**Wrote this some months ago, never posted it, and just now realized that for the first time since starting this blog I haven't posted in not just one but like three months. Not cool. So here, it's Fiction Wednesday! Also, hopefully I'll be posting a lot more in the near future, especially with break coming up. Forgive me- I've been giving tumblr all my attention.**
We're sitting drinking coffee. That's a romantic thing to say but we're not actually drinking coffee because you're in a hurry and I'm on a caffeine fast. But we're in the coffee shop, as if we're drinking coffee, almost as if we're on a date you and me. That sounds romantic too. Like that Landon Pigg song, Falling in Love in a Coffee Shop. I want all of my first loves, my first falls, to take place in this coffee shop, over the strains of The Civil Wars or Elliott Smith. I want your eyes meeting mine with The xx playing, want my heart beating faster in time with PJ Harvey, want Cat Power to stir in your belly and the whispers of Bon Iver or Jason Mraz to make your hand creep toward mine almost unconsciously, almost out of your own control.
But we're not falling in love in a coffee shop, are we, we're not even drinking coffee because you're in a hurry and I'm on a caffeine fast.
This is an interview, by the way. I write for the newspaper, you're a musician, and somehow God planted a seed in the head of my editor and for once she did something brilliant and assigned me to write an article about you.
You tell me you think that you're talking too much and I smile. I don't tell you that I'm asking too many questions, questions I don't need to ask you, questions that aren't relevant to this interview at all. I just can't help myself; the opportunity to explore you has been thrust at me, demanded of me really. I'm only human, you know. What kind of individual would I be if I passed this up?
The interview lasts longer than it should and I stare at your eyes longer than I should and you are so full of passion when you talk that I wonder how the other conversations full of inantities and trivialities, like finding the "one" and frustrations at work can even continue in the wake of your words. Your words are so powerful, you are giving a speech, what do any of these other people have any business doing talking while you're talking. How can they not be swept away just as much as I am? Their caucus laughter, the sound of their obscene ringtones, their overzealous laughter, I find vaguely infuriating.
Shut up. I am trying to fall in love in a coffee shop.
But we're not falling in love in a coffee shop, are we, we're not even drinking coffee because you're in a hurry and I'm on a caffeine fast.
My precious half hour with you is up now and I give you the dismissal to leave. But you pause a few moments, asking me about class, how do I like the book we're reading, what do I think of the professor; his teaching style is really relaxed, we're all slacking off quite a bit, which feels guilty but it doesn't matter much because he doesn't seem to care. He'd really be better off sticking to writing to poetry than teaching, you say, and I smile because you don't even know how many times I have said that before, to people who don't understand, not the way you do.
And then finally, you stand up, you're leaving, you're so tall, you're so lovely, don't leave me. You're in a hurry, I knew that from the start, you have to go to work now. But if you stayed, if you stayed behind and talked with me, maybe we could fall in love in a coffee shop.
You walk out of the door and I take a sip of my tea: chamomile, I don't like the Italian brand but it's all that this coffee shop has and the chamomile was necessary to calm my stomach.
I turn around and see long chestnut hair, ruddy cheeks, a head bent over intensively to text books. I know this girl. I've seen her before. All last year, she was on your arm, and she wore dresses and the two of you smiled and ate fruit together. She was your love and now she has seen us, here, and perhaps she thinks we are falling in love in a coffee shop, and perhaps she feels pain, perhaps she feels jealousy, perhaps she doesn't care but she must, I can't see how she couldn't.
I feel overwhelmed for her. I feel sad.
I wonder what it was like for her, when you sat her down and told her things couldn't keep on this way.
I wonder what it was like for her the first time you held her hand or the first time she knew that she was the only person dancing around in your head.
I wonder if the two of you fell in love in a coffeeshop.
I feel an intruder, and I want to hug her and give her some of my tea but I can't. I can't because I like you and she's a girl and so she can tell by the way that I laughed at your jokes and tried to meet your eyes as often as I could and clung to your words like they were diamond and gold and pearls, jewels dropping from your perfectly-formed lips.
And so, we can never be friends, her and I, and that's sad and I sigh. We can never be friends. Because of the coffee shop and how this is the place where people fall in love.
Showing posts with label Fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fiction. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
Saturday, April 28, 2012
Breaking Point (A Lesson In Fiction)
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Saturday, December 31, 2011
The Nude
I've done such a crappy job of posting lately, I'm a bit ashamed of myself and so I want to make it up to you. This little tidbit is the piece of flash fiction I did for my fiction final. It was hard to write: I had to cut it and edit the crap out of it to get it down to 300 words and it was sad. But here is that final product, which, hopefully, isn't terrible:
The Nude
The first naked body he saw besides his own was at the age of nineteen. One of boys he lived with, an architect, had his middle-aged sister visit for a weekend in April, an April so hot that the buds emerging from the sleepy dirt had shriveled slightly, rethinking their decision to sprout.
