Category: writing

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.

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Feeding Time

For Matt Ruff. Thank you for your friendship and support.

It is amazing that more people don’t die at the zoo, because basically the zoo is ten tons of clawed fanged rip-your-guts-out die-screaming fun just waiting for the next moron who thinks he’s at Disneyworld. Oh, cool, the hyena wants my ham sandwich! Munch, there goes your hand. I’m gonna climb this fence and give the tiger a beer! Oops, the tiger ate your brain.

People are stupid, Will, Caesar says. But y’all taste good. He grins at me. Caesar is beautiful and strong and he knows it. He is a furry orange-striped death god behind a pane of the thickest glass they can find; because stupid is relative, and Caesar knows that too. I am just another lunch on legs to him, but he seems happy to talk to me until the day he can persuade me to come inside and play with the kitty. On that day I would officially be Too Stupid To Live, so I guess it would all work out.

I can talk to all the big predators. Pete the polar bear once said that means I am one of them. You’re a giant weasel, Pete, I told him. I am not a member of your weasel tribe.

Ooooooh, Pete said, someone’s feeling sensitive. And maybe I was, a little. My friend Sara Parsons called me a weasel for making her miss Jack Houghton’s invitation-only beach party. I told her I’d drive her. And I did: around and around, pretending to be lost. Pretending to be stupid. Because I know how Jack’s private parties sometimes turn out. Jack thinks girls are stupid, but they taste good. I can’t wait for him to graduate to the bigger buffet of some university at least seven states away. And I wouldn’t mind seeing him in the cage with Caesar for a little heart-to-heart.

#

The next day at school, Jack says to me, “Dude, come up to my place tomorrow afternoon for hot tub and margaritas.”

“Maybe,” I say.

“No, definitely. Bring Sachertorte Sara with you this time.” And he looks at me with half-lidded eyes, like he’s imagining a mouthful of cream.

“Bring her,” he says. “Or someone else will.”

“Whatever,” I say. “If she wants to.”

“Of course she wants to.”

And that’s the thing: she does. “Will, I can take care of myself,” she says when I try to tell her. “I know how to say no, and I know how to handle boys. I just want to see what it’s like…”

“To end up roofied in the cabana with your underwear gone?”

“Oh, please,” she says. “I’m not stupid. I won’t drink anything I don’t open myself. I just want to know…” She gives me a long look, with all the years of our friendship behind it. “You know what I mean.”

And I do. We both wonder what it’s like to live that way. The money and the fun and the 400-volt fizz of making all your own rules for a night, for ever. “I would rather go with you,” she says, which means she’ll go no matter what. So I take her to Jack’s the next day.

But first, we go to the zoo.

I lead her to Caesar’s cage. He’s lounging on his favorite rock, posing for the lunchtime crowd. When he sees us, he stands and stretches and strolls to the glass.

“Oh, he’s beautiful,” Sara says, with just the right note of admiration and respect that Caesar likes best. It’s like she bows to him with her voice. He regards her for a moment, then he rubs his cheek along the glass. The nice kitty likes you. Look, look. All this strength and power, this rumble and tongue, this attentive spotlight gaze, all this for you. Rub, rub.

“Wow,” she says. She kneels and presses her hand against the glass where his cheek is. I know she’s never been that close to something like Caesar before; and in her face is wonder and delight.

And suddenly Caesar half-stands and slams his dinner-plate paws against the glass on either side of her, opens his jaws wide wide wide. His mouth is bigger than her head. She yelps and scrabbles backward, and I catch her. For a moment we can hear his hunger, arrrr, arrrr; and privately he says to me, This one would be very tasty. Then he scrapes his claws down the glass as he drops, and gives her a half-lidded look, and turns and strolls to his rock.

Sara has recovered herself by the time we get to Jack’s house. She’s adrenalized by the thrill of the wild, ready to shake it up a little. We make our way to the back yard, where girls in bikinis are splashing each other in the pool, and on the lawn beyond, Jack and some of his posse are playing touch football. Soon they’ll start inviting girls to join them, and then the touching will become the hunt and those bikinis will start coming off.

I can see why girls think Jack is beautiful. He is lean and long and graceful, and when he runs with the ball he is focused and fierce. “Wow,” Sara says, “he’s great out there.”

