writing – Page 4 – Kelley Eskridge

CW 25: The Messenger

I wrote this today as part of my commitment to the Clarion West Write-a-thon. A dedication means that person sponsored it by donating to CW, and then provided me a writing prompt that sparked the piece. If you would like something written especially for you, please consider sponsoring me.

Here’s all the work of the 41 days. You’ll also find these pieces cross-posted at Sterling Editing as incentive for writers to practice their editing and story-building skills.

Enjoy.

The Messenger

For Camille Terhune. Thank you for your support of me and Clarion West.

The messenger wore rockstar sunglasses and jeans cut off at the knees, and drove her bike like an F-16. She came bombing through traffic on the centerline and cut to the curb lane for a right turn; a guy stepped out between two parked cars with his hand up for a taxi, and she just leaned under the arm whphht right past him as if she hadn’t even noticed he was there. The guy practically peed himself; the messenger took the corner without a backward look.

“Holy shit,” Harry said, “did you see that?” They were at an outside table because it was his turn to pick, and he liked being on the street where he could sometimes catch a glimpse of people living kamikaze lives. Gutsy lives. Harry liked to see that.

Marina speared a forkful of Cobb salad and said, with the smallest edge in her voice, “That girl on the bike? Yeah, she should be more careful.”

Outside-Harry said, “Uh huh.” Inside-Harry was doing the flaily-arm hop on the sidewalk, Did you see what she just did, sweet mary mother of god! But most people wouldn’t understand. It wasn’t the leaning, although that was fairly cool. It was the corner in crosswalk traffic on a fixie with no fucking brakes. And not just any fixie: a custom SE Ripper 700c fixed gear freestyle god machine. Inside-Harry wanted to find this girl and marry her.

He turned to the girl he would doubtless be marrying instead. A nice girl. Good safe job in accounts payable. Always ordered Cobb salad because who could mess up a boiled egg? Had already convinced him to put his bike away because it was more fun to find things they could do together.

She was holding her fork halfway to her mouth, looking at him. The edge that had been in her voice was still in her eyes.

“So how’s life today?” he said, and put on his listening face.

Two weeks later, he came out of Starbuck’s with his Americano and a grande soy-milk half-caf latte for his boss, and the messenger was across the street, settling her bag across her back as she headed toward her bike locked to a rail.

Two teenage kids stopped to eyeball the bike. One took a pair of boltcutters out of his back pocket.

The messenger yelled, “Hey!”, actually she roared like a girl-shaped lion and ran flat out with her palms braced and slammed into one of the kids at speed, bammo right into his chest. He went back, and he almost went down. Both kids looked startled and suddenly very young; then they turned and ran.

Holy shit, Harry thought, did I just see that? Inside-Harry gave him a shove. Dude, there she is! Step up!

“Excuse me!” Harry called, and reflexively raised his hand to get her attention. A guy cutting around him on the sidewalk bumped his arm. Harry’s arm jerked, and latte spattered the guy like soy-milk half-caf rain.

“What’re you doing?” said the guy. “Watch where the fuck you’re going!”

“Hey, I didn’t–” Harry said, and the guy put a finger up in Harry’s face and bared his teeth and said, “What?”

Harry stepped back. “Nothing. Sorry.” And when he looked again, the messenger was heading uptown in a taxi slipstream. No hands. Great bike, Harry thought. Great rider. Gutsy. And unaccountably found himself wanting maybe, he wasn’t sure, but maybe wanting to cry.

The emo fit passed pretty quickly, but in the days that followed he found himself more alert to every bike on the street, and more restless the rest of the time. It was a big city. He would not see her again. And it was confusing to want it so much and also be glad it would never happen because then he’d have to… what? There was a phrase for it that he couldn’t remember.

But he remembered something else. He remembered what it was like to ride. The wonder and the terror of it, the bumper grazes and the random opening of car doors, the adrenaline joy of precision at speed, taking the corners, taking the risk, no hands, and it all came back so fast, so fast, so fast and Outside-Harry thought Marina doesn’t want me to and Inside-Harry thought Fuck her! Because I have to, I have to–

And there it was; the phrase he was looking for. Get back on the bike.

CW 24: Choke Point

Here’s all the work of the 41 days. You’ll also find these pieces cross-posted at Sterling Editing as incentive for writers to practice their editing and story-building skills.

Enjoy.

