"The Treatment"

 

There was no building next to the parking lot. The only hint of structure came from the bushes planted in a line along each edge of the pavement, forming a perimeter. Errant branches like wires extended from the plants, tangling and knotting into each other and creating the rails of a botanical fence, a reminder to any visitors of the areas they may not visit. Something about it made a sliver at the center of Julie's core slow, just as her car slowed to take the right turn onto the driveway.

Julie urged the steering wheel around, returned the car to the mouth of the parking lot, and made another right turn, back onto the street she'd been traveling moments before. 

"What the hell?" Rachel said from the passenger's seat, pointing. "My appointment's and ten. And there's paperwork I've got to do."

"We have time," said Julie. "It's just--I want to get a cup of coffee with you before you go in. Can we do that? Do you mind?"

Rachel said, "Coffee. You really think my stomach can handle coffee right now?"

And Julie's hands, her knuckles night-white, twisted around the leather grip of te steering wheel as if she were kneading dough. "I know," she said. "I'm sorry."

The scenery outside, the trees and lampposts, old with all they'd seen, crossed Rachel's reflection in the window. "Tea," she said. "I can have some tea. Toast might be a good idea. Maybe an English muffin, I don't know." She shrugged. "I really don't knwo how this is going to go, you know?"

"I know," Julie said. "I'm sorry." No matter how many times she said them, the words never could make up for everything that was wrong.

The chairs in the diner booth had padded back and flat, hard seats--a little bit comfortable, but not entirely. Julie asked the waitress for coffee and, thinking of what Rachel had said in the car, an English muffin. Rachel ordered tea and an almond bear claw and lifted one of the short glasses of water brought for them to her cracked, grey lips.

"Why not, right?" Rachel said after the waitress departed. "I mean, I'm probably not going to be in the mood for a pastry afterward."

"It's whatever you want right now." Julie's smile was a thin film stretched across the surface of her face. "As long as it doesn't hurt you." The waitress came back with a mug of thick black coffee, topped with an iridescent sheen, for Julie and, for Rachel, a cup of tea.

They were seated at a table so wide that, if they were to try, they hardly would have been able to reach their arms across it. Except for a few stains and a chip that revealed layers of wooden pressboard, the tabletop was white, reflective despite the matte finish of its coating. It bounced cold morning light onto Rachel's skin as she rested her head atop her hand. Her skin bounced the light right back.

"You're having a pretty rough time with this," she said.

"I know," said Julie. "I'm--"

"If you say you're sorry one more time, I swear, I'm going to tell the cancer fairy to fucking visit you next."

"I'm scared," Julie said. The waitress returned. For what felt like a long time afterward, the English muffin and the bear claw sat on their plates between Julie and Rachel like two lonely islands in a hopelessly pale sea.

Julie reached out from her continent first. "I'm a horrible friend," she said.

"You'd be a horrible friend if you weren't afraid." Rachel pulled the bear claw closer to her and broke off a piece. "If you were happy about all of this? Then you'd be a horrible friend."

"I should be happy," said Julie. "You're getting treatment," she added when Rachel's eyebrows rose. "You have a chance to get cured. Like, completely cured. And I'm just sitting here thinking, 'Oh, but I don't know, I don't really get it.'"

"It's experimental. It's weird. Like I said, I have no idea how this is going to go."

"Then why aren't you worried? Why am I the only one freaking out right now?"

"Because your freakout's big enough to cover both of us." Rachel waited until Julie smiled and began to butter her muffin before she continued. "You know I'm terrified," she said.

"I know," said Julie.

"It's just that, more than that, I'm tired. Tired of being sick, you know? Tired of being tired, that's what they say."

"I know," said Julie.

For a while, they both looked out the window and ate in silence.

"It doesn't seem fair," Julie eventually said, "that you have to go through something so strange all alone."

This time, Rachel bridged the distance across the impossible-looking Formica-top sea between them: she took Julie's hand. "How can you offer to wait for me today and say I'm all alone?" she asked. "The parking lot's right there. I'm only walking a short way off. And all my brochures are in the bag. You can read up on the treatment while you wait, maybe make it seem a little less strange."

"I'm not just talking about the treatment," said Julie.

The words hung between them, heavy and full under the daylight. Rachel blinked as she smiled. "You," she said, "are a basketcase."

"I know," said Julie. "I'm--"

"--a very good, very neurotic friend who's going to pay for my breakfast and drive me to therapy," Rachel finished for her. Julie squeezed her fingers and felt her bones. "Come on, before I'm way the hell late," said Rachel. They stood up from the booth together and walked to the cash register arm in arm.

Julie parked the car two spaces to the right of the path that began at the east end of the parking lot. Rachel hugged her and set off on the path, which, Julie remembered from her reading, would lead Rachel to a glade a short way into the forest. The other details of the treatment Julie couldn't recall. Nor had she understood them when Rachel had tried to explain. On the other side of the lot's perimeter, the birch trees guarding the deepening path were slowly going white, their bark becoming a silvery skin starting at the branches' crowns. Julie didn't understand how birch trees did that, either. There was so much it seemed that she didn't understand.

At the edge of the lot, separating the world Julie knew from one she could barely imagine, a row of bushes sat with their branches entwined, as if they were holding hands.

"The Gauntlet"

Four sprinklers sat in a row ahead of Gus, guarding the edge where sidewalk met lawn. The neighbors had arranged them so that the areas they sprinkled overlapped, but just barely, leaving no grass ungreened. Their spray tubes spat water in arcs that swept the ground like pendulums.

Gus rolled up the sleeves of his dress shirt. He studied each sprinkler's motion in turn. When he was finished, he removed his glasses and tucked them into his breast pocket. Two teenage girls riding their bicycles in the street glanced at him while they cycled past.

He ducked his head and ran.

"My House"

 

Michael has been just as careful stacking the boxes next to the curb as he had been peeling back layers of newspapers from the dishes or sliding the new refrigerator out of its enormous crate. All of their belongings are unpacked, yet the house now feels empty without walls of boxes to trap their echoes. All of their belongings are unpacked, yet something is missing; something is not where it's supposed to be. A glance outside shows Michael that his son has dragged the refrigerator crate away from the curb to the middle of the front lawn and is drawing on it with a crayon. 

"Hey, big guy," Michael says when he approaches Calvin in the yard, "what do you got going there?"

"This is my house," Calvin informs him while continuing to color. "It's got a blue door, and two windows, and red flowers."

Michael studies his work. "Buddy, that's our old house," he says. "Why don't you give it a brown door? Make it look like what we've got now."

"This is my house," Calvin says again. He is beginning to lose against his tears. "I don't want you to throw away my house." He hits the top of the crate twice, striking the words that end his sentence. Inside the crate, the sound echoes.

