prose

I gazed past my porch onto the newly fallen snow.
The wind blew through my hoodie and I shivered.
The winter wind had long ago frozen my nose and feet.
I wrapped my arms around myself and continued to ponder

on a winter night long ago.
When the Ancients celebrated the true Light being given.
A newborn baby lying in a manger
far away
in Jerusalem.

I smiled remembering Christmas’ past.
The light of a child’s smile on my brother and sister’s face.
The smell of a newly cut tree,
laughter,
gifts being wrapped and waiting
waiting
for Santa Claus to come down the chimney.
Would He tell me that I had been a good girl this year?

(Ok, so this is something of a new direction for me to take my writing in. I would love feedback.)

“Earl! Where the hell is my oatmeal?” Rose said, her voice containing the essential components of both a shout and croak.
“It’s on its way, Missus Emerson,” Earl called from the tiny kitchen around the corner, concluding his thought with a cavernous burp.
“Don’t you burp like that, Earl. It’s rude,” she croak-shouted through tobacco-ravaged lungs. After a few moments of silence, she figured out that he had chosen not to grace her with a response, and in a few more he entered with a steaming bowl perched atop a breakfast tray clutched in oven-mitted hands. He set it down on the night table next to the antique lamp and glass of lukewarm water that seemed to always be half empty.

(This is part of the larger story I'm writing. On the whole, the entire story is experimental, but this piece is especially so. I'd love feedback on it. It is also highly inappropriate, so it should go unread by the sensitive.)

Knock, knock, knock.
“Sure, come on in.”
“Yeah, hi sir. Nancy said you wanted to see me.”
“Yeah, uh, sure. Why did I want to see you?”
“Well sir, I called this morning to say that I wouldn’t be in today. From Nancy’s description, you seemed rather upset about that.”
“Really?”
“Yes sir, you did.”
“It’s, uh, not that big a deal, just go back to work, ok?”
“That’s the thing, sir… I’m just stopping by to see you face-to-face and tell I’m sorry, and that I won’t be into work for the next few days. Something pretty serious has come up.”
“I don’t really care right now. I’ll see you.”
“Thank you sir! Goodbye.”
“Yeah… sure… uh, Mr. Dickenson?”
“Yessir?”

(This is the second installment of a story I may never finish. I realize that it has pretty much the same plot as the Big Lebowski so far. I'm trying to figure out how to remedy that.)

Danny got kicked out of the Starbucks without his coffee. Joshua followed him outside. A tap on the shoulder brought Danny whipping around to face Joshua.
“And what the fuck do you want?” he demanded. “Oh, it’s just you Josh. Don’t sneak up on me like that.”
“Danny I really need to talk to you…”
“Walk with me.” Danny took Joshua’s coffee and began walking up the street. Joshua followed obediently.
“It’s just that… I got beaten up by this big Hispanic guy who wanted money from me on behalf of some guy names Big Louie. I was wondering if you knew about this guy.”
“Why should I know anything about him?”
“You’re kind of a criminal, aren’t you?”

Your whispers in my ear are a pathetic attempt at telling me you love me. I disagree, you see, with your quiet logic about how every moment with me is priceless, how I am some work of art that very few can touch but all seem to admire from afar. Of course, your words are rhythmic and sweet, but I know that you’re lying and that’s all that matter to me.

Because of course I am not some masterpiece painted by other’s hands. You neglected to think of other symbols of this seemingly sweet comparison that wrap themselves around my thoughts. I was not a splotch of paint on a palette before I came to be who you “love”, I was just a child afraid to speak in case someone did not want to hear. I was so quiet before you came and wrapped your greedy little fingers into my heart. My quiet words were not good enough for your ears, and so you molded me like clay and made me who you thought I should be.

(This is kind of my return to writing. I was in a play, and my brain didn't really want to write. That might have been a good thing, because I didn't have too much time for it anyway.
In any case, I now have tons of ideas. I just started writing, and I'm going to see where this story takes me. I don't have any plan of attack.

Quick Edit: This particular piece is rather vulgar, so now you can't say I didn't warn you.)

There were two people in the small, green and white apartment. One was in pain. The other was inflicting the pain. The person in pain was a young white man with short dark hair, white collar work cloths on, and a large, throbbing spot of red on his forehead. His name was Joshua Dickenson. The person inflicting the pain was a big, heavyset Hispanic man in a basketball jersey. His name is unimportant.

Scene: A messy room, clothing sprawled across the floors and nearby furniture, adorning desks with faded denim with ripped knees and tees marked with shiny acrylic messages. The walls are painted pink, and the curtains are spotted green and blue and flow freely across the room from the wind blowing through the open window. In the midst of the clutter spread across the white carpet, gray in the dim light, is a bed. A small twin with a canopy covering the stainless white ceiling is ruffled with pink and blue at the tips. The room is spacious and well-decorated, clearly the work of a little girl.
The room is empty.

Long ago, you became frustrated with your fellow humans. It had started off as a nagging almost-thought in the back of your overworked brain. It grew. It became a regular thought, a constant thought, an obsession. You would lay awake at nights, listing undefined things that you hated about mankind. Your job ceased to apply. You became unemployed, hungry and impoverished. You never noticed. Too many people were suffering. There was too much wrong with the world for you to notice your own problems.
Death was not far off. You became a mess of bones contained by taut, colorless, rubbery skin, nearly robbed of life by your own brain.

I.
What if time were liquid? Would it be a river, rushing downhill forever from an undefined mountaintop or mythical spring? We would be the debris, the browned evergreen needles and waterlogged twigs, tossed around in the fickle current. What are moments? Are they groups of water molecules that rush along with us? Or are they little marks on the bank that we watch fly by as we are helplessly pulled along by the current, no matter how hard we try to cling to them.

What if there was a rock poking out above the surface of time? Could it stand the relentless rush of time? Would the debris be caught on it, abandoned in a single moment as the other twigs and needles were swept around a bend in time and out of sight? What could that debris do until it was dislodged by the river? Would it think? Would it ever catch up?

Here is an example of some short fiction that I wrote at the conference and just typed up:

Tomato Soup

I sighed as the man came a halt again, this time, appartently, to examine different tomato soup brands. Some more politically correct person in my position might have called him “overwight” or “obese” or even morbidly obese, but, in truth, he was fat. Some people are acceptable members of society who happen to be a bit overweight, but this particular fellow was fat. Why? Because he was an obnoxiously fat person. He quite literally took up the whole grocery aisle and seemingly moved at the pace of a boulder rolling uphill. I was pretty sure I was being ever so subtly pulled into his gravity well. I feared that if I traveled behind him too long I would be locked in orbit until he either lost weight on his own or through posthumous decomposition.