Choke Point

For Sue Grosz. Thank you for your support of me and Clarion West.

We have a surprise for you, Shirley’s parents told her one morning, and the surprise turned out to be the ruinizing of her summer. No sneaking into the movies when Lorena’s brother was working the box office. No Almond Joys from the corner store. No stickball. No trips to the zoo on Free Day. No library, no public pool, no Tasha or JJ or even stupid Lolly with the makeup kit she wanted to try out on everyone because she was going to be a cosme-thing when she got out of high school, which was a million years away, and even longer now that Shirley was going to spend her summer with old people and cows. They probably didn’t even have TV out there. They probably didn’t have Coca-Cola. And she could hardly remember Granny Bea.

“I don’t want to,” she said. “Why do I have to go?” But they wouldn’t tell her why.

She stood in outraged silence while her momma packed for her. She went rigid under her mother’s long, strong hug. She sat in stiff rage as her daddy drove her out of the city, and she wouldn’t talk to him even when he offered to stop for Dairy Queen. “You have a mighty will, child,” he said, with a chuckle that made her so mad she thought she would explode. But finally she ran out of anger, the way she always got to the bottom of a milkshake no matter how hard she tried to make it last. So then she sat in silence; she felt so confused and sad that all her words were stuck in her stomach.

But her daddy seemed to understand the difference. He reached out and stroked his big hand along the back of her head. “It’ll be all right, baby girl,” he said. “It won’t be long, and Granny Bea’s real nice, and she loves you.”

Granny Bea was almost as tall as Shirley’s momma, with deep lines from her nose down to the corners of her mouth. She wore jeans and a boy’s shirt with the sleeves cut off raggedy near the shoulders. She didn’t look like anyone’s grandma that Shirley had ever seen.

“Thank you, Bea,” her father said. “Toya sends her love…and we’ll get through all this.” Then he knelt so his face was level with Shirley’s. “Be good, sweetheart. I love you.” And still she couldn’t say a word; but she hung onto him tight and tried to make her arms do the talking. Don’t go, don’t go. The way he hugged her back, he seemed to understand. But he got in the car and went anyway, and left Shirley standing in the farm’s dirt driveway with too much to say and no one to say it to.

Granny Bea put a hand on Shirley’s shoulder and gave it a brief squeeze. “Come on, honey,” she said. “Let me show you around.”

They put Shirley’s suitcase in a small bedroom with a dresser painted with flowers and a mobile of different colored fish over the bed. The fish swam round and round each other in the breeze from the open window. “That was your momma’s,” Granny Bea said. “She liked the green-stripey one best.” Shirley did too, but she just nodded.

They went out to the barn. There was a horse named Billy-bob, and a cow named Florence, and a pig named Flower. “That one’s kind of a joke,” her grandma said, and wrinkled her face up and waved her hand in front of her nose.

“Stinky,” Shirley said in a small voice.

‘It sure is, honey,” Granny Bea said. “Now you come on with me, I’ve got one more thing to show you.”

She led Shirley into a patch of trees behind the barn. The breeze made the leaves rustle, shhh, shhh. “You hear that? Those trees are trying to say Shirley,” Granny Bea said. Under the trees, a creek ran shallow along a muddy bank. Some parts were shady and cool; in other places, the sun came through the leaves and made the water sparkle. “You know what I think?” Granny Bea said. “I think that sometimes when we’re not around, those fish in your room get loose and come over here to swim.”

Shirley hoped Granny Bea could see she wasn’t impressed. She was nine. She knew those fish were stuck there on the ceiling.

Granny Bea squatted and pointed at a narrow place where the creek was gummed up with dirt and leaves, so the water could hardly get through. “Those fish are gonna be mighty disappointed,” she said.

She picked up two fat sticks and gave one to Shirley. So they dug and poked, and one by one the leaves worked free. She watched them go bobbing down the stream, just like little green fish.

Granny Bea said, “Takes a while to get things unstuck sometimes.”

Shirley nodded. Inside her, words started swimming to the surface.

CW 23: The Green Chair

Here’s all the work of the 41 days. You’ll also find these pieces cross-posted at Sterling Editing as incentive for writers to practice their editing and story-building skills.

Enjoy.

The Green Chair

For Ginny Gilder. Thank you for your friendship and support.