"Music Takes Time"

What a crappy photo. I promise, that squash is not swarmed with bugs. That's just my phone's camera adding specks.

Lucas came back to check on the seedling two days after the seed was planted.

"It's not ready yet," Old Man Bones, who watched over things that grow, told him. "Go home and practice. Da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM. That's right." Lucas frowned but marched home, tapping out a simple rhythm on his belly.

Lucas waited a month before he marched back to visit Bones, beating the same simple rhythm that the old man had given him to work with the last time. "Still not ready for you yet," Bones said, "but come here, look at this." He turned the fruit over for Lucas to see. "See this little groove right here? This little notch?" Lucas nodded and pretended that he did. "That's going to be important. You've got to be ready to play it. So try it with some extra notes. Da-DUM, da-da-DA-dum." Lucas practiced for weeks without understanding the point of it, until one day, when, tapping the rhythm against his arm, his finger twitched and struck the bone of his wrist instead. The feeling was completely different. That's all that music was, he realized: paying attention to how the slightest changes felt.

He and Old Man Bones continued like that over the following weeks, the old man giving him new steps in his rhythm each time. Finally, summer ended, and the time for harvest came. Old Man Bones gave Lucas a beautiful drum, plucked straight from the vine. "Now it's ready for you," he told the boy, who ran off and began to play. And you're ready for it, Bones' inner voice added as they both enjoyed the fruits of their labor.

"Fire"

 

He rarely thought about the trees in any of the lands their army crossed, but this one he liked. The way the thin, curved fingers of its trunk curled toward the sky made him think of fire, and fire he liked as well. He took his striking stones from his breast pocket and reached into the pouch at his hip for one of the wax-dipped wads of cotton he carried with him. Grinning, he broke from the line of freeriders and went to kneel beside the tree. It was almost as if its lines were meant to lead the flames.

"The Tooth Fairy Pillow"

 

When I was younger, I had a small pillow, pink with lace trim and a pocket about as wide as the diameter of a quarter sewn onto the front, where I kept the baby teeth that I lost. The night after a tooth had fallen out, I would slip the dead little bit of enamel into the pocket. In the morning, the pocket would hold a coin. My tooth fairy was somewhat lax in her duties, though; often, she left the teeth tucked inside along with the quarter. As more and more teeth fell out of my mouth and ended up in the pillow, I swore that I could hear them clacking together at night, as if someone were talking very quickly, or shivering in the cold.

I hadn't thought much about the tooth fairy pillow until the other day, when I was cleaning the hair out of my brush. I'm used to imagining the tangled bunches that I pull out as tumbleweeds as they drift down toward the garbage can. This time, as it was falling, the mass of hair sprouted tiny legs and feet from its bottom side, landed on the can with its toes curled over the rim, and leaped onto the floor, where it dashed toward a crack in the wall. I thought I had been hallucinating until this morning, when some of my fingernail clippings joined together and grew a hand out of nothing, and afterwards proceeded to run out the front door like the Thing.

Sometimes I've thought about the parts of me that I've lost over the years, and the other lives that I or some other version of me might have gone on to live. Now there's a knocking on my door downstairs, and I find myself wondering, What about all the thoughts I used to have? The stories I once dreamed and the terrors I used to fear? What might have become of them?

Another Update

As you can probably tell by the stretch of time between today's post and the one I made last Thursday, I decided to take a more casual approach with the blog, at least over the past few days. I still don't know what I'm going to do moving forward. I can say, though, that the time away was well spent. I took care of another obligation, one that I'm happy to have.

I wrote my partner a story.

It's a thing we do. Every year, I write two stories just for him: one for his birthday, and one for the winter holidays. (In turn, he makes some art for me on those same days. Well, he draws for my birthday, not for his. You know what I mean.) His birthday is next Tuesday, and I had the idea; I just needed the time to write it out. Stupid as it sounds, I didn't want to talk about working on it until I had the story done. After over a decade with him, I'm still worried that I'll jinx myself and not finish the story if I mention it too early. I wonder if that worry is ever going to go away. At my age, I'm beginning to doubt that it will. And that's fine. Worry keeps me on my toes, eh?

It was hard, working on a longer piece after several months of not doing so, but I will say that this blog has helped me in committing to a story idea and seeing it through to at least some kind of ending--because if I didn't, I wouldn't have a blog post for the day! Whatever this blog ends up being, though, it's been a great exercise so far.

As for the other story I was working on, much as I love sharing with people, some stories are meant only for certain readers. (And Wes, if you're reading this... um, happy birthday! I made you something!)

"The Pepper Plant"

 

Eddi was twelve weeks into the pregnancy when she bought the pepper plant.

"I feel like I need the practice," she told the clerk at the garden center.

She actually felt that she needed some kind of distraction, something that wasn't a baby book or a question about her child-rearing plans from an eager co-worker that would leave her worrying away the rest of the afternoon. And she had always loved the taste and the color of hot peppers. She took the plant home, gave it new soil, and applied an Epsom salt solution to its leaves.

Once the plant, a cayenne, had produced several fruit, Eddi snipped one of the peppers and sliced off the tip. She was well into the second trimester by that point. She brought the piece to her mouth and began to nibble on it. Immediately she wanted to cry.

The burn of it was horrible, nothing like she remembered or had expected. Her stomach had felt like a minefield flooded with acid throughout the previous months, but she had still hoped to be able to enjoy some of what she had worked so hard to grow.

She called her mother.

"I can't do this," Eddi wailed into the phone, "I don't know what I was thinking. I can't do this."

"Do what?" her mother said. "Honey, is this about the baby?"

"I just wanted to eat a pepper," Eddi said.

She couldn't stand to look at the pepper plant the next morning, and she was hardly able to look at it the day after that. She did, however, check on it three days later. Its leaves were drooping. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," she whispered as she silently urged the water to fill the watering can. It didn't matter that she couldn't eat the peppers; it was still her plant. Yet she wasn't as worried as she thought she should've been. Somewhere deep inside of her, a voice was saying, It's all right, it's all right.

State of the Blog

Here I am, having taken several days away from this blog to do other tasks with deadlines and timeframes that didn't work well with this project.

For some time, I've questioned whether I should continue with these posts. They've been a helpful exercise, forcing me to write about themes I might not address otherwise and making sure I got some writing practice done every day. Heck, I started this blog to make sure that I got some writing in, even on days when I couldn't find the focus to work on longer stories. And as disappointed as I feel when I put the blog on hiatus, I can deal with it. I mean, it's not as if I can't make up for the days I missed.