“Yes,” I say. “He’s a real tiger.”

Sara goes very still, watching Jack. Then she looks at me for a long moment. And finally she say, “Without glass.”

When I tell Caesar later, he approves. He says, I like her. We should do lunch again sometime. And laughs his silent tiger laugh.

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.

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Mercy

for Rob Sutherland. Thank you for your support of my work and Clarion West.

I won’t I won’t I won’t go mad, Mercy told herself as she fled the apartment clutching her messenger bag, her keys, one sneaker and a nectarine. But her hands were shaking so hard that the keys jangled like chattering metal teeth oh god Eric’s teeth his TEETH —

Forget the elevator. She took the stairs.

By the bottom of the five flights, she had got some of her steel back; enough to stop, take three deep breaths, and crane her neck to study the stairwell above her. No thump thump thump of pursuit. No head over the rail, grinning gleeful, Found you! with those teeth —

Don’t, don’t. Breathe. Sit on the bottom stair. Put on her other shoe so the doorman doesn’t look askance, doesn’t call upstairs to ask her husband if she’s okay, because that answer is most certainly no. That answer is most certainly, Oh, thank you, Walter, will you please keep Mrs. Adams there so I can come down and get her?

I won’t go mad, she thought again. She straightened her bag across her back, and then she straightened her spine and opened the door into the lobby. She kept her keys like spikes between her fingers just in case Eric was waiting. In case anyone with teeth stood between her and the street.

“Morning, Mrs. A.,” Walter the doorman said. “Problem with the elevator?”

Mercy smiled so brightly that she was sure she looked insane. “No, I just felt like a little exercise.” How many calories did you lose running from a monster? Don’t go there, she told herself. But then she raised her hand to give Walter the usual little wave goodbye, and found the nectarine still in it. That was all it took to swing her into a mental U-turn, to rewind time to the moment that she stood in the kitchen —

— frowning at the fruit. Was it ripe? She picked it up as Eric stepped into view down the hall, naked, toweling his hair dry, giving her a view of his body that would have made her feel deliciously ripe herself on any other day. But today had been the worst fight ever. Today had bitten deep. They were so bitter with each other sometimes, so poisonous, and she found herself thinking that love might not be enough antidote.

Eric pulled the towel from his head and turned toward her.

His mouth was the mouth of a giant spider, with giant spider teeth; and even as her mind tried to turn itself inside out, the spider mouth spoke with Eric’s voice: “Mercy.”

Some old part of her brain took over then, as if she were facing a lion on a veldt. It made her rigid for an instant while it narrowed her vision to what was necessary, while it turned her internal adrenaline firehose to full stream; and then it told her Careful, now, and gave her back control. When she opened her mouth, she wondered if she would scream: but she only said, in a voice not too far from normal, “I’ll be right back.” Then she turned and walked to the living room and shoved her left foot into her sneaker and saw her keys on the console table and her bag on the floor and then behind her, close, the voice clacked her name, “Mercy.”

She made a desperate sweeping lunge to scoop up her bag, her keys, her right shoe. Then she ran. And here she was in the lobby with the nectarine still in her hand and her brain reminding her monster, monster, TEETH!

“Walter, would you like this?” she said. “I think it’s just about ready to eat.” Then she pushed through the door to the street as quickly as she could, so she would not have to see him raise it to his mouth and take a bite.

#

She made it half a block before she started to shake. By the time she reached the coffee shop, she was nothing but trembles and tears. Alice the barista took one look and came out from behind the counter, bullied a non-regular away from his table, and set Mercy in a chair. “Honey, whatever it is, we’ll fix it, okay? I’ll get you some coffee.”

A customer in line said, “Hey, we were here first.”

Alice said, “Then I guess that makes your day worse than whatever just happened to her, Mr. Compassionate? Go get your coffee somewhere else. Go on.” She flapped her hands at him as if she were trying to literally shake him out the door.

He went. No one else complained. Mercy sat, vibrating, staring at the tabletop, trying to stop the terror bouncing in her brain like a pinball hitting all the buttons. Ping! Eric so beautiful that body, turning. Ping! What’s that on his face TEETH TEETH! Ping! Ping! Ping! Then a hand reached into her field of view and set a mocha on the table.