Our town lies on the River Wrack. We are not large or important, except that we stand at the start of the Ever Road into the Gorge of the Dead. Travellers sailing upriver to the King’s Keep sometimes stop at the riverside inn for a meal or a night with someone who doesn’t smell so much of fish, and they smile at the names. Ever. Dead. But we’re not fanciful here: we call things what they are.

There was a ship at the dock and the inn was busy tonight, most bedrooms spoken for and the tables full in the bar and the snug. A warm night; I had Anders open all the shutters and prop the doors.

“We’ll have moths in the stew,” he said. He says it every time, and every time I consider it with a raised eyebrow and respond, “Well, we’ll risk it tonight, shall we?” Once I would have found it maddening; but I am fifty-three and I find sameness restful now; even busy, moth-ish sameness.

“Right, then,” he said, as he always does. I went to fetch another keg of beer from the storeroom.

When I came back with the keg, I saw a man stopped just inside the door of the bar. In the lamplight his face was lean and sharp, his eyes shadowed as he studied the crowd. He wore black leathers and carried a traveling bag on his shoulder. I caught Anders’ attention, and jerked my head towards the door. “Go see if he wants the last room,” I said, and hefted the beer down to the end of the bar.

I tapped the keg and reached for clean cups. Close behind me, Anders said, “Caddis,” in a voice so careful that I knew something was very wrong.

I turned. Anders stood with the man in leathers, who was studying me now. His irises were brown. The part around them that should have been white was flat gray, like smoke from a marsh fire. Like the fog in the Gorge. When the Dead take you and send you back alive, you come back with those eyes.

“Caddis Stone,” he said, “they want you at the Green Chair.”

“What?” I said. The Dead can call anyone anytime they want, and they do: infants, old men, once a set of twins of whom only one returned. I just never expected them to call me.

“No,” Anders said. “there’s a mistake.”

The man ignored him. “I’m Walter Surano,” he said to me. “I’ll be taking you there. I can give you the night to make arrangements.” Then, to Anders, “I’ll take that room now, if it’s convenient.”

Anders said again, “There’s a mistake,” and his jaw was set in that particular way that meant he was ready to say it a thousand times if that was what it took to make it true.

The man’s gray eyes turned to me, and I could read the message as surely as if he’d said it: Call off your dog. It was a flat and final look, a look that ended in blood on the floor and me riding to the Gorge regardless.

“Anders,” I said. He turned to me. “Anders, give him the room,” I said gently. “If the Dead want me dead, it’s already done.”

He took a sharp breath. We call things what they are, here, but that does not always make them easier to hear.

I looked around my crowded inn. My life. The smell of hops and stew, the moths in the lamplight. The tang of the river through the open windows. The folk I lived with in good times and lean, in flood and famine. The strangers from places I loved to dream of but never dreamed to see, because my life was settled in sameness and my dreams did not include doing.

We call it the Ever Road because it leads to Ever Dead or Ever Changed. But when the Dead call you to sit in the Green Chair and be judged, you have to go. So I went back to my rooms and began to set my affairs in order.

CW 22: Beautiful Wine

Here’s all the work of the 41 days. You’ll also find these pieces cross-posted at Sterling Editing as incentive for writers to practice their editing and story-building skills.

Enjoy.

Beautiful Wine

For Jude Berg (again!). Thank you for your friendship and support.

Jimmy and Helen came out of the restaurant into an afternoon of green turning burnt-gold and rust-red, the shadows longer, the world cooling as the sun slipped west. “I did not like the ceviche,” Helen said, “but I liked the chicken, and the wine, oh my god. Beautiful wine.”

“Want to maybe go to a movie? Make a real day out of it?”

“I know you, buster,” she said. “You’ll be snoring before the trailers are done. Let’s go home.”

She did know him. “Sure,” he said.

They turned toward the car. She took a deep breath. “What a pretty day,” she said, and then, in a funny voice, “Jimmy–” and reached for him and stumbled and went down.

And now Jimmy was sitting on the sidewalk holding her in his arms, and she was leaning against his chest, looking up at him with that quizzical frowny-smile that hadn’t changed in forty-seven years, the smile that meant Hang on, is this another goddamn adventure? And he was trying like hell to smile back. I think maybe so, kiddo. Around them, people fluttered and phoned ambulances.

“If you don’t want to go a movie, you can just say so,” he said.

“You know me,” she said, “I like a big moment.” Then her gaze went briefly internal, and he did know her: whatever she saw in there made her feel like something needed doing right now. “You were a big moment. I knew that from the first second I saw you,” she said. “I knew you right away.”

