Fiction Friday V. 1

This is my first official Fiction Friday post, the first of what I hope will be many more to come.

I have to apologize for two things. One, I'm not posting this on Friday. I'm actually posting it on Saturday afternoon. But I am not one to be a legalist, by any means. And in my defense, I did have this written on Thursday night actually, but what can I say, it's been an exhausting week for so many reasons, not the least of which being I am working twice as much as I was last semester and it eats up a lot of my evenings. So I'm getting this to you, belatedly, and I'm sorry about it but not really that sorry. The second thing I'm (half-heartedly, because if I really cared I would fix it) apologizing for is that this is not my best quality. I like the idea but I know it could use a lot of editing and cutting down. But I never promised that Fiction Fridays would be super high-quality final draft kind of work. So here it is, as it is. Sorry sorry and enjoy:

In Love with In Love

I don’t remember when we met: people have told me we were five, naked in somebody’s backyard sandbox at a Sunday School barbecue. I wonder if, even as little kids, you had already started looking at me the way you do now, that way that makes me feel like I might do something scandalous: get up in the middle of Sunday morning service and do cartwheels between the pews, and you would laugh and it would make you love me all the more. You find me whimsical, enchanting, and it isn’t egotistical of me to say this, it’s just that I can tell, from the look that you have in your green-gray-blue eyes. I know that I scare you sometimes, but I think you love me all the more for that.

Then, when we were twelve, around twelve anyway, your parents invited mine down to your Saquish beach house to eat hamburgers and play pickle on the sea grass. Us kids rode tumbled together in your daddy’s truck bed, tucked under a blanket so the police wouldn’t see and get mad. We were comrades then, hiding together from any who might seek to separate us. But then, on the beach, in our adolescent swimsuits, you and your brother threw clumps of seaweed at my sister and me, and I tried to throw some back, but my throw wasn’t very strong and they always fell short of where you stood, so cocky and confident, and you laughed.

When we got older you apologized, real shame-faced and reticent, as if I was really going to hold you responsible for teasing me when we were twelve. I smiled and said it was fine and I saw relief slump into your narrow shoulders and your eyes follow the way my teeth bit at my bottom lip, nervous and flirtatious all at once.

You told me I was demure once, and I gave you a hard time about it, and you shrunk back into your shell immediately, trying to modify the statement, admitting you supposed you couldn’t really say, you didn’t propose to know me that intimately, after all.

After church you’d linger with me in the foyer, the smell of coffee and musty choir robes, dusty Bibles comfortably wrapped around us, pushing us together and sometimes the chatter of the mingling congregation would get so loud, you’d have to lean in real close to hear me and I could see the blonde stubble on your chin.

When we went away to school, you brought those conversations with you: you’d email me and I’d send replies, long and detailed and complicated, because I never could manage to make my writing very succinct.

I don’t know what you ever saw in me. You were always so good, always so content and quiet and thoughtful and happy to do your Bible reading and happy to wear ironed, laundered button ups to church, and happy to clean you room, and happy to wake up earlier than seven o’clock in the morning. I was the girl that got the tattoos and had a Mohawk that one year in high school and wore ostentatious clothing and unabashedly questioned things we really shouldn’t question. I was wild, flyaway, self-conscious, annoying, fickle. I was the color red: sometimes dark and intense and moody, other times bright and cheerful and lovely.

I don’t know, now, if I’m really in love with you. We were engaged last summer under the poplar tree with the swing in your cousin’s backyard and part of me wasn’t surprised, part of me felt like this was expected, maybe almost like I had done it before, like it was a dream and I was only living it out again, in real life. And part of me couldn’t help but wonder, though it felt natural, did it feel right?

You hold my hand now- that’s the farthest you’ll go with me physically- almost nervously you inch your long, cold fingers toward mine and I feel almost repulsed at times, at times it takes everything I have in me not to slap that cold, tentative hand away. But then I remember the way you were when we were kids on the beach, brutally teasing and rough and unapologetic, and it gives me hope, that the twelve-year-old seaweed thrower might still be there somewhere inside, that he might show his face again one day, that someday, if I stick by you, I will coax him out again.

I lie awake at night sometimes and wonder if I am actually in love with you or really just in love with the way that you are in love with me.

Fiction Fridays

Guess what guys! I am really super very excited to announce that this blog will be hosting a new feature! I know! Who would've thunk it! I'm not really a "feature" type of girl.

I've had a plethora of blogs in the past, ones that I've created and used and then deleted or created and never used and then deleted, and as of now, I think three are in existence and two are updated regularly. My tumblr: is the blog that I kind of just use for fun, for personal things or random things or pretty and exciting things that I want to post whenever. This blog, when I began it, was meant to be a place for me to post completed works of fiction that I wrote.

