Photo #8
This place reeks of ghosts. It smells like memories, colored with musty old moments. When I sit down on the old bed, I hear the mattress creak, and somewhere down the hall, in its dark deepest recesses, there is laughter.
Did you hear that? I ask Alice.
Hear what?
I swear, it sounded just little girls playing in the hallway. It sounded like you and Mary.
Alice bunches up her cheek as her mouth turns into a grimace. She knits her brows in that concerned way that people do when they don’t understand. They never understand, but they always think that they’re smarter than you because of it.
Dust like fairies dance in the window, in the sunlight with rays that turn the deep, stained oak wood floors into amber. Sun that bounces off the mirror, opaque from layers of dirt and images that won’t wipe off, no matter where I stand in front of it. I look at my reflection, and despite how hard I try, I only see some stranger in it.
Who is this woman in a button-up shirt and blue cardigan? In these faded jeans that don’t fit right and come too high up my waist to even be considered attractive?
Sometimes the truth isn’t what you see, Mary told me once.
She tells it to me in front of this mirror, wearing a light pink dress, hot and big. I wear a bright teal something – can’t even justify it now – with my hair all tossed and fluffy, put together with some outlandish bow in the same ridiculous color. She tells me as I look myself up and down, say something about how I hate my face, the way I look. My face is too round, I say. She tells me no, that I’m beautiful and that I’m just looking all wrong.
Anna? Anna!
I am snapped back to reality.
Help me with these boxes, Alice says. They’re heavy.
My eyes close themselves before they can wander to that forbidden spot, but it burns through my lids, branded into my mind. Images that won’t wipe off, of limbs limp and fingers interlaced with cold metal.
Images of awkward family gatherings as strangers with features that I’ve seen in the mirror tell me sorry, shake my hand and hug me. The worst is when they hug me. They hold you real tight, put their cheek on your shoulder and rub your back. I try to force a smile, even though they can’t see me, and my eyes fixate on the big, wooden box framed with flowers and banners that read Condolences.
Then there’s that picture of Mary, smiling with her perfect long, dark hair and those green eyes. And while everything else I feel might be pretend, that picture can’t be. Not until I remember why it’s there and why I’m there, greeting strangers. Only then do I begin to wonder.
[[Inspired by this song.]]
Photo #7
I woke up in my chair like a rush of water. I felt someone had pushed me under and I had far too quickly emerged, jerking forward and gasping for air.
In-Class Writing 2.15.2011
[Note: First sentence of this piece was the prompt, provided by the instructor. It is the one that begins, “Mom says it happens…”]
Mom says it happens to everybody, but I think she’s just trying to make me feel normal. I highly doubt that every other kid’s parents ask them to stay in on a Friday night just because they had another fight. It’s always like this. They screw up, and I have to pay for their mistake.
And frankly, after Dad’s last two affairs, I don’t give a shit anymore. I am out of here next year. I got into Northwestern. They should at least be glad of that. I should be able to go out because of that at least.
Should, could and would - no, will - are different animals, though. And I am going out tonight.
Hell yeah I put on my jacket and go for the front door. I am walking out right in front of her. She and Dad got into a fight, not me. No more.
“Nick, I told you that you can’t go out tonight,” she calls from the sofa.
“Okay.”
I reach for the door knob.
“Did you hear me?”
“Yes, Mom.”
“I said: You can’t go out.”
“Yes, Mother.”
I open the door.
“And your’e going to do it anyway?”
I look her straight in the eye.
“Yup.”
“Nick, your father and I had a very serious - ” she paused, “discussion tonight. I don’t think you should go out.”
“I don’t care. I am not staying in just because you two can’t get your shit together.”
I find I am yelling.
She stares back at me. I think she’s shocked.
“You know, this happens to everyone, parents fighting.”
“You just tell yourself that to make yourself feel normal.”
I leave.
Creative Writing Homework 2.15.2011
Claudia stepped off the metro train and walked briskly to the escalator. It was one of the longer ones.
She tilted her head back to stare up into the gaping patch of brightness above her. She felt herself move toward it, slowly and without any effort from her body. Rows of lights striated forward into the space beyond, and she felt the earth tilt as her eyes followed the brushed metal sleekness of the moving machine. She felt like an astronaut, going into outer space at some glacial speed. This was truly the future.
Midway through the journey between the troglodyte land of the trains and the stars, Claudia turned her head with a dizzying courage. She was no wife of Lot, but behind her trailed the little beacons once more, transformed from guiding lights to hellish fires as the escalator sides lost their brightness and traded it for dark ombre.
