House
You received it as a gift—a ceramic house to set on your mantle or on a shelf or on a table. You hold the house in the palm of your hand—a triangle roof and a square base. No windows. No doors. Just the shape. Simple. The house a child would draw if you said, “Draw a house.” Or the house in a dream with no entrance and no exit. You’re just suddenly there. In the box of it, or you’re looking at it from a distance. Or there it is in a coloring book. You color it blue or brown. Maybe you add windows and doors. Even a dormer. And then the house starts getting complicated, and you can no longer hold it in your hand or remember your childhood or even dream it. Suddenly the house becomes a cape or a colonial or a bungalow. And there are too many words to remember, and too many memories to hold onto, and too much loss. The world is no longer the world you knew, and houses stretch for miles: triangles atop boxes. And you want to hold one in your hand. More than anything, you want to hold a house in your hand. And you reach out for one, but it stays just beyond your grasp. Never simple anymore. It is not the house in the coloring book. It is instead a structure full of rooms and doorways and hallways. The hallways are the hardest. They are narrow and long. You walk down one and push open a door. You hear the creak of its hinges and swear that one day you will oil them. You look inside the room, and maybe there’s a bed and a desk. A lamp sits on a table beside the bed. Maybe it is lit. Maybe a book waits by the lamp. Maybe a person, someone you love, holds the book. And that is familiar. And you leave the hallway and walk toward the familiar. Or you close that door and continue down the hallway and open another door. Its hinges do not creak, and the room behind the door looks like no room you’ve ever seen. All the windows on all the walls are wide open. Wind blows curtains up like wings. The wind takes you, and suddenly you are out the window and flying. You have wings. And nothing is familiar save for the houses below you—so far away you can only see their shapes—triangles and boxes. You want to hold one in your hand.
Tagged with: fairy tale, fiction, imagination, narrative, words
Got It
“I think I got mine,” Jamie said.
“Got your what?” Opal asked.
Tagged with: fiction, narrative, opal, story
Door
The back door would not open. She stood on the inside turning the knob, pulling on the door. It would not open.
So she called a man who knows about doors. He came over and looked at it.
Tagged with: fiction, narrative, story
Catch
Dear Readers,
Here’s another Opal story. I’m still exploring her character. My friend Rita’s new play, which features the character of Death, influenced this piece.
Opal watched from inside looking out. Droplets hung in beads on the window pane. Rain flooded the street in front of her house and soon became a brown river rushing down the pavement, shiny under the cloudy sky.
Tagged with: fiction, moments, narrative, opal, story
The Gray Bird
Readers,
This story was inspired by a baby cat bird that nested in my back yard blueberry bush. I had never heard of cat birds until this little guy showed up in my life.
—Jan
Along one path in the woods, the girl tripped over a tree’s root. She fell onto the dirt, and her hands caught her. Shaken by the fall, she stayed seated on the packed ground in the shade of the tree that tripped her. She scooted back and leaned on its trunk. She looked up at the leaves—autumn red and ready to drop. In fact, some of those leaves scattered around her on the cool earth.
Tagged with: connection, discovery, fiction, narrative, story
Time Out
Hello, Readers—
I just got the final edits for The Side Door, and they are going to keep me busy for the next several weeks. As a result, I will not be posting Opal stories for a while, but she will be back; I promise. Her story continues to unfold.
Tagged with: fiction, marketing
Lonely
Aunt Frances appeared to retreat deep into the couch, the TV providing the only light in the room. Opal sighed. She put her hand on Aunt Frances’ arm. But Aunt Frances kept her eyes on the TV. Blank eyes. They were not really looking at anything. Or maybe, Opal thought, they were looking inside instead of out.
It used to be that Aunt Frances’ spells only lasted a day or so and then she would be back to her old self—wanting to plan hikes and camp outs and movie dates. But lately, the spells lasted longer than her good days, and Opal had taken on the duties of housecleaning, answering the phone, and cooking dinner.
Tagged with: fiction, narrative, opal, story
Leaves
The little girl kicked at the leaves in the gutter. All the way down the street and back up the other side, she waded through the stream of orange, red, and yellow. She liked how the leaves cracked and rattled. She liked how, when the wind blew, they jumped off the ground in groups, swirling and dancing, finally landing back on the street. One or two still clung to branches, as if they might escape their fate below.