She arrived at their apartment around noon, bringing with her one piece of sturdy luggage and a gust of hot, stale air from the train station. She wore a faded pink cotton dress which didn’t hang quite right on her loose, lumpy form. Robert liked her eyes the best: they tore at him, dark and biting in an otherwise demure face. He longed to touch her, to immerse his fingers in the folds of her flesh and see for himself where her softness lay.
He did not mean to walk in on her naked, he explained later to her brother; He did not hear her when she said she was going to take a bath.
Robert was looking for the bottle of Murphy’s Oil they kept in the cupboard beneath the sink: he was going to polish the piano. He did not expect to see the sister standing there, in their mildewed bathroom, her toes pale and exposed against the peeling yellow linoleum. She was entirely naked and stood unmoving, staring at him with startled black eyes. He gazed, entranced, thinking that she looked exactly like the nudes depicted in those Peter Paul Rubens paintings he studied long ago. Her body was plump and gently rolling, the ankles that supported her thick, and solid. Years later he took women to his bed, women with bodies molded and starved to perfection, yet it was the April-time sister that he pictured as he made love to them in the darkness.
The Nude
The first naked body he saw besides his own was at the age of nineteen. One of boys he lived with, an architect, had his middle-aged sister visit for a weekend in April, an April so hot that the buds emerging from the sleepy dirt had shriveled slightly, rethinking their decision to sprout.
She arrived at their apartment around noon, bringing with her one piece of sturdy luggage and a gust of hot, stale air from the train station. She wore a faded pink cotton dress which didn’t hang quite right on her loose, lumpy form. Robert liked her eyes the best: they tore at him, dark and biting in an otherwise demure face. He longed to touch her, to immerse his fingers in the folds of her flesh and see for himself where her softness lay.
He did not mean to walk in on her naked, he explained later to her brother; He did not hear her when she said she was going to take a bath.
Robert was looking for the bottle of Murphy’s Oil they kept in the cupboard beneath the sink: he was going to polish the piano. He did not expect to see the sister standing there, in their mildewed bathroom, her toes pale and exposed against the peeling yellow linoleum. She was entirely naked and stood unmoving, staring at him with startled black eyes. He gazed, entranced, thinking that she looked exactly like the nudes depicted in those Peter Paul Rubens paintings he studied long ago. Her body was plump and gently rolling, the ankles that supported her thick, and solid. Years later he took women to his bed, women with bodies molded and starved to perfection, yet it was the April-time sister that he pictured as he made love to them in the darkness.
Monday, May 9, 2011
The Librarian
She flutters around the book-stuffed world that she calls her own. She wears ill-fitting clothes in bright, tropical colors, and sometimes she tugs a scarf twice around her beefy neck and calls it fashion. She has gray hair mixed in with wiry strands of white and it ends in a triangle just above her shoulders and three inches out from her head. She is round and flustered; small eyes and an even smaller mouth drowning in the sea of her face. She speaks far more often than she ought to now, she knows that. She cannot control her mouth; she is constantly ordering and questioning and muttering to herself about inconsequential things and puttering about like a little steam engine, always busy and bustling, always something to get done. But if she doesn’t do it, who will? This library is her domain, it is all she has to call her own and she loves it. She loves her job, though she gets tired out quite often and it saps away her energy.
Stephen died last year. All the expected guests attended the funeral, no more, no less. They returned to their houses in droves, carrying cold brownies wrapped up in cellophane and cookies on platters under their arms, the kinder ones remarking what a shame and the more cynical ones remarking with snide laughter what a surprise indeed that the old man hadn’t committed suicide years ago just to escape and were they really sure that wasn’t, in fact, what he had done now?
Since then, things have changed. Lillian keeps cats now, and watches television at night. Things she never did when Stephen was still living. He didn’t like the sound of the laugh track on the comedy shows she used to watch. And cats made him sneeze. He’d never have admitted he was allergic; he believed sickness was a sign of weakness, and the last thing Stephen wanted to be was weak.
Lillian tears up a little bit as she pushes a cart through the grocery store, eyes flitting from shelf to shelf across all the brightly colored packaged goods. The supermarket is a world of possibilities, now that Stephen has died. Lillian can buy potato flakes and frozen Stouffer’s macaroni and cheese and cartons of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream in any flavor she likes, even the “ridiculous” ones.