But being away brought me back to thinking about the big reason I debate continuing this blog as it is, which is that there are simply other stories I want to write, ones that don't fit into the "one picture + one story a day" format or that I'd rather submit and publish elsewhere. I miss spending more time with characters and getting to know them, y'know? The big problem with the big reason is that there's not enough time in my workday to do all the writing I want to do!

My thought now is to leave this blog not as an everyday commitment, but a space where I can work my writing brain with some short posts if I need a warmup or if I have an image with a story that needs to be told. I'm not sure if that's what I'll end up doing, but I might post this and see how I feel about it tomorrow.

If you've been reading this blog while I've been posting, please know that I'm grateful for your attention. There are a lot of good writers out there, and I'm pleased as all get-out that you spent some of your reading time on my posts. I hope it's been as fun for you so far as it's been for me. :)

"Old"

 

As he pushed the sealcoat across the surface of the parking lot, he became aware of an elderly woman watching him from the balcony of her second-floor condo. She was seated close to the railing, her hands folded over the top bar. The skin covering her fingers was dark brown. He imagined that it would look like splintered wood if he saw it up close, and that her fingers were curling over the railing like withered grape vines. He didn't know why it bothered him. He continued the sweep the liquid seal over the cracks in the exhausted asphalt that had been filled, telling himself that the sun was just getting to him.

On Break

The blog's on hold for the next few days. Got a test that got rescheduled, along with a project for work that needs to die already. Thank you!

"Sometimes on Those Summer Nights"

 

Sometimes on those summer nights, among all the shouts from the neighbors playing bag toss games in their driveways and the songs that fell in pitch as cars drove past the house, he would catch the sound of someone crying. He checked out the window a few times and once in the held-breath stillness of night even stepped barefoot on the lawn, but he never saw anybody. The only figure of any note was that of the tree, which stood in the middle of the yard, sticky with the sap that had built up inside it over the course of the spring and that was now escaping through cracks in the bark, unable to be contained any longer.

"What Are You Afraid Of?"

 

"It's the weirdest thing," said the oldest of the three rabbits. "They make these hard ground pathways for themselves, and they never step off of them, just follow them everywhere. When they're younger, they'll play in the grass, but the older ones--you almost never see that."

"Maybe they go blind as they grow up," said the youngest through the blades of grass that he had stuffed into his mouth. "Need the hard ground to know where to go."

"Or maybe they're afraid of what's out there," whispered the middle rabbit. The oldest turned to see him and would've sworn that he was just sitting still, listening to what the wind had to say for the evening, except that he follow the middle one's sideways stare and saw at the end of it a human, standing not five rabbits' length away, at the edge where the grass met solid ground.

"I don't like it," the middle rabbit said.

The oldest held still for a moment. Then he wrinkled his nose. "Why not?" he asked. "It's on the pavement. It won't come any closer." He lowered his head and joined the youngest in the task of eating.

"It's trying to hide its eyes now," the middle rabbit said in more urgent tones.

The oldest and the youngest glanced up. The human was holding a small rectangle in front of its face."Weird," said the youngest.

"It's still not coming any closer," the oldest said.

Later, the oldest rabbit figured that the human must have been able to hear him. That was why it put its foot on the grass.

"Run!" the oldest rabbit squeaked. The three dashed for the nearest bushes, scared to wonder what else the evening held in store.

"Snugglewood"

 

Person 1: "Hey, you want some wood?"

Person 2: "..."

1: "Look, Snugglewood's on sale."

2: "Sugar plum, it's always on sale. It's just not legal to pay for it outside of certain parts of Nevada."

1: "Why do I have the feeling that 'Snugglewood' was someone's euphemistic pet name for part of the body?"

2: "I don't know. Possibly because we already implied something like that just two seconds ago? Possibly because your mind thinks in weird euphemisms all the time? I don't know."

1: "What? Weird euphemisms?"

2: "I told you I was going to run to the corner and grab some eggs and you, like, died laughing for a half hour."

1: "I was just wondering whose you were going to grab."

[pause]

1: "I think a product name like 'Fucksticks' would help them sell a lot more firewood."

2: "Okay, going inside the store now. And I'm going to check the price of milk, too, if you think you can handle it."

1: [snicker]

2: "Yep. Definitely not getting any wood tonight, that's for sure."

"Dear as Pepper"

Today's post is based on an old Italian folktale called "Dear as Salt."

The wise woman left her cabin in the heart of the deep, living forest and traveled to the castle. There she found the prince, seated at a long table on top of a dais, celebrating his wedding feast.

She gave him a cloth bag full of black and red peppercorns.

"Pepper?" the prince asked, holding the bag open, sniffing. He tugged the bag's drawstrings and gave woman the most graceful smile that his confusion would let him manage. "To be honest, I would have expected mushrooms, or some other forest delicacy. Or at least salt. That has some value. We use that in everything."

The wise woman nodded. "Salt is simple and practical, a good foundation," she said. "But pepper. Pepper adds depth. Bite. Salt stands in agreement with each ingredient and makes each dish what it's meant to be. Pepper makes the whole dish something more." The wise woman bowed and turned to take her leave; the party was no place for her. "Go a year without pepper, and your bride there will say everything is seasoned pleasantly enough," she called out as she walked through the long hall. "But how long can a person look forward to dining on food that's merely pleasant?"

She didn't have to turn around to know that the prince's young bride was watching her leave, and that both her meal and the prince's remained untouched.

"The Pursuit of Happiness"

An open condom box, discarded in the grass near the sidewalk.

In my pocket, along with all of the other junk I carry with me daily, I have a fortune from a fortune cookie. It reads, "Happiness is not a reward; it is a consequence." There are consequences for your actions. I like this fortune. According to its wisdom, happiness can result from any action undertaken, no matter where on the moral scale, the line between good and bad, that action falls.

In theory, even littering can lead to happiness.

"5:21"

 

There was an old woman in the back of the electronics department, moving along the shelves of clock radios like a cursor moving along lines of text. When Frank got there, he saw that she was changing the time on all the clocks to 5:21 p.m.

He brought his careful shuffle to a standstill a few feet away from her and cleared his throat. "Ma'am?" he asked. "Can I help you with anything?"

"No," she said with a quick smile before continuing to the next clock, "I'm quite fine, thanks."

Frank nodded. He started to turn away but then swiveled back around on his heels. "If I can ask," he began.

"I'm dealing with something," the old woman told him. This time she didn't look up.

"Right," said Frank. He watched her work at her task. The finger that held down each clock's buttons seemed to tremble under the weight of whatever was motivating her to do this. 

"Ten-ten," he murmured to her when she was at the last clock on the wall. That made her stop. "That's the magic time," he said while she stared at him. "Whenever you see clocks in a store or in a catalog or whatever, they're usually going to be set to ten-ten. I guess it looks more natural or something, I don't know."

