“So skip. Didn’t you say everybody in that course was guaranteed an A?”

“But I don’t want to be like those damned sheep who just let it pass unspoken!”

“You’re not like them. Believe me, you’ll never be like them.” He held the handset. He held my eyes.

And slowly, I let go.

 

Hanging on the telephone

Posted on by February 25, 2020

Darren creaked down the stairs. The murmur of his wife’s voice on the phone to his mother soothed his steps. She said, “Yes, we’ll be there in under twelve hours Sherry.” He saw her at the bottom, pacing just outside the kitchen.

He thought, “Tie, suit, wingtips, dress shirt, black socks.”

She said, “I’m touched. Of course he’ll deliver the eulogy.”

“What? I’ll do what?”

When he spoke, she looked up and put her finger to her lips. She walked back into the kitchen, away from him.

“How can I give a eulogy for someone who should still be alive?”

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This week, Velvet Verbosity challenged us with ‘murmur’

Flori Rides a Bike (Flash Fiction 2012 Challenge)

Posted on by February 25, 2020

“Flori, don’t.” Cal was so weak he could barely stand up. Being trapped too long in a cat’s body tended to have that effect.

“Shh. I’ll be back in ten minutes.” Flori wasn’t much better off, but at least her transformation from human to gryphon and back again had gone smoothly. She wasn’t shaking violently, and her body didn’t have a sheen of sweat.

She hooked a basket she’d found in one corner of the attic and stepped out onto the stairs. At the last second, she turned around and plucked a phial out of Cal’s jacket. “No lartë.”

His mewl of protest bespoke the depth of his addiction. She reached back and cradled his head against hers for a moment, then kissed him tenderly as she reached behind him and pulled two more phials out of his pants. “Is that all of it?” He didn’t answer. “Do I need to … never mind. I do.” She pinned him against the wall between her thighs and kissed him rampantly while she ransacked his body. In the end, she had collected seven of the little containers of drug.

But that cost her half the time she figured they had before the gang caught up to them. She hurried downstairs to raid the fridge and returned quickly. “Now eat.” She jammed slices of lunchmeat into Cal’s mouth as she dragged him out the door.

“Flori, I don’t even know where I am!”He slopped salami down his front, opting to speak rather than to chew and swallow.

“The last place they’ll look for us.” She poked more meat into his open mouth.

He stopped walking and looked at her stupidly, but he did at least close his mouth around the food.

She blew a mouthful of air, but stopped short of actually rolling her eyes. “I came home. Now eat.” She drew him down the stairs behind her.

He asked her something, and she pretended not to hear him over his mouthful of food. But when he swallowed and repeated the question, she heard, “What are we going to do here?”

“We’re going…”

Cal tripped. He snagged his foot on a step and crashed forward into Flori. He was easily two feet taller, so they tumbled together down the stairs, landing at the bottom in a glittering mess of glass, lartë, and milk. Cal flipped over, off Flori and started lapping the milk like a cat.

“No you don’t.” She caught him from underneath and rolled him away from the place where all of the little phials had smashed with the milk jug and gotten mixed in with the bread. “We’re going to steal your ride and get as far from here as we can before daybreak.”

Outside, the distant roar of motorcycle engines caught even Cal’s attention. “They’re coming,” he said. “And I just broke…”

“They’re going to kill you anyway for taking it. Giving it back won’t make a bit of difference.”

“Let’s go.” Suddenly, his body lost its uncoordinated jerky gait. Flori had to wonder if he had gotten some of the drug in his rapid slurping. Or maybe it was just adrenaline. Now he took her arm and hauled her, sopping, away from the site of the spill.

As they made their way through the house, she used her own magic, the kind that came to her without the drug, to crowd the furniture together. If they could get clear before the others arrived, they might think Flori and Cal were holed up in the house before they noticed the missing bike. Not a probable scenario, but she had to hope. She had to try.

They ran out of the house and across the yard, dripping milk and lartë all the way to the garage. Cal punched in the garage code fluidly, but Flori stopped him short of mounting his chopper. She took the key and pushed him back to the passenger pad. “I don’t care what it is that’s gotten rid of your shakes, they’ll come back soon enough. I’m driving. You’re riding bitch.”