Stephen was raised on Vermont soil and when Lillian had begged him to move to Massachusetts after their son was born, he had hated her for it. But there were jobs in Massachusetts and little suburban communities with nice schools and real, city-educated teachers. Lillian hadn’t been able to sleep at night, plagued with nightmares of Carl as a grown man, spending his days milking cows and fixing fences and never finding a life outside of the one his father and grandfathers continued to cycle through every eighty years. The thought had bothered her so much that she had kept at the subject every night for a month; she had been braver then, more willing to stand up for herself. Stephen didn’t believe in divorce, just as his good dead mother had taught him, and so the only solution had seemed to be to give in to her demands. So he picked up and moved and got a construction job in a clean, bustling little town with a mall the next town over and a school all to itself. And he punished Lillian for it for the rest of his life.
But she didn’t regret it, not for a second. When Carl grew up and went to college in Boston and then to law school in New York, Lillian couldn’t have been prouder. She cried the day he passed his BAR. Stephen only muttered that it was a good waste of a small fortune just to get his son to pass a test so that he could become another one of those dirty cheating snakes that made up the American legal system. Lillian shouldn’t have been surprised; she knew how Stephen had felt about lawyers ever since they had gotten “scammed” by one back during that lawsuit.
The neighbor, whom Stephen had previously been friends with, claimed he had lost business due to the disheveled state of the Fosters’ front yard. Stephen didn’t believe in keeping up appearances like the other inhabitants of the tidy little street insisted on doing. If he didn’t want to keep the grass trimmed down to a perfect 1.5 inches, he wasn’t going to. If he wanted to leave the rusted over bits and pieces of last winter’s broken snow blower strewn haphazardly about the front yard, he was going to do that too. Will and Macy ran a little knickknack shop full of homemade birdhouses and painted glass wind chimes out of their living room. Business had declined significantly the year Stephen and Lillian moved in, which was partly due to the unappealing state of their front yard, but mostly due to the bad economy. Presentation, it’s all about the presentation, Will’s lawyer claimed in court. Stephen got so heated he stood up in the middle of the lawyer’s argument, his chair echoing sharply as it crashed to the ground. The judge didn’t even have to say anything before a policeman stepped out quietly as if from the shadows and restrained her husband like no one had ever dared do before. Lillian could have laughed in that moment, as she saw the giant of a man she had married actually held back by somebody else, dominated by another bigger, stronger person, but she didn’t dare.
They released him from custody when he calmed down and apologized and Lillian had to bite her lip as he trudged out of his jail cell and the policeman gave him the manila envelope full of his things. The case was wrapped up the next day with Stephen getting charged, though less harshly than Will had hoped, and the neighborly friendship they had developed dissipating. After that Lillian and Macy couldn’t talk to each other anymore, no more friendly gossip shared over the fence or recipe swapping or desperate phone calls if one was in a bind and needed the other to babysit. Once, Macy snuck over for a cup of coffee but then the sound of a car in the driveway sent them into a panic. It turned out to be just someone who had gotten lost using the drive for a turnaround but after that, Macy didn’t come back.
If Lillian had a nickel for all the times Stephen had ever made her give something up or throw something away she would’ve been a rich woman. But she forgave him for all those times, though he never asked. And the day that he died, the day that his heart finally couldn’t take him anymore, Lillian knew she should be sad.
Three days after her husband’s funeral the librarian came back to school. The other teachers said it was too quick, they said she needed longer to mourn, but she felt fine. She came back to work and she let her books consume her. They have been her comfort all her life and they continue to comfort her now. And she loves what she does. Sometimes her coworkers are rude to her, pushy and impatient New math teachers, new young English teachers, men who spike their hair and wear designer frames and sweater vests and have ideas about how to change America; women who straighten their hair with flat irons and wear high heeled boots and subtle perfume and believe that armed with a smile and an edge, the whole world will be theirs to conquer. Her students are rude to her, a new generation raised to be self-centered and disrespectful in their own right. A generation raised to question why they should wait, why they should listen to the admonishing or adhere to the rules. The librarian doesn’t hold much store in any of that. She believes she does more work in that library in a single week than any one of them has done in a year. Nobody else is willing to take on the burden of all she does. Much the same as these books she adores, she is stagnant. Nobody wants to read her. She could die here, right at her desk and she wouldn’t mind. Nobody would mind.
Stephen died last year. All the expected guests attended the funeral, no more, no less. They returned to their houses in droves, carrying cold brownies wrapped up in cellophane and cookies on platters under their arms, the kinder ones remarking what a shame and the more cynical ones remarking with snide laughter what a surprise indeed that the old man hadn’t committed suicide years ago just to escape and were they really sure that wasn’t, in fact, what he had done now?
Since then, things have changed. Lillian keeps cats now, and watches television at night. Things she never did when Stephen was still living. He didn’t like the sound of the laugh track on the comedy shows she used to watch. And cats made him sneeze. He’d never have admitted he was allergic; he believed sickness was a sign of weakness, and the last thing Stephen wanted to be was weak.