"Well. Never noticed that," the woman said. She returned her attention to the clock and pressed one of its buttons until its glowing red lines aligned in the shapes of the digits 5, 2, and 1.

"My manager's probably going to make me change that," Frank said, even though he doubted Shawn would notice.

"Probably," the woman said. Her task complete, she faced Frank with her hands folded in front of her belly and a smile fighting to take hold on her lips, which confused Frank, as the tears swelling in her eyes suggested that that smile had no business even trying. "Still," she said. "I'd like to see how long we can keep these like this, if that's all right."

"Doesn't bother me any," said Frank.

The old woman nodded and patted Frank on the shoulder as she moved to walk past him. "Maybe I'll go home and set my clocks to ten-ten," she told him. "See if there's any magic in that magic time of yours after all." She left Frank lingering in that instant. Even years later, Frank thought back to that night at the store when an old woman came in and locked the clocks on the shelves at 5:21 p.m. The moment seemed, at least in memory, to last forever.

"The Wind"

 

I heard kids' voices come through the window on the back of the summer-day wind. When I got up, though, and pushed back the curtain, I saw no one outside.

Then I heard one of the voices again. "Shit," a boy said, "did you see that?"

"See what?" asked another boy. Still no faces appeared.

There was a pause before the first boy's voice returned with an answer. "Nothing," he said. "I swear I saw the old man's ghost," he added, speaking more quietly.

"You saw the wind move the curtain," said yet another boy I wasn't able to see. "Come on. I hate this place." The voices disappeared then as they always did, cut away by the wind that moved between us, as thin as a razor, separating the world into two.

"Blueberries"

 

[A double post for the day--making up for missing Wednesday's entry.]

After sweeping all the shards and dust from the floor, Ian hurried the ceramic angel and the wing he had broken off of its back into the forest behind the house, where the dirt near a low-growing cluster of blueberry bushes was still soft and bare, untouched by moss or grass. With the wing as his shovel, Ian dug a hole. The pale cast of the figure's material clawed like a scream, a sharp white next to the dirt's darkness when he laid the angel down, but he didn't know what else to do.

When he finished, he looked at the blueberries. Handful by small handful, he filled the pockets of his jackets. He didn't want any; he just needed the excuse. One of the blueberries burst. He glanced at the crevice between his forefinger and his thumb, at the skin where the purple mark was beginning to spread.

A shout split the air like a crack of thunder. Ian turned around. His father was home.

"Flashlight"

 

When the storm knocked out the power, Edna found herself thinking how glad she was that she had remembered to place the flashlight on the side table, which she happened to be sitting by at the time. Then, as soon she turned the flashlight on, she heard the tapping start inside the wall at her back. She was suddenly less glad. 

She swung the beam around until it landed on the wall. "Hey! Turn that thing off!" squeaked a voice somewhere behind the plaster.

Edna panicked and did what she was told.

"Seriously, what's the point of us fixing the lights, now, if you've already got a light to shine?" The voice was so small and light that Edna thought it would echo inside a teacup.

"Who's there?" she whispered.

"Oh, no one," came the voice. "Just give us a second, and..." Instantly, the power returned; the room was flooded with lamplight that drowned the flashlight's beam. 

"Hello?" Edna called, her own voice trembling. But no one replied. She turned in her chair and knocked on the wall, but no answer came. She sat for a bit after that, pondering what to do.

And then she unplugged the lamp.

"The Nut House"

 

He came into the kitchen while she was seated at the table and said, "I've got to know."

She closed her book on her lap. "Are you sure?" she asked.

He nodded. "Yeah," he said. "I've just--I want us to be excited about this together."

"You're sure?"

He nodded again.

"Okay," she said, letting her smile come out of hiding. She eased herself up from the chair. "I got you something that I actually bought to give you whenever you asked. Or, if you didn't ask," she added, tiptoeing toward the closet, "I was just going to give it to you after." She took a bag from the lowest shelf, reached inside for its contents, and passed him his gift.

He studied the antique metal sign.

"I don't get it," he eventually admitted. "Are you telling me it's furry? Or crazy? Or..."

"Use your sense of humor," she told him.

He looked at the sign a while longer, until she finally saw the light break across his face. "Oh," he said, and then, "Oh," with a smile. "A boy," he whispered. "It's a boy."

Short Break

No post tonight, possibly not tomorrow night, either. Work calls. Back soon (I hope)!

"Sour Times"

 

"I often wonder," he said to the bartender, who looked young, even in the bar light, "who it was that first came up with the idea to put lemons in water."

"Really? Do you really often wonder that?" she asked. Her eyebrows were doing as much of the asking as her voice and her words were.

"I'm very drunk," he said, sipping the water. 

"I know," she said. She smiled at him. "What I like to think," she said, tapping the bar counter, "and this is by no means historically true, but what I like to think is that someone decided to take all the goodness of water and add something sour to it, so that whenever someone drank it, the water tasted so much better whenever you got a taste of it through all that sourness." She dropped her bar rag onto the counter with a sodden slap and wiped away a pool of nearly melted ice. "Sounds like I'm a romantic or something, huh," she said. "But I think that sounds better than saying people did it so they wouldn't get scurvy, don't you think?"

He looked down at his glass. He wanted to ask what she could possibly know. But by the time he looked up again, she was at the other end of the bar, pouring whiskey for someone with a face even older than his.

"Circular"

 

[Two other influences on today's post: 1) an image I saw, very similar to this photomicrograph, of bone tissue; and 2) Inger Christensen's incredible poem "alphabet," which I've checked out from the library.]

bones and branches, they both exist

with their circles of cells swirling

whirling in a time-wrought wind

round go the centuries of record

softly the days play a song

"Discovery"

 

I sat next to an old woman at the bus stop. She had a book in her lap but was holding it there with the back cover facing up and the spine turned toward the street, so I couldn't see what she was reading. A bookmark was keeping its vigil about two-thirds of the way through.

"Must be a good book," I said to her, pointing. "Looks like you're almost done with it."

The woman smiled and said, "Oh, it's unbelievable. Very informative. Some books just, I don't know, wake you up, make you realize how much more you have to learn about the world, you know?" She turned her book over and showed me a dictionary's front cover. When the bus finally came, I let her board first.

"The Echo Tree"

 

[A note about this post: When I began writing it, I had an idea of how the story would end. As I continued writing, I liked that ending less. I might be able to fix this, but I couldn't in the time I had today. So below is what I was able to get down of this story.]

The Saturday night before classes were set to start, everyone else on our floor left for a party at one of the nearby apartments, which meant that it was just Lori and I who went out to see the echo tree.

