"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.