Holy moley. A whole year? Really? I've finally come back around to fixing the flagrantly bad chapter one of the dread fic Entropy.
Reccomended reading before going forward: The Prologue
Enjoy!
Chapter 1
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Kakashi waited outside the Hokage's office. He knew exactly why he was here, but that didn't stop his stomach from churning unpleasantly. He had doubts and misgivings about all this. Could he really accomplish what the Hokage had set him to do? He forced his body to relax, made his hands hold onto the paperwork securely but without crumpling it. As he did with most quiet moments these days, Kakashi ruminated.
It was an unspoken rule not to mention the fact that Sasuke was crazy. True, he’d never been right in the entire time team seven had known him, but he had become decidedly worse after receiving Orochimaru's tutelage. Killing his brother had been the last straw.
But, while the ninja of the village were careful not to say anything in front of Naruto or Sakura, they had no such compunctions about Kakashi. Kakashi wondered why this didn’t apply to him. Perhaps because he had been an instructor and not a classmate? Maybe everyone thought Sasuke and he had not been close, despite months of group training and months of one-on-one and that middle-of-the-night intervention that had so miserably failed. Kakashi sighed.
He knew he shouldn’t blame himself entirely. After all, he had had a few months to try and affect the patterns of years’ worth of obsession in a particularly stubborn and willful not-quite teenager. Even then Sasuke had looked like he was only just stopping himself from imploding with hate and anger and despair. He’d been so feral the night Kakashi had tried to intervene, so violent and cruel.
Kakashi smoothed the papers in his hands. He corrected himself. No. Not cruel. But unthinking and uncaring beneath the widespread branches of the tree. If he’d had wings then, no doubt he would have flown off on the wild winds that had stripped the leaves off twigs and frothed the water of the river into great sprays.
Kakashi had failed him, no matter that Sasuke was as flat and dead as the moon. He hashed and rehashed the events, thinking that there could have been some way he could have done more. Kakashi's heart twisted deep in his chest. He felt responsibility for everything Sasuke had done after that, could see the lack of his influence so clearly in all the bad, wrong, and downright nonsensical events that followed Sasuke's defection.
This was why, now, years after Sasuke’s return to Konoha, Kakashi had agreed to take him on again. Sasuke’s homecoming had been no easy thing. Admittedly, he had come back to the village of his own will. It was pure bad luck that he had come to destroy it, but it was the thought that counted, right? He cared enough about it to want it wiped off the face of the planet, at least.
It had been obvious to Kakashi then--and was still plain to him now--that Sasuke had come completely unscrewed. It showed in his commanding, too. He had been too focused on destroying the village and not enough on things like defense…or basic tactics. He hadn’t seemed to care if his people got taken down, as long as he had more time to cause as much destruction as he could. Sasuke had been bent on personally taking out each and every house, building, or wall of mortared stone.
Kakashi remembered that a good third of the village had been flattened by enormous battling summons, and most of what remained had been scorched by Sasuke’s hard-won Amaterasu. The academy was reduced to rubble. Many good ninja had died, not the least of whom was Tsunade. To be more accurate, she didn’t actually die during the battle but rather some days afterward from chakra exhaustion from both the fighting and the healing afterward. Tsunade had spent her last hours dictating village business from her bed. One of her final orders as Hokage was to send Naruto out as a diplomatic envoy.
So, while Sasuke had spent the first few weeks after the destruction of Konoha with Ibiki at the ANBU headquarters, Naruto had been fulfilling Tsunade's request. Kakashi scratched his head, trying to remember. Naruto had spent a year--or was it two?--as a diplomat, first to Suna and then on an as-needed basis to less friendly countries. Although he lacked a certain polish, he was exceptionally good with people. It also didn’t hurt that he had, by then, subsumed all the Kyuubi’s power and could (though he never did) flatten a country with that massive chakra reserve.
During Sasuke's debriefing and Naruto's diplomatic dispatch, a secondary ninja council had taken over as a temporary measure while the village rebuilt and took stock and tried to decide who would be Hokage next. Shizune had taken the lead on it for a time, before declaring that the hospital needed her more. Ibiki was second choice, but he declined before they could officially elect him. He much preferred the shadows to the limelight. Danzou had stepped in to fill the void, which lead to Sasuke's transfer from the ANBU holding cells to the Konoha prison.
There had been months of infighting and backstabbing and dirty politics, to all of which Kakashi had been privy. Finally, the remaining jounin and ANBU who were not loyal to Danzou banded together and kicked him out of office through surprisingly democratic methods. Those same ninja had then stepped up to the responsibility in a rotational fashion. Kakashi had begged off of council duty: he knew he wasn't suited for such a tedious and thankless job, but he had couched it in terms of being more useful in the field taking missions. Thankfully, the majority had agreed with him.
When Naruto had come back from diplomatic deployment, he did some time on the council rotation. He consolidated power, won over councilors and heads of clans, and proved himself to be politically astute. Then he had taken another turn. And another. Finally, the provisional government agreed that he should become Hokage. The regular council insisted that he have advisors who were, quote, “not biased towards him in such a manner as to cause undue favor of his ideas.” This meant that Kakashi wasn’t allowed anywhere near him. (Not that Kakashi wasn't already flat-out with critical and difficult missions.) Naruto's council-appointed advisors were Ebisu, Ibiki, Shizune, and Anko. Naruto agreed that the advisors would assist him with village matters large and small, for a probationary period of six months. If he didn’t manage to run the village into the ground in that time, the council would consider allowing him complete autonomy after that.
Ibiki and Anko had bailed on him after a week. Apparently, for the first time in his life, Naruto proved in a very big and public way that he was more than competent. Shizune gave up dogging him after a month. Ebisu stuck it out the longest, but this was more for the sake of looking good in front of the council than any real desire to assist or police Naruto. By the time Ebisu quit, Naruto had firmly cemented himself in village politics and no one said anything when he announced, with great aplomb, that Ebisu would be returning to his former duties.
As soon as Naruto had officially accepted the mantle of Hokage, he got to work cleaning up the village. He had made public works one of his priorities. He wanted everyone to have a home and he wanted all the buildings and infrastructure repaired, rebuilt, or replaced. The last thing that went back up was the Academy. Once everything was rebuilt, Naruto had set his sights on the prison. It rankled him that not only did Konoha have a prison in the first place, but his former best friend was there…had been there, actually, for nearly five years. Whoops. Naruto asked Ibiki to look into it, and Ibiki did. Yes, Sasuke was still there. No, he didn’t plan on escaping. No, he wasn’t going to destroy the village anymore. Yes, yes, he was still terribly crazy. Dangerously so. Although Ibiki used the terms “unstable” and “likely to harm himself.” Sasuke wasn’t doing notably worse in prison, but he wasn’t getting better.
So Naruto, still as surprising as ever, had come up with a plan. The plan still gave Kakashi a warm feeling of pride that this young man had once been his student. Naruto had made many diplomatic overtures and promises and called in favors, and in return the prisoners were sent off to various other countries as menial hard laborers. They’d be fairly treated: properly clothed and fed, but supervised and, most importantly, they wouldn’t be in prison any more. For those prisoners who were ninja, Naruto consulted with Shizune and Sakura and the knowledge of the Kyuubi. He found ways to block their chakra. It was a hard decision to make, but Naruto couldn’t just let the prisoners loose, even in the supervised work environments, to start causing trouble again. If the former prisoners were ever rehabilitated, the blocks could, in theory, be removed.
As soon as the prisoners were taken care of, Naruto gleefully had had the prison demolished. He had vowed that he would find solutions other than incarceration for future offenders. But all this progress still left the problem of what to do with Sasuke. Naruto had been convinced that, given more time, Sasuke could recover into some semblance of normalcy. So, briefly, Sasuke had gone into the hospital. It didn’t help anything and. In fact, Sasuke had gotten a bit worse. More isolated. More withdrawn. More likely to burst out in a fit of anger.
And so Kakashi had volunteered to watch over Sasuke. Or, more accurately, Kakashi was volunteered by the Hokage. Naruto had given it a lot of thought and decided that Kakashi had a better chance than anyone else. Better chance of what he didn’t say. Survival, probably, though success was also implied. It had been made an official mission, paperwork and all. Kakashi would be taking charge of Sasuke tomorrow, which was why he was waiting to see the Hokage now. He had looked over and completed his half of the paperwork. He just needed to turn it in.
Kakashi wondered now if he should have visited Sasuke during either his prison or hospital stays. He had been busy, yes, but being busy was an excellent excuse to not do it. He hadn't always wanted to see Sasuke, for one. He didn't want to see the changes the years had wrought, didn't want to connect the genin he'd trained to whoever Sasuke had become. Of course he had doubts about this mission. But, Kakashi reminded himself, he had to do this. He would do this. He may not like it, but he could endure it.
He took a deep breath and steeled himself as the door to the Hokage's office swung open.
"Come in."
The Hokage's voice drifted into the hall.
Kakashi rose from his seat. It was unavoidable. He couldn't escape this duty now, no matter how he felt about it. He double-checked his paperwork, took another breath, and stepped into the open doorway.
---
I think it is entirely less choppy than before. I also hope that it now reads a bit less like the boring exposition it used to be. (Okay, so it's still exposition. I just hope it's more readable now!) I probably still didn't do enough to make it less boring, but I think I made real, genuine improvements. (For comparison's sake, here's the original chapter one. I'm not removing it from the site, but I will be redoing the index so new readers get the improved version.)
Anyway, I must away! Onward and upward to better and different things!
~Later
Showing posts with label complete. Show all posts
Showing posts with label complete. Show all posts
05 February 2010
09 January 2010
What a Crock.
Quick freewrite. I've been thinking about this all day.
---
Mass Hysteria
It happened like this:
Once upon a time, there was a planet, occupied by men and women. The men did manly things, like shooting guns and playing sports and earning money, which they brought home to their wives, who did womanly things like have babies and cook dinner and knit wooly socks. This system worked rather well for the men and not so well for the women.
So, gradually, women started joining a massive Cult of Ideas. No one knew who founded it, exactly, but women all over the world joined it with the belief that chores and wage-earning and everything that made up their lives should be shared equally between men and women. They went through great pains to keep this society secret from men, because the men were sure to try to nip this rebellion in the bud, seeing as the current status quo was just fine for them.
This Cult of Ideas crept into the lives of the women over many, many years, and it became less of a secular idea and more of a religious one. Its members started praying to a universal Goddess to help them change things and make it all even between men and women. (By this time, men had become even more stuffy and unwilling to change the way things are, because the way things are is the way things always have been, and who wants to break up that sort of history anyway?)
And so it came to pass, on this planet inhabited by men and women, that a wave of mass hysteria swept the planet, and the men of the planet panicked like nothing else. You see, for a very long time, “mass hysteria” was a purely mind-over-matter issue of panic and delusion. Men knew this, and they also knew that it was a woman thing, having its roots in the womb, center of all of those uncontrollable, dangerous emotions found in women. Men didn’t have hysteria.
But, possibly through alien experimentation, maybe through the power of the years of women’s prayers, men all over the world suddenly developed wombs of their own. The men panicked like there was no tomorrow. And the women laughed themselves sick before they did anything else, like try and help the men adjust to this abrupt anatomical phenomenon.
----
This idea may sound completely cracked out, but it's not half as crazy as this show I was watching today, an anime in which a little boy lives in a jungle with his mom. And one day his mom inexplicably adopts a strange little girl who eats everything (like statues and people everything) and the stuff she eats gets sent to a different dimension...inside of her. And she can spit the stuff out again if she really wants. It's insane but insanely cute. Plus, it has the bonus of having one of my favorite voice actors in it.
Anway! Back to mass hysteria! I've always thought it was kind of a strange term. Sexist, yes, but also weird. And anyway, these days "mass" is always about cancer...or church. But mostly cancer.
My brains are going to explode out of my aching skull, and I'm still not free of yesterday's ailments. I should go to bed, maybe?
~Later
---
Mass Hysteria
It happened like this:
Once upon a time, there was a planet, occupied by men and women. The men did manly things, like shooting guns and playing sports and earning money, which they brought home to their wives, who did womanly things like have babies and cook dinner and knit wooly socks. This system worked rather well for the men and not so well for the women.
So, gradually, women started joining a massive Cult of Ideas. No one knew who founded it, exactly, but women all over the world joined it with the belief that chores and wage-earning and everything that made up their lives should be shared equally between men and women. They went through great pains to keep this society secret from men, because the men were sure to try to nip this rebellion in the bud, seeing as the current status quo was just fine for them.
This Cult of Ideas crept into the lives of the women over many, many years, and it became less of a secular idea and more of a religious one. Its members started praying to a universal Goddess to help them change things and make it all even between men and women. (By this time, men had become even more stuffy and unwilling to change the way things are, because the way things are is the way things always have been, and who wants to break up that sort of history anyway?)
