frosted glass.

prompt:  no prompt. just write.

I don’t like the frosted glass. The whole world obscured by a cartoon coffee cup and a bean. A man climbs out of his Nissan and all i see is shoulders one hip, 1 shoe.

The coffee bean looks like a brain, right brain, left brain: Everything comes in opposing hemispheres. She’d say this out loud, but no one would hear, and if they did, they’d scoot away.

So many things–how many?–does she not say every day. Pages of conversation flip accordion style every second. It makes sense to me, she’d say, but everything outside of her own cognition melts the context and loses steam. She hears the words come out and wants them back. They never sound the way they did in her head.

An experiment: Say everything. Too dangerous. Not a single intimate thought held close. The crazy spits helium and circles the moon. It would never work. She’d be locked up in a day.

A week?

An hour?

Whatever. It wouldn’t take long.

The difference between us is microscopic, you know. My editor is just quicker to tighten the noose. She didn’t say that.

Last night she turned off the news when Kenya came on. A year of drought, cattle dying. An elephant lay poached; they showed the footage. Too much. The newscaster had brown hair and a blue shirt. The camera spanned right, and dead things, carcassed souls stripped of hides, splattered the landscape. Oh god. She said that out loud. I can’t I can’t I can’t and ran for the remote. Changed it to something stupid. Southern comedy, You might be a redneck. It made her sad, and she hoped the polar ends of us were okay. Start and finish tied firmly, connected, still.

That’s what today feels like. A beach towel rolled end to end, scooping sand into the middle. Time is scrolling both ways at once. Does anyone else feel this? It can’t just be me. She won’t ask. They’d stare blank, blink, scoot. They’d lie and say no.

I hate this frosted glass. Camouflage hat, yellow stripe down your sleeve. Where is the rest of you?

drive.

prompt: Drive

Another elevator ride would kill her dead in the lobby. If I died today, she had thought, I would be most upset about wearing these dress pants on the last day of my life. God, take me out in my red sneaks, for Christ’s sake. So she held pretend conversations in a tin, wheeled rocket with airbags, 7o miles an hour down the interstate.

Hello to the cows.

Hello to the pretty man in the Honda Accord.

I love you (so much easier in flight. Can barely make out the syllables when her feet are still, becoming solids, wet socks in concrete, wearing parking lots for shoes.).

Caught sight of her forehead in the rearview mirror. The crease was gone. He had told her she looked so angry all the time. “I’m not angry,” she’d said. “I’m thinking.” Her thought interrupted. It made her mad, and she decided that was ironic but chose not to tell.

Songs meant more when the trees sprinted sideways along hills, driven south (always south. north was wherever she was going. even if it was east.). I’m not making any sense. She knew this. It didn’t matter. Sense is irrelevant when you’re anonymous. She told this to the lab in the back of the pickup truck. His lips wobbled and his ears flapped like wings. He agreed, and said he didn’t know her. She turned the radio up.

Yellow lines, white lines, velocity peeled back the hard-earned callous skull. Open open open. This was better. So much easier to feel the sun this way. Anonymity, for certain. She’d spent the morning walking among people who did not know her. She was there and not there, everywhere and nowhere at once. Half-way between endpoints, and no one remembered five minutes after she was gone.

Once they know your name, you’re toast, Kid. His nose barely reached the window of the dirty Cadillac. The thick black line of you draws you in. The numerology of you is added and subtracted, and you’re solid. I don’t know your name, Kid, and you’re better off that way. The Cadillac carried him right, into the rest stop. A man stood hunkered over a garbage can. She watched him get smaller through the back window.

So grateful for a name no one ever says right the first time.

There was nothing horrible she was escaping. No gross offense had occurred. It was the routine of it, like static on the television, or spinning blades of a ceiling fan. Pleasant, for sure. But her life became background noise, and the tick tick tick in her chest grew insistent, more obvious. Vertigo, when the tilt of her mismatched the tilt outside of her, two planes of motion colliding silly silo style. Try as she had, she’d never grown numb to it.