Soon the neighbors would pile their leaves into bags and send them away somewhere. The little girl hated when that happened. The colors looked like jewels on the ground and in the sky. She wanted them to stay forever.
Tagged with: discovery, fiction, imagination, story
Jacket
Loretta saw the jacket draped over the park bench. It was on her usual route from Kline Avenue down Bailey Road and then in through the gates of Clem Park and onto the dirt path that led through the hemlock grove. She looked around. Surely the jacket’s owner had just stepped away, left it there temporarily. But the dirt path showed no evidence of recent activity. Curious, she reached for the jacket, lifted it and held it out, as if she were in a shop, deciding. She liked what she saw: soft blue cotton, silver buttons, white thread on the seams and edges. She slipped it on. Just then, clouds rolled in, and the air changed. The hemlocks groaned in the wind. Loretta buttoned the jacket and pulled up the collar. Grateful for its warmth, she slipped her hands into the soft pockets, and her fingers happened upon a scrap of paper. She pulled it out—just a torn corner with the handwritten word, “Yours,” as if it were the end of a letter—the sign-off before a signature, “Yours,”—the comma hung there, as if waiting. Waiting. She searched through the pockets, hoping for more evidence, something. But that was all—the ragged edge, a piece of some letter—a story she would never know. The wind picked up. The hemlocks swayed, their tips reaching, brushing against the moving clouds. She read the word one last time, “Yours,”—and then let the scrap of paper loose on the wind.
Tagged with: discovery, fiction, narrative, story, words
Fat Nana
He heard some woman humming in another room. That’s how he got to telling me about Fat Nana. He remembered how she enveloped him in her big arms and pulled him up into her ample lap.
“She hummed—all the time she hummed,” he remembered.
Tagged with: fiction, narrative, story, words
Watercolor 2
It was a painting of a house in the woods. Its windows reflected in the water. There was a lake there, and in the distance, this white glow—light coming in through the trees. Except for that one spot of white, the painting was all blues and greens and yellows and oranges. Even though it was done in watercolor, it didn’t seem like it. It wasn’t watery at all. I was in this gallery off some side street just, you know, staring into this painting like I could go there. Really go there. I’m telling you, it’s the kind of place you want to go. I mean, I can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t want to go there. So peaceful—all that reflection in the lake makes you wonder—makes you want to go deep, makes you think there is some actual depth to reach. Not like real life where the sights are grainy and gray, where most stuff is right there on the surface: subways and public bathrooms and graffiti on mailboxes—makes you want to find a place to wash your hands. Not so in that painting. I mean it. I’m not sure you’d ever need to wash your hands there. Well, maybe if you planted something in the dirt. But that’s clean dirt. You stand there looking at a painting long enough, you start to believe in it. Not only that, you start to lose your hold on what’s the difference. Like what’s the difference between that image—watercolor on paper—and the half moon hanging above the city? You can see it if you go outside and look up. C’mon, maybe the moon is watercolor on paper, too. Probably not, but you could make up a story about it.
Tagged with: connection, fiction, narrative, painting
Teeth
Birdy had all of her teeth until one day the dentist said he would have to pull that back molar out. So that’s what he did. “Can I have it?” Birdy slurred through numb lips. “Really?” the dentist replied. “You want this?” The dentist held it up between tongs—bloody roots and all. Birdy nodded. So the dentist cleaned it up and offered it to Birdy. “Can you drill a hole in it for me?” she asked. The dentist did that, too. Birdy put the tooth on a string and hung it around her neck. Birdy’s mother, a church going woman, could barely stand the sight of a tooth dangling on her daughter’s chest. “What?” her mother said. “Are you a pagan now?” Birdy considered the question. She considered hiding the tooth beneath her t-shirt. After all, she had been brought up to hide stuff. It’s what people did: Play your cards close to your chest. Don’t show them how you really feel. These were the mottos of Birdy’s world. And now this tooth hung there for everyone and her mother to see. The thought made Birdy smile, her first real, true smile. All of her teeth were showing. Every last one.
Tagged with: fiction, imagination, narrative, words
Hole
The idea occurred to Bob at work while he sat at his desk. Out the office window, he noticed a shadow on the sidewalk. The shadow made it seem as if the cement had a gaping hole in it. And for the first time in a long time, Bob felt a sense of hope—of anticipation even. Even when the light changed, and the hole that was not really a hole vanished, Bob could not quit thinking about it.