And so it came to pass, on this planet inhabited by men and women, that a wave of mass hysteria swept the planet, and the men of the planet panicked like nothing else. You see, for a very long time, “mass hysteria” was a purely mind-over-matter issue of panic and delusion. Men knew this, and they also knew that it was a woman thing, having its roots in the womb, center of all of those uncontrollable, dangerous emotions found in women. Men didn’t have hysteria.
But, possibly through alien experimentation, maybe through the power of the years of women’s prayers, men all over the world suddenly developed wombs of their own. The men panicked like there was no tomorrow. And the women laughed themselves sick before they did anything else, like try and help the men adjust to this abrupt anatomical phenomenon.
----
This idea may sound completely cracked out, but it's not half as crazy as this show I was watching today, an anime in which a little boy lives in a jungle with his mom. And one day his mom inexplicably adopts a strange little girl who eats everything (like statues and people everything) and the stuff she eats gets sent to a different dimension...inside of her. And she can spit the stuff out again if she really wants. It's insane but insanely cute. Plus, it has the bonus of having one of my favorite voice actors in it.
Anway! Back to mass hysteria! I've always thought it was kind of a strange term. Sexist, yes, but also weird. And anyway, these days "mass" is always about cancer...or church. But mostly cancer.
My brains are going to explode out of my aching skull, and I'm still not free of yesterday's ailments. I should go to bed, maybe?
~Later
07 January 2010
What's in a name?
For some reason, I seem to write about names a lot. Here's a short snippet entirely devoted to it.
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Prudence Chastity Maheux, age seventeen, was counting down the time until her eighteenth birthday, when she would legally be allowed to change her name. She didn’t know what her parents had been thinking, naming her that. Maybe her mom had still been high on painkillers when she put that down.
Since age ten, when she had realized it was patently uncool to share her names with the Pilgrims coming off the Mayflower, Prudence had been looking for a better name. Her parents had been calling her Prudie since she could first talk. No amount of argument could convince them that her new nickname (adopted age twelve) was Chaz. It was the most cool, smallest part of her soon-to-be-ex name. Still, she reflected, Chaz was a little bit too boyish for a forever name.
Prudence had been collecting names over the past seven-and-a-half years. She kept the list in a three ring binder. She’d write down names of movie and book characters, classmates, and celebrities. If she overheard a name she liked, it went into the notebook. She had several baby name books and she eagerly awaited the coming of new phone books with their thousands of intriguing entries.
She knew all about last names as first names, and names that bridged the gender gap. She knew some names that crossed from widely male usage into widely female and the converse. Prudence was of the opinion that many Germanic names were too harsh for what she wanted. French ones sounded too snooty. And the Celtic ones…Prudence couldn’t even pronounce half of them, let alone imagine calling herself by one.
Still, she had hundreds of names to choose from, and she spent a little time each day trying them out in front of the bathroom mirror. Otherwise, how would she know which one she was? Sometimes she liked one enough to try it out for a day or two, signing her new name on her school papers and refusing to answer to her (soon to be ex) name. Prudence had invested in some “Hello my name is” stickers and they were invaluable.
---
I always have a hard time naming characters. I can't imagine how hard it might be to name myself. I mean, I go by a nickname I've had for years, but it's derived from my full name. I don't know that I could find the perfect, right name for me starting cold from a list, even if I took years to suss it out. And as for legal name changes? I don't know that I could jettison my old name. My name has history and sentimental importance attached to it.
But, if I were a Prudence Chastity, I'd make the effort.
~Later
---
Prudence Chastity Maheux, age seventeen, was counting down the time until her eighteenth birthday, when she would legally be allowed to change her name. She didn’t know what her parents had been thinking, naming her that. Maybe her mom had still been high on painkillers when she put that down.
Since age ten, when she had realized it was patently uncool to share her names with the Pilgrims coming off the Mayflower, Prudence had been looking for a better name. Her parents had been calling her Prudie since she could first talk. No amount of argument could convince them that her new nickname (adopted age twelve) was Chaz. It was the most cool, smallest part of her soon-to-be-ex name. Still, she reflected, Chaz was a little bit too boyish for a forever name.
Prudence had been collecting names over the past seven-and-a-half years. She kept the list in a three ring binder. She’d write down names of movie and book characters, classmates, and celebrities. If she overheard a name she liked, it went into the notebook. She had several baby name books and she eagerly awaited the coming of new phone books with their thousands of intriguing entries.
She knew all about last names as first names, and names that bridged the gender gap. She knew some names that crossed from widely male usage into widely female and the converse. Prudence was of the opinion that many Germanic names were too harsh for what she wanted. French ones sounded too snooty. And the Celtic ones…Prudence couldn’t even pronounce half of them, let alone imagine calling herself by one.
Still, she had hundreds of names to choose from, and she spent a little time each day trying them out in front of the bathroom mirror. Otherwise, how would she know which one she was? Sometimes she liked one enough to try it out for a day or two, signing her new name on her school papers and refusing to answer to her (soon to be ex) name. Prudence had invested in some “Hello my name is” stickers and they were invaluable.
---
I always have a hard time naming characters. I can't imagine how hard it might be to name myself. I mean, I go by a nickname I've had for years, but it's derived from my full name. I don't know that I could find the perfect, right name for me starting cold from a list, even if I took years to suss it out. And as for legal name changes? I don't know that I could jettison my old name. My name has history and sentimental importance attached to it.
But, if I were a Prudence Chastity, I'd make the effort.
~Later
06 January 2010
The Dream Experience
So, for today's freewrite, a regurgitation of the dream I had whilst napping away the early evening hours.
----
I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and ended up smack in the middle of an alien invasion. I had been shopping in an antiques mall, hundreds of booths and corridors and staircases that looped around in a dizzying display of merchandise. I was stopped by an elderly gentleman who had apparently heard me whistling Beethoven and he wanted to know if I could sing. He gave me some sheet music and I embarrassedly admitted that my sight reading skills were bad. Nonetheless I sang for him.
And then things went wrong. People with clear torques around their necks started to crowd out the people without them. They started chasing me, relentless. They were going to collar me, make me one of them, an alien. Or, at least, under alien control because they were coming today. I ran and fought and tricked. I punched through walls and ceilings trying to get up and out, but the aliens were swarming near me. I asked the numerous cats lazing about for help, and they obliged. They collected, out of the antiques, necklaces that could serve as a fake torque. I had to slow down in my flight to try them on. I finally got one that fit and I made my way back to an alien, because no one had witnessed my deception. But there was a flaw in my plan: my necklace was not clear, but red.
The red necklace scared the other aliens. From what I could gather without revealing to myself, I was someone higher up in the invasion plan than the aliens had been anticipating seeing so soon. Still, sweating every inch of the way, I made my stately, deliberate way to the exit…and then I ran into my mom and I had to rescue her without raising suspicions and I was so, so afraid for her, much more than I feared for myself. I managed to get her to safety, and the aliens finally caught up to me.
They were going to hold me until their leaders arrived and, by then, I was so tired that I couldn’t fight any more. I basically laid down to die. I was so tired and sad because, really, there was nothing I could do anymore. And then I woke up…which I had tried to do earlier without success.
----
Ugh. I'm sick of alien invasions.
~Later
----
I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and ended up smack in the middle of an alien invasion. I had been shopping in an antiques mall, hundreds of booths and corridors and staircases that looped around in a dizzying display of merchandise. I was stopped by an elderly gentleman who had apparently heard me whistling Beethoven and he wanted to know if I could sing. He gave me some sheet music and I embarrassedly admitted that my sight reading skills were bad. Nonetheless I sang for him.
And then things went wrong. People with clear torques around their necks started to crowd out the people without them. They started chasing me, relentless. They were going to collar me, make me one of them, an alien. Or, at least, under alien control because they were coming today. I ran and fought and tricked. I punched through walls and ceilings trying to get up and out, but the aliens were swarming near me. I asked the numerous cats lazing about for help, and they obliged. They collected, out of the antiques, necklaces that could serve as a fake torque. I had to slow down in my flight to try them on. I finally got one that fit and I made my way back to an alien, because no one had witnessed my deception. But there was a flaw in my plan: my necklace was not clear, but red.
The red necklace scared the other aliens. From what I could gather without revealing to myself, I was someone higher up in the invasion plan than the aliens had been anticipating seeing so soon. Still, sweating every inch of the way, I made my stately, deliberate way to the exit…and then I ran into my mom and I had to rescue her without raising suspicions and I was so, so afraid for her, much more than I feared for myself. I managed to get her to safety, and the aliens finally caught up to me.
They were going to hold me until their leaders arrived and, by then, I was so tired that I couldn’t fight any more. I basically laid down to die. I was so tired and sad because, really, there was nothing I could do anymore. And then I woke up…which I had tried to do earlier without success.
----
Ugh. I'm sick of alien invasions.
~Later
04 January 2010
Pushing Boundaries with Naughtiness
Apologies for the non-writing over this week. I've been stricken ill by some terrible plague and have, honestly, been shivering in a recliner all day every day while watching movies and waiting to die.
To celebrate the possibility that I may be recovering, I give you porn. Gay porn. Well, okay. It's not particularly explicit: I've seen pg-13 movies with naughtier sex. But I'm hoping you, the reader, will find it as evocative as I do. Yes, it is fanfic. But if it makes you feel better, substitute two different man-names. There's really nothing fandom-specific in this story...I just like to think about ninjas getting it on, hahaha.
-----
Sasuke thinks of other things when they do it. Sensational association games. Kakashi’s skin is smooth and he thinks of stones and frogs and water without ripples. Kakashi’s hair is soft and grey, warm mist and kittens and softly broken dawn and his breath is the strange air before a thunderstorm with teeth like lightning closing on his neck, quick strike and on to another area. Sasuke lets Kakashi roll him over on the bed.
He thinks, oddly, of vegetable gardens; freshly turned rows, tomatoes, zucchini, onions in soft dirt. Footprints as his toes flex and his feet arch and dig for purchase in the sheets. Kakashi’s belt buckle jingles, the burr of a zipper and the shush of clothing pushed aside lay train tracks, stretch for miles like scars crisscrossing the pale skin of the land. Horses racing, heartbeat-hooves thunder under hot skies’ intensity.
Kakashi’s eyes and he can’t breathe. Arresting, bright, full of love, for him, full like the ocean. Overflowing. High tide. Seashell nails clutching him, fingers digging into the meat of his shoulders as they writhe, grappling, vying to express this thing between them. Lights flash behind his closed eyelids and he wonders if he’s going to cry.
Sasuke sniffs, feeling water gathering at the corner of one eye, tries to focus more--and at the same time less--on Kakashi, what they’re doing together, to each other. He thinks he’ll go mad as his heart hammers in his chest and it might burst because it is full and squeezing in tandem with what Kakashi is doing and he’s just lying there. He should reciprocate, give back, do something. But his hand is shaking as he reaches and presses even closer to Kakashi and he knows that Kakashi knows. It is branded into his palm, radiating, burning into Kakashi’s skin, will forever be written there, an invisible seal of love and longing and things he’ll never say out loud.
Sasuke’s world seizes. Stutter--stop--stutter--stop-stutter-stutterstutterstop. Stop. His hearing rushes out to sea and returns on a wave. He’s bitten his tongue, and all he can say to Kakashi through the copper taste is “drapes” because the connections are gone. He can’t find the words. Kakashi takes it as approval, because he replies in kind: “toaster oven.” They laugh breathlessly, plastered together on the bed. Kakashi offers him a tissue and Sasuke takes it, holds it, wonders what to do with it. Kakashi takes another and wipes Sasuke’s face--he cried after all, then--and Sasuke dabs at the mess on his front. He brushes the hair out of Kakashi’s eyes and draws him close for a kiss, lets Kakashi’s sweat transform his lips into something else. He tingles, pulls back a fraction of an inch, and they breathe the same air. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale.
-----
Have I disappointed you by posting something old instead of writing something fresh?
I have, for the moment, decided against putting this under some kind of content filter because it is (very much) a fill-in-the-blanks piece of writing. If it were a painting, it would be the sort where you'd be stepping closer and back to try to find the perspective in which it makes the most complete picture. To rephrase: I don't think it's got enough in it to qualify for filtering. Let me know what you think, yeah?
I had both a very easy and a very difficult time writing this. It's very easy to get into the sort of stream-of-consciousness this piece takes on, but it is hard to hone it and reign it in. Even now, months after writing it, I'm still tempted to trim and rephrase pieces of it. Have I overwhelmed the reader with too many random thoughts in between the sexy bits? I hope I have, mostly because I thought all of it was sexy, even the weird, disconnected parts. I have this thing about language...(And for some reason, I couldn't come up with a better euphemism for sex than "doing it." It's just one of those things, I guess, founded in my interpretation of the characters.)