She swung her leg over, turned the key, and revved the throttle. She felt, rather than saw, Cal get on behind her. “OK,” he said. “You can drive if you want to. But this isn’t going to wear off for a long time.”

“What do you mean?”

“You missed two grams when you were frisking me up there.”

“Oh for  the… Yeah, but you didn’t take them. You didn’t transform. They’re probably broken all to hell in your pockets.”

He laughed as he settled his warm body in behind her. “Of course I did. I used them to turn into a human being this time. We’re just another kind of animal after all.”

Flori groaned, but she didn’t argue. Instead, she put all her energy into steering the motorcycle out of the garage. She stopped long enough for Cal to get off and shut the door. When he came back, she traded him seats willingly. She wasn’t used to driving his custom machine, and she wished her own wasn’t stashed half a city away, behind the boarding house where she’d rescued Cal when the stolen lartë nearly killed him. She slid in behind Cal now, and they roared away from the house, back in towards town and away from the gang.

“We’re in some kind of trouble baby,” she murmured into his back.

“Yeah, but trouble’s so much fun!” he shouted in return.

______________________________________________

July, as I learned about an hour ago, is flash fiction month. It’s like NaNoWriMo only shorter. Up to a thousand words a day in flash fiction. Today’s challenge is to write urban fantasy with a comedic theme. I thought it might be good to hear from Flori again.

She starts here:

She continues here:

And that gets us to “Flori Rides A Bike”

I wrote this in under an hour, and I will be revising it. I don’t plan to use serial characters for these challenges, but Flori seemed to fit this prompt so perfectly. Still. Like the play from a couple of weeks ago, this one is still quite rough around the edges. Not my usual fiction, but I wanted to dive into the challenges.

No (It’s too damned hot, dog)

Posted on by February 25, 2020

Dear Chewie,

The kids beat the heat in lots of ways. They spend a couple of days building Lego vehicles.

Here’s our progress after day one (roughly two hours) of building

And playing with them.

Which meant dinner was late, since the kitchen table was his playing surface.
He played with it for a good two hours.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Daddy reads them books.

Here, Caroline, how about a book or ten?

I take them to the pool.

Seriously. It was 104 in the sun at the pool. But his lips were blue just before I shot the photo. The pool is like a sauna. What gives? Whose circulatory system did this kid get?

 

But take the dog for three walks in a day?

the poor neglected leash and harness that only comes out twice daily in this kind of weather

Dude, you’re crazy. Not happening.

He took the bone, but he refused to even look at me.

Here, have a rawhide and don’t eat my shoes, OK?

Love, Mom

Elbow Grease

Posted on by February 25, 2020

 

Mom and Dad were physical people. They changed their own oil, fixed up all our furniture a thousand times, and plumbed like they were born to the sewers. Dad even learned some basic wiring to avoid calling in an electrician.

Which made it that much harder to see Dad in his hospital gown, prepped for surgery. Mom held his hand, the one that wasn’t poked full of IVs, and I sat a little behind him. The nurse said, “Now, I need you to confirm that you understand the procedure we’re going to perform.”

Dad interrupted her. “You’re going to pull out some of the old wiring, plunge the line, and patch me up with what passes for electrical tape if you’re a surgeon.” In spite of the situation, Mom snorted laughter.

“Um.”

“Yes, I get it. You’re removing plaque. You’re putting something else in place of my vascular walls. Listen, you’re cute. What do you say I take you out for coffee and we forget all about this nasty heart business.”

“Dad!”

Mom kissed his forehead. “You’re incorrigible,” she said.

The nurse smiled brightly. She said, “Or we could go to a bar. I know this anesthesiologist who can mix up a mean cocktail.”

“Now you’re talking!”

Mom rolled her eyes and looked in my direction. “Don’t encourage him,” she told the nurse.

“It’s all right,” she said. “A positive attitude is what gets most heart patients through. We’re about to head back to surgery now.” Indeed, an entire team had materialized around the bed. They tugged and rotated, and soon, my father was on his way out the door.

Mom stood up suddenly. “Jim!” she called.

The whole parade stopped for a moment as she walked across the room. She took his hand again and said, “You come back to me, now. I love you old man.”

Dad smiled from the gurney. “My heart is going to be just fine,” he said. “All it needs is a little elbow grease.”

Then they let go of each other, and he rolled away down the hall. I said, “He’ll be OK, Mom.”