The echo tree was on the west side of campus, near the intersection of Howard and Taylor. It looked like an ordinary tree, except for one abruptly terminated growth about five feet up the trunk. That looked like the remaining nub of a severed branch, except that it was hollow at its core, leading a cavity within the trunk and giving the impression that the tree was whistling, or puckering up for a kiss.

Lori tilted her head as she examined it. "'I'm a little teapot, short and stout,'" she sang.

"Oh, please don't let this tip over and-or pour anything out," I said. "I don't care if it really is empty inside. It's still pretty big."

Lori snickered. "Hey, thanks again for coming out to see this with me."

"No problem. Like I said, I was curious, too. And parties--not so much my thing." Which was true, and which made my assignment to a roommate like Lori, a stranger until yesterday who seemed to feel the same way that I did about what the resident director had labeled "social endeavors," all the more surprising.

"I know," she told me. "I mean, I know shouldn't be shocked, but I am, I can't believe how many people are spending their first weekend at school doing who knows what stupid things that they won't even remember. I mean, new-found freedom and all, I guess, but...."

"Freedom, and learning who you are," I said, "not to mention the fact that we're about to spend our Saturday night talking to a tree, so if anyone's wandering the realm of stupid...."

The story behind the echo tree was that whenever someone spoke into its hollow branch, the tree spoke back--made sense, given the tree's name. The thing about the echo tree, though, was that what it said back was never the same as what had been said to it moments before. There were all sorts of theories as to what was actually happening: that there were pipes that ran underground between the tree and apartments across the street; that one of the frat delegations had slipped some kind of device inside and passed down the secret from one batch of conscripts to the next; that some of the city's homeless, known to shelter in the underpasses, were having some fun at the students' expense. The only one with any answers to share was the tree, and the tree offered only what it had been given to say.

"When Your Petals Fall Away"

 

[Finally started reading A Game of Thrones not too long ago, and was reading it before making tonight's post. I think it put me in a certain mindset...] 

The girl behind the flower stall, who smelled as sweet as honey and smiled like a summer day, watched the old woman in the brown robe edge through the crowd, basket swinging from her arm like a chain, and head straight for the dark-haired man in velvet, the one the flower girl had thought was walking toward the tulips. "Care for something exotic for your kitchen, good sir?" the woman asked when she was in front of him.

The flower girl watched as the man peered first into the basket and then at the crone, his smile thin, his eyes narrowed in confusion. "Good woman," he said, "forgive me for being so frank, but those are the ugliest old roots I've ever seen."

"Not the first time I've heard that," said the crone, smiling, "but if you'll allow me a second, you'll see that those ugly old outsides hide a lovely inside." While the man looked on, she reached for a root and broke off one of its swollen branches. From behind her baskets, the flower girl saw the color of the root's flesh--a keen yellow, like that of autumn leaves--and caught its peppery scent. "A lovely inside," the woman repeated, "not to mention--absolutely delicious." She angled her smile at the man with a knowing nod. "If I may be so frank."

The man offered a chuckle and a large brass coin in exchange for one of the roots and departed without a second glance at the flower stall. "You must do well at the market with your wares," the flower girl said curtly to the old woman once the man was gone.

The woman turned to her with a smile so toothy that the plainness of it was hard to behold. "I do fair at market, yes," said the crone with a shrug. "But I do better afterward, with the men who want to know what else those ugly old outsides are hiding." She tossed the broken root at the flower girl, who caught it just before it struck her face. "Something to remember later, child, when your petals there all fall away." And with that, the old woman left, calling out to another man, "Care for something exotic, good sir?" while the flower girl cast her eyes downward and studied her roses.

"Less than Nothing"

 

It was another morning in the hospital, and thoughts were coming and going through April's mind like insects flitting around a leaf, or nervous little birds hopping along branches. Some she understood why she had them. Like the one about the day she learned about mass versus weight in one of her early science classes. She could see the old memory play on a screen somewhere inside her head, see the pug-nosed boy sitting next to her--was his name Roger? or maybe Greg?--punch her arm and declare for all the students to hear that there was no difference between mass and weight when it came to April; she had a lot of both. And then she could follow the thought back around and recall what had brought it to mind in the first place. In this case, it was because she had glanced at her wrist. It was so thin now that her plastic ID bracelet, fastened on the last hole as it was, kept sliding down onto her hand.

Moments like those were becoming rarer, April could tell. Most of her thoughts arrived and left without giving any indication why they came. There were holes in her memory that she wished she could avoid. Inevitably, needing to know why her mind had chosen to drift this way or that, she would go a few steps backward along the path that her thoughts had taken and stumble. It was almost too much. At times, when she was aware that something was missing but couldn't say what, she imagined herself losing her mind at the same rate she was losing fat tissue and bone mass, imagined the subtraction of her memories from the world occurring alongside the depletion of substance from her body. In those moments, she saw herself at the end shrinking and shriveling beneath her blankets until she weighed nothing and then, as her last thought dissipated, shrinking even further until she weighed less than nothing, becoming a tiny disruption in the air, a bit of negative space that tugged at the people who passed the hospital bed and made them pause for a second, wondering if there was anything there that should have mattered.

An image of a bird flickered across the television screen. It sang its song and darted away, the camera following its flight. April had known once what kind of bird it was by that song. She would have sworn on it.

"Runaways"

 

Moira swore that no one could have heard her crawl out her bedroom window. Her parents certainly wouldn't have. They never listened, just called instructions to her while they balanced their checkbooks or filled out forms for work, telling her to clean her room, or do her homework, or change bratty little Liam's diaper, though at least they never told her to change Grandma's. But it was just an endless sea of chores with them. When she sneaked through her window that night, it was as if she broke through the surface of the ocean, although she made her escape very quietly, taking care to avoid even breathing too heavily.

Which was one reason she was so surprised to find the ash tree from her front yard, labeled by the people from Public Works with a tag that read "65," following her down the sidewalk.

Moira had sat in Sixty-Five's shade enough times to feel certain that the tree meant her no harm. It was the only fact that she felt certain of when, hearing its roots tap their way over the cement like the feet of a thousand tiny insects, she turned around. She made a few stuttering attempts at a sentence before whispering, "You're not supposed to be here," thinking both of her belief that she had left the house in secret and of the tendency of trees to remain in fixed locations.

Sixty-Five remained a few feet away. It tipped the uppermost part of its trunk to the right as if asking a question.

"Trees don't move!" Moira hissed. Sixty-Five replied by slowly waving its branches, giving the impression that a small wind was stirring them.

"You know what I mean," Moira said. "Trees don't get up and walk. They have roots."

A larger branch swung around until it was pointing at her chest.