“Helen–”

“It’s not what I expected,” she said, with that quizzical smile again.

“Helen–”

“Forget the ceviche, Jimmy,” she said. “I liked it all.”

CW 21: Synchronicity

Here’s all the work of the 41 days. You’ll also find these pieces cross-posted at Sterling Editing as incentive for writers to practice their editing and story-building skills.

Enjoy.

Synchronicity

For Jocelyn Paige Kelly. Thank you for your support of me and Clarion West.

My mother met me on the porch of our rental house with a paper bag in her hand and a horizon look in her eye, and I knew I would find the car packed and ready to go.

“Beth,” she said, “we are running for our lives.”

She tried to hand me the bag, but I stepped back. “Star, no, please,” I said. “Please. We’re good here. We don’t have to go.”

She gave me the second of her traveling looks: You are a roadblock. Don’t get in my way. “For our lives,” she said.

“We have lives here!” I always had to say we with my mother, but what I meant was my fledgling life: an art teacher I really liked, a little sunny patch in the back yard, and the most amazing guy in school said hello to me today —

Today. Probably right around the time Star began to think goodbye.

“Mama, please,” I said.

But now she wore the third look of traveling: I am a compassionate knife. A cleaver of love. “Honey, I love you so much. So much. And I want what’s best for us. If I stay here, things will go bad. I feel it. So come now, or I will leave you to the wolves.”

Knife in. Cleaver down. There goes the boy with the light green eyes and the scar I would have asked him about, but I will never see him again. There goes the sketch of an abandoned house in my art cubby that I will never finish, and isn’t that just the way, that I begin to draw an empty house the week my mother decides our house should be empty? Jesus, when will I ever learn? Goodbye, little life. Fly away without me.

I began to cry. I took the bag. “Chicken salad,” she said. “Let’s go.” So I got in the car with my backpack of textbooks and gym clothes, and I cried for the first hundred miles down the road.

My mother believes in signs and portents. Synchronicity is the engine of her world. It’s a really convenient way to live your life, because everything has a reason even if no one else can see it. That makes it so simple for her, and so complicated for everyone else.

We drove all afternoon and on into the night. We left the interstate for state highways, and I began to understand that she was taking us into the desert. That made me stop feeling sorry for myself, and start worrying instead about how much worse it could get. My mother calls the desert the heartland, but that is not a happy word for her. The desert is where she left her heart to wolves.

“Do you want me to drive for a while?” I said. “You could get some sleep.”

She gave me a wry and knowing smile. “And wake up back in Carson? No thanks, baby. You’ll see. Where we’re going is better.”

Sand around us. Stars overhead. She played John Denver and James Taylor and Audioslave and Nine Inch Nails with the windows open and the dial all the way to the right, and I imagined desert mice knocked flat by the bass as we boomed by. She sang as she drove. She was happy; and I couldn’t help it, her joy was so big and beautiful that finally I sang too. The two of us, the night air so cool, the music pounding, and the world was nothing but stars and possibility, and I loved my mother with every atom in my body.

I’m guessing that for anyone else, the experience of belting I want to fuck you like an animal with your mom would probably feel a little nonstandard. Although maybe Trent Reznor would approve.

About 4 AM, she was telling me again the story of her audition in high school for The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, the moment she stood before the bulletin board: “And I looked up, and I saw Star McGuire–”

Above us, a meteor arced and fell.

“Holy shit,” said my mom, and pulled the car into a hard right turn onto a two-lane county road, and followed her fucking star.

The road led to a small sleeping town, and a tiny building with a handpainted sign: The Synchronicity Cafe. And underneath, a second sign: Help Wanted.

My mother braked the car and looked at the signs. The engine idled, ready to run some more. But then she turned it off, and settled back in her seat, slowly slid the key into her jeans pocket, folded her arms. She gave the satisfied sigh of a hard job well done. She wore the fourth look of traveling: Home at last.

CW 20: Love Story

Here’s all the work of the 41 days. You’ll also find these pieces cross-posted at Sterling Editing as incentive for writers to practice their editing and story-building skills.

Enjoy.

Love Story

For Amy Shepherd and Laura Treadway. Thank you for your friendship and support.

