cw – Page 3 – Kelley Eskridge

CW 29: Wings

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.

Wings

For Anne Sneideris, with love.

Another bad day at school. Bruises under Nora’s clothes, and a heavy sodden panic in her chest that made it hard to lift her head or think, or even breathe. Like when Mrs. Morrison erased the board before Nora understood something, and then it showed up on a quiz. Maybe that’s what happened. Maybe one day Mrs. Morrison put on the board what kids were supposed to do to make their parents not hurt them, and Nora missed it, and now she couldn’t pass the test.

Today she gave the wrong answers the first two times Mrs. Morrison called on her. The third time, she just stared at her desk. All the other girls giggled, until Mrs. Morrison said in a sharp voice, “Very well, Laura Lipton, when you’re quite done tittering, you have a go.” And Laura didn’t know the answer either.

Out in the corridor after class, Laura said in a vicious whisper, “You’re stupid,” and pinched Nora hard through her shirt. Another sore place. Another bruise. The panic in Nora’s chest was heavier now, choking, like yesterday… she didn’t want to think about that. She kept her head down and went to her history class.

At recess, she stood pressed against the iron fence that kept kids from wandering off the bluff and down to the rooftops below. She liked to come here these last few weeks, even in the rain. She liked to watch the blackbirds swoop over the bracken and then fly away. It made her chest feel lighter for a minute or two.

“Hello, Nora,” said a voice, and Mrs. Morrison stepped up beside her, hugging a cardigan around her shoulders. “Birdwatching?”

Nora nodded without turning her head.

“Birds are lovely,” the teacher said.

“Yes,” Nora said, and couldn’t hold back the single tear that spilled from her eye down her cheek.

“Do you know, when I was about your age, birds taught me to fly?” Mrs. Morrison said. Now Nora looked at her, and the weight in her chest was the worst ever, because if Mrs. Morrison was making fun of her it would break Nora’s heart. It would be even worse than the pinching, or whatever might be waiting for her at home.

“I was very sad,” the teacher said, “about something that happened. And I came out to this very fence and watched the birds, just like you. Then I picked one special bird, and I imagined what it was like to be right inside of it, flying up in the sky. Can you do that?”

Nora chewed on her lip. And then, because it was Mrs. Morrison, she tried. She imagined herself in the air, her arms spread like wings. But that would never work. She was too heavy to fly.

She began to shake her head, but Mrs. Morrison said, “Imagine, Nora. There we are, you and me, blackbirds up in the sky looking down on these two peculiar creatures on the ground. Can you see us?”

And then, “Oh!” Nora said, because now she understood. It was like yesterday being held down in the bathtub until she felt wet and heavy all through, and then she wasn’t in her body any longer, she was up on the ceiling watching and it didn’t hurt anymore. Oh….

And spang! there she was, up in the sky looking down at her own tear-smudged face lit up with wonder, watching Mrs. Morrison crouch and put an arm around her, hearing as if from far away the teacher saying, Well done, Nora, well done. Now, would you like to tell me what’s making you so sad? And Nora would try in a minute, she would try, but right now she was stretching her wings, she was wheeling away, she was heading for the open sky.

CW 28: The Real Deal

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 Real Deal

For Jean Rukkila. Thank you for your support of me and Clarion West.

I land seven hours late, welcome to the modern fucking world of air travel. I get out into the long-term lot in a cold gray whippy-wind afternoon, welcome to another fucking summer in Seattle. My car battery is dead. Welcome to my kick-the-tire hurt-my-foot scream-like-a-motherfucker life.

I limp my ass and my rollerbag back to the terminal and find a taxi, and once we’re on our way, I check my phone and find the email informing me that while I was on Air Turbulence over the Rockies, the client signed with the Asshole Competitor. No surprise: I blew the most important deal of my life with one stupid remark halfway through the box lunch. I have been stewing in failure all day, with a hefty side of bitter sauce. Stick me with a fork. I’m done.

But apparently I’m not. There are fifty-seven million emails from Thea:

How did the meeting go?
Fwd: LOL Funny!
Fwd: Your Daily Joke!
I hope the meeting went great!
See u at home soon!
Fwd: LOLcat so cute!

If I had known Thea likes stupid internet jokes and bad English translations of foreign signs and fucking LOLcats, maybe we would never have made it past the first date. But like anyone with a bad habit, she kept it under wraps until I was totally crazy about her, until we bonded over the Mariners and Indian food and the Harry Potter films. Then she let the bad jokes creep slowly into our lives, along with her health-food obsession and a fondness for sentimental television commercials.