Mom said, “I know. Or I hope I do. I just hope he doesn’t tell so many jokes the doctor forgets how to operate.”

“That’s why they put him under, I think. So the doctor can concentrate and do his job.”

“You’re probably right about that. Anyway, let’s scoot back down the hall. That waiting room isn’t going to populate itself, you know.”

“I guess not.” I tried hard to think of one of Dad’s signature jokes to fill the silence, but nothing came, so I took my mother’s hand and we walked out together.

For the Scriptic prompt exchange this week, Barb Black gave me this prompt: All it needs is a little elbow grease.

I gave Kat this prompt: Chad followed me from room to room singing his cow song while I picked up dirty laundry and cleaned litter boxes.

Priorities

Posted on by February 25, 2020

At the eighth grade dance, Patty Ann Lawson kicked Tricia Smiley in the shin. Tricia caught Patty’s vest in her fist. “Anthony Gray’s bombed or he wouldn’t have tried kissing me.” She held Patty at arm’s length. “I try not to punch deserving assholes in public.”

“Is something the matter?” Mrs. Haverty descended.

“We’re dancing.” Tricia suddenly pulled the much smaller Patty in close.

Patty seized Tricia’s arms. “Dancing!” she echoed, and tried a couple of steps to Katy Perry’s “Wide Awake”.

“ I’d suggest you dance a little less roughly. I could year you ‘singing along’ over there.”

“Yes ma’am.”

The chaperone left, and the girls jumped apart. Patty dusted her vest where Tricia had been clutching it. “We broke up.”

“Then why are you coming after me? Seems like you already did yourself a favor.” Katy Perry changed to Justin Bieber. “God. I’m going to the bathroom. I can’t stand the shit they play at these things.” Tricia stalked away.

“Wait up.”

“What the hell?”

“ I don’t want you to think I’m following you when I go to the same place for the same reason.”

In the bathroom, Tricia climbed up on a sink and forced open a window. She lit a cigarette and blew smoke out into the night.

“That’s so gross.”

“I didn’t ask for your opinion.”

Patty swept Tricia’s pack off the counter and into the trash. She plucked the freshly lit butt out of Tricia’s fingers and rammed it down the uncovered sink drain all in a piece.

She hissed, “Wash your hands,” as Mrs. Haverty appeared in the doorway.

When the teacher left, Tricia said, “Thanks. I think.” She dug her smokes out of the garbage.

Patty shrugged. “I guess I figured out I owed you a favor.”

“Tricia said, “No you don’t. You don’t owe me anything.” But she held the door for Patty on the way back to the gym, and they sat together on the bleachers, mocking Justin Bieber and Anthony Gray.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The final Trifecta week 33 challenge asked us to respond to Smashing Pumpkins “Thirty-Three”. It’s a dark song that sounds to me like it’s about a guy whose marriage proposal has just been rejected, or maybe his girlfriend just killed herself. Anyway, because I never respond to a musical prompt the way I expect, I wound up at a high school dance with the heavy footfalls and that sense of imminent tragedy.  (Funny aside. When I was a kid, the words “tragedy” and “strategy” threw me. I always said “Stragedy” and “Trategy”.) Smashing Pumpkins are forever associated, for me, with being a pariah. Mellon Collie was released when I was 19. By then, I was 3/4 of the way to finishing my BA, but I was only four years into expunging high school from my system. My sister owned Siamese Dream, and I’m pretty sure Dad owned Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. None of this is very useful, but it may give you a sense of the frame of mind the song put me in.

Rent

Posted on by February 25, 2020

Lady Beatrice whispered, “Magda can’t find out.”

Lord Bertram pulled her thigh closer to his lips. “Never.”

Then the world rent open with a piercing scream and a jagged hole in the wall. Lord Bertram threw Lady Beatrice onto the bed. A crier shouted, “To arms! To his majesty’s chambers!”  Bertram scrambled into his breeches and a tunic and ran to answer that call.

And then he reappeared in the wall’s hole, but it wasn’t him at all. This man looked exactly like Bertram, but he wore a mud leather helmet and a strange mask. Instead of a tunic, he had a short coat and strange breeches.  He carried Magda’s body in his arms, and then he dropped her.