“Liquid Xanax,” Alice said.

“Thank you,” Mercy said, in a voice not too far from normal, and looked up —

Alice’s mouth was the mouth of a giant spider, with giant spider teeth, and it said, “Don’t run,” but oh by god Mercy did.

#

And then the street was full of spiders. Everywhere she turned, everywhere she looked, all of them saying her name. Mercy, Mercy! They cut her off at an intersection, spiders on every corner, Mercy! They herded her into a dead-end alley. Mercy! And when she was huddled shrieking against the wall, one pushed through the crowd and stood before her.

“Mercy,” Eric said. And then he waited.

She silenced herself. She found her steel, and she made a cage of it and put her gibbering brain inside. Then she stepped away from the wall.

“What do you want?” she said to the monsters.

Mercy, they whispered. Mercy. Mercy for the spiders in us all.

Above his nightmare mouth, Eric’s human eyes were full of pain and shame and hope. When she touched her own mouth, she found the teeth there. Be merciful, she thought, and lifted her face for his kiss.

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.

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The Cabaret of Love

for Tommaso Fiacchino. Grazie per il tuo sostegno, e per l’avventura.

“Oh, come on,” Marty said. “It’ll be fun. Live a little before she ties you down.” He punched Joe in the arm the way men did: I’m only kidding, bro, ha ha! And Joe was once again grateful for Lola, who never needed force to speak of sadness. She would have simply said, I worry we won’t see each other as much. I worry you’ll leave me behind.

When he talked to her about his brother, she only said, “It’s your bachelor party. Go be a bachelor.”

“I’m not sure it’s a party if there’s only two of you.”

“Oh, yeah?” she said. “Come over here, big guy, I’ll show you a party of two.”

And of course he did, and of course it was. He remembered the first time she gave herself to him; not the first time they made love, although that was terrific even with the inevitable awkward moments of two people new to each other. But there had come a time weeks later when they were moving together and he suddenly felt her… melt against him and then into him, and then she was fire, she was cold clear water, she was flying in a hard blue summer sky and he was flying with her. He thought with absolute clarity, This isn’t her body I’m fucking anymore, this is her soul. And when they lay trembling in each other’s arms after, he knew that he would marry her.

This time after, she kissed him and said, “I hope Marty doesn’t have this kind of party in mind. Because I really don’t think he’s the right girl for you.”

He laughed. But…. “I don’t know,” he said. “This place is called the Cabaret of Love. It might get a little… extreme.”

She was silent for a moment, and then she shook her head with a small, tight smile and a raised eyebrow that said Of course it will get extreme, that’s what men do; and it reminded him so much of his mother that for a single, chilling instant the only coherent thought in his brain was Run, run! Because the point really, really was not to get hitched to his mother; the point with her, as it had been for years, was to be at least a thousand miles away and always carry a gun.

“Go,” Lola said again, and this time her smile was just Lola, a warm smile that showed a couple of crooked teeth and twenty-five years of the kind of life Joe thought of as a Good Trip. He’d had pretty much the other kind, until he met her.

#

“This is going to be so awesome,” Marty said for the thirty-fifth time. Joe smiled politely and waited while Marty paid the cover to a woman in a bikini and heels so high they should have come with a safety line.

The main room of the cabaret had a stage at one end fronted by small round tables. A wooden bar ran along the side wall; it looked old and well-maintained, not the sort of bar you’d let drunk men spill their Coors Light on while they shouted Give it to me, baby! at the pair of bare breasts onstage. There was no bartender. There were no other people at all except Marty and Joe.

In the center of the room stood a glass case topped with gears and rods pumping up and down, up and down. Behind the glass, small marionettes moved to the rhythms. Here was the cabaret in miniature, but this little world was full of people: here was the audience he had expected. Men and women at the bar and tables, raising and lowering their glasses, faces turning endlessly to one another. They were naked in all the human ways, nipples and wiry body hair, bellybuttons, flabby stomachs. Some of the men had strings at their groins, and when the gears turned overhead their penises went up and down, up and down. In one corner, a woman straddled a man and the gears moved them apart, together, apart. The mouths in their wooden faces were delicately carved into howls of laughter and pain, of bone-breaking rage and numb disregard. On the stage, a tiny blowsy woman with drooping breasts sang into a microphone: underneath the vulgar blue eyeshadow and the bright lipstick that was the perfect shade of contempt, her face wore that same expression as the little wooden woman forever fucking in the corner, as Lola, as his mother, and Oh no, Joe thought, what is this?