Also, I seem to have a continual struggle with pronouns versus proper names, especially when I've got two men on the page. I try to be specific in who is doing what, but sometimes I fail in juggling all the he- and him- and his-es.
~Later
Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto. All rights remain with its original creator, Masashi Kishimoto. I make no profit from writing these stories.
To celebrate the possibility that I may be recovering, I give you porn. Gay porn. Well, okay. It's not particularly explicit: I've seen pg-13 movies with naughtier sex. But I'm hoping you, the reader, will find it as evocative as I do. Yes, it is fanfic. But if it makes you feel better, substitute two different man-names. There's really nothing fandom-specific in this story...I just like to think about ninjas getting it on, hahaha.
-----
Sasuke thinks of other things when they do it. Sensational association games. Kakashi’s skin is smooth and he thinks of stones and frogs and water without ripples. Kakashi’s hair is soft and grey, warm mist and kittens and softly broken dawn and his breath is the strange air before a thunderstorm with teeth like lightning closing on his neck, quick strike and on to another area. Sasuke lets Kakashi roll him over on the bed.
He thinks, oddly, of vegetable gardens; freshly turned rows, tomatoes, zucchini, onions in soft dirt. Footprints as his toes flex and his feet arch and dig for purchase in the sheets. Kakashi’s belt buckle jingles, the burr of a zipper and the shush of clothing pushed aside lay train tracks, stretch for miles like scars crisscrossing the pale skin of the land. Horses racing, heartbeat-hooves thunder under hot skies’ intensity.
Kakashi’s eyes and he can’t breathe. Arresting, bright, full of love, for him, full like the ocean. Overflowing. High tide. Seashell nails clutching him, fingers digging into the meat of his shoulders as they writhe, grappling, vying to express this thing between them. Lights flash behind his closed eyelids and he wonders if he’s going to cry.
Sasuke sniffs, feeling water gathering at the corner of one eye, tries to focus more--and at the same time less--on Kakashi, what they’re doing together, to each other. He thinks he’ll go mad as his heart hammers in his chest and it might burst because it is full and squeezing in tandem with what Kakashi is doing and he’s just lying there. He should reciprocate, give back, do something. But his hand is shaking as he reaches and presses even closer to Kakashi and he knows that Kakashi knows. It is branded into his palm, radiating, burning into Kakashi’s skin, will forever be written there, an invisible seal of love and longing and things he’ll never say out loud.
Sasuke’s world seizes. Stutter--stop--stutter--stop-stutter-stutterstutterstop. Stop. His hearing rushes out to sea and returns on a wave. He’s bitten his tongue, and all he can say to Kakashi through the copper taste is “drapes” because the connections are gone. He can’t find the words. Kakashi takes it as approval, because he replies in kind: “toaster oven.” They laugh breathlessly, plastered together on the bed. Kakashi offers him a tissue and Sasuke takes it, holds it, wonders what to do with it. Kakashi takes another and wipes Sasuke’s face--he cried after all, then--and Sasuke dabs at the mess on his front. He brushes the hair out of Kakashi’s eyes and draws him close for a kiss, lets Kakashi’s sweat transform his lips into something else. He tingles, pulls back a fraction of an inch, and they breathe the same air. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale.
-----
Have I disappointed you by posting something old instead of writing something fresh?
I have, for the moment, decided against putting this under some kind of content filter because it is (very much) a fill-in-the-blanks piece of writing. If it were a painting, it would be the sort where you'd be stepping closer and back to try to find the perspective in which it makes the most complete picture. To rephrase: I don't think it's got enough in it to qualify for filtering. Let me know what you think, yeah?
I had both a very easy and a very difficult time writing this. It's very easy to get into the sort of stream-of-consciousness this piece takes on, but it is hard to hone it and reign it in. Even now, months after writing it, I'm still tempted to trim and rephrase pieces of it. Have I overwhelmed the reader with too many random thoughts in between the sexy bits? I hope I have, mostly because I thought all of it was sexy, even the weird, disconnected parts. I have this thing about language...(And for some reason, I couldn't come up with a better euphemism for sex than "doing it." It's just one of those things, I guess, founded in my interpretation of the characters.)
Also, I seem to have a continual struggle with pronouns versus proper names, especially when I've got two men on the page. I try to be specific in who is doing what, but sometimes I fail in juggling all the he- and him- and his-es.
~Later
Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto. All rights remain with its original creator, Masashi Kishimoto. I make no profit from writing these stories.
29 December 2009
Blast from the Past
I'm kind of too sick to concentrate and write. (Hell, I've been watching movies all day because reading books was too difficult.)
In the spirit of illness, I bring for your reading pleasure a poem from my past.
---
A Winter Sonnet
In wintertime we stay inside and drink
our herbal teas in hopes that we might not
succumb to colds and flus. We make a stink
when illness first appears as drippy snot.
We blow our noses ‘til they’re raw and red--
The trash can soon overflows with tissues.
The store brand cough drops cannot clear our heads.
We try to put aside these trifling issues.
We go to work and spread this horrid plague.
While sniffling in our shirtsleeves we’re mumbling
“Everything is fine.” But fine is too vague
a word for such a coughing, grumbling
disease that takes up all our strength and time.
Until we‘ve kicked it, all we do is whine.
----
I wrote that a while ago, but I still think it's pretty good. As I recall I spent a while making it appear to rhyme while phrasing it so that the end rhymes were downplayed in an out-loud reading. (I'm hoping this is my final version, and not a partway edited one full of embarassing errors...)
Here's to drinking herbal tea and using a million tissues!
~Later
In the spirit of illness, I bring for your reading pleasure a poem from my past.
---
A Winter Sonnet
In wintertime we stay inside and drink
our herbal teas in hopes that we might not
succumb to colds and flus. We make a stink
when illness first appears as drippy snot.
We blow our noses ‘til they’re raw and red--
The trash can soon overflows with tissues.
The store brand cough drops cannot clear our heads.
We try to put aside these trifling issues.
We go to work and spread this horrid plague.
While sniffling in our shirtsleeves we’re mumbling
“Everything is fine.” But fine is too vague
a word for such a coughing, grumbling
disease that takes up all our strength and time.
Until we‘ve kicked it, all we do is whine.
----
I wrote that a while ago, but I still think it's pretty good. As I recall I spent a while making it appear to rhyme while phrasing it so that the end rhymes were downplayed in an out-loud reading. (I'm hoping this is my final version, and not a partway edited one full of embarassing errors...)
Here's to drinking herbal tea and using a million tissues!
~Later
26 December 2009
Book Review the First
Boy, it's been a while since I've done this. Forgive the choppiness, please. I'm still fairly scattered from the holiday extravaganza this past week.
This week's book is “Follow my Leader” by James B. Garfield.
Follow my Leader is the tale of young Jimmy Carter--not to be confused with the former US president--who is a rather ordinary eleven-year-old. He enjoys a good game of baseball played among friends and, in fact, it is on the baseball diamond that Jimmy’s world changes forever. For, you see, the boys are playing on the fifth of July, and one of them finds an unexploded firecracker left over from the previous day’s festivities. The boy lights the firecracker, panics, and throws it in Jimmy’s face, where it explodes, roughly four pages into the narrative. Jimmy is completely, permanently blinded and spends the rest of the book (183 pages) learning to live without his eyesight.
He grows accustomed to moving about in perpetual darkness, graduates to the use of a white cane, learns Braille, and, finally, gets a seeing eye dog. Then, at the end of the book, he and his dog, dubbed “Leader” go on a Boy Scout trip and save some of the boys from being lost in the woods. This brings Jimmy full circle, from his popularity on the baseball team to his low points of isolation and blindness, back up to the status of hero and good man all around, despite the terrible accident’s lasting effects.
This children’s book hails from 1957, the era of “Golly!” and “Gee whiz!” The following conversation is typical for the book.
“‘Are you going to the school for the blind?’ [The woman] asked.
‘Heck, no. I’m going to the guide-dog school. I’m going to get a dog,’ Jimmy said proudly.
The lady turned to a passenger across the aisle. “This young man is going to a guide-dog school and is traveling all by himself. Isn’t that wonderful?’”
Yes, apparently Jimmy’s harrowing story touches the hearts of all the passengers on the bus, as later they all try to buy his lunch for him.
The themes of American perseverance and patriarchal masculinity are almost overpowering throughout the book. Jimmy, who is, just to remind you, eleven, cries about his blindness only twice before shouldering his burden and pushing forward. He tries his best to carry on as if nothing has changed, though he must learn new ways to read, write, and move about in the world. He appears to be more concerned with no longer being able to captain the baseball team and go on Boy Scout trips than anything else. Except, of course, his pride in not asking his sister for help. He is more than willing to walk down the street holding hands with one of his male friends helping to guide him, but goodness forbid his sister do anything more than bring him cookies and lemonade.
I found this book to be so sentimental and cheesy that it was hard to read. Also, the book was full of randomly placed exposition about various blindness-related topics, which really broke up the narrative. That being said, this was an excellent children’s version of a pulp fiction novel. The kitsch value is almost immeasurable. Notice on the cover the stylish button-down and sweater-vest combo our hero is wearing. And, if he weren’t blind, those glasses wouldn’t be out of place on a greaser. (Seriously, just imagine Jimmy wearing a black leather jacket.)
I didn’t really care for this book, though my mother claims it was her favorite as a child. Being such a product of its times, it is difficult for a person not from that era to read. The values and mores and norms of society had made such radical changes that reading this book was a bit like digging through the contents of a time capsule. (Plus, you know, it’s always a pet peeve of mine when the female characters are second fiddles. Jimmy is the main character, I know, but there’s no female lead character to balance it out.)
Overall ranking: C. For all its faults, it was entertaining to watch Jimmy going along until achieved his ultimate goal of getting a guide dog. The scout trip at the end was kind of ridiculous and over the top.
This week's book is “Follow my Leader” by James B. Garfield.
Follow my Leader is the tale of young Jimmy Carter--not to be confused with the former US president--who is a rather ordinary eleven-year-old. He enjoys a good game of baseball played among friends and, in fact, it is on the baseball diamond that Jimmy’s world changes forever. For, you see, the boys are playing on the fifth of July, and one of them finds an unexploded firecracker left over from the previous day’s festivities. The boy lights the firecracker, panics, and throws it in Jimmy’s face, where it explodes, roughly four pages into the narrative. Jimmy is completely, permanently blinded and spends the rest of the book (183 pages) learning to live without his eyesight.
He grows accustomed to moving about in perpetual darkness, graduates to the use of a white cane, learns Braille, and, finally, gets a seeing eye dog. Then, at the end of the book, he and his dog, dubbed “Leader” go on a Boy Scout trip and save some of the boys from being lost in the woods. This brings Jimmy full circle, from his popularity on the baseball team to his low points of isolation and blindness, back up to the status of hero and good man all around, despite the terrible accident’s lasting effects.
This children’s book hails from 1957, the era of “Golly!” and “Gee whiz!” The following conversation is typical for the book.
“‘Are you going to the school for the blind?’ [The woman] asked.
‘Heck, no. I’m going to the guide-dog school. I’m going to get a dog,’ Jimmy said proudly.
The lady turned to a passenger across the aisle. “This young man is going to a guide-dog school and is traveling all by himself. Isn’t that wonderful?’”
Yes, apparently Jimmy’s harrowing story touches the hearts of all the passengers on the bus, as later they all try to buy his lunch for him.
The themes of American perseverance and patriarchal masculinity are almost overpowering throughout the book. Jimmy, who is, just to remind you, eleven, cries about his blindness only twice before shouldering his burden and pushing forward. He tries his best to carry on as if nothing has changed, though he must learn new ways to read, write, and move about in the world. He appears to be more concerned with no longer being able to captain the baseball team and go on Boy Scout trips than anything else. Except, of course, his pride in not asking his sister for help. He is more than willing to walk down the street holding hands with one of his male friends helping to guide him, but goodness forbid his sister do anything more than bring him cookies and lemonade.
I found this book to be so sentimental and cheesy that it was hard to read. Also, the book was full of randomly placed exposition about various blindness-related topics, which really broke up the narrative. That being said, this was an excellent children’s version of a pulp fiction novel. The kitsch value is almost immeasurable. Notice on the cover the stylish button-down and sweater-vest combo our hero is wearing. And, if he weren’t blind, those glasses wouldn’t be out of place on a greaser. (Seriously, just imagine Jimmy wearing a black leather jacket.)
I didn’t really care for this book, though my mother claims it was her favorite as a child. Being such a product of its times, it is difficult for a person not from that era to read. The values and mores and norms of society had made such radical changes that reading this book was a bit like digging through the contents of a time capsule. (Plus, you know, it’s always a pet peeve of mine when the female characters are second fiddles. Jimmy is the main character, I know, but there’s no female lead character to balance it out.)
