Category: blog

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.

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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.

---

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.

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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.

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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.

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 Locks and the Ladders

for Ronnie Garvey. I love you, BFF.

Jet poked me hard in the shoulder. “That fucking hurts,” I said.

“No swearing on the bus,” the driver said automatically, without even looking in the mirror.

Jet said, “What’s wrong, Cassie? You look like your cat died.”

“I don’t have a cat.”

“I know, that’s why it’s okay to say it. If you really had a cat, it would be completely insensitive.”

I went back to staring out the school bus window.

“So what is it?” she said. “You look like your pony died.”

You know how someone can make you smile even when you don’t want to? And for a second you want to smack them on the nose for getting inside you like that? But you’ve been best friends since kindergarten, and so it would just be like smacking yourself. That’s Jet. She’s the only one who will tell me I have something nasty showing in my nose. I’m the only one who knows that her brother’s not at college, he’s in rehab in Salt Lake, and she is terrified that he will kill himself. And when I holed up in my room last month crying over Jamal Watson and playing Evanescence so loud it hurt my ears, she snuck to his house in the middle of the night and let the air out of his tires. All four of them. It took her an hour in the rain.

“Cass,” she said. No kidding this time.

The front wheel of the bus hit a pothole. We all went up and down in our seats. The back wheel hit. Up and down, while the world outside the bus stayed level. No one out there felt the jolt. No one raised their hand and said Can you give me a break with the thrill ride, I got motion sickness here! I cannot wait to be a part of that world.

“The Dickhead is moving us to Oklahoma City at the end of the school year,” I said.

“What the fuck?” she said. About a dozen kids responded, in perfection caricature of the driver, “No swearing on the bus,” before they went back to seeing who could complain loudest about a stupid field trip to look at stupid fish.

“They told me this morning.”

Jet opened her mouth. Then she closed it again. She looked like she did the day she told me about Tyler’s crack habit. Five years old again.

“I can’t start crying about this right now,” I said. “I can’t. Not…” Not here, is what I meant. Not in front of these people whose idea of special bonding is to make fun of the bus driver.

She swallowed. “Okay,” she said, and took a breath, and pushed it all back down.

The bus turned into the parking lot of the Ballard Locks. When we got off, Jet rubbed a smudge from under my eye, and then we linked arms and followed the teacher.

We didn’t talk. Jet kept her arm in mine. I thought about living someplace strange with only Dickhead and my mother to rely on. I must have made a noise, because Jet said in a low voice, “Breathe.” I took a deep breath. Pushed it down.

“This way to the fish ladders!” the teacher called to the group. “You want to see persistence in action, salmon are it!” Because we’re just kids and none of us have any fucking idea what it’s like to swim upstream.

“Breathe,” Jet said.

A tunnel sloped down to a room with windows into the underwater. Kids pushed by, snarking about the teacher and the bus driver, Jesus, give it a rest, I thought, and I didn’t want to see the little fish swimming out to the wide wild sea where things were waiting to eat them.

I shook my head. “Cool,” Jet said. “Let’s go watch the boats.”

We stood at the observation rail over the locks. Fishing boats, pleasure boats, crowding in together, waiting for the water to go up and down.

“Breathe,” Jet said. And then, “Look!” But I was thinking Oklahoma City thoughts, and I could only see the boats at the bottom of the nearly-empty lock, tied to bumpers between the narrow walls. I could imagine the fish climbing their ladders.

Jet poked me in the shoulder. “Look,” she said.

Two seagulls were flying above the canal. Just ordinary gulls. No one else paid any attention to them. But the birds rode the air currents as if it were easy, as if they were going nowhere in particular, as if it were enough to fly together in the sun.

I leaned against her shoulder. I breathed. In the lock, the water began to rise.

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 Public Library

for Graeme Williams. Thank you for supporting my work and Clarion West.

“What did you do before?” the soldier said.

“I was an administrative assistant,” Mary said.

