CW 12: Monkeybar Hope

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.

Enjoy.

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.