Overall ranking: C. For all its faults, it was entertaining to watch Jimmy going along until achieved his ultimate goal of getting a guide dog. The scout trip at the end was kind of ridiculous and over the top.
22 December 2009
Groundhogs!
...I'm not sure where this came from. It's kind of insane.
---
They say the town of Kilcastle--current population 2301--was saved by a pair of groundhogs in the days of its founding. The story goes like this:
Back when the settlers were sweeping west in a grand motion to conquer all they saw, they moved into a nice, grassy valley with a river, called the Little Grass Snake, running on its western edge. There was plenty of game to hunt, and fish practically leapt into the boats. There was more than enough timber to go around , and so the settlers built themselves a little town comfortably close to the edge of the river.
The valley was also home to a lot of groundhogs. All the construction and increasing hubbub of human habitation drove most of them out of the town proper, but two stubborn groundhogs refused to be scared off. They maintained a series of tunnels beneath Maddock Barrow’s general store. And, though he tried with poison and shotguns and all manner of clever traps, he could not get rid of them. Why, sometimes this pair of groundhogs had the nerve to enter and exit the building through the main entrance intended for human customers! Eventually, Barrow gritted his teeth and admitted that the groundhogs did his stock no harm and he put up with them.
In fact, the groundhogs became a bit of an attraction. All the children came to see the “tame” gophers and, generally speaking, those with a bit of pocket money might purchase a small candy upon which they feasted while waiting for the gophers to appear. In time, the children named the gophers Mariachi and Pip.
Pip was the female--or at least, the one they presumed was female, given groundhogs tend to look alike. And she was named Pip because she would “pip” her head around the corners of the long display cases before venturing forth across the open floor of the store. Mariachi received his name for the unusually shaped patch of fur on his side; if you squinted, it looked like the sombreros the children had seen on a traveling band of musicians. None of those musicians had spoken a word of English, but Mariachi had cocked his little head at their speech, and so Mariachi was christened.
As the little town grew and prospered, Pip and Mariachi enjoyed a celebrity status among the newcomers. Of course, there were some who did not like the gophers being in the general store. These dissenters soon discovered that the store could do without their patronage, but that they could not do without the store’s wares.
During one spring, the rains were unusually hard. But the river did not overflow its banks. The land could still be farmed. It was dreary with so much rain, and the well-traveled paths had mud deep enough to suck the boots right off a grown man, but nothing truly awful was happening from all the water. So the inhabitants of Kilcastle shrugged it off as best they could and carried on.
But then, one night at the end of spring, Maddock Barrow, proprietor of Barrow’s General Store, was wakened in his bed on the second floor above the store by an unearthly screeching. He ran down the stairs, nightgown flapping, shotgun in one hand, lantern in the other. He rubbed his eyes when he saw the pair of groundhogs whistling ear-piercing notes and scurrying away from the stairs that led to the storage cellar. Hr had never seen them behave like this before. What was going on?
“Now Mariachi, Pip,” he said. “I’m going to take a look downstairs, see what you’re making a fuss over.”
And he peered down into the cellar and was shocked. The whole place was flooding! Barrow’s first thought was for his stock down there, but then he thought of his neighbors. Were they flooded too? He dashed outside to try and figure it out.
A huge wash of water filled the street. Maddock Barrow put on his gum boots and followed the water up the street toward the river and there, he saw that several huge trees had come down from upriver and were diverting the flow of the water right into their little town! Barrow ran door to door, pounding and yelling. Soon the whole population was roused. The women and children gathered a few belongings as quickly as they could and headed for higher ground. The men worked hard; one group worked at digging ditches to help direct the water away from the homes, and another group worked together to try and move the blockage. They also sent their fastest horses and the best riders among the young boys to the neighboring towns for help and as warning.
Three days later, the crisis was over. The trees had been moved, as many homes as possible had been saved, and everyone was safe and dry with roofs over their heads and food to eat. The townsfolk tried to hail Barrow as their savior, but he was modest. Mariachi and Pip were the ones to thank. They were the ones who had saved the town. And so the gophers were treated like kings for the rest of the days of their lives, and no one ever again complained about gophers in the general store.
Over time, the townspeople erected a statue, and groundhogs became incorporated into many store signs. The town of Kilcastle has held a celebration in honor of the valiant groundhogs ach year on the anniversary of the eve of the flood. They even have a play, “Mariachi and Pip Save Kilcastle,” put on annually. But, though this is the official name of the dramatic work, every child of Kilcastle knows that it is, really, truly called“Mariachi and Pip Save the World.”
-----
I know it was kind of rushed but, frankly, I want to go to bed. At least I got the idea out there, right? I suppose it shows that I've been reading several books that take place in the days of the Wild West lately. But also, it's kind of cool to think about all the weird things that crop up in the histories of towns.
~Later
---
They say the town of Kilcastle--current population 2301--was saved by a pair of groundhogs in the days of its founding. The story goes like this:
Back when the settlers were sweeping west in a grand motion to conquer all they saw, they moved into a nice, grassy valley with a river, called the Little Grass Snake, running on its western edge. There was plenty of game to hunt, and fish practically leapt into the boats. There was more than enough timber to go around , and so the settlers built themselves a little town comfortably close to the edge of the river.
The valley was also home to a lot of groundhogs. All the construction and increasing hubbub of human habitation drove most of them out of the town proper, but two stubborn groundhogs refused to be scared off. They maintained a series of tunnels beneath Maddock Barrow’s general store. And, though he tried with poison and shotguns and all manner of clever traps, he could not get rid of them. Why, sometimes this pair of groundhogs had the nerve to enter and exit the building through the main entrance intended for human customers! Eventually, Barrow gritted his teeth and admitted that the groundhogs did his stock no harm and he put up with them.
In fact, the groundhogs became a bit of an attraction. All the children came to see the “tame” gophers and, generally speaking, those with a bit of pocket money might purchase a small candy upon which they feasted while waiting for the gophers to appear. In time, the children named the gophers Mariachi and Pip.
Pip was the female--or at least, the one they presumed was female, given groundhogs tend to look alike. And she was named Pip because she would “pip” her head around the corners of the long display cases before venturing forth across the open floor of the store. Mariachi received his name for the unusually shaped patch of fur on his side; if you squinted, it looked like the sombreros the children had seen on a traveling band of musicians. None of those musicians had spoken a word of English, but Mariachi had cocked his little head at their speech, and so Mariachi was christened.
As the little town grew and prospered, Pip and Mariachi enjoyed a celebrity status among the newcomers. Of course, there were some who did not like the gophers being in the general store. These dissenters soon discovered that the store could do without their patronage, but that they could not do without the store’s wares.
During one spring, the rains were unusually hard. But the river did not overflow its banks. The land could still be farmed. It was dreary with so much rain, and the well-traveled paths had mud deep enough to suck the boots right off a grown man, but nothing truly awful was happening from all the water. So the inhabitants of Kilcastle shrugged it off as best they could and carried on.
But then, one night at the end of spring, Maddock Barrow, proprietor of Barrow’s General Store, was wakened in his bed on the second floor above the store by an unearthly screeching. He ran down the stairs, nightgown flapping, shotgun in one hand, lantern in the other. He rubbed his eyes when he saw the pair of groundhogs whistling ear-piercing notes and scurrying away from the stairs that led to the storage cellar. Hr had never seen them behave like this before. What was going on?
“Now Mariachi, Pip,” he said. “I’m going to take a look downstairs, see what you’re making a fuss over.”
And he peered down into the cellar and was shocked. The whole place was flooding! Barrow’s first thought was for his stock down there, but then he thought of his neighbors. Were they flooded too? He dashed outside to try and figure it out.
A huge wash of water filled the street. Maddock Barrow put on his gum boots and followed the water up the street toward the river and there, he saw that several huge trees had come down from upriver and were diverting the flow of the water right into their little town! Barrow ran door to door, pounding and yelling. Soon the whole population was roused. The women and children gathered a few belongings as quickly as they could and headed for higher ground. The men worked hard; one group worked at digging ditches to help direct the water away from the homes, and another group worked together to try and move the blockage. They also sent their fastest horses and the best riders among the young boys to the neighboring towns for help and as warning.
Three days later, the crisis was over. The trees had been moved, as many homes as possible had been saved, and everyone was safe and dry with roofs over their heads and food to eat. The townsfolk tried to hail Barrow as their savior, but he was modest. Mariachi and Pip were the ones to thank. They were the ones who had saved the town. And so the gophers were treated like kings for the rest of the days of their lives, and no one ever again complained about gophers in the general store.
Over time, the townspeople erected a statue, and groundhogs became incorporated into many store signs. The town of Kilcastle has held a celebration in honor of the valiant groundhogs ach year on the anniversary of the eve of the flood. They even have a play, “Mariachi and Pip Save Kilcastle,” put on annually. But, though this is the official name of the dramatic work, every child of Kilcastle knows that it is, really, truly called“Mariachi and Pip Save the World.”
-----
I know it was kind of rushed but, frankly, I want to go to bed. At least I got the idea out there, right? I suppose it shows that I've been reading several books that take place in the days of the Wild West lately. But also, it's kind of cool to think about all the weird things that crop up in the histories of towns.
~Later
Don't panic! (It's just a parody.)
I wish I could rightfully blame this on drunkenness, but the truth is I've been mulling this one over for a while. Rated L for a bit of language...but mostly it's just kind of funny.
---
"Freeballin'" (to the tune of "Free Falling" by Tom Petty.)
It’s a hard life, living on my own,
Doing all the chores momma used to do.
Maybe someday I’ll be good at cleaning,
But ‘til then I may be screwed.
I did laundry ‘bout three weeks ago.
Do the dishes only when they gather ants.
Bedroom floor is covered in beer cans.
And today I don’t have no underpants
And I’m free, free-ballin’!
Yeah I’m free, free-ballin’!
I’m rushing, trying to get to work:
Can’t believe it’s already half past eight.
I can’t find any boxers or briefs.
I’ll have to go commando or be late!
And I’m free, free-ballin’!
Yeah I’m free, free-ballin’!
Been a long day, in my cubicle at work,
Eight hours (plus lunch) in khakis that chafe.
Feels so good to get home and strip down,
I’ll never make that same mistake!
And I’m free, free-ballin’!
Yeah I’m free, free-ballin’!
Yeah I’m free, free-ballin’!
Free-ballin’!
I’m free, free-ballin’!
----
...I can't believe I did that. Well, no, I can. It was slightly more challenging to do than I had anticipated, but certainly not as difficult as most structured forms of poetry I've tried.
I love that I have the right to parody and not go to jail for it.
~Later
---
"Freeballin'" (to the tune of "Free Falling" by Tom Petty.)
It’s a hard life, living on my own,
Doing all the chores momma used to do.
Maybe someday I’ll be good at cleaning,
But ‘til then I may be screwed.
I did laundry ‘bout three weeks ago.
Do the dishes only when they gather ants.
Bedroom floor is covered in beer cans.
And today I don’t have no underpants
And I’m free, free-ballin’!
Yeah I’m free, free-ballin’!
I’m rushing, trying to get to work:
Can’t believe it’s already half past eight.
I can’t find any boxers or briefs.
I’ll have to go commando or be late!
And I’m free, free-ballin’!
Yeah I’m free, free-ballin’!
Been a long day, in my cubicle at work,
Eight hours (plus lunch) in khakis that chafe.
Feels so good to get home and strip down,
I’ll never make that same mistake!
And I’m free, free-ballin’!
Yeah I’m free, free-ballin’!
Yeah I’m free, free-ballin’!
Free-ballin’!
I’m free, free-ballin’!
----
...I can't believe I did that. Well, no, I can. It was slightly more challenging to do than I had anticipated, but certainly not as difficult as most structured forms of poetry I've tried.
I love that I have the right to parody and not go to jail for it.
~Later
11 December 2009
Warning: May Contain Lesbians Invisible to the Naked Eye
Sometimes I cannot adequately convey my frustrations. Also, this poem is in rough shape. It may not be done. I can't rightly tell yet.
---
Invisible lesbians
Come from invisible isles
Have invisible names
Forgettable haircuts, paper coffee cups
Sedate sedans and understated smiles.
They’re there at the corner of your eye:
If you look for them in the street.
But face them straight on and they disappear
Away on shoes with quiet heels:
Unremarkable size eight feet.
The books about them are elusive:
In libraries they move from shelf to shelf
In stores they cower behind the books of
Dead white men. Those stories bore me, passing over
All the things a woman might have said or felt.
The world needs more lesbians: not invisible
Not hidden out of sight and out of mind
Not written out of fiction, not blotted out of scripts
But there and real. High budget. No nonsense, just
Human and woman and easy to find.
