Write the Year 2021—Week 52: As Long as You and I Are Here

Manicure: One of the prompts from Writers Write last week.

Title: As Long as You and I Are Here
WC: 700

It is the least I can do. It’s also the most I can do. I am not built for these palaces of femininity. I am not made for gossip and surrender to the will of someone who indubitably knows better than I do. The shiver-inducing delights of being worked on are completely alien to me. I have no store of small talk at all and a stranger’s touch—any stranger’s touch—calls up the wrong kind of shiver.

But decades ago, all at once, I made an effort for reasons I cannot recall. I shelled out money for make-up of my own, guided by the only behind-the-counter person at the Michigan Avenue department store (Saks? Bloomingdales? I honestly cannot remember.) who’d take pity on me with twenty minutes to go before close on a Sunday evening.

I made appointments for real haircuts—salon haircuts—that cost far too much and did nothing to tame my hair’s untamable sea witch vibe. I had one and only one pedicure. I clutched the magazine tight enough to leave its edges ragged and tried to focus on the story about people obsessed with having sex up against the windows in the ladies room of the 95th floor of the Hancock Tower, just across the street. I wanted to slither out of my skin and leave it entirely behind.

None of it took, though. On the rare occasions that I wear makeup and catch sight of myself in the mirror, I jump in genuine fear and lack of recognition. After a brief stint with a taciturn, capable stylist who gave a great cut and believed me when I said I was never, ever going to blow dry my hair regularly—or indeed do anything other than wash and brush it—I’m back to putting off appointments until a special occasion rolls around and I can co-opt someone else’s labor to make whatever is going on with my head look deliberate, if not good.

I’ve settled on the manicure when absolutely necessary. As a bride, as a bridesmaid, whenever there is a summons to femininity en masse, I hand over my hand and let someone else tease order out of chaos. I stick to something short and simple, a nude color and a square tip, for preference.

I hate it. It’s still a stranger’s touch. It’s still an occasion when I’m apt to be found out—to be outed as having no enthusiasm for pampering, for preemptively being annoyed by the first chip, which I’m sure to suffer before I’ve awkwardly handed over a tip that’s almost certainly the wrong amount. But it’s the least I can do.

It isn’t the last manicure that I remember the best. My memory wants to insist it must be, but the math doesn’t agree. My aunt was getting remarried, a happy occasion that drew far-flung family back together. There was a girls afternoon planned—a command performance with the bride, my sisters, another aunt, and my grandmother. 

I think about her a lot this time of year. I have a red sequined cardigan I pull out almost exclusively for Christmas. I call it my Mimi cardigan, and I miss her among all the sparkling things.

At not-the-last manicure, the young woman who got stuck with me was quiet. It was at least as much a matter of her reading my vibe as the two of us having very little language in common. But the silence seemed to suit her as well as it suited me. I was surprised when, as she was finishing up, she seemed to want to say something to me quite urgently.

After a few false starts and comically exaggerated sidelong looks, I realized she was asking something about Mimi.

“Your grandmother?” I eventually worked out this is what she was asking.

“Our grandmother.” I nodded to my sisters. “Their mother.”

The young woman asked Mimi’s age. I gave my best guess, shaving off a few years, I think, partly out of uncertainty, partly because I thought she might want me to.

The young woman shook her head, awed. “She is beautiful. You have nothing to worry about.”

Write the Year 2021—Week 51: As Lovely

It’s come to this. I have written a poem about a tree. It’s a weird tree. But still. This is a cadae, which is a poem based on Pi.

Title: As Lovely
WC: 49

Encircle
me
like roots gone wrong.

Rise.

Or don’t. The purpose
might well be served by excavation.
The trick
is never to look down.

Seems easy enough.

Coyotes
and their mountainsides
can hardly hope to outsmart us.
We come equipped with hollows, thump proof
and perfect for curling up.

Write the Year 2021—Week 50: Variant

This is extremely dumb, but kind of amusing to me. It is mostly not at all a response to this prompt and it is a Mistress Bradstreet Stanza.

Title: Variant
WC: 51

Along the way, the second l was lost.
The culprit? I suspect a poker game,
rather than the ocean
left us an off-brand Shakespearean name.
Profligate is as stingy with its ls
as any relative, long lost or well-
met by moonlight’s self-same
single, slender, evil-implying t uncrossed.