The patio door of the villa opened straight onto the beach. Dave stood in front of the screen door that kept the bugs out; Elena was scared of bugs. To his left, the faint noise of hammers and men’s voices: if he turned his head, he would see them putting the finishing touches on the tent up by the hotel. But he looked straight ahead at the ocean that rolled in like a metronome and stretched flat and blue as far as he could see, as far as the sky, as far as forever. Elena wanted a wedding by the sea.

She came into the room with what he had started thinking of as the Enormous Binder of Stupid Wedding Shit. Precisely calculated seating charts. The exact shade of blue the bridesmaids should dye their shoes. Careful notes on the width of the ribbons that some poor hotel asshole was going to have to tie on every single chair in that stupid fucking tent tonight while the sea rolled in, rolled in, forever.

She settled down on the couch with a sigh. “I need a break. You want to watch a movie? Let’s find a love story.”

“I am so sick of love stories,” Dave said, and it was like something with wings and teeth buzzing into the room.

“Really,” Elena said. Careful voice, tight face, but he could hear wings whirring in her, wanting out. “Then what do you want to see?”

“Okay, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that,” he said. “I’m tired, you’re tired, we have this thing to get through. Can we just watch something mindless?”

“This thing to get through?” In her eyes, in her voice, bzzz, bzzz. “Tell you what, find something with chainsaws and body parts. Because that really sets the tone for the thing.” And she threw the remote onto the couch and went into the bedroom. She didn’t take the Binder with her.

Dave thought he’d go take a walk on the beach, maybe all the way back to Cincinnati.

He walked about a quarter mile with the sea rolling in to his left, imagining the Enormous Binder of Stupid Life Shit: the fights, the stings, the scary things inside them that could come flying out anytime.

Like just now.

He stopped. He looked out at the forever. “Okay,” he said out loud after a while. “I get it.”

As he turned back towards the hotel, he could see the tent in the distance, up now, flags flying. And a little closer, Elena standing on the beach, looking in his direction.

The sea foamed in around his feet and left him a piece of bridesmaid-blue sea glass. He smiled. “I get it,” he said again.

They met each other in the middle. “Got you a present,” he said, and put the sea glass in her hand.

“It matches,” she said.

“It’s our color, apparently,” he said. She smiled. That smile could still put butterflies inside him.

She gripped the glass in one hand and gave him the other. They held hands as they walked toward the villa.

“I found us a movie,” she said. “Scream 3.”

“Thought we were going for a love story.”

She held up their clasped hands and said, “Right here.”

CW 19: Magic

Here’s all the work of the 41 days. You’ll also find these pieces cross-posted at Sterling Editing as incentive for writers to practice their editing and story-building skills.

Enjoy.

Magic

For Larry Eskridge. I love you, Dad.

“The Magician! The Magician has come to town!”

The Rider pedals like he carries stolen treasure and the pirates are right behind. He pumps his legs so hard and fast that Mr. Robinson only sees a blur when the bike streaks by the drugstore window, and Mrs. Arnson has to hold down her hat in the wind of his passing. “The Magician!” he calls, “the Magician!” and hopes they hear him in the crack of the sonic boom he leaves in his wake. The speed! Better than Superman, faster than the Flash, he is the Rider! And now the Rider reaches the west end of Oak Street and turns the bike south down Harmon Hill. Whooooosh! Down down down, no hands on the bars because they are up over his head waving to his friends who are gathered at the bottom of the hill, preparing their summer day’s adventures. Never mind all that now! The Magician has come to town!

The Rider hits the brakes and leaves his bike in a tumble, and takes a step or two before he must bend and brace his hands on his knees, gasping with the effort and electricity of that ride, and now he’s just red-faced Tommy Morris in jeans and sneakers, bursting with the news. “Guys! The Magician’s here!”

They know how it works; the magic needs time to gather, and the Magician must prepare. So they content themselves with riding like banshees through town shouting the news; twice along Main Street to make sure everyone’s heard, past the church, all around the park, and even out on Maple Street by the empty school, summer-sleepy, smaller-seeming without the roil and racket of children.

“It’s just a building, really, isn’t it?” Gordy Levinson says. “Just a dumb old building.” He sounds disappointed. Tommy knows Gordy really likes all that stuff, history and math and even spelling, and he’s pretty sure that Gordy is a lot smarter than he lets on. Gordy is maybe even a brainiac. Tommy shakes his head over how different they all are, him and Gordy and Frank Thomas whose dad is the town janitor and Alice Karlsen who is a girl. “Don’t worry, Gordy,” he says. “‘Course it’s just a building. Needs us there to be a school. We’re the magic!”