---
This poem really stems from three things: one, I am in a mood for lesbians. I want to read books and watch movies and look at comics that are all about women being together (and apart.) Two: I could not find a good film to watch tonight. Three: general frustration at the continued domination and exclusion of women's writing. (I'm thinking specifically of some short story collections that were completely composed of either Dead White Men's work or just plain men's stories, all on topics which women frequently, successfully, and eloquently write.)
I suppose it's my twisty sense of feminism speaking out. It's bothersome to want things to be available that are so (apparently) elusive. I mean, I'm sure there's lots of lesbian material for me to consume, but I can't find it. And my point is kind of that it shouldn't be this hard to find in the first place. Accurate or not, I get the feeling that what I'm looking for is a fringe element of a subculture, which would make it an even smaller pool of availability than if I were just looking for some man-on-man stuff.
Ugh. Cultural stuff is weird. There's so much of it that I just don't understand, only so much of it that is accessible to me. This is why I shall become a hermit and live in a shack in the woods and commune with squirrels.
~Later
---
Invisible lesbians
Come from invisible isles
Have invisible names
Forgettable haircuts, paper coffee cups
Sedate sedans and understated smiles.
They’re there at the corner of your eye:
If you look for them in the street.
But face them straight on and they disappear
Away on shoes with quiet heels:
Unremarkable size eight feet.
The books about them are elusive:
In libraries they move from shelf to shelf
In stores they cower behind the books of
Dead white men. Those stories bore me, passing over
All the things a woman might have said or felt.
The world needs more lesbians: not invisible
Not hidden out of sight and out of mind
Not written out of fiction, not blotted out of scripts
But there and real. High budget. No nonsense, just
Human and woman and easy to find.
---
This poem really stems from three things: one, I am in a mood for lesbians. I want to read books and watch movies and look at comics that are all about women being together (and apart.) Two: I could not find a good film to watch tonight. Three: general frustration at the continued domination and exclusion of women's writing. (I'm thinking specifically of some short story collections that were completely composed of either Dead White Men's work or just plain men's stories, all on topics which women frequently, successfully, and eloquently write.)
I suppose it's my twisty sense of feminism speaking out. It's bothersome to want things to be available that are so (apparently) elusive. I mean, I'm sure there's lots of lesbian material for me to consume, but I can't find it. And my point is kind of that it shouldn't be this hard to find in the first place. Accurate or not, I get the feeling that what I'm looking for is a fringe element of a subculture, which would make it an even smaller pool of availability than if I were just looking for some man-on-man stuff.
Ugh. Cultural stuff is weird. There's so much of it that I just don't understand, only so much of it that is accessible to me. This is why I shall become a hermit and live in a shack in the woods and commune with squirrels.
~Later
10 December 2009
Assumptions
What with shoveling all the snow yesterday dumped on my stairs, I was worried I would be too tired to do a free-write. I should have known better.
-----
Fifty pound dog kibble sack: empty.
Army surplus backpack: full of this and that.
Bud Light can: forty but now twenty after a long sit down
In the downtown Laundromat,
waiting for clean clothes in out of the cold.
Two feet of snow dropped yesterday and the roads
Aren’t easy walking between the water and the cars.
Slumped in a chair
Back to the windows, wet boots stuck out
under the hot air vent, it’s the best sort of wind that blows.
It’s a hard day’s walking ahead, he knows,
slipping through drifts and over-the-boot-tops slush, unplowed
Sidewalks stretching ahead and behind.
Wind whips the powerlines so much the poles move
As the washer washes and the dryers tumble: twenty four hours
open no matter the weather. It’s always safe and dry.
Doing the load of laundry and hoping the sun will get a little warmer
By the time the laundry dries he’ll finish drinking and fold.
And back the clothing goes, not fifty pounds of puppy chow but
Something to weight the shoulder and carry on to home.
----
Because, of course, the laundromat is a secret hiding spot for inspiration. I don't know whether the man I saw was homeless or not, but he was definitely wandering around town drinking beer and carrying a dog food bag full of laundry.
I may come back to this poem later and work out some more of the clunkers. I realize I wasn't very consistent with the punctuation and capitalization, either. Oh well. It's something to save for a rainy day, I suppose.
~Later
-----
Fifty pound dog kibble sack: empty.
Army surplus backpack: full of this and that.
Bud Light can: forty but now twenty after a long sit down
In the downtown Laundromat,
waiting for clean clothes in out of the cold.
Two feet of snow dropped yesterday and the roads
Aren’t easy walking between the water and the cars.
Slumped in a chair
Back to the windows, wet boots stuck out
under the hot air vent, it’s the best sort of wind that blows.
It’s a hard day’s walking ahead, he knows,
slipping through drifts and over-the-boot-tops slush, unplowed
Sidewalks stretching ahead and behind.
Wind whips the powerlines so much the poles move
As the washer washes and the dryers tumble: twenty four hours
open no matter the weather. It’s always safe and dry.
Doing the load of laundry and hoping the sun will get a little warmer
By the time the laundry dries he’ll finish drinking and fold.
And back the clothing goes, not fifty pounds of puppy chow but
Something to weight the shoulder and carry on to home.
----
Because, of course, the laundromat is a secret hiding spot for inspiration. I don't know whether the man I saw was homeless or not, but he was definitely wandering around town drinking beer and carrying a dog food bag full of laundry.
I may come back to this poem later and work out some more of the clunkers. I realize I wasn't very consistent with the punctuation and capitalization, either. Oh well. It's something to save for a rainy day, I suppose.
~Later
09 December 2009
Scene from a Dream
This was, more or less, a dream I had last night. I wrote it down this morning, fleshing it out and doing things like naming the characters from it and cleaning up some of the nonsensical weirdness. I have no idea how much sense it makes to an outside reader, but it's a pretty clear scene to me.
----
Joan was sitting in the second row of the classroom. Unfortunately, this gave her the perfect view of the first row. Athletes to a man, they were currently mooning the classroom and tittering to themselves. This was both a good and bad thing. Good, because being in the second row meant that she was very close to the professor’s desk and the blackboard, and bad because she had absolutely no interest in the dozen or so pale and hairy butts in front of her.
Joan took a quick survey of the room. She was the only woman in sight, in a classroom auditorium that probably fit a hundred students. There were a few discomfited faces in the crowd, but many of the boys--really, anyone who would participate in this was not yet a man--had the giggles. Or, worse, they were whispering and pointing at her. Joan bit down on her tongue before raising her hand.
The professor, from the looks an ex-military good old boys type, waited a minute before acknowledging her.
“Yes?” he said.
“Sir,” she said. “This is inappropriate.”
There were rules about sexual harassment, and they made a nice neat fence between her and the first row. Joan felt secure for all of two seconds.
The professor rose from his desk and approached her. Up close, he was no less intimidating than before.
“And how, miss, is it inappropriate?”
His eyes pierced hers when they met, but he showed no signs of concern for the dozens of policies he was allowing to be broken. Joan fought down her temper and the urge to squirm in her seat. The boys behind her grew less rowdy, seeming to settle into their seats. The whispering back and forth swelled like a wave.
“It’s harassment,” she said. “Sexual harassment.”
The whispered wave broke in a froth of snickers.
“What makes it harassment for you?” said the professor.
The professor was calm. Very, very calm as if this were a sort of situation he’d experienced before. Joan’s temper flared. How dare he first ignore the situation and then, then! To be asked for an accounting of why being mooned by a dozen jocks was insulting! Joan pushed back from her seat and stood. She looked into the professor’s eyes and counted to three.
“Because I don’t want to see their stupid asses,” she said.
Joan bit the inside of her cheek, still furious. At the same time, a sort of shock set in. She’d sworn at the professor. He was going to boot her from the classroom. She sat again and swept her pencils and notebooks into her bag. Joan was scrambling to think of a way to make a quiet exit. She was sure everyone was staring at her. She was pinned to the spot.
“All right then,” said the professor.
He strode to the front of the classroom in dead silence.
“Pull up those pants boys!”
What? Joan looked to the professor.
“I said pull up those pants and sit down!” he said. “No one wants to see your stupid asses unless it’s on the field, whooping the other team!”
Joan sat, dumbstruck. The professor pulled down a whiteboard, covered in what appeared to be test questions. The front-row boys hitched up their pants, one by one, and seated themselves. Nobody said a word.
“My name is Harmon,” said the professor. “You may call me Professor Harmon or Sir. If you want to talk to me, raise your hand. If, and I say if, I call on you, you will stand while you speak. When I am done talking to you, you will sit.”
His eyes swept the classroom. He turned toward the board and waved at its contents.
“This,” Harmon said, “is your first test. Answer it to the best of your abilities as quickly as you can. Calculators are allowed. Get to it!”
Professor Harmon left the front of the classroom and went to sit at his desk. He pulled out a stack of papers and ignored the class. Joan was stunned. She slumped in her chair.
She looked at the board and felt like crying because none of the equations looked familiar, except maybe the first one. She dug into her backpack. She dug a little more and frowned. She rooted frantically in her bag. Joan pulled out a notebook of blank paper and a couple pencils. No calculator. She needed a calculator. She couldn’t solve the equations without a calculator. All around her, the other students were frowning and pushing buttons and scribbling down answers and solving processes.
Joan despaired. She sat, frozen, watching the time tick away from her. Ten questions stood between her and success. Ten miserable math problems lined the path to her academic failure. She snuck glances at Professor Harmon. He had his head down, pen working furiously over the papers in front of him. The clock ticked mercilessly as she stared at the board.
Half an hour went by as Joan’s eyes skittered all over the board, seeing no way out. Then, something miraculous happened: Joan noticed that question four was something she understood…sort of. She took a deep breath and put pencil to paper. She wrote, carefully, “4.” at the left margin line. She cringed to be skipping ahead, leaving vast blank spots for questions one through three on the page. Teeth gritted, she copied the problem off the board and started to break it down into manageable pieces. Joan almost jumped out of her skin when someone coughed beside her.
She looked up. The professor was standing there.
“Took you long enough,” Harmon said. “I thought I was going to have to kick you out.”
“What?” Joan said.
“You have to learn to stand on your own two feet in my classroom,” he said. “I thought you weren’t going to make it.”
Joan looked down at her paper, embarrassed.
“I’m not very good at math,” she said.
Harmon raised an eyebrow at her.
“Oh really,” he said. “Then why are you here?”
Joan couldn’t tell what he wanted her to say.
“It’s been a while since I’ve had a math class,” she said. “It’s been…”
Joan counted on her fingers, thinking hard. She chewed her eraser.
“It’s been since sophomore year of high school. That was ten years ago, give me a break here!”
Professor Harmon stared at her. His jaw worked up and down a moment.
“Why don’t you just go home to your father, let him pick out a nice husband for you?”
That chauvinistic bastard. Joan was going to kill him.
“Because,” Joan snapped. “He’s dead and he can’t, and I’m here with you to learn!”
The professor smiled at her and Joan’s anger was overlaid with confusion.
“That’s what I’m looking for, here,” he said. “No excuses, no layer of politeness for the sake of being polite, no political correctness. Just straight-up honest answers.”
Harmon laid a polite hand on her shoulder and clarified himself.
“I’m going to break down the walls between you and me and get to the real you, because right now, the way you are, you’ll never learn a damn thing,” he said. His face was even more serious than before.
“But,” Joan said. “But…”
Joan didn’t like the idea that she was some sort of project for this man.
“Oh, you’ll nod and smile and agree, but you won’t learn anything.”
He was quiet, calm. He gave her shoulder a squeeze.
“Good luck with the test, miss,” Harmon said.
He turned to go back to his desk.
“It’s Joan,” she said. “Not miss. Joan.”
Harmon’s laugh was sharp and loud in the classroom. Half the front row jumped in their chairs.
“I like you, Miss Joan,” he said. “We’re going to have fun together.”
Harmon sat at his desk again, shuffled his papers, and noticed that the class was staring at him.
“What the hell are you all looking at? Get back to work before I fail everyone in here!”
Joan bent to the task at hand and tuned out the rest of the room. She could do this. She knew she could.
----
I swear, it's always math classes that haunt my sleep. I remember that the first question of the test had something to do with the quadratic formula, except it was all jumbled and weird, as such things usually are in dreams. (And yes, I really did dream that the entire front row was mooning me. It wasn't a standing-up mooning, though. They were bent at the waist and bracing themselves with their elbows on the desks. Their butts were distinctly jiggly.)
~Later
----
Joan was sitting in the second row of the classroom. Unfortunately, this gave her the perfect view of the first row. Athletes to a man, they were currently mooning the classroom and tittering to themselves. This was both a good and bad thing. Good, because being in the second row meant that she was very close to the professor’s desk and the blackboard, and bad because she had absolutely no interest in the dozen or so pale and hairy butts in front of her.