When he got home, he found his shovel and went out to the front yard to dig. When he was done digging his hole, he sat on his porch and looked out at his handiwork. He still had dirt under his fingernails and blisters on his hands from shoveling. It was all very satisfying.
Tagged with: fiction, narrative, story
Rain
It rained. It rained and rained. It rained so hard the windows cried. It rained so hard the roof thundered. It rained for so many days the girl no long believed in the sun, no longer believed in the light. The rain came down so hard, it knocked leaves off of trees. It splattered dirt out of flowerbeds. It even took blooms off of branches, leaving red and yellow memories on the slick pavement.
And so she went out into it. All around her people scurried for doorways and bus stops. Some held umbrellas turned inside out in the wind. Some held newspapers over their heads. But she did none of these things. Instead, she stood perfectly still. She waited while the water soaked her clothes, her hair, her skin. She felt the weight of all that water, as if she might become rooted there on that city street.
Tagged with: connection, discovery, fiction, imagination, story
Passageway
“The brain has corridors”
—Emily Dickinson
She moved from street to street, from building to building, from floor to floor. She had done this for more years than she cared to count. In fact, she had grown tired of counting: one year became five became fifteen and twenty as fast as fists could unfold. The passage of time exhausted her, felt like running in place, eyes blinking, clouds covering the sun.
Tagged with: audience, discovery, fiction, imagination, narrative, story, words
Enough
“You are not enough.”
She said it out loud.
Tagged with: fiction, imagination, moments, narrative, poem
Lamp
“Stay there, until you see
You are gazing at the Light
With its own ageless eyes.”
—Rumi
She was cleaning out the attic when she found the lamp, its blue ceramic base chipped, its white shade yellowed with age. All morning she had been tossing old clothes and dishes: uncluttering her life.
Tagged with: fiction, moments, story
Bones
All winter long she watched the same tree. She could see it out her back window, its branches stark and spare. A cup of coffee warmed her hands as she watched the birds perch and chatter to the gray sky. She made a game of counting them and waiting as they flew off one by one to some other tree in some other neighborhood where someone else in some other house could see them framed through a window. Sometimes the tree limbs reminded her of bones, as if the tree were a skeleton in the February air.
One day, she sat at her usual spot and forgot to look out. Another day happened like that. She looked down instead—at a crossword, at an article, at a spill on the counter that needed her attention. Until a morning when the light came in just so, and she finally looked out. The bones had gone. Green leaves crowded the sky. She could barely see the birds through all that green. She could hear them though—singing their spring songs.
Tagged with: fiction, moments, story
Waiting
The little girl sat on the stoop and looked out across the flat land to the place where the sun sat half circle on the horizon. She waited. She wanted to feel the earth turn.
She heard yesterday that the sun did not really rise in the sky. “The sun neither rises nor sets,” her teacher said. “It stays still, and the earth rolls around it.”
Tagged with: fiction, imagination, story, struggle, truth
Wish
It was enough to make her crazy—the constant yearning for something she could not name. She saw glimpses of it—in the smile of a new friend, in the tree limbs scraping the sky, in the lone crocus on her lawn—glimpses that just made her want it more.
The wind picked up, and the clouds crawled in. And when the rain began, she listened to its steady beat on the roof. She watched it cry down the windowpanes. She imagined herself on an old raft, a dog at her side, letting the water take her down the river of her street and out into some new adventure.
Tagged with: connection, fiction, imagination, story, why write, words
Watercolor
The man sits on the subway. His elbow rests on the small ridge of window. His chin rests on his hand. Outside his window, tunnel gray and underground blurs rush by. He is Watercolor on Newsprint, 1962. I stand in a gallery watching him through a wooden frame; he is my window. I feel as if I know him—his tan coat, his brown boots, his deep eyes resting and open.
I leave the gallery. I step out onto wet pavement. I walk through the puzzle of parked cars. My ears fill with horns and the steady swish of tires on slick roads. I walk down stairs and under the city. I wait for the E Train, and when it comes, the doors slap open. I feel the breeze and bump of other riders—the dance of step off, step on. I find a seat. My elbow finds its place. My face leans into my hand. Outside is tunnel gray—underground blurs rush by. I am watercolor. I am fading.