"Me? I don't have roots. I have my family. Not like they're going to notice I'm gone or anything. Not till they need the toilet cleaned or whatever."

Somehow the branch curved inward so that Sixty-Five appeared to be pointing at itself.

"Trust me, they'll see you're missing," said Moira. "But I'm not as big as you are. And no one there cares about me."

As soon as the words left her mouth, Moira saw Sixty-Five's leaves droop. At first she thought that the tree was tired of arguing, which was confusing, as she always imagined that a good shade tree was nothing if not patient. Then Sixty-Five began to back away, and she realized the weight of what she had said. All those days before, with Sixty-Five looming high above her while she sat in the yard, Moira had assumed not that the tree cared about her, but that the tree was just being a tree, indifferent to anything she did or wanted.

She had made similar assumptions about her parents.

Once she and Sixty-Five were back in the yard, Moira dropped to her knees and patted the dirt back in place over its roots. It turned out, as she saw the tree's wings unfold like moth wings in the moonlight, that the work wasn't so bad after all.

"You and I"

 

If you're reading this, I'm sorry to scare you, though chances are that if your day has been anything like mine--let's be honest, you've probably pissed your pants at least once. At this point, I'm not ashamed. Because if you're reading this, there's a small chance that you and I are the last two people alive in the world.

There's nobody else here. No one is answering the phone, and the websites I visit haven't changed since yesterday. I have a pedometer. It tells me that I walked eight miles through my town today. Eight empty miles, covered without anyone else coming outside to answer the door or silence the car alarms that I kept setting off or see why there was some crazy girl walking down the middle of the street with a baseball bat and a chef's knife, crying until her lungs were in shreds.

What you see above is the one thing I've found that might be a clue. Someone left that camera there in the middle of the sidewalk. The view screen or whatever it's called was open on the other side. I think someone recorded video.

I have the camera with me. For what it's worth, I left a note on the door of the house next to where I found it. I'm not a total savage--not yet, anyway. But if you're out there, please let me know. I don't care where in the world you are; when I take a look at whatever's on the memory card, I don't want to be alone.  

"Pick-It Fences"

 

"See, there's that whole saying about how good fences make good neighbors. The thing is, though," John said to the giantess with a nervous cough of a laugh, "that you've gone and, well. You've decided to use our fence to make your toothpicks."

John looked at his new neighbor, all the way up at her, twenty feet above him as she stood. She had been using what was once the corner fence post to work either a large head of broccoli or a small tree free from the space between two incisors. "Seems that I have," she said. "Does that bother you?" she asked, leaning forward and blocking out a small part of the sun. Her shadow easily crossed the space that the fence had previously divided. All along his back, the summer heat pressed against him and pounded on his skin like boulders unleashed in an avalanche, but in front of him, her shadow and his forearm were nearly touching.

Yes, he wanted to say, it bothered him, very much.

"He Tried to Keep Them Safe"

Vintage paperbacks, wrapped in poly bags, on the shelf at the used bookstore.

He knew it was inevitable that they would get older, so he tried to keep them safe. It was a thin kind of protection, the love he had for them, one that inevitably would fail against the harshness of the years; yet he wrapped them up tightly, and for the most part, it was enough. Of course, a moment arrived when he realized that he had loved them a long time, but he sat with them less and less each day. Then, he knew. He understood that he would never stop loving them, even after he let them go.

"Water Carries It All Away"

 

[Making up for yesterday's missed story...]

Mae sat on the edge of her bed as lightly as her weight would allow and began loosening and peeling back the fraying leathers she wore over her arms, as carefully as if she were peeling away a layer of skin. The practician's orders sang in her mind like a hymn of absolution: "The healing pools are yours tonight, girl. Use the mineral salts."

Her skin exposed, Mae started to study the cuts that the practician had rubbed clean, the joints that she had shifted and worked as close as possible back to normal. "Got you good today, didn't they?" the practician had said to Mae, not needing to hear the answer. "Well, go, get yourself changed, and go sit in the water, then. Water carries away all that pain."

It was a saying in these green hills--water carries it all away--yet as Mae approached one of the pools and began to scoop salt from a nearby barrel into the water, she found herself angry at the practician for offering it. She was divided; her body ached for relief and responded to the hot water with what felt to Mae like its own wave, a wave of release; yet her mind wanted to hold on to the image of each wound that marked her, to examine it like a map, so that she would never again lose her way on the practice field. Sinking into the pool up to her chin, Mae turned so that she could see the barrel of salt. She thought about what she knew of the way that rocks and minerals formed: layers of earthen material, becoming hard under thousands of years of pressure. Inside, she willed herself to turn to stone. Water carries it all away, she told herself, but rock remembers.

"I'm Sad About It, Too"

 

Ladies and gentlemen (if any of you are here reading this), my apologies, but it seems that my desire to complete my work today is leaving me little time to think of a proper blog post. In exchange for not making an actual attempt at creative writing today, I will come back and make two posts tomorrow.

A part of me does hope that I'll come up with something magnificent in the last few minutes of the day, though. Because if I don't, the Lorax is just going to sit here and look at me like that the rest of the night, and that... that is a tough look to bear.

"Closing Time"

 

"It just..." The butterfly heaved and sighed. It folded its wings together and then let them lay flat above its body in defeat. "It just feels like everything's changing so fast sometimes, you know? I mean, I know change is part of life, but..."

"Sweetie," the flower said, gently, "it's almost nighttime. You know the drill. You don't have go to the underside of that tree branch..."

"...but I can't stay here," the butterfly finished. It wished so badly that it could mistake the closing of the flower's petals, the brushing of those petals against its legs, for the start of some kind of embrace.

"Take It Off"

 

"You know, I really kind of want to just take the night off," she said, leaning back in her chair.

To which he replied, "Yeah! Woo! Take it off! Take it all the way off!"

She looked at him.

To which he replied, "I was hoping you had said 'take the nightgown off,' which makes no sense, since you're not actually dressed for bed yet, but, you know," and then sheepishly cast his eyes downward and returned to reading his book.

"The Pitcher"

 

"So how do you see the glass, half empty or half full?" one man asked while he contemplated the tumbler of water on his desk.

"Neither," a second man, sitting at the desk to the first man's right, replied. "All I know is that, either way, I have to pour water out of my pitcher to fill it up. And every time you have some sort of existential crisis, I have to take time out of my day to deal with it. So how about instead of contemplating all the deep and meaningful parts of life this morning, you finish up your drink and get back to work?"

Eyebrows raised, the first man took a sip of his beverage and set the glass back down, gently, because the second man's glass, or pitcher, as it was, was obviously sitting on the edge of a terribly steep drop, and in no way did he want to disturb it.