When he turned, Marty was gone, and Joe couldn’t see the door anymore, and then the room went cold and an old, cold voice filled him. A voice like the fire going out, like shit in the stream, like a bird dropping dead from the sky. The voice said, This is what you all are, underneath. Forever pulling each other’s strings.

And for a moment like a long-held breath, for a moment like the stopping of a heart, Joe knew it was true. The Cabaret of Love was just another layover stop on the Bad Trip, and Joe and Lola had a table waiting in the front row. Or maybe in the corner.

And then he reached for the memory of her melting. He reached for her smile. He reached for the hope of the Good Trip, tied together, not tied down.

And then he stood in a room that was crowded with men, warm from their sweat and their temporary unbound desire. On the stage, a pretty woman smiled and gave it to them, always out of reach. Marty stood next to him, holding two beers. “Here you go, bro,” he said, and handed one to Joe. “Here’s to one more night of freedom!”

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.

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Monkeybar Hope

for Pia Sass. Thank you for your support of my work and Clarion West.

Cammy picked Portia because she could hang by her knees from the top of the monkeybars, way up high, and Cammy longed to do it too. She knew it would feel like… well, she didn’t have a word for it yet. She was working on that: she sounded out a new word with her dad every day from the old calendar. He had put it in the trash because it was a new year and he didn’t need it anymore, but how could you not need words?

Her word today was pugnacious, but that meant fighting. She didn’t want to fight with Portia. She wanted to hang upside down with her forever. And she knew a word for that, so she marched over to Portia swaying from the monkeybars and used it.

Portia frowned upside-down and shook her head. “Uh uh. Only boys can have girlfriends.”

“That’s stupid,” Cammy said.

“Girls have boyfriends and boys have girlfriends, and you’re not a boy so you can’t have a girlfriend,” Portia said.

“I can so too,” Cammy said, although now inside she was feeling like when her dog Peppy got freaked out by the doorbell and ran around in circles going ark ark ark until someone opened the door. “I can have a girlfriend.”

Portia pulled herself back up into a sitting position on the bar and looked down at Cammy. “No, you can’t,” she said, with an awful air of finality. “That’s stupid.” Then she climbed down the bars and went over to Becky Bunton on the teeter totter, and left Cammy standing there not knowing what to say.

Cammy went to every girl in the playground that afternoon. Will you be my girlfriend? She even asked Becky Bunton. They all said no.

“I told you,” Portia said, from the top of the teeter totter. So Cammy shoved Becky off her seat, and Portia’s side came down hard and Portia toppled off into the dirt. Then Cammy got on her bike and rode home. Ark ark ark in her stomach. She didn’t have a word for that either.

#

Cammy sat at the front counter of the coffee shop with her notebook open, waiting for words to come. It was raining. The street was bright with neon and bustling with people. Two women walked together past the window, laughing, their reflections running behind them like paint in the wet gutters. Life upside down. Down the drain. Upside down the drain. Cammy fell into the poetry place.

At some point later she heard her name. She blinked. Someone was standing beside her. “What?” Cammy said, and put some bite into it: sometimes being pulled up unexpectedly from the poetry well made her feel like an animal interrupted in a meal, lifting a bloody muzzle, baring her teeth. Pugnacious.

A woman was looking down at her. Short hair, muscle t-shirt, woven leather bracelet. Cammy’s stomach knew before her brain did. Ark ark ark.

“Well,” Portia said, “knock me over sideways.” And then, impossibly, magically, she grinned.

When Cammy stood, they were eye to eye, and it didn’t matter about the rain or the guttered poem, or the fact that she was wordless, because there it was again. That monkeybar hope. Inside Cammy, something turned right side up.

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.

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The Taste of You

for Caitlin Kavanagh-Ryan. Thank you for your support of my work and Clarion West.