Forgetting her nakedness, Beatrice ran to her dead sister. Only just as the man was not really Bertram, the woman wasn’t really Magda. Her open, vacant eyes, were brown as the man’s muddy helmet, and her hair was dark instead of golden.

“Who are you?”

“I’m his majesty’s bombardier and gunner, and I am your lover, Lady Bea.”

“Where is my sister? “This isn’t Magda!”

“This Magda is the only one who matters to us.”

“ Why is she dead?”

The bombardier looked over at the bed Beatrice and Bertram had so recently vacated. “She stabbed her own Beatrice in vengeance, then took poison.”

“No!”

“Your sister  is coming now.”

“She would not kill me.”

“She is the paladin’s wife, and she will.  Death settles every score. None can ask reckoning of the dead.”

Then he reached for her. “But she need not find you. Where I come from, you are wholly mine now. Your living sister can have that Bertram forever. Will you return with me through the hole?

Beatrice understood his truth as she heard her sister near to  the bedchamber. “Oh Bea!” Magda’s voice was laden with despair.

Beatrice reached back to the bombardier. She took his hand and he pulled her close. Together, they stepped through the hole to forever.

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This is my second submission for Trifecta’s 33rd weekly prompt. This prompt is a bit more traditional. Well, as traditional as anything ‘Trifecta’ gets. We’re being asked to take off on the third definition of ‘score’.

Thrice Told

Posted on by February 25, 2020

This week, Trifecta celebrates its 33rd weekly challenge. It’s actually three challenges, and it ends at 8AM tomorrow. I’ve been travelling, so posting these has had to wait. That means you’ll be hearing from me three times today (and then I’ll be quiet on Thursday). The first challenge is to respond to the following quotation

“What I tell you three times is true.” — Lewis Carroll.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Thrice Told

A young mother wore her baby through the airport and pulled two suitcases behind. She was alone.  “My husband died,” she said to the woman beside her in the boarding area.

Her husband quickly joined her then. “Don’t say that.”

They boarded the plane, and the flight attendant flipped the suitcases up overhead. “Do you need any of this to go under the seat?”

The mother adjusted her wrap to buckle her seat belt “No. Thank you for the help with the bags. My husband died.”

Her husband smiled and shook his head. He sat beside his wife. He brushed her ear with his lips and whispered, “Shhh.”

The baby fussed after takeoff, and the mother handed it her cell phone cover. While the baby twisted and bit the rubbery pink plastic, its mother leaned back and closed her eyes. She wept.

A woman asked, “What’s wrong?”

“My husband…”

“No,” said the husband. “Please stop saying that.” He touched his wife’s face with his fingertips. “Please don’t say it ever again.”

“… died”

His body broke into a thousand particles and scattered through the cabin. The passengers gaped at the spray of light that flooded down the aisle and raced from person to person, like a blindingly bright bird looking for escape. Finally, the pieces gathered and floated towards a window. They crossed through and out, vanishing into the clouds and sun.

The wife patted the warm spot in her husband’s now empty seat. She wiped her eyes with a napkin and settled the baby once more on her chest. Her face seemed more haggard now, more tired, and more wrinkled.  But her eyes were only a little red. The cart came and she took crackers. Her body seemed to grow as she ate them, to swell and fill the place formerly occupied by her spouse. It was as if he had been dead for a long time, and she had, in the rising plane, finally managed to let him go.

Hope

Posted on by February 25, 2020

Hope is seeing  your grandmother’s flowers in your aunt-in-law’s backyard. It’s watching second cousins who have only met once latch onto each other with ease and love. It’s eating sausages cooked by a young man who fought back childhood cancer that could have killed him. It’s taking pictures as directed by a tiny girl and complying to her demand, “Me see em!” entirely to hear her squeal “Oh my GOD!” even if you just took a picture of a water glass.  It’s watching a total of ten first and second cousins ranging from 18 down to 2 years in age play joyfully together for an entire afternoon and evening, even after rain drives everyone indoors at a small lakeside cabin. It’s catching three sisters laughing, when they were only supposed to smile.

Dear Helen,

I barely knew you. I met you several times, the first when Scott and I started dating. You took the whole family to eat at the Dog Team restaurant, where food was served in impossible little Ferris Wheels.  I was sad for you when, several years later, it burned and was not rebuilt. You came to our wedding and our baby shower.  We got together in New York State and in Vermont. Although Scott and I never lived close enough to spend much time with you, I still understood that you were his grandmother and an important figure in his life.