Proudest accomplishment and most inconvenient truth of her: an inability to go numb and settle.

a letter to Time.

prompt: An open letter to Time. (totally self-serving today)

Today, you suck. I hate your guts. You have no concept of yourself, sprinting when I tell you to walk; creeping when I tell you to zoom. If you have lights, I’ll punch them clean out.

I barely understand the structure of you, how you shoot straight and then bend at will, like you are a rubber arrow or a looping coaster, whichever pleases your latest whim. You are then and now and once and heretofore, and you are belching up your power with your hand in your pants.

I will not wear you on my wrist–ultimate denial. “You’re not the boss of me.” (I hate it when you make a fool of me.)

“I’m no fool,” I scream and shake my fist and chase you down the street-my own juxtaposition. You like that? You do.

I hate your rhythmic tick. Subtract one. Subtract one. Subtract one. Subtract one. Subtract one. You are robbing me slowly, smugly, draining my light, spilling opportunity down drain after drain. You wrinkle my forehead and gray my hair. I can’t ignore these sticky notes telling me you’re running out, you’re leaving, I’m missing, I’ve missed, gone, the wrong end of a microscope, smaller-not-bigger, sitting backwards in the train, expiration date in sloppy ink. I hate that you do this. I hate more that it bothers me. You make me nauseous when you slip willy nilly out the side door.

I want to squish you, liquify you, and pour you into a vial, wear you around my neck. Subtract one. Subtract one. Subtract. Without your lid, you crystalize and go gas. You ass.

umbrella.

Prompt: Umbrella

She held a dog-checked umbrella, blue and white, and stared at the man who stared at the sky. It was okay that the bus had not come so she could stand, blend into the 3D street scene, another slosh of paint against a steel-colored canvas. Observe and report. Observe and report, her mantra.

Should have warn taller socks, thicker. The puddle at the corner had splashed and left the denim at her achilles heel soaked and cold. Should have leapt, she thought. I never leap.

The man who stared at the sky stared at her, and she wondered if he saw, or didn’t see. He leapt too far, maybe. The only reason, she could see, for the way he craned his neck. It was anticipation, of what, she knew not. Aliens? God? Cloud chickens? Was it curiosity instead of expectancy? Had she missed a warning? The sky would fall while she tied her shoelace. He muttered something; she couldn’t tell. She didn’t ask.

The bus came. It stopped. The doors opened and the driver wore black orthopedic shoes and did not look at her, only at the light, still green but not for long. “Nevermind,” she said and waved. The cold seeped further, slipped under the arch of her foot, and she shivered in tailpipe exhaust.

The man returned to sky gaze, and she followed his eyeline, difficult under the outline of her umbrella–navy blue stitching crooked framed the cityscape; blocked people standing at windows above the fifth floors of office buildings; blocked 1859 etchings on dirty concrete trim; blocked birds and trees and helicopter landing pads. She tipped the umbrella back and back, behind her like she would dance (There would be choreography and a singing number.). She could see it all then, but had to close her eyes when the rain picked up its pace and fell.

a glass of water.

PROMPT: a glass of water.

“There’s a hair in my water,” she told the waitor.

He nodded.

She saw the flex of his jaw and felt his grimace (masked. He tried. But she could feel it. You can’t mask the lead weight of aversion.)

She drummed her fingers on the table, and they sounded like hooves. How much longer would she wait? This was ridiculous.

“This is ridiculous,” she whispered to the vase. The long green stem divided the room in half. Men in brown and navy, three black suits sat in varied poses around a large rectangle table. Only two laughed, and she could not tell if it was genuine.

The waitor brought new water. She assumed the hair had been replaced with a dirty finger. She said thank you, and pushed it aside.

It had been at least 20 minutes. She would wait 30. And then she would order the steak, because it was the best thing on the menu. She would eat as though it were her intention all along to treat herself, enjoy her own company, snicker quietly at her own private jokes.