And off they ride.

That evening, as the sky turns waxy-blue and the sun melts into the treeline across the fields, as dusk comes on cool and gray with her neekerbreekers and fireflies, the town gathers on the fairground where the Magician has set up his caravan. The stars twinkle overhead as if they are the audience too: Look at that, look at that, magic, magic!

“Welcome,” the Magician says. He doesn’t look a day older, not a minute, from last year or the year before that, or any of the years that anyone can remember, even Grandma Karlsen who has seen eighty-nine of those years. Eighty-nine summers of tire swings and the cold brown secret water of lakes, no hands down Harmon Hill and popcorn at the Crest Cinema, eighty-nine summers to dream summer dreams. Imagine that, Tommy thinks. Eighty-nine summers!

Grandma Karlsen leans down to Tommy now and says in a confidential whisper, “Not a day older.”

It’s magic.

CW 18: Closed Circuit

Here’s all the work of the 41 days. You’ll also find these pieces cross-posted at Sterling Editing as incentive for writers to practice their editing and story-building skills.

Enjoy.

Closed Circuit

For Colleen Lindsay. Thank you for your friendship and support.

Peter got the call while he was giving the 8th graders his Don’t Try This At Home speech about electricity. “We’re using low-voltage batteries for this experiment,” he said. “Do not go home and plug yourself into the wall, okay? Because you’ll probably fry your brains, and you’ll definitely flunk this class. Strong current is dangerous–”

The ringtone startled him so much that all he could do was pull the phone from his pocket and stare while the kids snickered and Alanis Morrisette wailed The mess you left when you went away. And he almost let the call go because it was a mess, but…

“Excuse me,” he said, “I have to take this.” He stepped into the hallway and put the phone to his ear, and took a deep breath and said, “Dad?” But he didn’t recognize the voice on the other end; and it took the longest time to understand that his father’s death was calling.

“Celestún. In Yucatán. Are you a great distance away?” the doctor said.

I’m not the one who’s far away, Peter thought. I’m right here. But what he said was, “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

He spent the entire journey — the subway to his apartment, the packing, the taxi to the airport, the planes, the drive from Mérida — preparing and discarding greetings to his father.

Excuse me, are you George Bridges? Oh, hi, Dad. I’m Peter.

What’s so important that we have to fight about it in person? That’s what the phone is for.

Hi Dad, long time no see, thanks for breaking our hearts, fuck off and die. Oh, right, you are.

But in the small hospital room, he found his father white-stubbled and gaunt, and so thin under the blanket that all of Peter’s bitter words trickled away.

His dad turned his gaze from the window and held up a skeletal hand. “Petey. I’ll be damned. You came,” he said.

“I’m sorry I took so long,” Peter said.

“I think that’s my line,” his dad said. And Peter gave a small, appreciative smile at the charming, cynical way his dad told his truths. Even the painful ones.

Peter sat by the bed. The window gave a view of a lagoon where flamingos stood in the green water like a rack of pink umbrellas, and herons spiraled in to land. “Is this where you’ve been?” Peter said.

“A couple of years. They have a bird sanctuary here. I like birds.”

“They migrate,” Peter said. Now it was his father’s turn to smile small. “They also occasionally kill their young in the nest,” his dad said. “So thank God for small favors.”

And Peter couldn’t help that it still hurt, that his dad could still burn him after all this time and distance. High voltage. No resistance.

There was a long silence during which his father took several shallow breaths. One of them turned into a wracking, gutteral cough that had Peter halfway out of his chair before his father waved him back weakly. So Peter sat while his dad hacked bits of himself into a tissue.

After it passed, his dad turned his head back to the window and looked out at the birds. “I didn’t think you’d come,” he said finally. “I probably wouldn’t have. And I thought, even if you did, what the fuck would I say to you?”

Peter thought, Christ, then what did I come all this way for?

His dad was still watching the birds. “And then I thought, you know, when Petey was born, when they gave him to me… you were bawling your head off. You were mad, you were scared, I don’t know. But I held you and you got quiet. You know? Whatever it was, it was okay then.”

Then he began to cough again, hard and deep and no time for tissues because he was too busy fighting for breath, fighting the death that was coming down to land. Peter helped him sit up; then he put his arm around his dad and braced him while his dad leaned back and shook himself to pieces inside, and every spasm went through Peter like current. No resistance.