Tagged with: fiction, imagination, painting, story, struggle
Shoes
Once there was a girl who lived with her stepfather in a house on the edge of the wood. “Your mother has left us both alone. It is your fault she is gone,” the stepfather told the girl. On a table next to the girl’s bed sat a lamp in the shape of a tree with roots for legs and a leaf-painted shade. The girl had a small memory of her mother giving her the tree-lamp. So at night before sleeping, the girl talked to the lamp: “You are my light. Please protect me.”
One day on her way home from school, the girl stopped by the stream that ran by the path. The sun shone down through tree limbs, and the stream called out to the girl. So the girl took off her shoes and waded in. The sky grew dark, and the girl, forgetting her shoes, ran home.
Tagged with: fairy tale, fiction, story
Eyes
“What can I do for you?” The doctor rolled his chair so that he sat facing me.
“My eyes,” I said. “They hurt.”
Tagged with: construct, fiction, narrative, story
Heart
I heard the tiniest of heartbeats. Ba-dump. Ba-dump. It wasn’t a Tell-Tale heartbeat, nothing frightening like that. This heartbeat had a soothing rhythm. From what I could tell, the beat came from the trunk of an old tree just off the path where I had been walking. I approached the trunk and put my ear up to its grooves. I listened. No heartbeat. I waited, and then I heard it again—faint, in the distance. A little faster now. Badumpbadumpbadump. I followed the sound and ended up at another tree—this one full of crows and their caw caw cawing. “Shhhh,” I called out. “I am listening for a heart.” One of the crows looked down at me and laughed, or that’s how I perceived it. The crows flew off one by one, and I waited for the heartbeat. When it finally started up again, it seemed to be coming from underneath the snow. So I dug down with my mittened hands. No heart. I sat completely still. Me. The snow. The tree. The crows cawing in the distance. And then I heard it again. But this time, I did not go searching. I sat still. I did nothing. I just listened.
Tagged with: connection, fiction, imagination, story, struggle, words
Jules reached inside for a quarter or a tissue or a chapstick. Anything. Her pockets were empty. Not even a lucky rock. As a rule, Jules never left home with empty pockets. It was a thing she had. Pockets were meant to hold stuff. To make up for their emptiness, she put her hands there. A passerby kept his head down, his own hands lost inside his overcoat. In fact, all the passersby, men and women, looked just the same: sad, drawn, a bit lost. Jules could barely stand the gloom of it all—the gray sidewalk, the overcast sky, the cold air. Her empty pockets seemed even emptier. And so she dug deeper and deeper. She wanted to find something—anything. And finally, there it was, in the deepest recess of her pocket: a clear marble, the tiniest of crystal balls. Jules stood there, in the middle of the crowded city sidewalk and held the transparent orb in the palm of her hand. And people stopped to see what was there, what might be in store, what the future might hold. People needed something, however small, that was clear and round and easy to carry. Something to keep forever in their pockets.
Tagged with: center, discovery, fairy tale, fiction, imagination, narrative, story, words
In the TV Light
The day had been long. Grace entered the dark kitchen looking for food. She found a box of cereal and poured some into a bowl. She carried the bowl, some milk, and a spoon with her to the couch where she settled in amongst the pillows. She aimed the remote at the TV, turned it on, then poured some milk into her bowl, watching the cereal change as she did. The TV lit the dark room, and Grace looked up to see a teenage girl lying in a hospital bed—her face wounded and distorted. An interviewer stood over her. Apparently they were in Afghanistan. The interviewer said, “Why do you think the men poured on acid on you?” The teenage girl with the damaged face said simply, “They do not want girls to go to school.” Grace put her cereal bowl down on the coffee table. She leaned into the TV light. The girl with the damaged face looked right at Grace. It seemed that way. It really did. And then the light changed. The image switched to a commercial about some man throwing a crystal ball at a vending machine. When the vending machine broke open, the man laughed and laughed and laughed. He laughed so loud that Grace had to turn down the volume. The man who threw the crystal ball laughed right at Grace. It seemed that way. Grace switched channels hoping to find the teenage girl who just wanted an education. But Grace could not find her anywhere.