As it was, I wrote more, I think I once termed them "impassioned diatribes" than works of fiction, hence the name shift and, on the whole, a kind of purpose shift for the blog. But I don't want to stop posting fiction altogether, as that was kind of my original purpose, and it is, ultimately, what I most enjoy writing and the place I hope to eventually take my writing, in terms of a career and my life focus, etc.

So with that being said, I present to you Fiction Fridays. Now that my fiction class has ended, I have no reason to be writing fiction on a regular basis anymore, and that's not good, because that means that I won't. I just won't do it. And I need to be doing it. So to keep me writing fiction and to maybe make my blog a bit more fun and interesting? (maybe not) I'm going to have Fiction Fridays, at least once, maybe twice a month. These are Fridays on which I will be posting strictly works of fiction. I have no guidelines for the types or lengths or quality of fiction at the present. I'm also going to set the goal of just getting at least one Fiction Friday a month for now, and we'll see how that goes. For whatever reason, I seem to do a lot better at posting regularly when I'm actually at school, so that seems to indicate I will still be able to do my regular weekly post as well as a Fiction Friday on the week that the two coincide, but once again, no promises. We'll see what happens with it, where it goes. For now, I'm going to try it out and hopefully, it's not a complete flop! I hope you're looking forward to it! (Maybe. Kinda. Ok. Shut up.)

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.

Things To Do Instead of Write a Story About a Gay Boy Named Alan

These are all the things that I have been filling my night with, rather than writing a story about a gay boy named Alan (which is the homework I actually need to complete for my fiction class).

1. dye hair with red kool-aid

2. look up organic soap online

3. take a typing test, to yet again discover that I type averagely somewhere between 87 and 93 wpm (my version of a pick-me-up)

4. think about how much I like doing laundry

5. change clothes

6. wonder if I should've closed the blinds before I changed clothes

7. look up tlc's "don't go chasing waterfalls" on youtube and sing along

8. eat a handful of flavor-blasted goldfish and then vow that will be the last handful

9. go on facebook

10. go on twitter

11. go on whydoihaveablog.net, which is probably one of the funniest blogs I have ever read in my life (which is saying something, because I've read a lot of blogs), probably because it is so frighteningly relatable...

12. in a fit of productivity, ex out of EVERY website open on my browser and go back to typing asdfghjkl over and over again on a blank document

13. turn on my iTunes

14. browse the iTunes library of every other Houghton student who has their homeshare turned on, especially the libraries named "An Organist Does Listen to Some Normal Music", "KFURMZ", and "Charlie Sheen"

15. Charlie Sheen's library was a let down

16. but he had a whole bunch of 3OH!3 on there so...

17. listen to the entire 3OH!3 Want album, and realize I still know all the lyrics to every song

18. finish the album and feel really guilty because I just wasted like an hour of writing time jamming out to, of all bands, 3OH!3...

19. wonder who i even am anymore

20. contemplate existence

21. go back onto facebook

22. still no notifications, nobody loves me

23. try to estimate the number of people i can pretty safely bet on attending my funeral if i died

24. ex out of facebook, listen to Any Color Black

25. spray my imitation Toms with that Pumpkin Linen Spray I got from my friend Hannah who has 6 sisters

26. wonder what it would've been like to have 6 sisters...

27. eat another handful of goldfish. THIS IS THE LAST HANDFUL TONIGHT SERIOUSLY.

28. realize it's really super cold in my room and crawl under the covers

29. go back on Twitter to post about how good I am at wasting time

30. decide making a whole blog post out of it would be much cuter

31. make a blog post

32. post it

33. tweet about it

34. make a facebook status about the tweet

35. email everyone in the UNIVERSE about the facebook status

36. text my whole address book to check their emails

37. is there any other way I can communicate with half the planet in about .5 seconds?

38. bite my nails

39. i should probably start writing that newspaper article i have due tuesday

40. i should probably start writing that TEN PAGE STORY i have due for my fiction class tomorrow, which is a really important assignment, not only because it's a major grade for the class, but because it incidentally also happens to be the thing i kind of want to do with my life

41. listen to anya marina's version of t.i.'s "whatever you like", #gawshiloveagoodremake

42. ok, ok, im gonna write now

43. write the story about a gay boy named alan, hand it in, its brilliant, get it published, pulitzer prize, lots of money, drop out of college, rich life in vienna

44. why vienna, we'll never know, it just sounded really good...

(the blogger has left to now commence working on #43, be back never)

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.