Palmtown Towers, which are neither a town nor a tower but do sport a single sad palm

Tags

apartments, braided, crazy, fiction, flash fiction, madness, mold, prompt, stories, unhappiness, writing, writing group

“Braided essay, story, or poem” prompt from Saturday’s writing group.

Apartment 101

Anna and Bob are arguing again. Their voices spilling down the hallway, bouncing off the concrete and hanging out with the half-dead potted plant.

She wants a man who will buy her happiness.

He wants to know where he can get some for himself, how much it’ll be, and if the struggle to get there is worth getting off the couch.

Apartment 102

Carlos has been kicking the heavy bag in his studio for well over an hour. The yelling next door reminds him of his father, his uncles, his mama and all the people he left behind to come here.

The rhythmic pounding of flesh to leather also reminds him of his father.

At least it drowns out the yelling.

Apartment 103

Dawn has been high for about three years, but she’s recently discovered the best one yet. The pastor on television wants to save her and like all the other pushers, all he wants is money.

Saved. The word holds a prospect of peace and clarity she can’t wait to get her hands on. She wants to be saved.

She’s looking for her wallet.

Apartment 104

Emilio is watching Fabiola cook rice and beans. He’s anxious and he’s hungry and he’s wishing his mama hadn’t gotten remarried and told him he needed to move out. He’s hoping he can talk Fabiola into coming and cooking every night. He gets so hungry living off cereal and chips.

Fabiola’s stirring in turmeric and saffron and hoping she doesn’t burn the rice, that he’ll let her stay since the landlord locked her out of her apartment for not paying the rent.

Apartment 105

A lone ceiling fan spins. The place otherwise sits empty, full of the smell of Fabiola’s shampoo and spicy cooking. It’s waiting for its mistress to return.

Apartment 106

Grant and Hector are counting twenty dollar bills on the scarred table they got off the street. They aren’t speaking because each is planning a way to steal from the other.

Grant shifts his legs so he can get to the pistol holstered at his left ankle.

Hector rubs his nose and glances at the steak knife on the bar beside their empty plates.

Apartment 107

Iphigenia is off her meds.

People are after her. She’s sure.

People are talking about her. She knows. She hears them.

She’s sure there’s a bug in the hall palm. If she can find her baseball bat, she’ll take care of it for good.

Apartment 108

Jack looks at the estimate to get rid of the mold in the building A/C ducts. He knows if he gives it to the owner, the guy’ll fire him for sure. Hire someone who won’t make any trouble, create any expenses.

He looks up the symptoms associated with the mold. Decides, eh, they aren’t so bad. Most of the residents don’t stay too many years. Many are crazy anyway.

He figures he should look for a new place, though.

Apartment 109

Keenan knows what has to be done. All the filth and the disease of the world. He’s been keeping a log of it since he moved in seven years ago. It’s growing. It’s festering.

He lights a match and then a fuse.

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Wrong Kind of Friends

Tags

conversation, crime fiction, dialogue, flash fiction, free writing, friends, murder, stories, writing, writing group, writing prompt

This is a flash fiction exercise from writing group. The prompt was to write in approximately 250 words or less a conversation without tags or description.

“We’re gonna do this, right?”

“Huh? Oh. Yeah. Sure.”

“No. I mean, we’re gonna do this. Right?”

“Look, I don’t know what got into you, but I’m not agreeing to anything more. And, I don’t even want to do that.”

“That’s cool, man. I mean, that’s okay and all. But…”

“Absolutely not. This was your stupid idea. You married her.”

“But you were the best man, man. The best man.”

“Yeah, I showed up, wore the tux and made the speech. You want this done, you’re doing it yourself.”

“She’s killing me, man. You don’t understand. She won’t even let me smoke in the house.”

“You don’t need to. It’s making you fat.”

“Damn munchies. Besides, I told you. I gotta glandular thing.”

“You’ve got a brownie and Lays thing.”

“That’s not the point.”

“The point is, you wanna knock off your old lady for the money and you’re gonna drop dead of a heart attack before you can spend it.”

“You said you’d help.”

“I said I’d tell people you were at my house. You’re always over there anyway like you think I’m running an opium den.”

“Ain’t opium, man. That’s whack.”

“And quit talking like that. You live in Weston for God’s sake.”

“So, you ain’t gonna help? Bro. Damn.”