One of the things I love about Charlie is that he’s a hard man whose music tastes so sweet. He goes on stage like he’s ready for a fight, his shaved head and his scowl, his jailhouse tattoos, the skull etched on his synthesizer, and he sings songs so brutal they make people flinch. Bad love, violent ends, hopelessness, despair, barely containable rage. And it all tastes like strawberries and cream. It’s such a kick: Charlie’s wailing I’m gonna kill my girlfriend with a mallet and a stake, and I’m in the VIP zone by the sound board wanting to eat the music with a spoon and then lick the bowl.

“Tell me again what it is?” he said, the second time we slept together.

“I taste music. Synesthesia.” He repeated it thoughtfully while I curled tighter against him. I could feel the word rumble in his chest.

“So,” he said, “are we talking full-course meals? Beach Boy burgers? Mozart pie?”

“Humble Pie,” I said, and he laughed. That rumbled too, and ran down the scale salty on my tongue. A laugh like sex. You are all mine, I told him silently. Out loud, I said, “It’s not food, it’s taste. The intervals in music each have their own flavor. It can be chords, melody line, guitar, whatever….” Your laugh. I hitched myself onto my elbow so I could smile at him. “Music makes my tongue go wild.”

“Oh, baby, you are something else,” he said. “Come here with that wild tongue.”

#

Of course he didn’t really get it. People don’t. That’s okay. All of us who see numbers in color or feel the personalities of letters of the alphabet will be over here with a beer while the rest of you go look it up on the internet. And while you’re gone, we’ll talk about you in blue and square and A-major, in salt and sour, in ways you can’t possibly understand.

#

And of course there is music that tastes nasty. There’s the one interval that’s like something dead just walked into my mouth.

“This one?” Charlie said.

“Don’t, it’s disgusting,” I said. I think I probably made the same kind of face a dog does when it’s trying to get peanut butter out of its mouth: something sticky and wrong that won’t go away.

“Really?” He looked genuinely confused. He played it again.

“Stop it!” I said.

“But what’s the matter with it? I mean…” It is the wrongest sound in the universe, I was about to say, and then he continued in a tight, disappointed voice, “I just wrote my best song ever and it’s full of these.”

We were quiet. Silence doesn’t normally taste for me, but this one was bitter.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

#

And now it’s wrong between us. Because he really doesn’t understand. And it turns out you don’t complain about the food at Charlie’s Restaurant, because the chef takes it very personally.

Yesterday he said, “Won’t you just listen to it once? Just once?” And I said I would try. And it broke my fucking heart. It’s a love song, a good-love song, a forever-after love song, and it tastes like roadkill.

“So you really can’t,” Charlie said finally, after I stopped crying quite so hard. “Isn’t that just fucking wonderful?” And he laughed. A sad laugh, a broken laugh, a love-dying laugh. It went down the scale on that nasty interval. I still don’t know whether that was on purpose, or not.

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.

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The Heart of the Matter

for Kevin Scarr. Thank you for your support of my work and Clarion West.

Here was the day when the newly dead returned to finish particular business with the living: a crowded hour of violence and love in breakfast nooks, in bars, motels, alleys, the bedrooms of children come home with sharp teeth. The living knew whether to expect the dead, and whom. Passion and rage were things that cried out for closure, and so the dead came with soft open arms to pull the living into love, or strong hard hands to pull them into pieces. Everyone else locked their doors and turned up the music loud.

Lucy wasn’t expecting the dead. She was turning from the counter with a cup of apple-cinnamon tea, lifting it carefully because things were still sore, and a dead was sitting at her kitchen table. She fumbled the cup and spilled half the tea on the floor. The heart in her chest began to beat strong and wild, like a bird fluttering get away get away.

Lucy had never seen a dead; you didn’t generally, unless one came for you. He was a man in his early thirties in pressed linen trousers and a beautiful blue silk shirt. He looked like money. He looked solid in every way. The sun through the window did not bend around him; the floor did not crack beneath. The lights didn’t flicker, the doors didn’t slam. But there was a sense of power and intention in her small kitchen that told her those things were possible, if the dead were feeling cranky.

“Hello,” Lucy said, as cautiously as she had lifted her tea a moment ago. “Do I know you?”

He cocked his head and raised an eyebrow at her chest. The heart inside thumped so hard that Lucy swayed.

“Oh, Christ,” Lucy said. “You’re Jack Mossman. Oh, Christ, have you come for your heart back?”