Tagged with: fiction, moments, story
Hope
The snow fell. It fell and fell. It fell so fast the air was white. It fell so deep, the ground was gone. There was only snow. The little girl stepped out onto what used to be her sidewalk, and she sunk. She sunk all the way up to the tops of her legs. She thought, “If this keeps up, I will be swallowed whole.” And so she shoveled through the night to make a path so that she could walk from here to there. And in the morning light she turned to see her walkway. But there was no walkway. The falling snow had covered whatever work she had done. She planted her shovel into a drift and leaned on its handle. She looked toward the sky, as if some answer waited there. But she could not see the sky through the snow. She opened her mouth to speak, and she saw her breath float out and disappear into the white expanse. That’s when she knew. And so she turned and shoveled her way back through the fresh-fallen snow. It was all she could do—to create the ground of each new step.
Tagged with: construct, discovery, fiction, learning, words
Shadows
She has been thinking about shadows lately—how they change daily, depending on the light—how they offer a weird kind of mirror, a reflection: so there’s a tree silhouetted on the side of a house, a bird in flight flat out on the pavement. That’s the thing about shadows—they don’t make sense. But they do. You know, the bird isn’t really flying on the ground, and the tree isn’t really on the side of the house. But when she studied the shadows, they seemed real enough. And that got her thinking: maybe we had it all backwards—like the shadow is the bird. The shadow is the tree. If that were the case, would everything else be illusion? The question haunted her, so she spent a whole day following her shadow—letting it be her guide. She had to trust that her shadow knew where to go and when. And of course it did; the shadow simply listened to the light. It was that simple. The whole experience calmed her down considerably.
Tagged with: connection, fiction, story, truth
Blizzard Dream
The blizzard wind whipped swirls around the black mouse as it scurried atop the snow, finally slipping under the tiny crack at the base of a garage door. “Great,” Lou thought as she shoveled more snow off the driveway, “Now it will find its way into the house.” And that night—New Year’s Eve night—Lou dreamed of that black mouse, curled up and sleeping on a towel in the entryway—a towel she had put down to protect the wood floor from her snowy boots. In the dream, the mouse purred. And when the mouse awoke, it stood and stretched like a dog. Lou watched it from some distance. Was she even in the dream? Or was she the mouse? Dreams happened like that. And then she woke up—in the dream or from it—she wasn’t sure. Dreams happened like that, too. On New Year’s Day, she could not stop thinking about the mouse—black against the white snow—anxious to find shelter. The wind died down, and tree limbs brushed lightly against the windows. She closed her eyes and saw the mouse there—just behind her lids. “It has gone and crawled inside me,” she said aloud, not at all startled by the thought.
Tagged with: fiction, story, words
Solstice
“I feel completely unfulfilled.” Bea lifted her cup of tea, took a sip, and put it back down on top of the newspaper she was reading.
“Is there something in the paper that made you say that?” Lindsay asked.
Tagged with: fiction, moments, narrative
Prayer
It was a cold and frosty morning. The boy could see his breath. Actually see it! “Look at that,” he said and blew again. His mother reached out to grab his arm—there was traffic, after all—and the streetlight was about to change.
“Hey!” he yelled. “You put your hand right in my breath?”
Tagged with: connection, exercises, fiction, narrative, story, words
Blue Gray
The day was cold. Too cold for early December. Her shoulders tensed in the air, and she hated that bulky jacket—the way it took over and became her. She looked up at the trees, completely bare now. The sky shone through their gray branches, a deeper shade of the same color. Even the asphalt matched the sky. She smiled to herself. “I am walking through a black and white photograph—even my hair and coat are gray. My corduroys are gray. It is truly a gray day.” And then she heard the wings before she saw them—almost like breath on the sky. From the sound of it, she knew the bird was large. So she expected a crow, or by some wonderful chance—a red tailed hawk. But there, against the overcast sky, a blue heron appeared—almost dinosaur-like in the cold December light. The heron moved in slow motion flight. She saw its yellow eyes, its fish-shaped throat, close enough to touch, but not really. Its colors blended right into the day, and she was happier than she began, not near as cold and maybe even ready for winter. As if anyone is ever truly ready for that.
Tagged with: center, fiction, story, words
Into the sun
On Friday, I flew from Boston to Kansas City. Then I climbed into a rented car and drove five hours west—into the sunset—toward Hastings, Nebraska.
Destination: my niece’s wedding.