“I am not — note the tone — not helping you dismember your wife.”

“I gotta get better friends, man. I thought we were tight.”

“No.”

“Fine. I’ll ask Frank. He’s got all those good chef knives anyway.”

Inconvenience

Tags

crime, fiction, flash fiction, robbery, short, stories, writing

“It’s totally perfect.” Jed was ripping open a box of Little Debbie brownies in the back room of the Stop & Run, his third in the hour.

“What if someone catches us?” Boner was supposed to be stocking the shelves and Jed was supposed to be home sleeping, but the morning guy didn’t seem to care as long as Jed occasionally came out and gave him an unauthorized smoke break.

“Who the fuck’s gonna catch us? We do it late at night. No one comes in there then. Couple of potheads, drunks, whatever.”

“Cops.”

“Then we do it when the cops aren’t around. Duh!”

“So, what? Like tonight?”

Jed shrugged. “Works for me. I start my shift at eleven.”

Five minutes after midnight, Jed was behind the counter. Boner was in the alley, adjusting his Salvation Army ski mask. Afternoon storms had left the air sticky and he was already sweating before he’d pulled the wool over his eyes.

He checked around the corner. No cops. No customers. Just like Jed planned it.

He took a deep breath, touched his dad’s revolver in his pocket, and rounded the corner into the dim streetlight.

Jed had a Budweiser open under the counter and could be seen sipping from it through the triple-paned front window. The security camera over him, they’d discovered, had stopped working three weeks before and the cheap ass owner hadn’t bothered fixing it yet.

When Jed had asked him how that was supposed to make him feel safe, the owner had told him there was a gun under the counter and to man up.

Boner walked in, casually enough, got all the way to the counter before pulling out the revolver and waving it in Jed’s face. “Give me all the money.”

Jed looked at him. “Gotta buy something so I can get the register open.”

Boner picked up a pack of gum and set it on the counter.

Jed punched some keys and the antiquated drawer popped open. “You got a bag you want me to put this in?”

Boner looked over at the money. “Quit being an ass, Jed. Paper. Plastic. Whatever, man.” He was sweating so hard under the mask he was starting to feel sick.

Jed stuffed the money in a plastic Thank You for Shopping bag and handed it over, calm as an ocean breeze.

Boner turned to go and saw Ford headlights coming up the street. “Shit.”

“Run, fucker.”

Boner continued to stand there staring out the window as the car pulled into the lot.

“Get that damn mask off and hide, dumbass.”

Boner walked toward the storage room, knowing damn well it would be locked that time of night.

“Bathroom, retard. Use the girls.”

Boner shuffled down the short hall and went in the women’s restroom and slipped into the first stall. He smelled something foul even through the wool.

Out front, the door chimed and Jed muttered some how-dos.

A few minutes later, the bathroom door opened and hard-soled black shoes walked in. The shoes walked to the far stall. “Ew. Fuck.”

Quiet. His heart pounded in his ears.

Seconds bled into minutes.

Pounding on his stall door. “Hey, buddy. You gonna be in there much longer?”

He swallowed. Waited.

“Hey, you okay in there?”

He thought about trying to answer, but wasn’t sure he could pull off a girly voice.

“Answer me or I’m coming in.” Her voice had lost all hint of concern. “I’m giving you five seconds to answer me.”

He eased the revolver in front of him and pulled back on the hammer with his thumb.

“Three. Four.”

The sound of gunfire bounced off the tile walls and metal stall. He was sure his ears were bleeding.

The shoes on the other side of the door stumbled back, stopped.

He was sure she should have slid down the wall, sat like someone in the movies. He couldn’t hear anything except muffled ringing like being underwater in the town pool.

On the other side of the door, the bullet had hit Officer Modigliani’s vest, stunning her before she reached for her holster and returned fire.

Always Faithful

Tags

faithfulness, fathers, flash fiction, military, nagging, stories, writing

This post can also be found at McDroll’s blog.

Another piece of flash fiction. I’ve been trying to get up one of these a week. This one clocks in at just under 1000 words and I really wish it were better, but I fear it’s not.

Please to enjoy.

“I think we found her a new doctor. That last one didn’t think she needed the shots. He was a quack. He said she could get by with some over the counter medication.”

“Well, that’s good, Dad.” Jacob sounded disappointed, far away like he’s only half listening.