“No,” he said. “I thought we could… talk.” It surprised her enough that some of her wits returned. She put the cup down. “The dead don’t come to talk,” she said.

“No, we come to fuck or kill. Occasionally both,” he said. “Nonetheless.” He shrugged, opened his hands. “Willing donor. I’m not feeling robbed. But I want to know what you’ve done with it.”

“Um,” Lucy said. “Um… I don’t understand. I’m still…” She found herself unbuttoning her robe and spreading it open to show him the long red scar. “I’m healing.”

“Are you?” the dead said, and then bang! he was standing right in front of her, inches away, and the heart slammed against her sternum so she thought she would faint from the pain, and then he put his hand on her chest and she felt it as warm and real as it must have been in life before it slid like smoke into her body and cupped the trembling muscle there.

“Show me,” the dead said, and Lucy tried to find breath to say I don’t know what you mean, but the heart between them answered for her. Look! Look! Lucy wakes in recovery and her first thought is of someone’s life inside her, and when she feels it beat she thinks oh god, oh god, every day is a miracle! Lucy lies in her hospital bed and her visiting hours are full of friends whose joy is as bright as the flowers they bring, as goofy as the Get Well cards that make her laugh too much and hurt the heart inside her with the happiness. Lucy cries alone and afraid the first night at home, thinking how many people she must make amends to if she is to deserve this heart. Lucy hears her favorite 80’s mix and when Simple Minds play “Alive and Kicking” she cannot find the breath to sing with her voice, so she lets the heart sing for her. Don’t say goodbye, don’t say goodbye, in the final seconds who’s gonna save you?

“You did,” the dead said. “I am healed.” His hand still on her heart. “Oh, the miracle.” And then he was gone.

Lucy put her hand to her chest where the dead had touched it. Inside, their heart beat, full of life.

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.

---

Bubble

for Beverly Marshall Saling. Thank you for your support of my work and Clarion West.

A single white whisker on a black cat marked a leader, and Bubble the Brave led well. He made his neighborhood rounds twice every day. He rubbed noses and smelled scent messages for status reports. He stiff-walked the impetuous young ones back into right-thinking when they needed it. He rough-tumbled kittens to toughen them up. One memorable week, he and a select crew — Scooter, Pirate, Catfish and Bill — routed a Labrador that had recently moved into the neighborhood. The dog went limping, one eye blind, and never came back. It had to be done: the dog was insane, a cat-killer, a child-biter. It had a taste for blood. One day, Bubble knew, it would have turned on its people. They had no cat to protect them, and Bubble considered them his responsibility too.

And he took his responsibilities seriously, even when they were inconvenient and, like today, uncomfortable. He arrived home from the morning reconnaisance soaking wet and requested entrance, looking forward to a warm corner and some Friskies.

The sliding door opened. Bubble looked up into the eyes of his enemy and commenced the required stare-down.

“Your cat’s too dumb to come in out of the rain,” the Usurper said.

“Move over,” Staff said. She leaned out and scooped Bubble into her arms. He did his best to maintain the stare until she carried him out of the Usurper’s range.

“You’re so wet!” Staff said. “My bubblehead kitty.” She was warm, and she knew how to hold a cat properly. She dried him gently. She offered him fresh Friskies. She stroked his head. She was a very good Staff in every possible way except, recently, in the matter of the bed. It was undignified to jostle the Usurper for space; but she was Bubble’s Staff, so every night he jostled. And every night he was put outside the room, trembling with rage and indignation, halfway tempted to return to his kittenhood, his Bubble the Berserker days when all cloth objects feared his claws and anything breakable trembled before him.

Something had to be done. Bubble curled up and hoped the answer would come in a dream.

It came, instead, in the Usurper himself. A disagreement with Staff, the two of them hissing and spitting and stiff-walking each other around the house. He was pleased to see that Staff had learned a thing or two about that. She drove the Usurper off handily, his frustration and anger trailing him so strongly that Bubble imagined everyone could smell it. It was laced with sadness too, and there was a sense of finality in the Usurper’s gait.

Everything was back in place. Bubble turned his attention to planning the capture of the troublesome mouse in the garage, and that night he slept against Staff’s back.