In thirty minutes she would order steak and drink the water sitting idle at the empty setting across the table. There would be dessert. Wine. She would call a cab home.

She thought on it, felt her stomach grumble. The chair felt like a barrel, a vat, and it swallowed her. Years slid backward. She was six or eight at a too-tall table, dragging a crayon across the white cloth. She wore clown paint and sat under a blinking red light. The table grew taller, nipped her chin.

The waitor returned. He nodded to the empty seat, “Would you like to order an appetizer while you wait, Ma’am?”

A man in a black suit laughed with his head back, slapped his knee. “What a horrible cliche,” she said.

“I’m sorry?”

“No,” she told the waitor. “Thank you.”

She put her napkin on the table by the water and left.

brown bag.

Prompt: brown bag

“It’s not as likely as it is necessary,” she said.

Sarcastic. She refused to dull her blade, preferring instead to pull the dark out of the corner and toss it into the middle of the table like an ante.

“You never make any sense.”

Defeated. He’d tried. His willingness to voice optimism was fading.

The bag on the spare chair was full; it bulged, and neither one would touch it. Small as a farm cat, but it filled countries of disconnect between them. “I can’t do it,” she said and left.

He imagined a vapor trail behind her forming an S around the couch, a U into the hall. He heard the door to the bedroom shut and latch. The brown bag made no sound, and he tapped the faded knee of his blue jeans. This was not his plan; he resented the unseen agenda.

The TV clicked on through the wall, and he knew she’d pulled off her socks and tucked toes under the blanket. Stone Phillips introduced a man with no arms who sang opera.

“Can you turn that down?” he yelled. The TV popped static and switched off. “Jesus,” he whispered. Not in vain. A prayer. Always. Even when cursing. He picked up the bag, folded crumpled at the top, and let the front door squeak closed behind him. Down the porch steps. Off the porch, now. Out the yard, “Get on, now,” his mother would have told him.

Heavier than he remembered, transformed, and he wondered of the chemistry of things, always morphing into alternate forms. Solid, but everything is fluid. He would not let the bag touch his leg, and his shoulder grew tired by the time he reached the end of the block, Taco Bell on the corner, green dumpster in the back.

Flies and grease, he grimaced when the lid hit the wooden fence behind. He tossed the bag. Glass and cardboard clanked and settled, respectively. “I’m sorry,” he said while looking at the palms of his hands.

And he was. So sorry.

hunting for ghosts

prompt: weird fascinations

Always so interested in what’s behind the layer. Don’t give me the stage, give me what’s behind it. I want to see you pull the ropes and crank the chains. I want to dig through the prop chest and watch the actor drop his line, forget his mask, and slip sideways into himself by accident.

Always so conscious, chest nearly full of it, of the invisible fibers pulling silvery threads at my limbs. How many worlds do I walk through on my way to the kitchen and back again? Cannot for a second believe this is it: the couch, the floor, the mess in the sink, the TV, the cat, unread books on the shelf. Cannot for a moment believe all this junk in me is limited to what fits in a ribcage.

Give me ghost hunters looking for sense between static, parallel energies leaving handprints on cabinets. I want the freedom of sliding between illusions, want the off-centered vertigo of knowing at all times i’m standing over a giant hole and there is nothing really, but perception giving force to the gravity of me. If it were not so, I don’t believe I could bear another elevator ride, could not bear another shopping trip, could not tolerate to stand in another line of drones to buy toilet paper or salsa or granola bars for my office drawer, or clock in or out of another predictable 24 hours at an excrutiatingly groundhog’s day cycle.

I want to scythe webs and hunt ghosts.

I have conversations with you, doing as you do, behind the film. Do you hear me? Why do I suppose you are better versed in invisibility just because you are where you are? Why do I think there is some great wisdom inherited once you cross realities? Surely this is not the only one with limits. You might, just as well, sense me without understanding really what I am and what I’m made of. I barely do.

The sun is shining; is it warm where you are?

Free your ride: #7

Here are the rules.