He knew it was boring, all the talk of medications and doctors and what they’d try next. He also knew Jacob thought his mom was faking it or addicted or  just too lazy to get out of bed. Roy figured his son was probably right about a lot of it. He just. Well, it just wasn’t worth the fight. Not anymore.

“Um. Well, she needs her meds. And I need to make her sandwich.”

“Nice talking to you.” The accusation, the question – couldn’t his mother make her own sandwich? – hung unspoken on the line that was no longer a line but rather some nebulous satellite transmission Roy couldn’t understand.

“Yeah. Love you, Son.”

“You too.”

Generic conversation, all they ever had anymore. Most lasted about ten minutes, but sometimes they ran long. Roy could tell Jacob was busy doing other things during those calls, that he was letting the old man rattle on just because he was balancing his checkbook or unloading the dishwasher and not really listening. Jacob had stopped really sharing anything, really talking about anything. Never really told him how the kids were or what he and the wife had been up to. Roy sometimes felt he might as well call some customer service rep in India for all the reception he got.

Hard to blame the boy, though.

He shuffled off to the kitchen, sticking the little phone back in the pocket of his cargo shorts. The weight caused the shorts to sag slightly on that side and he hitched up his belt, marveling at how quickly his body was changing.

Louise’s lunch consisted of the same thing every day. She was convinced if she ate anything but whole Pepperidge Farms wheat bread with “store turkey” from the A&P, she’d get sick. She demanded a single leaf of iceberg lettuce and a single slice of Kraft American cheese product with two tablespoons of Miracle Whip slathered only on one slice of the bread. The slice of tomato had to be the perfect shade of whitish pink or she claimed it was “too darn sweet” and wouldn’t eat it, asking, “what are you trying to do, kill me, Roy?”

Oddly, despite being able to taste the difference between the plastic Kraft and the plastic rice cheese their daughter had left in the fridge, she’d yet to notice the thin basting of diluted thallium sulfate he’d been adding to the turkey for a month. The thallium he’d gotten from an old war buddy who’d made a habit out of collecting things he probably shouldn’t. She’d noticed the sickness, but since she’d been pretending to be sick for years, it wasn’t like she could explain the difference to anyone without outing herself.

He’d taken her in for a few new meds, though, just to be safe. Her latest doctor didn’t even seem to ask what was wrong, just which pill she thought she needed and handed her a script. He’d come recommended special by one of the church ladies with a not-so-secret Xanax problem.

When she insisted he make her a new sandwich because the lettuce was two smaller leaves instead of one large one, he’d complied. He always complied. He’d been trained to do nothing but comply since high school, and some would argue even before that. He lived to serve. And he’d served. Faithfully. His country. The local car dealership. The Masons. And Louise. He’d been serving her for forty-two years.

In that time, he’d watched her deteriorate from a part-time pill-popping mom to a strung-out-for-days-on-end addict who shopped for doctors like other women her age shopped for comfortable shoes. And yet, she wouldn’t let him so much as have a Coors Light after mowing the lawn anymore. “That stuff is for drunks,” she’d told him countless times, most recently after he’d come home with the scent on his lips after a neighbor’s cookout. He hadn’t even known she’d bee awake after her “cocktail” shot; she’d made him stay in the garage that night because of “the smell.”

He’d have guessed she’d have died first. Probably everyone else figured the same. Even her sister called to say she didn’t plan to see her again until the funeral. Louise’s mother had told him a million times to “stop enabling that woman.” Both the kids refused to come visit because she grumped and fussed and wouldn’t let them wear perfume or use scented soaps except for her stash of “roses begonia” that she got at Wal-Mart in the late nineties.

As he made a new sandwich, he figured if he did it right, he could make it to the funeral himself.

Three months before he’d gone to the doctor. Routine stuff. Came back not so routine. Older doctor, looked all tore up about it, said it might be related to his Agent Orange exposure all those years ago, that several of “the boys” had come up with similar problems lately. Said if he filed all the right paperwork in time, there was a slim chance he might be able to leave a little settlement for the wife and kids.

He’d filled out the paperwork, made sure the kids were in his will, and gone to see his old war buddy that afternoon.

When he’d come home, she’d yelled her head off. How dare he “be gone for six hours without calling.” Yes, he decided, as he added an extra layer of poison to her turkey, if he did it just right, he could make it to her funeral, too.