"Swarm"

 

[While I'm writing about ants, might as well include a link to an article about ant behavior that I thought was a good read: "7 Reasons Ants Will Inherit the Earth"]

Lina had been at the window for a few minutes when Kristin came up behind her. Together they stood and watched a mad cluster of ants, thick as a cloud, swarm their front porch.

"I heard that ants go crazy like that right before a storm comes," Lina said, her eyes focused outside.

"Really?" Kristin murmured. "I heard that when they pile on each other like that, they're basically two colonies at war, fighting each other."

Lina turned. "Just have to disagree with me on everything, don't you?" Her smile was little more than a twist of her lips, as if she had swallowed something sour. 

Kristin sighed and pressed closer, placing her hand on Lina's arm, her chin on Lina's shoulder. "I'm sorry," she told her. "I didn't mean it like that. Look, can we, I don't know, just press 'rewind' and go back fifteen minutes or something? Try that again?" Outside, the sound of thunder rolled toward them like an army.

"Preserved"

 

Outside the labs, all along the hallways on the second floor of the science building, display cases stood silently, like sentinels. Most of them contained skeletons; a few held geodes. One was devoted to a collection of expertly preserved snakes. Jeri stopped in front of a case that offered a glimpse into prehistoric plant life through the fossils on its shelves and pondered what it meant that something that had survived the onslaught of so many years had ended up on display at a community college in the suburbs.

In the reflection of the glass, Jeri saw her instructor slowly approach. "You okay?" Ms. DuBois asked her.

Jeri heard her laugh cut the air open. "About what? The fact that I'm going to fail this lab? Not really," she said.

"No failure here," Ms. DuBois said. She folded her arms across her chest and moved to Jeri's side. "Dissection is hard on a lot of people, even the ones who look forward to it. I had a lab partner in college once, the second we made our incision into the abdomen, just threw up right there, right in the opening." Jeri raised her eyebrows and turned to see her instructor smile. "Look, take your time," Ms. DuBois told her, "but come on back. And my advice? Honestly?" Her smile was almost ghostly in the glass. "Ask your group to be the one to use the knife."

Jeri remained under the quiet watch of the display case a little while longer after Ms. DuBois returned to the lab. She took another peek at the fossils inside, split wide, their stories released into the air like souls and revealed to everyone despite what protection the case could lend, before drawing in her breath and heading back to continue with the dissection.

Her group had named the cadaver William.

"The Muffin Man"

 

[According to Wikipedia, there really isn't much to the lyrics of "The Muffin Man."]

When I pulled up in Janelle's driveway, I saw that she was sitting on the step leading up to her front door. She was frowning and had her chin resting on her hands; she was sitting like a little girl who had gone outside to nurse a broken heart. Because she had invited me over for margaritas, this confused me.

"Hey," she said after I had gotten out of the car. "You know the Muffin Man?"

"Yeah, why? What's up?" I really didn't know him any better than Janelle did, but I had seen him walking through the neighborhood enough times, taking on that big, doughy middle of his through daily bouts of exercise, that I knew who she was talking about.

"He died," Janelle told me. "I saw his picture in the obituaries today."

"Oh," I said. I didn't know what else to say after that. I didn't know anything else about him, except that I thought he lived on Drury Lane--I saw him go into a house there once. So I told her that.

She looked at me and nodded. "His name was James Obryzewski. Fifty-three years old, no kids, volunteered twice a week at Prairie Food Bank," she said. "Listen, I think I want to take a walk." She placed her hands on her knees and stood, wearily, no longer looking young with her heart in pieces but older, the age she truly was, with her heart showing all the little cracks that come with living and never fully heal. "You want to come with? Or maybe we can go later, I don't know."

"No, now's good," I said, "margaritas can wait."  Janelle took me by the arm and smiled. It was a simple thing, what I said to her, but I had the feeling that to her, like a child's nursery rhyme, it meant so much more.

"Better Than Snail Mail"

 

When I was a kid, there were plenty of times when I wanted to send someone mail but couldn't get to the post office in time or was a few cents short of the money I needed to buy stamps. In those cases, I made a trip to see Mr. Aves.

I still remember the time I made a card for my grandmother when she lost her job. Allowance Day was two days away; I was a sucker for tater tots and so had gone back and paid for seconds at lunch at the school cafeteria; in short, I was a handful of pennies away from what being I called "broke," and so I went to ask if Mr. Aves could help. I was only expecting a robin or a sparrow. But he took my pennies and from the bunch plucked one that had all the shine of the morning on it. "Well, now, here we have something special," he told me. "For this, we can do for your grandma something very nice." From his cages he brought out a kestrel, young and razor-thin and spectacular, and gave the bird my card to deliver to my grandmother. 

More than anyone, I think Mr. Aves understood the magic of getting a letter in the mail.

"Food for Thought"

 

"So they call it pot," said the first girl.

"Yes," said the second.

"And when you do it, you get baked."

"Yes."

The first girl rolled onto her side. "I don't know about you, but I am so friggin' hungry right now."

The second girl responded by shoving most of her left hand into her own mouth and saying, "Problem solved," except that it came out sounding like pwobwob solb, and after they had laughed for a while about that and about how stupidly enormous their heads were, they went to the hot dog stand at the end of the street and got the largest bag of fries on the menu.

"Leaving a Red Brick House"

 

"It's a good house," the second brother said to the first while they were standing outside their younger sibling's home of rich, red brick. "Better than anything I could ever build."

"Hey, you don't have to tell me about the value of a good house," the first brother said. He glanced two lots over, at the pile of blown thatch that had once been his. 

The second brother turned to him. "So why don't you want to stay?" he asked.

"In there?" The red house sat in front of them, kindly and squat.

"With us," said the second brother. "As one of us."

The first brother squealed. "Oh, come on. 'One of us'? Really? You're talking like some girl's going to come kiss me into a prince or something." He sighed. "We've been through this. It's just--you know, after everything that's happened, I've been wondering what I've been doing with my life. Why all of this--" he pointed with a hoof at the brick house "--matters. No offense. But maybe it's time for something more spiritual, I guess."

"It's 'cause you're getting old," said the second brother.

The first brother raised an eyebrow, then snorted a laugh. "Yeah, well, losing a house sure makes you feel old," he said. "But you should know that. Shit, you're just as much a geezer as I am, in that case."

"Just a few years away from my own existential crisis," the second brother agreed. "Still don't see myself picking a religion where they butcher me, though."

The first brother saw the second glancing back at his loins and became confused and suspicious. Then he remembered. "Right, the circumcision thing," he said with a shrug. "Eh, it could be worse. Overall, I feel pretty safe with them."