Today I can’t even pretend to laugh. I have tell her I blew the deal and maybe the promotion and maybe the career, and I just don’t know what to say, I just don’t know, and the taxi takes me through a downtown full of people laughing in happy-hour bars, a couple of guys high-fiving each other outside the bank, and then we turn a corner and leave all that behind.

My phone rings.

As soon as I answer, she says,”Hey, how did it go?” There’s the little growly sound in her voice that means she’s happy, and I can imagine her quirky smile, and I hesitate. Then my phone goes ping! and a text message opens: an inane photo of a cat in a negligee with the caption Welkum Hoem TomKitteh! And apparently I am not done with failing, apparently the whole day has just been the runup to the really special moment when I open my mouth and say, “You know, Thea, LOLcats are so butt-stupid I can’t believe it every time I see one.”

When I walk in the door, there are candles on the table and Frank Sinatra on the iPod, and the smoke of something-gone-wrong in the air, and Thea sitting puffy-faced on the couch staring at the floor. She is wearing sweat pants and her oldest t-shirt, but her hair looks nice and somehow I know that she was in one of her jungle-print nighties when she called.

I stand in the doorway. I have no idea what to say. I’m angry at me and her and the client and the airline and the car battery and how a whole deal can go down in flames in a moment, and I’m afraid to open my mouth because I don’t know what might come out.

She says, without looking at me, “I was making aloo chard, and then I decided to sit down and cry, and it burned.”

And suddenly I know, the clearest I have known anything all day, that this is the most important deal of my life: Thea and her hand-labeled collection of curry spices and her leopard underwear and her ability to laugh at stupid things, and christ knows I sound butt-stupid when I say, “So you charred the chard?”

She looks up. There’s a long moment… and then she shakes her head and I see the small corner of a smile that tells me I haven’t blown it completely yet. I drop my bags and say I’m sorry, I tell her I love her, and I tell her what I did today, and I swear to myself that tomorrow I will find her the perfect LOLcat if it kills me.

CW 27: Burn Bright

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.

Burn Bright

For Kate Schubert. Thank you for your friendship and support.

No one understands anything these days. They don’t know why computer systems have begun to fail and their clouds drop data like rain. They don’t know why skyscrapers suddenly shiver on their massive skeletons and occasionally shed pieces of themselves onto the street. They don’t know why millions of bees have massed over Santa Cruz and Wichita and Richmond, their buzzing a giant bullroarer in the hand of heaven. They don’t know why the sun is swelling into ecstatic death five billion years early.

These days the scientists go sleepless and sweat over solutions and try and try and try. The governments go on full alert and send their troops into the streets to curb the panicked riots of the Save us, dammit, that’s why we pay our taxes! crowd, and the hell with posse comitatus. The celebrities and politicians go to underground shelters, looking reluctant and noble for the cameras. They don’t seem to understand that the deep places won’t save them; they will die in darkness as surely as we above will burn bright.

We hear it’s bad in the cities as people bunker up and hoard food, and the stink of uncollected suicides rises in the streets. We hear the sea is full of bodies, and the Grand Canyon… well, never mind. That doesn’t matter now. What’s important is that we do the right thing for our own.

I confer in my office in Town Hall with the city councillors, which is a grand way of saying that the four of us who have been running things for a while have our shoes off, our feet up, and a bottle of wine open so we can argue in comfort about what to do next.

I let everyone else talk first. I am the mayor, and I often get what I want; that makes it more important to know what other folks want too. Even now. Maybe especially now. So I listen while Tyrone makes a case for death being a private event best left to each family; Jess ponders the need for a community ritual; and Stu, whom I’ve always suspected of a fascist streak, opines that the criminal, the sick, the elderly and the reluctant ought to be given a little social assistance with their dying so as not to be the inheritors of the earth in case the sun wanders off to another part of the galaxy to do its burning. Stu is not so smart, but he does like to think things through.

Everyone says their piece. There’s a silence. Outside, the sun is brighter than we’ve ever seen it. Tyrone pours us all more wine.

“What do you think, Bea?” Jess says.