But I barely knew you.

I never knew your mother died when you were five, or that her name was Jennie, or that it was the influenza of 1919 that killed her. I never knew that your father was so strict that it was something of a rebellion for you to attend parties with your nursing school colleagues. Although I knew you survived your first husband by many years, I never knew what Allen looked like.

I never knew that nineteen of your children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren could gather in a two bedroom cabin with a small porch and laugh for some seven hours. And I would never have guessed that the five spouses mixed into that number would enjoy the event as much as the blood relatives. I never imagined that from one person could descend such camaraderie.

Ninety seven years is a long life. It’s a life that resonates.

And I never thought to say thank you.

Sincerely,

Your granddaughter-in-law Jessie

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I’m prompt-hopping with this one. The Lightning and The Lightning Bug asked us to flicker our inspiration towards hope. Hope is normally a dangerous emotion for me, but I found a rather pleasant way to approach the subject. And Amanda at The Last Mom On Earth is hosting a week of open letters. This one is to my husband’s grandmother. And yes, I know the “dear” part falls in the middle, when technically the salutation in a letter comes first. But I’m not your typical letter-writer, either.

Notes from the road: Under Boston

Posted on by February 25, 2020

I’ve been scheduling my posts for the last week or so. If it works as well as it has been, I’m going to keep scheduling about half of them. I’ll still do plenty live, but if I can keep ahead of the flow, it will help when life (or grading) become crazy and I have to go to earth.

For example.

I’ve been on vacation since last Thursday, so I scheduled all my posts a week out. (Poor Roxanne at The Good Luck Duck noticed my prescheduled cow post on Facebook when I screwed up my scheduling function. And the accidental early publication attests to the fact that I’m telling the truth to say I totally scheduled that before Trifecta gave us a cow in the road prompt.)

This trip is part vacation, part family reunion, part memorial service. Scott’s grandmother died back in April at the age of 97. She lived in Vermont, as do Scott’s aunts and one of his cousins (and that cousin’s family). Another cousin and family live in Massachusetts.  Scott and his sisters are scattered all over the country, and Scott’s Mom is in Cincinnati. Rather than have everyone-who-could-break-away rush to a funeral back in April, Grandma Irwin’s three daughters (Scott’s Mom and her sisters) decided to hold a memorial service in June, when we could all be present.

So last week, we took the dog to the kennel, drove to Atlanta, and caught a plane to Boston, and from there we drove to Vermont. Here are pictures of the kids in the airport and on the plane.

Thanks to medication, Sam slept for the first hour of the flight, didn’t destroy anything in the airport, and didn’t cause mayhem

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And here’s what I didn’t photograph. We got to drive under Boston! Back when they ripped up the city to build a tunnel underneath, I thought it was so damned cool. And I also thought I would never ever get to go in it. I mean, when it first opened, it cost I think $15 to use.  And plus, I go to Boston like once every four years maybe. So when we turned into the Ted Williams Tunnel after picking up our rental car, and Scott casually told Sam, “This is one of the longest tunnels in the world,” I was as cooled out as the kids.I kept asking, “Are we really driving under Boston, like right under the city right now?” And we were.  For like fifteen minutes in rush hour traffic, we drove under Boston. And that was fifteen minutes that would have been an hour before the tunnel was built. It meant we could arrive at five and plan to meet Scott’s cousin who lives just south of Boston at a restaurant just north of the city at six.

Oh yeah! We got to see Mike and Michelle and Devon and the other Sam again. We went to a restaurant called Not Your Average Joe’s. Great food. Even better atmosphere. The staff tolerated it as the Sams cavorted  threw i-phones, and built the Tower of Silverware. Oh, and bit people. And no, it wasn’t just my Sam engaged in those practices. He had an awesome sidekick. Well, except for the biting. That’s like a personal thing.

Trouble meet trouble Uh… computer, meet electronic game?

Then we went next door for ice cream and visited until the turkeys turned into pumpkins outright and we had to get them back to their carriages. Then it was up to New Hampshire and our hotel. The first day was, in spite of the stress of travelling with children (and our children in particular) an unqualified success.

second start to the right and straight on ’til morning