Boxtered In

Tags

car, economy, flash fiction, free writing, stories, writing

The car. The only thing he had left was the car. Sure, it was a little older. Sure, it was the base model. But it was a base model Porsche and he didn’t care that he’d been parking it in front of a shitty studio apartment on the ugly side of town for six months. It was his. And it was a Porsche. And he wasn’t selling the car.

Six months ago. Yeah, he’d thought he was doing something then. Had the wife. The job. The house. Of course, the car.

Now, it was just the car.

His own fault, really. Well, the wife part. Probably shouldn’t have been dumb enough to put the hotel on his credit card. Then, how was he to know Eileen’s coworker would have her ID stolen and she’d develop a habit of meticulously checking statements she’d never glanced at before?

The job? That wasn’t his fault. Damn company shipped everything to India except the sales force. India: land of the programmer and customer service rep. Engineers and IT support hanging from ever twisted tree. But apparently no one willing to take a guy out for a steak dinner, call his butt-ugly wife lovely and get a signature. How they even planned for the sales force to sell the crap they were manufacturing (in Thailand) was beyond him. Even the redesign they’d had him working on before the layoffs was a turd in plastic housing. Not that it mattered anymore except the stock options they’d showered on him were now worthless. Couldn’t even sell them for enough to make rent.

Which left the car. But he wasn’t selling the car.

As it was, he’d get maybe a summer’s worth of rent money out of it and then what would he do? Ride the bus? Steal his neighbor’s Schwinn?

No, the car was his.

Finally, he got a line on a job. Decent pay, working in a warehouse district down under the interstate. Left his car out front, but hid it behind a work van in case the guy hiring thought someone driving a Porsche wasn’t really looking.

He was in a hurry. Had gotten stopped at the tracks by an Amtrak, by a couple of charter yachts at the bridge. Had nearly run out of gas and was sweating filling the tank with the last of his savings.

The interview itself went okay. No better or worse than the other two. Just knew the supervisor could smell his underarms and the desperation living there.

“Well, we’ll call you either way.” Guy had said, rubbing the back of his thinning hair. “You said you had reliable transportation, right? Last guy…” He shook his head.

He was pretty sure he wouldn’t get the job. And if he did, he’d be making a quarter what he had before.

He left feeling like he’d felt the day before. Like the only thing he had left in the world was that stupid car. The one his buddy had told him was a trap, right before he’d quit corporate and taken off to tour European couches with a punk band named Sloppy Meat Surprise.

He took out his keys, walked around the work van, and stared at the empty space.

His head whipped around involuntarily, looking for another work van, another space, his car. But the lot was small, the van alone, and the car gone.

He’d have pulled out his phone and called the police, but his service had been cut and he hadn’t been able to let himself give up his hipster phone for “ghetto PCS.” The only thing he knew about the bus schedule was that those little yellow signs always popped up when he was running late.

Walking around the curve toward the main road, he saw the red.  As he got closer, he realized that was about the only thing left. The rest? Stripped and sitting in the middle of the road.

He got behind the wheel and tried to start her. No gas. No wheels anyway.

A semi, heading for one of the warehouses, came up on the curve fast. The driver wasn’t expecting to find a car there. There were never cars there. It was one of the least-traveled roads in the city.

He looked up at the daytime running lights bearing down on him and wondered if they’d stolen the airbags, too.

End of Summer: Project Review

Tags

editing, neliza drew, self-esteem, stories, summer goals, worm poop, writing

As Joelle Charbonneau has reminded us, summer is almost over.

My goals for the summer were to study, figure out what to do after next year, and edit that stupid book I’ve been telling myself I’d get to for years.

I mean, I’ve written and rewritten the thing about twelve times. It’s not remotely the same story it started out as. I’ve scribbled a lot of other ideas and crappy short stories along the way. I’ve also quit writing off and on for a variety of reasons ranging from grad school to deciding it was like baseball and just something I was rotten at and should avoid. Except, I never have an urge to play baseball. When I’m working through something, when I’m processing something, when I’m bored, when I’m driving…my brain decides to tell itself stories and sometimes I just have to write them (or part of them down). Later I toss it all in a box, a drawer, the shredder. Usually, the shredder. Worms have made poop of a lot of my word poop.

I also realize the beloved Chuck Wendig questions those who’ve worked on the same thing as long as I have. Something tells me he believes in his work more than I’ve been prone to. Or maybe he just has a weaker shredder.