"Yeah, I guess I can see that." The second brother nudged the first with his forehead and began trotting toward the brick house. "I think it's just slop in the trough tonight, but what do you say? One more dinner where you don't have to worry about keeping kosher?"

The first brother stared at his youngest sibling's home. The home was family; it represented everything he had ever known, the sum of his life story as it so far had been written. But what was he without a home? He didn't yet have the answer. He knew only that there were a people who had gone homeless for forty years and were still around today. The rabbi wasn't expecting him for a few days anyway; everyone knew how long a trip it was to the temple. So, "Sure," the first brother said the second, and they went to join the third brother for a meal of scraps, their last together before the first brother left to begin his journey through the study of the Torah. He tried to imagine the taste of milk and honey the entire time he ate.

"Spiders on the Brain"

 

[Doodle courtesy of Wesley Wong]

"You've been drawing spiders a lot lately," he said to her.

She shrugged and swept her pen across the sheet of paper, creating a web of thin lines and broken angles. "I don't know. They've just been on my mind."

In bed that night, he woke and found her turned away from him. The lamp on her nightstand was on and dimly glowing. He peeked over the crest of her shoulder and saw that she had a notebook open and a pencil in her hand. Another spider menaced him from the corner of the page.

"Hey," he whispered, "drawing again?" Her hand kept moving, creating lines on the paper. He glanced at her face and saw that her eyes were closed. And then he saw the first of the spiders crawl out of her ear.

"The Faerie Mosh"

 

He was tall, lanky even, with two spindly legs that carried him behind her like exclamation points at the end of her name. The faerie queen liked this boy very much. She tucked her hair behind her ear, letting the multiple piercings catch the moonlight, and took him by the hand to lead him toward the cluster of erratically grown mushrooms beneath the oak tree.

"Just to be clear," she told the boy, "this is what they call 'being pixie-led.' You're being pixie led right now."

"You know, I think I knew that," he told her with a shrug and a smile. He stopped at the edge of the mushroom cluster and poked at one toadstool with the toe of his plaid canvas shoe. "Why did I think that faeries dance in, like, a circle of mushrooms or something?" He suddenly moved his foot back. "Should I not touch that?"

The faerie queen laughed and wove her fingers into the spaces between his. "Relax," she told him, "we're much less formal than you think. Circles are fun, but we can dance just fine without them." She thought of how he had looked at the club, jumping and bouncing to the music on those skinny legs that had shouted to her from across the room. His hair was a crown of red-tipped spikes that had held its shape despite his frenzy. She couldn't wait to see what kind of mess she could make of it.

"It All Ends Up the Same"

 

The old ones say, "You're young and green; you have nothing to worry about."

The young ones say, "Nothing can hurt you, with your thick, weathered skin."

It turns out that a knife cuts all of them equally well.

"Never Tear Us Apart"

 

"Please! Let me down!" the fledgling robin chirped as the hawk plucked it from the ground.

"Sure, I'll get right on that," said the hawk.

The robin's voice nipped at the air as it continued to cry. "Please! My brother's down there! I can't leave him alone, or else he'll get in trouble."

The hawk's response was to release the young robin and let her go tumbling across the lawn just below them. The hawk glided onto the grass behind her.

"So let me get this straight," the hawk said as the robin righted itself. "You believe that if I let you go back to your brother--brother, you said, yes?--you'll be able to keep him out of trouble, and he'll be fine?"

"Oh, yes," the robin said, giving her feathers a shake. "That's what our mom said. She said that as long as we stay together, we'll be all right."

"I see," said the hawk. "Well, then, I believe we have no choice but to go find your brother." The way the hawk spread her wings, it was almost as if she knew how to smile.

"A Fresh Start"

 

[For brownie lore and background information, click here.]

The brownie slumped down the night-swamped street, the doll's clothes that had been left neatly folded for him in his corner of the old house now tucked under his arm like a bundle of rags. He was cold, and he had already started to despair.

When he glanced up at one point during his walk, he did so intending to ask the heavens for some form of deliverance from his current plight. He did not expect to see a sign already waiting for him.

"'Garage Sale,'" the brownie read aloud. He mumbled the address to himself several times over, until it stuck in his mouth like taffy. There would be a large house there, one that had been emptied of some of its stuff and was ready to be cleaned, one with space that a brownie could fill nicely. He smiled then, took his sorghum-bristle broom out from the bundle on his back, and began twirling it as he resumed his walk. It was a broom well made for sweeping, which made it a fine accessory for a fresh start.

"The Message"

 

I've had a lot of time to think while I've been in here. Once I was able to come by some paper and a pencil, I finally put the time to use. That's when I started writing her the letters, just to let her know that I was okay.

I don't know how a caterpillar ended up in a prison yard. There's a really heavy metaphor in there somewhere, though. At least it feels like there is. But when I saw the caterpillar the other day, I remembered this story my grandma told me once about a girl who whispered a message to a caterpillar, and when the caterpillar hatched into a butterfly, it had the message written all across its wings. Not sure what put that story back in my head that after all these years. As I said, I've had a lot of time to think.

Today I found my caterpillar in the yard. The flies had found it, or at least the piece of it that was still there on the pavement, before I did. And I hate having this thought now with the picture of that squished little thing so close by in my mind, but the person I've been writing to, she hasn't written back to any of my letters yet. I just hope she's getting them. And I hope she's okay. Because when I write them, even when I finish them, and I fold them up and bring their edges close, I feel free. For a little while, anyway.

"Persuasion"

 

[Random fact learned today, courtesy of Rick Steves and Fred Plotkin: Giuseppe Verdi was not only a master composer of music but also a skilled butcher. Whenever he wanted to encourage someone to fund or support a project or idea of his, he sent them a bit of prosciutto or some other cured meat as a method of persuasion.]

The young man on the other side of the bar from Drew looked like one more element of the restaurant's decor--dark grey dress shirt, black tie and pants, a face so cold and even that it suggested a slab of marble--which made it all the more surprising for Drew to find out that the man was applying for a job in the kitchen. He held himself with posture that appeared to have been calibrated against the edge of a knife and kept his hands folded on top of the lacquered counter while Drew scanned his neatly typed resume. When the young man said, "I'll cook you," Drew almost answered him with, "That sounds about right."

Instead Drew said, "I'm sorry. What did you say?"

"I said I'll cook for you," the man replied. "In your kitchen, right now."

"That won't be necessary. Plus, I'm pretty sure our insurance won't cover you."

But the young man shook his head and said once more, "I'll cook for you," and when he turned on his heels and began walking, Drew simply let him lead. As little as Drew liked the idea of a stranger in the kitchen, he liked the idea of this person walking behind him even less.