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?

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.

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.

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.