So, why have I gone back to the same thing (sort of) again and again after all these years? Am I mental? Likely. But more than that, I really like the characters who grew out of that earlier mess. I just hated their story. So I stuck them in different stories, tried them out in different settings, moved them all over the Eastern Seaboard. Worm poop.

I wrote about six hundred pages of two other “things.” Worm poop.

I tried some idiotic naval-gazing suburbia-is-crap sort of stories. You know, the kind you get encouraged to write in college writing classes with teachers who only read literary journals. You know, the ones you can find on the magazine rack at Barnes & Noble. Except, they also tell  you to write  what you know and I’m neither a gang member nor a bored house husband so I came to the conclusion that if that was “writing,” I’d pass on expecting payment and go back to scribbling down stuff for my own amusement.

Which is how I’ve lost some really good stories. There was one I wrote in my head on a treadmill. I was at the gym. A news story came on that got turned around in my oxygen-deprived head and was a terrific little tale of small town revenge. The right mix of violence and pathos. Except, instead of running back out to my car and writing it down, I finished doing weights first. And I have not been able to recapture it in a hundred tries since.

So, you know, I just suck.

I did, however, finish editing the novel. And I have the following notes on a Post-it:

• boat thing probably too crazy/stupid
• what the hell happened to AW?
• the thing with E is dumb – just dumb
• end is too pat – probably retarded

 

When you burn down the bridge, there’s no water under it.

Tags

prose poem, stories, writing

The ghosts of you remain.

Little half-used jars of goop. Shampoo bottles with masking tape tops-a sure sign of too much packing & moving.

You flicker in sometimes on a screen. I’m not always there. When I am, I sometimes wish I wasn’t.

You chose your path. It was clearly marked, with no room for others to walk with you.

It’s too late to try this road, this freeway of other drivers you turned away from.

You want others to share your joy. Mostly what you share are lies.

The ones who love you, loved you… They hold the grudges you swear you’re unable to support. Just as well. Most are against you.

Not matter how hard it rains, Mother Nature hasn’t been able to wash all that pain away; you left such heaps of it everywhere.

The scars will heal. And one day I’ll get around to tossing those toiletries.

Writing Methods, Procrastination, & Distractions

Tags

bands, blues, disappointment, distractions, laptop, live music, outdoors, paper, pens, procrastination, punk, stationery, stories, writing

Over the weekend, I had a bit of inspiration for a short story.  The trouble was that I was in a bar trying to listen to live music performed by people I knew (but not well enough for them to be completely understanding of me scribbling on scrap paper at the bar while they played).  The next day turned into a whirlwind of nonsense and I only got to a bit of dialogue.  The dialogue is missing context, plot, and a host of other things.  It was a start.

Saturday night found me watching a completely different band — this time outdoors in a brutal wind (okay, for those of you up in the frozen, blizzardy north, it was honestly a 17mph wind and the temp was in the very low 60s (F), but in my defense I was dressed to be indoors — in a short-sleeved sweater and a thin jacket — and we were out there from 9pm to 2am).  I couldn’t feel my fngers even if I’d wanted to scribble on napkins and hope they didn’t blow away.

Normally, I write on a laptop.  When I get new inspiration, though, I usually want to uproot the thing from its myriad cords and cool pads and external mice and etc. and take it out to the yard for a change of scenery.  Except I was transferring files to external hard drives.  (I’m telling you, my weekend was against me.)  So, I tried scribbling on paper.

I’ve had a thing for office supplies since I was a tiny tot drooling over markers and notebooks instead of Barbies, and all this really means is that I sometimes have to have the “right” pen for a job — nevermind how mundane the job — and sometimes the “right” paper or the “right” surface… and all these “right”s change periodically to keep me delightfully unbalanced.

The bottom line is, that I’ve managed to cover a measly sheet of notebook paper and I’m disappointed in myself.  My goal before bed: at least another sheet.

2009 Reading List

Tags

amazon, comics, fiction, journals, nonfiction, reading, reading list, stories

My goal for 2009, reading-wise, was to read at least one fiction and one non-fiction book each month.  As the year came closer to ending, I also was kind of hoping to hit 50 “books” or “book-like” texts by the time the ball dropped.

