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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.

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.

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.

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.

In the comments below -or on your blog with a link -or in your very very v. private pink diary, Write (Ride).

Start with the start — a photo, a quote, a word, a story. Produce words, one after another, until you are done. Spelling and punctuation, inconsequential. Grammar preferred but not required.

Editing strictly prohibited.

Start here:

“behind the greenhouse”

Write (Ride):

I don’t know who spilled gasoline in the rhubarb patch behind the greenhouse, but it was much too literal for my taste: the greenhouse gas, that is. I imagine it was Amelia and her penchant for fire, for setting fire, watching fire, roasting things in fire, for she was all things fire from the inside out. She was not redheaded, though, and I think we were all surprised by that; such flamability on the inside demands some kind of show on the outside, is what I say. But she did have a spiked ring of gold around each of her pupils. Could never say for certain that her eyes were exactly blue or exactly green or exactly hazel, but only that whatever color they were was only an approximation, and it was interrupted, of course, by the hot glow. That’s what I meant about fire on the outside, because it wasn’t for her hair, you see.

What I think happened is just before she shot west, just before she theived Rodney’s old Yamaha crotch rocket, she wanted to set the whole thing to blazes, but she was interrupted. Could have been anybody, but I’d put my money on Isabelle from next door, who was as nosy as anybody was ever nosy. Is what I guess, is that Isabelle saw what Amelia was up to, and clattered out the side door, crossed the gravel (when is someone going to finish that paving?), and waved a robed arm in the air. I’m sure that’s when Amelia dropped the gas can, straddled the bike, and took off.

I don’t know where she is now — Amelia, I mean — but I sure hope she’s stopped to wash her hands.

The piece unpuzzled, though, is why the greenhouse? Was she going to start there and work her way match by match to the house, past the shed, through the garage, and spray unleaded all over the floral print couch? I don’t know, except that it may have been the orchids. Leon loved his orchids, always his orchids, more than anything else his orchids. And of course the greenhouse was full of them. Maybe she just wanted to set him right and take down each delicate stalk by stalk.

Leon would have told her orchids weren’t as delicate as they looked. But they’d have burned anyway under all that heat.