I think that I’m sixty-four and a grandmother and a farmer and I am going to have to kill my animals myself so they don’t suffer; and though they will not understand why they’re dying, they will know that I am doing it. I think that I am in a mighty rage, and it makes me feel alone and small under the weight of the question: how shall we die? I was planning to go home and end as I’ve lived, on my own terms. But now I have listened to what they’ve said, even Stu, and I realize that we may be only a small town, and we may only be small people, but we need each other like we always have. Even now. Maybe especially now.

“I’ll tell you what I think,” I say. “I think we should have a picnic in the park. Everyone comes. Everyone who wants to,” I add for Stu’s benefit. “We have a nice day and a nice evening, and then before dawn we have some Kool Aid or some special wine.”

“What about the ones who won’t?” Stu says, with his chin out.

“This is America,” I say. “Everyone’s got the right to die alone.”

After we’ve settled Stu down and are into the details of the plan, I say to Jess, “Will you play us out?”

Her eyes fill with tears. Finally she says, “Yes, I… Yes.”

On the last afternoon, we all sit down under trees and tents to fried chicken and steak and pork chops, potato salad, pots of boiled corn, enormous bowls of strawberries, blackberry pies. We have a lot of fun. The grownups tell all the old stories about each other and laugh so hard we snort our wine. The smaller kids splash in the fountains and run shrieking with laughter back to their parents for more sunblock. It’s the teens I feel the worst for: too old to play, too young to laugh with human joy in the face of human death. But we all do our best. And the last dusk falls and our part of the globe turns from the sun and begins its journey back. Somewhere in the world, people are beginning to burn.

About an hour before dawn, the sky is already light enough to see each other clearly. I catch Jess’s eye, and nod, and begin to pass out drinks.

Jess carries her cello to the chair we’ve placed in the clearing. The rest of us sit. Everyone looks at me.

“To us,” I say. “To life.” And we drink.

In the distance, the sun is firing the tops of the trees. Jess pulls her cello closer and begins to play.

CW 26: Because The Night

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.

Because The Night

For Dave Slusher. Thank you for your friendship and support.

“You are ripe for this experience,” Mark says, and looks at me like he is already taking off my clothes. Like he can see me naked. The boys at frat parties always blow this moment; they stare at my boobs, their mouths drop open a little, and I can practically see them riffling through their mental inventory of Playboy centerfolds. And that is why I have never said said yes. But Mark is not a frat boy. He’s a thirty-two-old doctoral student, and he has never stopped looking in my eyes the whole time he has been asking me and waiting for my answer.

“Come on, Cathy” he says. “What are you, afraid of a little moshing? We don’t have to mosh.” We don’t have to slam our bodies together in a pit full of sweaty safety-pinned headbangers. Okay, good. Because I like The Eagles and Fleetwood Mac and Steve Miller, and I think what’s-his-name, Sid Vicious, is skinny and weird. And I don’t know if I want to go to a punk show tonight.

“I don’t really like punk music,” I say.

“You have no idea what you like.” He smiles as if he’s thinking But you will, and he will be the one to make me like it.

And I believe he could. That’s what makes it so scary. So exciting. In five weeks I’ll pack my dorm room and my dad will drive over from the Tri-Cities to bring me home for the summer, to get an office job or run the cash register in the A&P, to hang out with sorority sisters and nice boys my parents know. This man is not nice at all, and he wants to take me to the Paramount and put music in my brain that will get right up inside me so that he can get there too. So I don’t know if I want to go to a punk show tonight.

You can say yes or no, Cath, my mom always says. It’s up to you.

We stand and wait and drink our beer and we don’t say a word. Mark is beside me and a little behind, one arm draped loosely over my shoulder. It’s crowded and dark where we are, bright and hot on the empty stage, and then people begin whooping and clapping and stamping their feet whup whup whup whup whupwhupwhupAOOOOO as the band comes out.

And the singer is a woman. A pale skinny woman in dark skinny jeans and a British flag t-shirt. I didn’t know there were girl punk singers. I didn’t know a woman could open her mouth and say Well I don’t fuck much with the past but I fuck plenty with the future and then turn her voice into a growl like a hand coming up inside me from my crotch to my stomach to my chest into my brain, that would make me wish I had said yes in my life to whatever could make me sing like that, I didn’t know I didn’t know, but now I do and the knowing makes me dizzy.

At some point I lean back against Mark. He plants himself to take my weight, and his free hand comes up under my shirt, and he says into my ear, “Do you want to go somewhere?”

I can say yes or no.

And so I say, “Fuck no,” and I stay for both sets. And then I let him take me home.

CW 25: The Messenger

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.”