I also realized that for 2010, perhaps I needed a better way of organizing or catagorizing or listing or whatever. (I guess we’ll all find out what I came up with in a week when January comes to a close.)

So, for now, here’s the 2009 list:

January:
Fiction:
A Canticle for Leibowitz** by Walter M. Miller

Nonfiction:
How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill

February:
Fiction:
Until We Meet Again by Anne Schraff (bloody awful, but I needed to read it to write a quiz for a student)
Catch-22** by Joseph Heller
Weeping Susannah by Alona Kimhi (translated by Dalya Bilu for the British publication)
Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
All She Was Worth by Miyuki Miyabe (translated by Alfred Birnbaum)

Nonfiction:
Florida: A Short History by Michael Gannon

March:
Fiction:
The Torrents of Spring by Ernest Hemingway

Nonfiction:
Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness by William Styron

April:
Fiction:
Girls At War by Chinua Achebe
The Sirens of Titan** by Kurt Vonnegut (The seeds of the short story “Harrison Bergeron” are in there.)

Nonfiction:
Bless Your Heart, Tramp and Other Southern Endearments by Celia Rivenbark (Torturous, as I failed to find her brand of humor anything but shallow and painful.)

May:
Fiction:
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Angels & Demons** by Dan Brown (A good romp up until the improbable escapes and “Luke, I am your father” nonsense.)
Witness by Karen Hesse (picked it up in my classroom. It’s oddly reminiscent of Spoon River Anthology)
Tangerine by Edward Bloor (Another classroom read…it was oddly good even though it was about a seventh grader.)
Jacob Have I Loved by Katherine Paterson (I need to stop picking up random books in my class.)
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
The Warlord of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Sandman Vol. 2: The Doll’s House by Neil Gaiman (Okay, it’s a comic, but it’s more literary than that Bluford book from February.)

Nonfiction:
The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise by Michael Grunwald

June:
Fiction:
The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck (Love Steinbeck)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man** by James Joyce
Backwater by Joan Baur
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut (Love me some Vonnegut, too)

Nonfiction:
Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect Our Children’s Minds and What We Can Do About It by Jane Healy, Ph.D.

July:
Fiction:
Blindness** by Jose Saramago (If you can get past the punctuation and fecal matter, it’s a worthwhile read.)
Small Craft Warning by Tennessee Williams

Nonfiction:
Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie by Barbara Goldsmith (Surprisingly, there’s a love story or two in there.)

August:
Fiction:
The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
Bronx Masquerade by Nikki Grimes (My co-teacher was doing this one with our shared classes.)
East of Eden by John Steinbeck (Awesome opus!)
Neuromancer** by William Gibson

Nonfiction:
How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines by Thomas C. Foster
A Moving Target by William Golding

September:
Fiction:
The Sun Also Rises** by Ernest Hemingway

Nonfiction:
Hemingway: A Biography by Jeffery Meyer

October:
Fiction:
Other Voices, Other Rooms** by Truman Capote (It helps to go into it assuming it to be a very long short story more than a “novel.”)

Nonfiction:
The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America by David Hajdu

November:
Fiction:
The October Country** by Ray Bradbury
California by Amra Brooks (Fabulously bent.)
Gulfstream: South Florida’s Literary Current Vol. 25 (paper ed.) various authors
Ghosts for Jesse Jewel by Amber Frangos (storytelling poetry — excellent)
American Gods: A Novel by Neil Gaiman

Nonfiction:
Last Train to Paradise: Henry Flagler and the Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Railroad that Crossed an Ocean by Les Standiford

December:
Fiction:
Candide** by Voltaire

Nonfiction:
Blood Done Sign My Name by Timothy B. Tyson

**Book Club Picks (Note: I was at a concert during March’s meeting and I’d read the book before so I skipped that one.)

Snippets of a One-Sided Conversation

Tags

prose poem, rough draft, stories, writing

Yes, but she didn’t want it.
She didn’t say she didn’t want it.
But she didn’t say many things.
She didn’t say many things she perhaps should have.
She acted without words too often for us to not be forced to interpret words and gestures as communications.

She doesn’t seem to connect her actions with results.
She wants to be the victim so she can avoid all responsibility.
The whole ignorance is bliss theory?
No. She seems to like the opposite of bliss.
She just wants her condition in the opposite of bliss to be someone else’s fault.

I want to rip the Band-Aid off, but I keep having to wait.