“I’m here,” Peter said. “I’m right here.”

CW 17: Garden Grow

Here’s all the work of the 41 days. You’ll also find these pieces cross-posted at Sterling Editing as incentive for writers to practice their editing and story-building skills.

Enjoy.

Garden Grow

For Vicki Platts-Brown. Thank you for your friendship and support (and being a *wonderful* neighbor!)

Janet was not a pessimist, not really. She just knew the universe had its own particular sense of humor.

“So you’re not a pessimist,” Maureen said. “You’re paranoid. Okay, honey, I feel so much better now.” She smiled. It was a great smile, a twenty years and I still love you smile, and Janet wanted to see it for another twenty thousand years.

They finished their coffee and croissants in companionable silence over the newspaper. The patio was warm with spring-morning sunlight. All through the garden, flowers and herbs and little shrubby things grew with the exuberance of the well-weeded, the properly mown, the carefully fertilized. Mo liked her garden happy.

“It’s so peaceful here,” Mo said. She gave Janet another one of those smiles, and Janet smiled too. One day the universe would get out the mulcher, laughing all the way: until then, it was good to be happy.

Ten seconds later, they heard the grinding rattle of a diesel engine chewing its way down the street. Janet imagined the universe giving her a friendly wink as it turned its attention to whatever real fun it had lined up today.

The engine grew louder and louder, chut chut chut CHUT, and then stopped. Mo stood and craned her neck over the deck rail around the side of the house, toward the street.

“Aha,” she said. “The new people are moving in.”

Janet looked up and raised a hand. “No PNFH,” she told the universe. “That’s all I ask.”

“Honey, it’ll be fine. It always works out.”

“Sure,” Janet said. And to the universe, Just behave.

Maureen stood and gathered the plates, and dropped a kiss on the top of Janet’s head before she headed for the kitchen. She stopped along the way to pluck a withered leaf from one of the special plants she kept in pots on the patio, the ones that need particular tending. Then she said, “They aren’t even out of the truck yet. Let’s at least meet them before we haul out the pitchforks.”

“Sure,” Janet said. But she felt the universe chuckling. Oh, come on, Janet. Let’s have some fun! Let’s play Psycho Neighbors From Hell!

Mo spent the next afternoon in the garden, and joined Janet on the patio with dirt smudges on her gorgeous cheekbones and a full report on the neighbors. “Max and Tiffany,” she said. “Tiffany’s the one with the nails.” She raised an editorial eyebrow; then, in a widdle-girl voice, “Weeding is so hard!” with a wide-eyed, pursed-mouth shimmy and a flap of her hand as if trying to pull a weed without actually touching it.

“What about Max?” Janet poured Mo a glass of the usual pinot gris and leaned back in her chair.

“She never got a word in edgewise,” Mo said. “I get the feeling Tiffany doesn’t like the kind of conversation where other people talk.”

The last of the day’s canteloupe light dappled the Japanese maple, and Mo’s potted plants seemed to stretch luxuriously to meet it. The sounds of dusk gathered around them, the crickets and the crows. And Tiffany shrieking through an open window, “No, put it there! No, there!”

“Sex or furniture,” Mo said, with a slight wince and a larger-than-usual sip of her wine.

“Pitchforks?” Janet said.

“Nah,” Mo said. And then, “Not yet.” Janet said nothing, but she suspected there might be trouble ahead. If Mo decided she didn’t like these people…. Well, she wouldn’t be happy.

“It always works out,” Mo said.

By summer, the grass next door was two feet high, the dandelions had planted their flag of empire, and all the lavender Mo had helped the Jensens plant there five years ago was choked by bindweed.

Janet came home from work one day to find Mo on the patio already making inroads on the wine, white-lipped with rage. “I have sent email,” she said. “I have asked politely. I have taken them a goddamn carrot cake. And today I went over and told them they need to take care of the yard before everything dies, and that woman said they’ll get around to it if they can but after all, it’s nature’s way and maybe I need to learn to deal with it.” She drank off her wine in a gulp and stared narrow-eyed at her potted plants nodding in the sun, green and vibrant and lush, spiky leaves, large buds tightly closed.

Then she took a breath. “Well,” she said. “You were right. PNFH.”