Once more, planes shifted, and Claudia felt herself fall. She gripped the rubber handles, reassuring herself that she would not slip. Her eyes darted from the sidewalls back down into the earth, into hell. The darkness and its depths seemed an infinite space away, some Hades where people were born to make the same journey as she, emerging slowly from its womb into –
She turned back forward again to see the mechanical future only to find herself at the landing of the escalator. Her arms hugged her sides and her shoulders tensed as the harsh winter wind whipped at her and her hair. She braced herself and walked against it towards the bus stop, continuing the rest of her morning commute.
[Prompt: Write a scene in a setting that is likely to be quite familiar to your readers (supermarket, dorm, classroom, movie theater, etc.) but that is unfamiliar, strange, outlandish, or outrageous to the central character. Let us feel the strangeness through the character’s eyes.]
Creative Writing Homework 1.25.2011
By the time he entered the room, Tess was already awake. She drew her knees towards her chest, stopping as they made a right angle with her body, lined up with her waist. She pulled the white sheets up to her neck, tugging it tightly against her chest and torso like a body bag, wishing she could bring it over her head and lose herself in its whiteness.
Did you sleep well? he asked her, leaning over her lump as he took a sip of coffee and set it back down.
Yes, Tess nodded softly, staring out the apartment window into the bright morning light, at the windows across the street, mirroring back the man’s window. She wondered if she could see herself if she stared long enough, stared hard through the glass and air, if she would find another Tess looking back at her with all the self-same features but mirrored, in opposition, reversed.
Good, he said, nuzzling his closely shaved beard against her back, sniffing her hair while he climbed back under the sheets, peeling them away from Tess’s body. (She shivered.) He settled his rough cheek on her shoulder, and told her, I’m really glad you came. I’m glad you – you know, spent the night.
She sensed him smiling.
Yeah. I am, too.
Would the other Tess say the same thing? she wondered. The other Tess, with her opposite face – maybe what was inside of her was opposite, too. That other Tess, made up of only image, she would be a truer being with no false interiors, only the outside, reflecting it back again and again and meaning it.
Mmmm, good, he replied as he put his arm around her waist and drew her into him and then said, It’s because I like you Tess.
That’s nice –
she paused –
I like you, too.
She felt the man’s face spill into a grin against her shoulder blade, his arm squeeze against her skin, her insides, then his lips as he kissed the back of her neck and settled his cheek back against it with a comfortable sigh.
Tess’s face remained unchanged. She closed her eyes, and the window disappeared.
[Prompt for my Creative Writing Class: Write a scene in which a character speaks politely or enthusiastically but whose thoughts run in contradictions.]
Photo #6
To Samuel Duckett, conversation was a fine art. He believed in the weight and beauty of words, in the power of speech. Silence was the canvas, a blank space. Words were the carefully chosen marks, a minimalist painting in which each sound gained all the more importance against the background of soundlessness.
Now, this is not to say that he spoke little, but rather that Duckett was a man of purpose, of practicality, versed in the economics of verbal poetry.
Photo #5
Walking down the street with music in your ears, it’s a little like being underwater. That’s probably why they call it “swimming in a crowd.” The sounds of people walking, talking, cars driving and doors opening; they become one huge muffled, mass. Lost inside your own thoughts, you see the colors and shapes of these massive buildings and the half-formed, blurry faces of strangers, wavering as you walk past them.
(Sorry about the lack of posts the past two days to anyone who cares. Final projects kicked my ass.)
Photo #4
Though not too big, it was a sizable enough room. The two large windows looked across the street at more of their kind as light flooded in from the sky. On the left wall were two small tungsten lamps that painted orange splotches on the bumpy, white ceiling, grayed with dust and age. To the opposite far side, the ceiling met the wall at the edge, drawn straight down as though with a pencil, the shadow seemingly smudges from the careless artist as they gradated back into the pale center.
Photo #3
She was an emperor; men were conquered where she sent her arms. She was Khan, and her lust for power, her lust was a maddening, expanding throne built on their bodies.
Photo #2
He woke up encased in her bed. In the half-light, half-awakening, he pulled his nose to the sheets and inhaled deeply.
It smelled like pine, and he felt a tingle up his spine and the prickle of the green needles tickle and dance down his skin and through his body. He thought of her softly, but her image receded as the fantastical and mythic beasts of Dream pawed at his mind.
And he wilted and succumbed, slumbering in a cocoon of distraction made with her sheets.
She came back in, hearing his deliberate shuffling; disappointed to find his closed eyes and heavy breathing.