But Staff was unhappy. Her tail was down, and it stayed that way in spite of his head butts and his purrs. Sometimes he had to remind her about food or bedtime. Sometimes it seemed she didn’t really see him. And she never called him Bubblehead anymore.

Something had to be done.

He asked Catfish to keep an eye on the place. Then Bubble the Bold ate a good breakfast, found the last of the Usurper’s scent on the porch, and began to follow the trail.

So many dangers. The cars, the unfamiliar smells, the delicate negotiations with strange cats to cross their turf. He had to fight his way down one alley against staggering odds. He slept that night under a metal box of rotting food and wondered if he would ever see Staff again. The next morning, he licked the blood crust off his wounds and went on.

And finally, the trail grew strong and definite, and brought him to a door. He began to call.

The door opened. Bubble looked up into the eyes of his enemy.

“What the fuck?” the Usurper said. “Bubble?”

He put a cautious hand down, and Bubble’s respect for him went up a notch. It took a certain amount of courage, after the last time. Bubble sniffed the hand and then butted it.

“Jesus,” the Usurper said. “Susan must be going out of her mind. You’d better come in.”

When Staff opened the door and saw Bubble, she burst into yowls and clutched him so hard that he squeaked. Then she extended one arm to include the Usurper in the clutch.

Bubble the Bringer ate a good lunch and practiced his stare of superiority on the Usurper for a while. Then he went out to the garage. He did catch the mouse, but he let it get away: Staff had her present for the day. There was no point spoiling her.

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.

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Cuckoo

for Marny Ashburne. Thank you for your support of my work and Clarion West.

“Is she aware?” Caroline said.

“Of course,” the Clockmaker said, quite dispassionately.

The pendulum swung steadily. A beautiful clock. Old. It might have been keeping time for centuries.

The minute hand clicked to 11:57.

“Is she suffering?”

The Clockmaker said, “It does not cause her physical pain to be small and wooden.”

Caroline thought of Grace. The lithe, restless body immobilized. Those clever fingers touching nothing. Unable to blink, unable to look away, unable to close her eyes to what had become of her.

“You haven’t answered the question,” Caroline said.

The Clockmaker looked at her for the first time as if she were perhaps not so tedious after all, perhaps even a tiny bit interesting. “Time is longer inside the clock; not in a physical sense, but a minute of despair is always longer, no? A minute of knowing oneself alone and lost. A minute of clutching hope, or losing it. And another, and another. Tick tick tick. Then the hour approaches, the mechanism gathers itself, the doors burst open and she is out…”

Out in a dark, dusty storeroom of a shop closed for the holiday weekend. Out in a hallway outside a mudroom where no one paid attention because they were too busy coming and going. Out in the common room of a residential center where people watched from their wheelchairs or the greater prison of their minds. Out in a busy household with people who did not wind the clock for days, for vacation, forever.

The pendulum swung steadily. 11:58.

“So she suffers,” Caroline said.

“Of course,” the Clockmaker said, with a face no longer impassive; underneath the skin, satisfaction moved slowly, like slugs in soil.

Caroline nodded.

“And now you must choose,” the Clockmaker said. “Take her place, and spend your life knowing she walks free. Or walk away yourself, and imagine forever her minutes, her hours, her years here in the clock.” The Clockmaker watched Caroline’s face with great interest now. “This is always such a rich moment,” the Maker said. “It is one thing to give your death for someone. But will you give your life?”

The pendulum swung steadily. 11:59.

“Choose,” the Maker said.

“Oh, go fuck yourself,” Caroline said, and shoved her fist right through the Maker’s face, through the wide O of surprise and what might even perhaps have been delight, right through to the doors of the cuckoo clock as they burst open and Grace came out on the spring, arms reaching, and Caroline opened her hand…

What happened then?

Does it matter?

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.

---

Golden

for Angelique Corthals. Thank you for your friendship and support.

We all like Coach Adler pretty well, but he is only about three years out of some swamp college in the buttcrack of Mississippi, and he talks funny. So we all thought he was saying Today we talk about mercy. Even me. It was possible: he gets us together after practice to talk about all kinds of things he thinks will improve us, from protecting our knees to the Seven Habits of People Who Read That Book. But although I still care about lacrosse, I don’t really give a shit about being a highly effective person, because what difference does it make if some stupid germ or whatever wait what is he writing on the board…

MRSA

If some stupid germ just takes it all away.