“Camp librarian,” he said. “Military and community. Liase with the teachers and commander’s personal admin. Next.”

“Wait…. you have books?”

He gave her an Are you stupid? look. She flinched. Of course there were no books. Shakespeare was the extra lining in your clothes that kept you warm. Romance novels lit your cookfires. Jane Austen wiped the diarrhea from your child’s bottoms. And the pages of all those self-help books made great stuffing for the chinks in a drafty barracks.

“Figure it out,” he said. “Next.”

She stepped out of line.

When she was six, her family had taken a beach vacation to northern Florida. It rained most every day, and there were giant spiders under the cottage porch. They didn’t scare Mary, but her brother Norton freaked the fuck out. That’s what Yessir called it, when Nordy stood red-faced and ashamed on the carpet in the small living room, and Mary and her mother sat at the kitchen table as they had been told to do while her stepfather put Nordy back on the right path.

“You freaked the fuck out over an insect!”

“Yes, sir,” Nordy said, in such a low voice that Mary could hardly hear it. She leaned close to her mom and said in a whisper, “It’s not an insect. It’s an arach… ara…”

“Arak-nid,” her mom whispered back. And as Yessir ranted at Nordy in the next room, What’ll you do when the terrorists come for your mother and sister, you little faggot?, her mom kept going. “That’s right. From the Latin arachnida. That kind is called a wolf spider. They hunt instead of building webs. They eat bugs.”

Mary thought of Nordy standing scared under Yessir’s bug-eyed fury. “I like spiders,” she said.

“Me, too,” her mom said. “You know, once there was a very wonderful spider called Charlotte. She was the kind that builds webs, and she built her web in a farmyard.” And her mom kept talking, telling her about Charlotte, until Yessir stopped shouting and sent Nordy to his room.

Why was she thinking of Charlotte now? Why was she remembering something that had happened forty years ago, before the spiders of war hunted each other down into nuclear winter and it seemed that all the world had gone to ground in camps like this one, and all the books had become just paper, and the internet was something they all hoped they’d get back one day when the armies were done with it?

And then she knew.

When she explained to the commander’s personal assistant what she wanted, he gave her a pencil and single, precious piece of paper that had only been used a couple times before: there was still space left. Then she began moving among the camp, meeting people, making tiny notes when she needed, but mostly trying to memorize everything she could. A good librarian didn’t need a catalogue of her own resources. A good librarian knew where to find the information.

Five days later, she set up a desk in a corner of the administrative barracks, along with as many tables and chairs or stools or boxes as she could commandeer. A practiced young man with a paint sprayer stencilled letters on the wall behind her. “Put it on the outside, too,” she told him. “So everyone can see it.”

And so he did. Public Library.

It took about twenty minutes for the first civilian to approach. He was maybe thirty-five; his hands were blistered as if he’d been using unaccustomed tools. She imagined a shovel or a saw.

He said cautiously, “Is this the library?”

“Yes, it is,” Mary said. “I’m the librarian. How can I help you?” She hoped it didn’t come out sounding too much like Oh my God I hope this works.

“Umm… do you have the Harry Potter books?” His face was tight in the way of someone already braced for the bad news, already feeling like a fool.

Mary said, “Can you come back in about an hour?” And watched his expression transform. It really was true, she thought. People’s faces could light up.

The guy came back in an hour. With seven other people, all of whom looked both hopeful and deeply suspicious. She led them to a table where a young woman of about twenty waited. “Have a seat, everyone,” Mary said. Then she nodded to the young woman.

“Okay,” the woman said. She looked at the group. “Okay.” She took a breath. “Once there was a boy named Harry Potter who lived with his uncle and aunt and obnoxious cousin, a real little shit. I mean…”

“No,” said the guy. “He was a shit. So…”

“So they actually made Harry sleep in a tiny little room under the stairs…”

Mary went back to the table, and turned her head so that the human book and the human readers would not see her cry.