Joan took a quick survey of the room. She was the only woman in sight, in a classroom auditorium that probably fit a hundred students. There were a few discomfited faces in the crowd, but many of the boys--really, anyone who would participate in this was not yet a man--had the giggles. Or, worse, they were whispering and pointing at her. Joan bit down on her tongue before raising her hand.
The professor, from the looks an ex-military good old boys type, waited a minute before acknowledging her.
“Yes?” he said.
“Sir,” she said. “This is inappropriate.”
There were rules about sexual harassment, and they made a nice neat fence between her and the first row. Joan felt secure for all of two seconds.
The professor rose from his desk and approached her. Up close, he was no less intimidating than before.
“And how, miss, is it inappropriate?”
His eyes pierced hers when they met, but he showed no signs of concern for the dozens of policies he was allowing to be broken. Joan fought down her temper and the urge to squirm in her seat. The boys behind her grew less rowdy, seeming to settle into their seats. The whispering back and forth swelled like a wave.
“It’s harassment,” she said. “Sexual harassment.”
The whispered wave broke in a froth of snickers.
“What makes it harassment for you?” said the professor.
The professor was calm. Very, very calm as if this were a sort of situation he’d experienced before. Joan’s temper flared. How dare he first ignore the situation and then, then! To be asked for an accounting of why being mooned by a dozen jocks was insulting! Joan pushed back from her seat and stood. She looked into the professor’s eyes and counted to three.
“Because I don’t want to see their stupid asses,” she said.
Joan bit the inside of her cheek, still furious. At the same time, a sort of shock set in. She’d sworn at the professor. He was going to boot her from the classroom. She sat again and swept her pencils and notebooks into her bag. Joan was scrambling to think of a way to make a quiet exit. She was sure everyone was staring at her. She was pinned to the spot.
“All right then,” said the professor.
He strode to the front of the classroom in dead silence.
“Pull up those pants boys!”
What? Joan looked to the professor.
“I said pull up those pants and sit down!” he said. “No one wants to see your stupid asses unless it’s on the field, whooping the other team!”
Joan sat, dumbstruck. The professor pulled down a whiteboard, covered in what appeared to be test questions. The front-row boys hitched up their pants, one by one, and seated themselves. Nobody said a word.
“My name is Harmon,” said the professor. “You may call me Professor Harmon or Sir. If you want to talk to me, raise your hand. If, and I say if, I call on you, you will stand while you speak. When I am done talking to you, you will sit.”
His eyes swept the classroom. He turned toward the board and waved at its contents.
“This,” Harmon said, “is your first test. Answer it to the best of your abilities as quickly as you can. Calculators are allowed. Get to it!”
Professor Harmon left the front of the classroom and went to sit at his desk. He pulled out a stack of papers and ignored the class. Joan was stunned. She slumped in her chair.
She looked at the board and felt like crying because none of the equations looked familiar, except maybe the first one. She dug into her backpack. She dug a little more and frowned. She rooted frantically in her bag. Joan pulled out a notebook of blank paper and a couple pencils. No calculator. She needed a calculator. She couldn’t solve the equations without a calculator. All around her, the other students were frowning and pushing buttons and scribbling down answers and solving processes.
Joan despaired. She sat, frozen, watching the time tick away from her. Ten questions stood between her and success. Ten miserable math problems lined the path to her academic failure. She snuck glances at Professor Harmon. He had his head down, pen working furiously over the papers in front of him. The clock ticked mercilessly as she stared at the board.
Half an hour went by as Joan’s eyes skittered all over the board, seeing no way out. Then, something miraculous happened: Joan noticed that question four was something she understood…sort of. She took a deep breath and put pencil to paper. She wrote, carefully, “4.” at the left margin line. She cringed to be skipping ahead, leaving vast blank spots for questions one through three on the page. Teeth gritted, she copied the problem off the board and started to break it down into manageable pieces. Joan almost jumped out of her skin when someone coughed beside her.
She looked up. The professor was standing there.
“Took you long enough,” Harmon said. “I thought I was going to have to kick you out.”
“What?” Joan said.
“You have to learn to stand on your own two feet in my classroom,” he said. “I thought you weren’t going to make it.”
Joan looked down at her paper, embarrassed.
“I’m not very good at math,” she said.
Harmon raised an eyebrow at her.
“Oh really,” he said. “Then why are you here?”
Joan couldn’t tell what he wanted her to say.
“It’s been a while since I’ve had a math class,” she said. “It’s been…”
Joan counted on her fingers, thinking hard. She chewed her eraser.
“It’s been since sophomore year of high school. That was ten years ago, give me a break here!”
Professor Harmon stared at her. His jaw worked up and down a moment.
“Why don’t you just go home to your father, let him pick out a nice husband for you?”
That chauvinistic bastard. Joan was going to kill him.
“Because,” Joan snapped. “He’s dead and he can’t, and I’m here with you to learn!”
The professor smiled at her and Joan’s anger was overlaid with confusion.
“That’s what I’m looking for, here,” he said. “No excuses, no layer of politeness for the sake of being polite, no political correctness. Just straight-up honest answers.”
Harmon laid a polite hand on her shoulder and clarified himself.
“I’m going to break down the walls between you and me and get to the real you, because right now, the way you are, you’ll never learn a damn thing,” he said. His face was even more serious than before.
“But,” Joan said. “But…”
Joan didn’t like the idea that she was some sort of project for this man.
“Oh, you’ll nod and smile and agree, but you won’t learn anything.”
He was quiet, calm. He gave her shoulder a squeeze.
“Good luck with the test, miss,” Harmon said.
He turned to go back to his desk.
“It’s Joan,” she said. “Not miss. Joan.”
Harmon’s laugh was sharp and loud in the classroom. Half the front row jumped in their chairs.
“I like you, Miss Joan,” he said. “We’re going to have fun together.”
Harmon sat at his desk again, shuffled his papers, and noticed that the class was staring at him.
“What the hell are you all looking at? Get back to work before I fail everyone in here!”
Joan bent to the task at hand and tuned out the rest of the room. She could do this. She knew she could.
----
I swear, it's always math classes that haunt my sleep. I remember that the first question of the test had something to do with the quadratic formula, except it was all jumbled and weird, as such things usually are in dreams. (And yes, I really did dream that the entire front row was mooning me. It wasn't a standing-up mooning, though. They were bent at the waist and bracing themselves with their elbows on the desks. Their butts were distinctly jiggly.)
~Later
02 October 2009
New Story is a Guinea Pig?
I have a new story for you to read. It is a Naruto fanfic, though I could make very minor changes and it could stand on its own. (In fact, I'm considering doing that, but instead of making it into an original, I want to see how it works out with different characters from other fandoms. It's a fiction experiment!)
After some serious thought, I'm shaking things up a little in how I'm allowing people to view this particular story. It does contain some objectionable content, so I didn't want to just lay it out and accidentally whammy anyone. Instead, I'm providing a link to the story, which is in the extremely-convenient-to-me Google Docs. (I love the whole mass of kissing-cousins Google products that are bundled into gmail accounts. It's like I have a chicken coop full of chickens ready to lay eggs when I need them.)
Warnings for the story:
*Angst and general craziness
*sexual innuendo/suggestive dialogue
*thematic elements
*mention of the existence of porn
*gay guys co-habitating
*gay kissing
*two guys groping
*kittens...but not in a nice way.
*pervy old ladies
So that list? I may be over-exaggerating the importance of some things and under-representing others. I don't want to give too many specifics because I'm worried it will ruin the story experience. I will not lie. This story is not a happy story. It is unpleasant and a bit disturbing, but I promise I wrote it with love.
Now that you have been thoroughly warned, read the new story, Liability, here.
I don't know. Does this system of delivery work better? I may back-track and convert all the really long entries on here into GDs. I suppose aesthetically it's not everything I'd want, but maybe I can tweak it.
I think this is also a good (temporary) compromise while I consider whether I need to use Blogger's adult content filter. While there are many benefits to filtering, I hate that it's an all-or-nothing deal on here. For now, this is as close as I can get to selective filtering. Is it working for you?
Later!
Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto. All rights remain with its original creator, Masashi Kishimoto. I make no profit from writing these stories.
After some serious thought, I'm shaking things up a little in how I'm allowing people to view this particular story. It does contain some objectionable content, so I didn't want to just lay it out and accidentally whammy anyone. Instead, I'm providing a link to the story, which is in the extremely-convenient-to-me Google Docs. (I love the whole mass of kissing-cousins Google products that are bundled into gmail accounts. It's like I have a chicken coop full of chickens ready to lay eggs when I need them.)
Warnings for the story:
*Angst and general craziness
*sexual innuendo/suggestive dialogue
*thematic elements
*mention of the existence of porn
*gay guys co-habitating
*gay kissing
*two guys groping
*kittens...but not in a nice way.
*pervy old ladies
So that list? I may be over-exaggerating the importance of some things and under-representing others. I don't want to give too many specifics because I'm worried it will ruin the story experience. I will not lie. This story is not a happy story. It is unpleasant and a bit disturbing, but I promise I wrote it with love.
Now that you have been thoroughly warned, read the new story, Liability, here.
I don't know. Does this system of delivery work better? I may back-track and convert all the really long entries on here into GDs. I suppose aesthetically it's not everything I'd want, but maybe I can tweak it.
I think this is also a good (temporary) compromise while I consider whether I need to use Blogger's adult content filter. While there are many benefits to filtering, I hate that it's an all-or-nothing deal on here. For now, this is as close as I can get to selective filtering. Is it working for you?
Later!
Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto. All rights remain with its original creator, Masashi Kishimoto. I make no profit from writing these stories.
04 July 2009
Keep your fingers crossed for formatting!
It's poetry time! I only hope the formatting publishes correctly. Read it aloud, slowly, for the best reading. Enjoy!
---------
Every year I ask
why why why
A bee droning by
A nectarless flower
Seven years
bzzz bzzz bzzz
unflagging pain
from the un-healed wound
Still I ask
why him? why me? why any of us?
questions without answers
the bitter stinging never stops
The bee keeps flying
bzzz bzzz bzzz
no relief for tired wings
no pollen no nectar no honeycomb hive
No blossom smells sweet
why why why
seven starving years
have made the flowers vanish
----------
Okay, so not a happy poem. It is also a title-less poem. I've got it marked in my files as "me as a bee" but, while somewhat accurate, that doesn't really convey the right tone...
I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out. I didn't start out having to trim a lot of excess, but I still shaped it a lot from its first draft. I had a lot of fun messing with formatting, too, figuring out how much space I needed to make the right amount of emphasis. I'm always tempted to edit a piece to death, especially when it comes to poetry, but I didn't find that this piece needed a lot of big changes. It needed tiny changes instead.
I like that sort of finicky, precise detailed work, partly because it is challenging to make each word count, and partly because it doesn't let me lose my focus--I don't drown myself in a flood of words and ideas like I tend to do when writing fiction.
Some other time, I'm going to have a monologue on my ideas about poetry, fiction, and writing in general...
Later!
---------
Every year I ask
why why why
A bee droning by
A nectarless flower
Seven years
bzzz bzzz bzzz
unflagging pain
from the un-healed wound
Still I ask
why him? why me? why any of us?
questions without answers
the bitter stinging never stops
The bee keeps flying
bzzz bzzz bzzz
no relief for tired wings
no pollen no nectar no honeycomb hive
No blossom smells sweet
why why why
seven starving years
have made the flowers vanish
----------
Okay, so not a happy poem. It is also a title-less poem. I've got it marked in my files as "me as a bee" but, while somewhat accurate, that doesn't really convey the right tone...
I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out. I didn't start out having to trim a lot of excess, but I still shaped it a lot from its first draft. I had a lot of fun messing with formatting, too, figuring out how much space I needed to make the right amount of emphasis. I'm always tempted to edit a piece to death, especially when it comes to poetry, but I didn't find that this piece needed a lot of big changes. It needed tiny changes instead.
I like that sort of finicky, precise detailed work, partly because it is challenging to make each word count, and partly because it doesn't let me lose my focus--I don't drown myself in a flood of words and ideas like I tend to do when writing fiction.
Some other time, I'm going to have a monologue on my ideas about poetry, fiction, and writing in general...
Later!
24 February 2009
Out to Pasture: Repair Man Wanted
I actually finished this last spring. It's 2700-ish words long, and took an interminable amount of time to do. I'm still not completely happy with it, but it is finished regardless. I'm not going to keep going back to it; it's time to let it go and move on.
--Repair Man Wanted--
A woman used to live down the street from me. She was, I don’t know, some sort of mechanic or electrician. Linda. Linda Baker. She always dressed in old t-shirts or flannel button-downs with greasy jeans.