Lillian tears up a little bit as she pushes a cart through the grocery store, eyes flitting from shelf to shelf across all the brightly colored packaged goods. The supermarket is a world of possibilities, now that Stephen has died. Lillian can buy potato flakes and frozen Stouffer’s macaroni and cheese and cartons of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream in any flavor she likes, even the “ridiculous” ones.
Stephen was raised on Vermont soil and when Lillian had begged him to move to Massachusetts after their son was born, he had hated her for it. But there were jobs in Massachusetts and little suburban communities with nice schools and real, city-educated teachers. Lillian hadn’t been able to sleep at night, plagued with nightmares of Carl as a grown man, spending his days milking cows and fixing fences and never finding a life outside of the one his father and grandfathers continued to cycle through every eighty years. The thought had bothered her so much that she had kept at the subject every night for a month; she had been braver then, more willing to stand up for herself. Stephen didn’t believe in divorce, just as his good dead mother had taught him, and so the only solution had seemed to be to give in to her demands. So he picked up and moved and got a construction job in a clean, bustling little town with a mall the next town over and a school all to itself. And he punished Lillian for it for the rest of his life.
But she didn’t regret it, not for a second. When Carl grew up and went to college in Boston and then to law school in New York, Lillian couldn’t have been prouder. She cried the day he passed his BAR. Stephen only muttered that it was a good waste of a small fortune just to get his son to pass a test so that he could become another one of those dirty cheating snakes that made up the American legal system. Lillian shouldn’t have been surprised; she knew how Stephen had felt about lawyers ever since they had gotten “scammed” by one back during that lawsuit.
The neighbor, whom Stephen had previously been friends with, claimed he had lost business due to the disheveled state of the Fosters’ front yard. Stephen didn’t believe in keeping up appearances like the other inhabitants of the tidy little street insisted on doing. If he didn’t want to keep the grass trimmed down to a perfect 1.5 inches, he wasn’t going to. If he wanted to leave the rusted over bits and pieces of last winter’s broken snow blower strewn haphazardly about the front yard, he was going to do that too. Will and Macy ran a little knickknack shop full of homemade birdhouses and painted glass wind chimes out of their living room. Business had declined significantly the year Stephen and Lillian moved in, which was partly due to the unappealing state of their front yard, but mostly due to the bad economy. Presentation, it’s all about the presentation, Will’s lawyer claimed in court. Stephen got so heated he stood up in the middle of the lawyer’s argument, his chair echoing sharply as it crashed to the ground. The judge didn’t even have to say anything before a policeman stepped out quietly as if from the shadows and restrained her husband like no one had ever dared do before. Lillian could have laughed in that moment, as she saw the giant of a man she had married actually held back by somebody else, dominated by another bigger, stronger person, but she didn’t dare.
They released him from custody when he calmed down and apologized and Lillian had to bite her lip as he trudged out of his jail cell and the policeman gave him the manila envelope full of his things. The case was wrapped up the next day with Stephen getting charged, though less harshly than Will had hoped, and the neighborly friendship they had developed dissipating. After that Lillian and Macy couldn’t talk to each other anymore, no more friendly gossip shared over the fence or recipe swapping or desperate phone calls if one was in a bind and needed the other to babysit. Once, Macy snuck over for a cup of coffee but then the sound of a car in the driveway sent them into a panic. It turned out to be just someone who had gotten lost using the drive for a turnaround but after that, Macy didn’t come back.
If Lillian had a nickel for all the times Stephen had ever made her give something up or throw something away she would’ve been a rich woman. But she forgave him for all those times, though he never asked. And the day that he died, the day that his heart finally couldn’t take him anymore, Lillian knew she should be sad.
Three days after her husband’s funeral the librarian came back to school. The other teachers said it was too quick, they said she needed longer to mourn, but she felt fine. She came back to work and she let her books consume her. They have been her comfort all her life and they continue to comfort her now. And she loves what she does. Sometimes her coworkers are rude to her, pushy and impatient New math teachers, new young English teachers, men who spike their hair and wear designer frames and sweater vests and have ideas about how to change America; women who straighten their hair with flat irons and wear high heeled boots and subtle perfume and believe that armed with a smile and an edge, the whole world will be theirs to conquer. Her students are rude to her, a new generation raised to be self-centered and disrespectful in their own right. A generation raised to question why they should wait, why they should listen to the admonishing or adhere to the rules. The librarian doesn’t hold much store in any of that. She believes she does more work in that library in a single week than any one of them has done in a year. Nobody else is willing to take on the burden of all she does. Much the same as these books she adores, she is stagnant. Nobody wants to read her. She could die here, right at her desk and she wouldn’t mind. Nobody would mind.
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