“Mersa,” he said again. “Who knows what it is?” he said. I slumped in my seat and looked at the floor. I am not the person who knows shit like this. I’m not that smart.

“Men Resisting Sexual Advances,” Cummins said. “But no, why would anyone do that?” He’s the funny one.

“My Ride Sucks Ass,” said Molson. He’s not that funny.

Everyone looked at D-Man. Dormanski is the captain and our best midfield. Did you ever take a hose when you were a kid, turn it up full and wave it so the water comes out in a rippling rope? D-Man moves like that on the field. And he’s the smart one. But now he shrugged, and I couldn’t help it: it was stupid, but I just wanted him to notice me.

I lifted my head. “Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus,” I said.

Everyone gave me the Freak Show look. Methi-what? Did he just say cock? Dude, are you a pod person now? Except Coach Adler, who looked like he had just been given a puzzle to solve, and Dormanski, who raised an approving eyebrow. It all made me sit up a little straighter.

“Sanchez,” Coach said, “Good. What can you tell us about MRSA?”

I can’t tell you anything, I thought, but I said, “It’s this infection they can’t fix because drugs don’t work on it.”

“Good,” Coach said again. But it’s not good. It’s fucking evil. And it’s like everywhere, it’s in locker rooms and even in the hospital, you can go into the fucking hospital and get sick with this shit and they can’t fix it and they–

Oh fuck. Everyone is giving me the Defcon 1 Freak Show look. Oh fuck, I just said all that out loud. And now I feel like I can’t breathe, and I go back to looking at the floor like there’s something there that will save me.

Molson said, “Wasn’t there some kid from Cleveland High….”

But it’s Coach Adler who saves me instead. “Tragedy. Don’t let it happen to you. Sanchez is right. MRSA is everywhere. So hygiene is very important. Take showers. Wash your hands, guys. If you see any red spots anywhere…”

There are other things I know about MRSA. I know that aureus means golden. The kid from Cleveland High is Brooks Dunn, and he was effective, Coach Adler would love him, and he was golden in the game. He used to be my friend. And then we were drunk and he wanted to, and I said okay because that’s what you do for friends.

Don’t tell anyone, he said afterward.

Fine, I said.

I’m not gay, man, he said.

Fine, I said. Don’t be gay. No one cares.

Then MRSA ate his leg like it was a golden fucking drumstick, and yesterday they cut it off. He isn’t golden anymore. And I can’t talk to anyone because I swore I wouldn’t tell. Except Dormanski is looking at me, and I remember that he’s the smart one, and I’m thinking maybe I just did.

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.

---

Into the Sea

for Paul Massie. Thank you for the times you carried me.

The man who walks the cliff’s edge is dreaming wide awake. Below him, the sea spreads to the edge of the world, from which it brings no news; only salty secret whispers to the sand, whroom, whroom, a full-body lick to the rocks, ohhhhhh. Sometimes when the man is on the beach, the sea leaves debris at his feet like a hunting cat lays down the rabbit’s carcass in a cave where hungry kittens tumble and play. Sometimes when the man is in the water, he and the sea are kittens together. Sometimes they play rough.

The man who walks the cliff’s edge is dreaming his life back so that he may live it again. He looks like an old fierce bird, and his old fierce eyes are sea-blue. His life has been like the sea: deep and rough and restless, full of storms and calms. There are monsters in his deeps. Some people, he has drowned. Others, he has carried on astonishing journeys to places farther than they ever thought to go, and left them blinking in the brightness or shadow of themselves.

And now he brings them all back, like opening a treasure chest and pulling up gold one piece at a time. Here is a boy he helped to sing an impossible song. Here is a girl who loved him so much she could not speak around him, except in other people’s words. Here is a woman he treated like the sea treats the rocks, the lick and the leaving behind. Here are all the conversations, all the laughter, all the tears, all the cigarettes and coffee, all the work, all the times we told him I can’t and he said Yes, you can, you can, and the wide-eyed white-hot joy in those blue eyes when we did.

The man on the cliff has dreamed his life back so that he can let it go. Yes, you can, we tell him. And so he leaps, with the same joy.

Whroom, whroom, the sea says. Ohhhhhh.