But her way of fixing things was different than anything else I’d ever seen a handyman do. It was more like faith healing. Granted, I’ve never had her fix anything of mine. If a toaster breaks, too bad. It goes to the garage to rust in pieces, and I buy a new one.
John, my neighbor, swears she can fix anything. He had her do his dryer, and I don’t mean anything dirty by that. She fixed his dryer, and it’s still running without a problem seventeen years later. The thing never so much as had a full lint trap after she looked at it.
So one day I’m out mowing my lawn and John’s trimming the hedges that make the fence between our yards, and he yells to me:
“Heya, neighbor!” He stands there, staring at me until I turn off the mower and walk over. I really want to finish the grass-- there’s this tussock of crab grass that grows faster than the rest of the lawn and I can just imagine it’ll grow another half inch before I get back to it. John’s a real talker.
“Hi, John.”
“So have I told you lately about my dryer?” He clears his throat. I make some sort of sympathetic noise, because what can you do? Tell the man no, you don’t want to hear about his damn dryer? It’s just not what good neighbors do. John’s telling his story, but I’ve already missed some of it.
“ …weird. I mean, I know that appliances can have personalities, but this is going over the line. It just won’t stop squeaking and rattling whenever I use it.”
“I don’t know, John. Maybe call a repair man?” I shrug, still outwardly sympathetic.
“A repair man?” He looks at me as if I’ve suggested his wife has just confessed to an alien abduction…on national television. “I wouldn’t let a dead repairman touch my dryer let alone a living body! Wait a minute, that didn’t come out right.” John scratches his head. He gets words mixed up sometimes when he’s upset.
“Over your dead body, is that what you mean?” I’m trying, here. I take a quick look at the lawn. The goddamn crab grass looks longer already. I sigh, and hope John doesn’t think it’s about him.
“Not really,” he says. “But it’ll do. I tell you, I don’t trust ‘em. They just don’t have the skills these days.” He rubs his nose and I wonder if he’ll notice that he’s made a little piece of hedge-leaf go up one nostril.
“Nobody knows what they’re doing. It’s like any old Joe walks into the Maytag or Sears and says ‘hey, can I have a job’ and they say ‘sure, no problem.’” John shakes his head. “I’m telling you, they just don’t have the know-how. Why, back when I was a kid…”
I’m pretty sure my eyes are glazing over when he starts reminiscing about the “good ol’ handyman” his mother called while his father was at work. I don’t think he’s really thought it through, that it might not have been his mother’s appliances that needed the skilled hands of the repairman all those years ago.
I keep getting drawn back to that crab grass. It’s sitting in the middle of the lawn, mocking me, because John just won’t shut up and let me get back to my yard work. Look at that! It’s practically waving at me, like it’s some sort of red flag, saying ‘come and get me, you big loser!’ John’s still chatting away, but now he’s thrusting his hedge-trimmers in the air for emphasis.
“…I’ll do,” he says. “I’ll call Linda.” He smacks the top of the hedge with the clippers, but the clippers bounce and he nearly takes off his own nose. John’s too excited to care.
“Hey Linda!!!” His yell echoes down the street to three houses away on the other side.
“Linda!!! ARE YOU HOME?”
I hit my forehead on my hand. He wouldn’t use the phone, oh no. He just has to yell. I glance again, longingly, at the lawn mower and that detestable grass. I think it’s growing just to spite me now. There’s no earthly reason for it to grow like that. Maybe I could mulch it out? But then I’d have to mow around a lump of mulch.
John’s still yelling, but I stop looking at the grass when Linda answers.
“WHAT DO YOU WANT JOHN?” She’s leaning halfway out a window on the second floor. Linda has something in one hand, a plunger, maybe. It dips down as her grip relaxes.
“CAN YOU LOOK AT MY DRYER SOMETIME?” He’s turning red in the face from screaming down the street. “I THINK IT’S POSESSED.”
Linda disappears from the window. John stares at her house expectantly. Sure enough, five minutes later, Linda comes out the front door and crosses the street. She jogs over to us. Her face is shiny with sweat and half her shirt is wet. I bet she’s good with crabgrass, too.
“I can’t do it today,” she says. She’s thumbing through a beat-up appointment book. “But I can do it Wednesday, noontime.” Linda wipes the hair out of her face and smiles at me. What a smile. She’s got great teeth. I smile back.
“Yeah,” John says, after a minute. “Wednesday is good.” He is struck, I think, by the remnants of her smile. It a hard thing to miss, when Linda smiles. Dave, who lives next door to Linda, swears she can cure a hangover with it. I haven’t tried that one out, but I think it’s entirely possible.
“Well,” she says. “I have to get back now.” She turns away and for a moment we’re both drawn into her swinging walk. We mumble goodbye to her ass.
It’s Wednesday and John’s getting ready for Linda. The scent of Tide wafts over the hedges, so I’m guessing he’s washing some laundry to put in the dryer. Did he take off from work for this? I snort as I imagine him explaining this to his boss. I know I couldn’t do it with a straight face, and I‘m way better at explaining things than John.
I’m on lunch break, hanging out with a sandwich and waiting for Linda. I check my watch: noon. I hear a door slam and look up. Yep. It’s her, dressed for the hot weather in a tee-shirt and cutoffs. She’s got streaks of grease or sweat on her ribs--as she breathes the stripes move with her.
Linda walks confidently, sneakers squarely hitting the sidewalk. It’s like she’s parting the red sea as she steps out and crosses the road--no fear of the traffic coming from both directions. Traffic? I shake my head. Old lady Bessler in her Buick and Jamie Kalvoda’s minivan aren’t really traffic. Still, they stop dead for her.
This might be my only chance to see Linda at work, which is why I’m getting a sunburn and the mayo is sliding out of my lunch. Dammit. I wipe my hand on the hedge as Linda rings John’s doorbell. I don’t have to actually eavesdrop because John is loud enough for the whole block to hear.
“LINDA! SO GLAD YOU COULD HELP ME OUT!” John grasps one of her hands between both of his. He gives her whole arm a welcoming shake.
“I come in peace,” she says. “Take me to your dryer.” Linda’s lips quirk up, but thankfully she avoids stunning John with her full smile. She removes her hand from his.
“Right this way!” John moves wildly in some vague imitation of bowing. He leads her around the corner of the house to the side door which opens onto the stretch of lawn between our houses. That lawn is crabgrass free.
I look at my lawn. That trumped up clump of weeds is still there. I tried mulching it to snuff it out, but now I just have a lump of dirt with grass sprouting out of it. It’s like a mole with long green hairs. I have to trim it by hand now, unless I want to kill my lawn mower or spray everything within a ten-foot radius with mulch.
I think about this until I’m interrupted by a horrible caterwauling screeching noise, like someone’s poured fifty pounds of nails onto a dozen cats inside of a spinning cement mixer. I sigh. That’s John’s dryer.
“SEE?” John has to shout to be heard over the noise.
“WOW!” Says Linda. She has to shout too. “I CAN’T BELIEVE I HAVEN’T HEARD THIS ALREADY!”
I peer over the hedge when the noise cuts off. John takes his hand off the control knob and opens the dryer door. It’s a front loader with a door that comes down like a drawbridge. He pulls the clothes out and tosses them into a basket on the floor nearby. Before I realize it, he’s spotted me.
“HEY, NEIGHOR! HOW ARE YA?”
I don’t jump into the air, but I do drop my sandwich. I wave a hand at John, and he waves back.
“WANNA COME SEE LINDA FIX IT?” John makes big welcoming waves at me, as if I haven’t just been spying on him over our hedge-fence for the past half an hour. Maybe he didn’t notice me. Maybe he didn’t care. I know I probably wouldn’t if Linda was standing right next to me, smiling and making small talk.
I nod stiffly, like I’m being forced to go, but I round the hedge in record time. Linda’s getting down on her knees.
She kneels in front of the dryer, reaches her hands out, and stretches her arms into the opening. I imagine her fingers knocking about in that warm darkness, her hands striking the metal with dull plinking sounds. Is Linda testing for some invisible problem with her fingertips?
Personally, I think the drum is out of balance. That’d explain the louder-than normal thumping, anyway and, if it’s been unbalanced for long, it’ll wear the belts wrong, making for lots of screeching. I’m not a handyman, but I know that much. I wouldn’t be able to fix it, though. I had tried to tell John this, but he still wanted Linda to take a look. I don’t know why she thinks she can find out what’s wrong by touching the inside of the thing.
Linda comes up, then resettles herself, and ends up half inside the dryer. I swallow. Her head and shoulders and arms are all gone from view. She’s bumping around in there, but I’m much more interested in the parts of her still outside. Her torso twists and stretches. The streaks on her come alive, slowly crawling as her shirt rides up.
The really, really interesting part is her ass. It’s so nice and so there, in front of us. Her jeans are worn in all the right places and the fabric is pulled tight. I wonder if she does workout videos, or if this perfection is natural, or if maybe it’s because she spends so much time like this, on her knees with her arms buried in appliances. I take my eyes off it for a quick look at John. He’s starting to drool, poor guy. His brain has vacated the premises. I wipe my own face, just in case, as I return to looking at Linda.
Dammit. She stops moving, pulls herself out of the dryer, and unfolds to stand again. She wipes her hands on her shirt, leaving more streaks that slowly fade. Must be water. She smiles at us and John is stupefied again.
“Well,” Linda says. “I can fix it.” She keeps smiling at John. “I can do it right now, if you want.”
“Yeah. Now is good.” John clears his throat and shakes his head. “Go ahead, Linda.”
Linda takes the clothes from the basket and loads them into the dryer. She shuts the door, sets the cycle knob, and nudges John in the side with one of her elbows.
“You wanna do the honors?” She says.
“Huh?” John is so articulate sometimes. I feel embarrassed for him.
“Do you want to turn the dryer on? I can’t fix it until it’s running.” Linda takes a good look at John. “You feeling all right? You look a little sweaty.”
“It’s just the heat today…puts me off my lunch, you know?” John runs a hand over his face before attempting a smile. “Sure, I’ll turn the dryer on!”
What kind of fixing could Linda do with the dryer running? She could electrocute herself that way, if she has to open the dryer up and mess with the wiring. I frown just a little as John reaches out.
“Don’t look so worried. I do this all the time.” Linda whispers into my ear and I feel her lips brush against it. She pats me on the shoulder and steps up to the dryer once it begins its screeching. I wonder if she knows what she does to the people who own the appliances, if this is all on purpose or if she’s genuinely unaware.
I inhale and let the air out again. Linda’s hot, in her grungy repairwoman way. Or maybe she’s that much prettier because you can see she’s pretty despite the clothing and the wrenches and plungers? I don’t know.
What I know is this: she becomes the center of attention wherever she goes. Like now, where she’s posed just so in front of the dryer, it’s like everything in the room leads to Linda. The laundry basket, the washing machine, the doorway to the rest of the house, and even the bottles of detergent and fabric softener all align in such a way that Linda is the focus of it all. And, as she moves and puts her hands over the top of the dryer, not yet touching the surface, she exerts some kind of gravity and John and I are pulled in close. It’s like we can’t breathe until she breathes, though the dryer still screeches regardless of any special influence Linda appears to have. She claps her hands and breaks the spell.
“Now then,” she says. “Watch closely.” She smiles and winks at us.
John is speechless. I am speechless. Linda’s hands start, palms down, a foot above the dryer top. They descend. Ten inches up, her fingers spread out. Six inches and all her fingers wiggle and straighten out. At four inches her hands are perfectly rigid and straight: mannequin hands. Two inches and that perfect stillness spreads through her body.
One inch away from the surface, Linda stops moving entirely for a second, or two, or three. The noise from the dryer is at a deafening pitch. And her hands make contact with the metal. I exhale, not realizing I’ve held my breath until now. She lifts her hands up again and stands away. I hear something weird and turn my head.
I can hear John breathing. The hairs on the back of my neck prickle and I turn to look at Linda. What the hell did she do? The dryer is quiet now, emitting only the faintest hum as the clothes tumble endlessly around. Linda smiles.
“What? You. It’s fixed? That’s it?” I feel as stupid as John looks right now. He’s stunned by the smile and probably completely pole-axed by the dryer’s lack of noise. It’s a wonder he hasn’t fallen over. I’m surprised my head hasn’t exploded yet. This is weird. No. It’s beyond weird.
“It’s fixed?” John asks. “Really fixed?”
Linda nods.
“I’ve got the magic touch,” she says, the smile still on her face. Linda wiggles her fingers at us, turns around, and leaves.
“Yeah,” I say. “Magic.”
John nods his agreement and we stand there, dumb in front of the dryer, looking at our hands and imagining hers.