Here is the prompt:

Now write:

She did not know why she had agreed to meet him on Golden Road, under the Franz Kafka sign. “I’ve never read Kafka,” she told him.

“Never read Kafka?” he was incredulous. “Who hasn’t read Kafka?”

She watched him take a bite much too large of his potato salad, dressing forming a teardrop formation from the corner of his cracked lips. The sun was too bright. She squinted and felt the sear of the sunburn on her forehead when it wrinkled.

“I mean, come on! I bet you read Danielle Steele.”

She wished he would close his mouth when he talked; his tongue speckled with mustard and mayo and partially masticated potato chunks.

“Nora Roberts? Jesus. I can’t believe you haven’t read Kafka.”

“Ucet, prosim” she said to their Czech waitor. He nodded and disappeared into the darkness of the cafe interior. The family at the next patio table spoke French and laughed.

“What? Are you mad?” He wiped his mouth.

He was ugly. There was not a single thing about him that she found attractive; but she was lonely, already two weeks in Prague, and such time spent encased in solitude made her feel the universe had swallowed her half way and then belched her out.

“I can’t believe you’re mad.” He threw up his hands and leaned back in his chair, folding his arms across his belly. “Okay. Danielle Steele is a genius.”

The waitor came. He stood. He smelled of garlic, and she liked it. He smiled at her, apologetically, and she felt embarrassed to dine with the rude American who talked too loud. “Dekuji” she said to him. Thank you.

“Fine, but we’re still meeting up at 8, right?”

The French father glanced sideways and slurped his drink.

“You know nothing, yet think you know everything,” she said to her rude companion. But still, she would meet him at 8 under the Kafka sign.

Free your ride: #6

Here are the rules.

Here is the prompt:

 

writer’s block

 

Now write:

 

I have come here to write, but my words are lined up at the door. They are lazy children swinging metal lunch boxes — Holly Hobby, Skeletor — against corduroyed knees.

I have come here to write, but my words are lined up at the door. They are full-bladdered children wiggling willy nilly at the water closet, striped sleeves pulled over nervous thumbs. Whiney, impetulant children who have had too much juice to drink.

I have come here to write, but my words are lined up at the door. They are leaderless children, pestering one another about the neck, about the elbows, about tiny crooks of knees, waiting for an absent teacher. So grouchy she has become, this tardy molder of brains. So contemptuous (Is that a word?) she is, so split at her ends. She is nipping from a copper flask in the teacher’s lounge, distracting herself with vending machines and carpet stains. She will leave them there, she thinks. Each child slouching in v-neck sweaters. She will abandon them fully, as she can no longer bear the clumsy manner in which they bobble down the hallways — narrow pathways, so straight, they can only hint at containment (stupid line). Whoever designed these pedestrian tunnels did not understand the inflated bravado of young people-rockets on their way to recess. Goddamn these dependent little creatures. How they wait so mindlessly to be led. Can they not shoot out waving autonomy’s flag?

I have come here to write.

Free your ride: #5

Here are the rules.

Here is the prompt:

Now, write:

He hated the color green. “But I’ll put it everywhere you want. Fuck, you want a green dog?”

She smiled coyly, and her eyes were blue as blue as blue. “This is not so much green as it is pine.” She pulled a straight line in the upturned lid, smeared pine, a darker shade of green. She rinsed her painted finger tip in the sink.

Their bedroom was green: She called it sage. The bathroom was green: She called it mint. The living room was green: She called it jade. And room by room he obliged every hue, ceiling to floor, until his shoulder ached. “Fucking green,” he muttered sinking into his dirt brown recliner. It would not go, the recliner. He refused. He wondered how long before she pointed it toward the door, to replace it with everything wine. It was to be her new accent color, shades of plum and burghundy splicing across their living space.

“It needs another coat,” she told him, fingering the corner of a patterned swatch.

“That’s purple,” he said.

She did not look up; dismissed him with a quiet, breathy, “Merlot.”