Thanks a fucking lot, Janet told the universe. Because I need the extra hassle right now. She sighed. “Pitchforks?” she said.

Mo said, “Go get yourself a glass and we’ll talk about it.”

A few days later, Mo was humming in the garden like a bee, hmm hmm, small contented sounds as she deadheaded the rhodies. Late that night she said to Janet, “Let’s have some ice wine on the patio. It’s such a beautiful night.”

And it was. The full moon was impossibly wide and just the right shade of sour yellow. They drank their yellow wine.

Muffled screams began from next door.

“You took them a plant,” Janet said. Mo smiled and drank her wine.

Ho ho ho, the universe said. Wasn’t that fun?

The next day, Janet went over and mowed the lawn.

CW 16: The Last Cafe

Here’s all the work of the 41 days. You’ll also find these pieces cross-posted at Sterling Editing as incentive for writers to practice their editing and story-building skills.

Enjoy.

The Last Cafe

For Ivan Sun. Thank you for your support of my work and Clarion West.

The sign said The Last Cafe, but the place looked like what Annie thought of as a regular house, small and wooden with a covered front porch, sleepy in the shade of a stand of oaks dripping Spanish moss. Blue jays scracked overhead. It was going to be a hot day. Annie smelled salt in the air.

She left Bridget in the small parking lot while she went around back. She had learned that taking a little one to the door only made it more likely folks would say no. “Stay right here and wait for me,” she said. Bridget nodded tiredly and clutched her beanbag frog.

Annie followed a short gravel drive to the back of the building and found a battered pickup truck with a Sink or Swim! bumper sticker parked near a screen door. She could see kitchen things through the screen: a double sink, a large refrigerator humming in the corner, a big butcherblock counter with a rack of cookpots and skillets hanging from the ceiling overhead.

And then she saw beyond the truck, beyond the far back fence that bounded the land: a fingerpaint-blue sky arching cloudless over shallow water that lapped at the bottom inch of the fence posts and spread back as far as she could see. Back to the edge of the world. The oak trees seemed to be marching into the water until, far out, only their tops cleared the surface. Annie imagined them standing tiptoe on their roots, trying to breathe.

Annie took a breath. She had never been so close to the Great Sea.

“We’re not open until lunch,” a voice said behind her.

She turned. A man leaned against the doorjamb behind the screen. He wore a white cook’s apron over jeans and a t-shirt, and his dark hair was pulled into a ponytail. He held a butcher knife. Annie thought he was maybe as old as her dad had been the last time she saw him, when he had said Stay right here and wait for me, punkin. But he had never come back and finally she couldn’t wait anymore, because most everyone was leaving and taking the food. Sometimes they would yank a sack of bread and peanutbutter right out of some little kid’s hand before they smacked her down and left her in the street. That was where she had found Bridget; huddled up on a curb hugging her toy frog, with a swollen face and the most lonesome eyes in the world.

That had been a hundred and fifty-seven miles ago. Annie didn’t think she was going to see her dad again.

She looked at the Last Cafe man, and then again at the Great Sea. She must have taken a wrong turn on the county road. She thought she was taking them away from the creeping water. But here it was, like a monster mouth opening wider and wider, swallowing everything.

She took another breath. Bridget was hungry. So Annie said, “I can’t pay for food, but I can work for it.”

He regarded her in silence.

“I can chop things up. I know how to clean shrimp and shuck oysters. I can houseclean. I can do laundry. I can paint your porch rail, it really needs it.”

He wasn’t exactly frowning now, but he was shaking his head a little, and she suddenly felt desperate, like she was one of those trees with only one branch left above water. But her dad had taught her never sound scared, so she made herself believe the cafe man would say yes if she just talked fast enough. “I can bus tables. Really, I’m strong. I can wash dishes. I can cut the yard if you have a gas mower. I can…” But he bent his head and shifted his weight, and she knew what that meant: I’m sorry, but I’ve got problems of my own and I can’t hear yours right now. It meant he was about to turn away and let her drown.

“Mister,” she said, and her traitor voice quavered but she went on, “Mister, please, I have a child with me.”

His head came up. He blinked once, twice; and said in a careful, quiet voice, “A child. I see. And do you mind if I ask how old you are yourself?”

“I’m twelve,” Annie said.

“Jesus Christ,” he said. “Jesus.” Then he turned his head and called back into the house, “Stella!” Annie bit her lip, and stood silent, and hoped.