--Repair Man Wanted--
A woman used to live down the street from me. She was, I don’t know, some sort of mechanic or electrician. Linda. Linda Baker. She always dressed in old t-shirts or flannel button-downs with greasy jeans.
But her way of fixing things was different than anything else I’d ever seen a handyman do. It was more like faith healing. Granted, I’ve never had her fix anything of mine. If a toaster breaks, too bad. It goes to the garage to rust in pieces, and I buy a new one.
John, my neighbor, swears she can fix anything. He had her do his dryer, and I don’t mean anything dirty by that. She fixed his dryer, and it’s still running without a problem seventeen years later. The thing never so much as had a full lint trap after she looked at it.
So one day I’m out mowing my lawn and John’s trimming the hedges that make the fence between our yards, and he yells to me:
“Heya, neighbor!” He stands there, staring at me until I turn off the mower and walk over. I really want to finish the grass-- there’s this tussock of crab grass that grows faster than the rest of the lawn and I can just imagine it’ll grow another half inch before I get back to it. John’s a real talker.
“Hi, John.”
“So have I told you lately about my dryer?” He clears his throat. I make some sort of sympathetic noise, because what can you do? Tell the man no, you don’t want to hear about his damn dryer? It’s just not what good neighbors do. John’s telling his story, but I’ve already missed some of it.
“ …weird. I mean, I know that appliances can have personalities, but this is going over the line. It just won’t stop squeaking and rattling whenever I use it.”
“I don’t know, John. Maybe call a repair man?” I shrug, still outwardly sympathetic.
“A repair man?” He looks at me as if I’ve suggested his wife has just confessed to an alien abduction…on national television. “I wouldn’t let a dead repairman touch my dryer let alone a living body! Wait a minute, that didn’t come out right.” John scratches his head. He gets words mixed up sometimes when he’s upset.
“Over your dead body, is that what you mean?” I’m trying, here. I take a quick look at the lawn. The goddamn crab grass looks longer already. I sigh, and hope John doesn’t think it’s about him.
“Not really,” he says. “But it’ll do. I tell you, I don’t trust ‘em. They just don’t have the skills these days.” He rubs his nose and I wonder if he’ll notice that he’s made a little piece of hedge-leaf go up one nostril.
“Nobody knows what they’re doing. It’s like any old Joe walks into the Maytag or Sears and says ‘hey, can I have a job’ and they say ‘sure, no problem.’” John shakes his head. “I’m telling you, they just don’t have the know-how. Why, back when I was a kid…”
I’m pretty sure my eyes are glazing over when he starts reminiscing about the “good ol’ handyman” his mother called while his father was at work. I don’t think he’s really thought it through, that it might not have been his mother’s appliances that needed the skilled hands of the repairman all those years ago.
I keep getting drawn back to that crab grass. It’s sitting in the middle of the lawn, mocking me, because John just won’t shut up and let me get back to my yard work. Look at that! It’s practically waving at me, like it’s some sort of red flag, saying ‘come and get me, you big loser!’ John’s still chatting away, but now he’s thrusting his hedge-trimmers in the air for emphasis.
“…I’ll do,” he says. “I’ll call Linda.” He smacks the top of the hedge with the clippers, but the clippers bounce and he nearly takes off his own nose. John’s too excited to care.
“Hey Linda!!!” His yell echoes down the street to three houses away on the other side.
“Linda!!! ARE YOU HOME?”
I hit my forehead on my hand. He wouldn’t use the phone, oh no. He just has to yell. I glance again, longingly, at the lawn mower and that detestable grass. I think it’s growing just to spite me now. There’s no earthly reason for it to grow like that. Maybe I could mulch it out? But then I’d have to mow around a lump of mulch.
John’s still yelling, but I stop looking at the grass when Linda answers.
“WHAT DO YOU WANT JOHN?” She’s leaning halfway out a window on the second floor. Linda has something in one hand, a plunger, maybe. It dips down as her grip relaxes.
“CAN YOU LOOK AT MY DRYER SOMETIME?” He’s turning red in the face from screaming down the street. “I THINK IT’S POSESSED.”
Linda disappears from the window. John stares at her house expectantly. Sure enough, five minutes later, Linda comes out the front door and crosses the street. She jogs over to us. Her face is shiny with sweat and half her shirt is wet. I bet she’s good with crabgrass, too.
“I can’t do it today,” she says. She’s thumbing through a beat-up appointment book. “But I can do it Wednesday, noontime.” Linda wipes the hair out of her face and smiles at me. What a smile. She’s got great teeth. I smile back.
“Yeah,” John says, after a minute. “Wednesday is good.” He is struck, I think, by the remnants of her smile. It a hard thing to miss, when Linda smiles. Dave, who lives next door to Linda, swears she can cure a hangover with it. I haven’t tried that one out, but I think it’s entirely possible.
“Well,” she says. “I have to get back now.” She turns away and for a moment we’re both drawn into her swinging walk. We mumble goodbye to her ass.
It’s Wednesday and John’s getting ready for Linda. The scent of Tide wafts over the hedges, so I’m guessing he’s washing some laundry to put in the dryer. Did he take off from work for this? I snort as I imagine him explaining this to his boss. I know I couldn’t do it with a straight face, and I‘m way better at explaining things than John.
I’m on lunch break, hanging out with a sandwich and waiting for Linda. I check my watch: noon. I hear a door slam and look up. Yep. It’s her, dressed for the hot weather in a tee-shirt and cutoffs. She’s got streaks of grease or sweat on her ribs--as she breathes the stripes move with her.
Linda walks confidently, sneakers squarely hitting the sidewalk. It’s like she’s parting the red sea as she steps out and crosses the road--no fear of the traffic coming from both directions. Traffic? I shake my head. Old lady Bessler in her Buick and Jamie Kalvoda’s minivan aren’t really traffic. Still, they stop dead for her.
This might be my only chance to see Linda at work, which is why I’m getting a sunburn and the mayo is sliding out of my lunch. Dammit. I wipe my hand on the hedge as Linda rings John’s doorbell. I don’t have to actually eavesdrop because John is loud enough for the whole block to hear.
“LINDA! SO GLAD YOU COULD HELP ME OUT!” John grasps one of her hands between both of his. He gives her whole arm a welcoming shake.
“I come in peace,” she says. “Take me to your dryer.” Linda’s lips quirk up, but thankfully she avoids stunning John with her full smile. She removes her hand from his.
“Right this way!” John moves wildly in some vague imitation of bowing. He leads her around the corner of the house to the side door which opens onto the stretch of lawn between our houses. That lawn is crabgrass free.
I look at my lawn. That trumped up clump of weeds is still there. I tried mulching it to snuff it out, but now I just have a lump of dirt with grass sprouting out of it. It’s like a mole with long green hairs. I have to trim it by hand now, unless I want to kill my lawn mower or spray everything within a ten-foot radius with mulch.
I think about this until I’m interrupted by a horrible caterwauling screeching noise, like someone’s poured fifty pounds of nails onto a dozen cats inside of a spinning cement mixer. I sigh. That’s John’s dryer.
“SEE?” John has to shout to be heard over the noise.
“WOW!” Says Linda. She has to shout too. “I CAN’T BELIEVE I HAVEN’T HEARD THIS ALREADY!”
I peer over the hedge when the noise cuts off. John takes his hand off the control knob and opens the dryer door. It’s a front loader with a door that comes down like a drawbridge. He pulls the clothes out and tosses them into a basket on the floor nearby. Before I realize it, he’s spotted me.
“HEY, NEIGHOR! HOW ARE YA?”
I don’t jump into the air, but I do drop my sandwich. I wave a hand at John, and he waves back.
“WANNA COME SEE LINDA FIX IT?” John makes big welcoming waves at me, as if I haven’t just been spying on him over our hedge-fence for the past half an hour. Maybe he didn’t notice me. Maybe he didn’t care. I know I probably wouldn’t if Linda was standing right next to me, smiling and making small talk.
I nod stiffly, like I’m being forced to go, but I round the hedge in record time. Linda’s getting down on her knees.
She kneels in front of the dryer, reaches her hands out, and stretches her arms into the opening. I imagine her fingers knocking about in that warm darkness, her hands striking the metal with dull plinking sounds. Is Linda testing for some invisible problem with her fingertips?
Personally, I think the drum is out of balance. That’d explain the louder-than normal thumping, anyway and, if it’s been unbalanced for long, it’ll wear the belts wrong, making for lots of screeching. I’m not a handyman, but I know that much. I wouldn’t be able to fix it, though. I had tried to tell John this, but he still wanted Linda to take a look. I don’t know why she thinks she can find out what’s wrong by touching the inside of the thing.
Linda comes up, then resettles herself, and ends up half inside the dryer. I swallow. Her head and shoulders and arms are all gone from view. She’s bumping around in there, but I’m much more interested in the parts of her still outside. Her torso twists and stretches. The streaks on her come alive, slowly crawling as her shirt rides up.
The really, really interesting part is her ass. It’s so nice and so there, in front of us. Her jeans are worn in all the right places and the fabric is pulled tight. I wonder if she does workout videos, or if this perfection is natural, or if maybe it’s because she spends so much time like this, on her knees with her arms buried in appliances. I take my eyes off it for a quick look at John. He’s starting to drool, poor guy. His brain has vacated the premises. I wipe my own face, just in case, as I return to looking at Linda.
Dammit. She stops moving, pulls herself out of the dryer, and unfolds to stand again. She wipes her hands on her shirt, leaving more streaks that slowly fade. Must be water. She smiles at us and John is stupefied again.
“Well,” Linda says. “I can fix it.” She keeps smiling at John. “I can do it right now, if you want.”
“Yeah. Now is good.” John clears his throat and shakes his head. “Go ahead, Linda.”
Linda takes the clothes from the basket and loads them into the dryer. She shuts the door, sets the cycle knob, and nudges John in the side with one of her elbows.
“You wanna do the honors?” She says.
“Huh?” John is so articulate sometimes. I feel embarrassed for him.
“Do you want to turn the dryer on? I can’t fix it until it’s running.” Linda takes a good look at John. “You feeling all right? You look a little sweaty.”
“It’s just the heat today…puts me off my lunch, you know?” John runs a hand over his face before attempting a smile. “Sure, I’ll turn the dryer on!”
What kind of fixing could Linda do with the dryer running? She could electrocute herself that way, if she has to open the dryer up and mess with the wiring. I frown just a little as John reaches out.
“Don’t look so worried. I do this all the time.” Linda whispers into my ear and I feel her lips brush against it. She pats me on the shoulder and steps up to the dryer once it begins its screeching. I wonder if she knows what she does to the people who own the appliances, if this is all on purpose or if she’s genuinely unaware.
I inhale and let the air out again. Linda’s hot, in her grungy repairwoman way. Or maybe she’s that much prettier because you can see she’s pretty despite the clothing and the wrenches and plungers? I don’t know.
What I know is this: she becomes the center of attention wherever she goes. Like now, where she’s posed just so in front of the dryer, it’s like everything in the room leads to Linda. The laundry basket, the washing machine, the doorway to the rest of the house, and even the bottles of detergent and fabric softener all align in such a way that Linda is the focus of it all. And, as she moves and puts her hands over the top of the dryer, not yet touching the surface, she exerts some kind of gravity and John and I are pulled in close. It’s like we can’t breathe until she breathes, though the dryer still screeches regardless of any special influence Linda appears to have. She claps her hands and breaks the spell.
“Now then,” she says. “Watch closely.” She smiles and winks at us.
John is speechless. I am speechless. Linda’s hands start, palms down, a foot above the dryer top. They descend. Ten inches up, her fingers spread out. Six inches and all her fingers wiggle and straighten out. At four inches her hands are perfectly rigid and straight: mannequin hands. Two inches and that perfect stillness spreads through her body.
One inch away from the surface, Linda stops moving entirely for a second, or two, or three. The noise from the dryer is at a deafening pitch. And her hands make contact with the metal. I exhale, not realizing I’ve held my breath until now. She lifts her hands up again and stands away. I hear something weird and turn my head.
I can hear John breathing. The hairs on the back of my neck prickle and I turn to look at Linda. What the hell did she do? The dryer is quiet now, emitting only the faintest hum as the clothes tumble endlessly around. Linda smiles.
“What? You. It’s fixed? That’s it?” I feel as stupid as John looks right now. He’s stunned by the smile and probably completely pole-axed by the dryer’s lack of noise. It’s a wonder he hasn’t fallen over. I’m surprised my head hasn’t exploded yet. This is weird. No. It’s beyond weird.
“It’s fixed?” John asks. “Really fixed?”
Linda nods.
“I’ve got the magic touch,” she says, the smile still on her face. Linda wiggles her fingers at us, turns around, and leaves.
“Yeah,” I say. “Magic.”
John nods his agreement and we stand there, dumb in front of the dryer, looking at our hands and imagining hers.
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