Washington Street
You are eight years old and already lonely. You measure your walk home from school by sidewalk squares. Your feet have memorized the path. You are walking to the house on Washington Street where the steps to the porch are steep. Your mother greets you at the door, her face as familiar as wind.
Now, years later, you look at a photograph of her from that time; her brown eyes smile, her dark hair pulled back from her luminous face. You marvel at her beauty, showing the photograph to friends—anyone who will look: “See. See my mother. This is what she looked like then”—as if she is someone different, someone you don’t remember, someone you never saw before.
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
Train
Leaves glowed red and yellow under the morning sun. She could hear strains of Billie Holiday in her head—that unmistakable voice. “Body and Soul”—that was the tune. Other commuter’s walked the same path to the same train, but they all had different destinations: one train to many places. They moved through the turnstiles—all together and so separate, and then down the stairs to the tracks. Crisp air. Autumn air. City air. Soon enough, she felt the familiar rumble of wheels as the train approached. All the commuters lined up, positioning themselves, waiting for the doors to slap open and closed long enough to admit them. She stepped onto the first car and sat on the long bench-like seat just under the windows. The train started up again, and she watched the blur of buildings, the sun lit brick, go by. On the wall of the train posters advertised: attend this college, watch this show. One poster displayed an old photo of the Beatles—young and so full of possibility. Of the four of them, George stood out the most—his face shining. The train slowed toward its next stop. She looked out to the buildings and saw the graffiti: “There is no god” and “The world ends now.” The train stopped. Its doors slapped open and closed. A few stepped off, and a few stepped on. And then the rumble of wheels again, the blur of buildings. She looked into George Harrison’s eyes.
“Chant with me,” he seemed to say. “Bodyandsoulbodyandsoulbodyandsoul.”
Don't Drive Into Water
She rounded the curve and saw that water covered the road ahead. Her father always told her, “Don’t drive into water.” At the time, it had seemed too obvious, “Of course I won’t drive into water. Who would drive into water?” But at that moment, staring at the highway, there was no way to tell how deep it was. Should she risk it? This was the only route she knew, and to turn back now would mean returning to where she had started. And then what? She moved her foot from the brake to the gas pedal, but her father’s voice came through again, “Don’t drive into water”—almost as if he sat next to her, in the passenger seat. His voice was that clear. She looked to her right, close to believing he would be there. Of course he wasn’t. She had just that morning stood at his closet staring at his shirts hanging there. They made her cry, as if they had life, as if the sleeves would rise up and wrap her into the kind of hug only he could give. “Don’t drive into water”—there was that voice again. His unmistakable cadence. “No more crying, damn it,” she said aloud, even as the tears welled up. She stared ahead at the road, her windshield wipers clacking, the rain steady and relentless. She should listen to her father; she knew that. But in that instant of rain and clouds and memory, she hit the gas. She drove right into the water. She heard its swoosh under her tires, felt the pull of its power underneath the car. Through it all, the tires stayed on the road. The car made it to the other side, where she could see the pavement and the yellow line, where she could keep going to God knows where now that the world had changed forever.
Tagged with: moments, narrative, story
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
Landscape
She watched from her window as the snow fell. Actually, it flew that day. The wind blew flakes sideways and upside down until everything was covered—even fences and signs and windows. And when she stepped outside and into it, she marveled at just how much the landscape had changed. Curbs were now huge mounds of plowed snow. Mountains, really. Trees and bushes were now white creatures, bent low and heavy. There were no longer streets or sidewalks—the world had gone white and vast and pathless. She looked down and noticed that her feet with their red boots had all but disappeared in the deep snow—her red hat and mittens the only color for as far as she could see. Gray sky matched gray trunks and blended into the deep, snowy ground. She looked for the horizon, but it did not exist. She dug her woolen hands into the snow and out of it molded a ball. She held the ball in the palm of her red mitten, and then she laid it on a drift. It should have disappeared, white upon white, but instead it glittered. The snowball glowed back at her, full of promise or loss—a crystal ball waiting out the storm.
Tagged with: narrative, story, tale, words
Smart
Here’s a little piece I extracted and revised from something I was working on years ago—a piece of another novel.
They called her Four-Eyes. She didn’t care for the name; in fact, had another perfectly good one that her parents had given her. Still, her peers insisted on calling her Four-Eyes. The girl, almost blind from birth, had to wear corrective lenses so thick they made her eyes appear to throb behind them. It didn’t help matters that she was fat, that her parents were fat, and that they all lived on what was considered Willowood’s wrong side of the tracks.
Tagged with: imagination, narrative, story
Gray
The bare trees covered the hillside, and from a distance, it looked as if the hill was covered in fur. Funny that way—how hard branches soften. She drove a stretch of Vermont highway that even in the fall can ice over in spots. Her dog Gray slept beside her in the passenger seat. He curled up face to tail, and occasionally she laid her hand on his belly just to feel the slow rise and fall of his breath. She pulled the car off an exit and made her way down a back road and then to a dirt road. The tires hit ruts and bumps. Gray woke up then, propped himself on his hind legs, and looked out the window.
“Wanna take a walk?” she asked.
Tagged with: narrative, story, tale, words
Alone
Opal looked out the window. A gray overcast filled the sky. Leaves hung on trees—orange, yellow, red. She watched one fall. It twirled and almost seemed to shine against the dark day.
She put on her red jacket and her brown shoes.
Tagged with: narrative, opal, story, tale, words
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
Darkness
Readers, I’m trying a new approach to the Opal stories. Instead of writing in sequence, I’m just letting myself discover this character in various circumstances. I gave myself the exercise of putting Opal into a situation and seeing how she handled it. This is what developed from that.
Opal was a afraid of the dark—especially Aunt Frances’ cellar.
Tagged with: imagination, narrative, opal, tale
Faith
For years Faith had felt thunder inside her—a storm waiting to break. It was all so uncomfortable and exhausting, but no one had ever taken it seriously.
Until one day when Dr. Noah examined her. “Looks like we’ll have to open you up.”
Tagged with: moments, narrative, story
Gizmo
Readers,
I know I usually post fiction, but I recently wrote this essay about my dog Gizmo, who died last week. He was such a constant companion, so I wanted to honor him here.
Gizmo
Gizmo’s water and food bowls sat atop a doggie placemat, a black one with a white paw decorating its left bottom corner. Gizmo knew that placemat was his dining room, situated close to our own table and right next to the back door. When we lifted it up yesterday, we noticed the rectangular shape of the mat remained; that portion of the cork tile was decidedly darker than the rest of the floor—a permanent tattoo.