Write the Year 2021—Week 49: Discard

I liked this prompt from Writers Write, but I didn’t make much of it.

Title: Discard
WC: 500

• Odds and ends of yarn. Partial skeins, for sure, but true odds and ends, barely as long as my palm. They conspire to form a hundred tangled, snarling beasts lurking the bottom of bags and the back of drawers. They swallow stitch markers and cable needles and barrel counters whole. Waste yarn they whisper. For when you need it. Bits and pieces for one of those de-stash projects people do when they’re organized, when they’re good at this, when they deserve nice things.
• The row of chipped and broken things on window sill over the sink.
  • A skull candle holder. I knocked it over and broke the arc off the brim of its green hat.
  • A calavera lady mug with a triangular chip right out of the rim. The chip sits there in the bottom of the mug. She sits there, far from her mustachioed companion. I never drink from him, because it makes me sad to think of the home I’ve broken.
  • My pretty, delicate blue and white coffee cup. It looks fancy and grown up, but the blue pattern is sea monsters and mythological beasts. I broke the handle off, somehow. Those pieces are in the bottom of the cup, too.
    
• One million scrawled notes on one million songwriting lead sheets.
  • Most are mine.
  • Some belong to others, and I’ve scratched some indecipherable message to myself.
  • I tell myself I’m going to compile them one day. I’m going to annotate and create a record.
  • (I am never, ever going to do this.)
• Opera programs going back to 2001. Somehow, the record is incomplete. I don’t know how this can be.
  • I once made a special trip to the office to retrieve a copy of one I’d left in the bathroom at the Tasting Room. That was the night Mike wound up in the hospital for the first time.
  • Probably several decayed in the back of my car along with the copy of The Closing of the American Mind I never once opened.
  • Probably, I accidentally threw some away
  • So probably this doesn’t count.
• Pens. There is drawer in the mail center so full of them that it can almost never be opened. How many must be dry?
• Pennies. Whenever I am cleaning, they can stop me dead in my tracks.
• Clothing that is objectively too big for my body. (This is a trick item. There is no clothing that is too big for my body.)
• Books?
  • Swollen books I have dropped in the bathtub a hundred times.
  • Books whose covers and spines are distant memories.
  • Books with physical boarding passes marking the places where I gave up.
  • (I don’t always know who these are different from the books I cast away without a thought.)
• All-but-blank documents. With a line, with two lines, with false starts on things I am going to write someday when I am disciplined, when I know what a writing practice actually is, when I do more than piecemeal box-ticking bullshit.

Write the Year 2021—Week 48: Spear-Carrier

Lame and short, but a response to this prompt.

Title: Spear-Carrier
WC: 600

Today is day number seventy-eight of no one knowing you. That makes it November. Your legs are purple with cold, but you can’t risk pulling your socks up. You’re not brave enough to risk sweats underneath your skirt. You’re not brave enough to linger at the door to peel them off, let alone stalk straight to your locker, unconcerned by the threat of an out-of-uniform slip.

Today is day number seventy-eight, and did someone say shortened classes?

You swivel right in your chair, left in your chair. You swivel all the way around because you might be able to ask Kathy. She can’t remember your name, even though she’s in the last row. She’s got three people around her, not four, and she can’t remember your name. But she’ll talk to you if there’s no one else.

There’s someone else right now, and homeroom is so loud. No one is up at the board writing out the schedule—one, two, six, four, three, five, seven—that’s how lunch lands in the middle of the day, but maybe you heard wrong. Shortened classes, maybe that’s what you wanted to hear.

It’s easier those days. Forty minutes with your head down, thinking hard and fast to keep up the whooshing in your ear drums. Fifty-two minutes is harder. The whispers leak in—Is she new? Did she go to Peace? Fifty-two minutes gives you time to worry that someone will realize.

You are not new. You did not go to Peace. Fifty, sixty, a hundred of these girls, all told, have seen you most days since all of you were five. Didn’t she have those messed-up ponytails? Is she the green girl? The clown? She’s not the vamp, is she?

These are the details that spark collective memory. Ponytails your dad didn’t know how to do, a green-checked polyester jumpsuit with a belt that was cool when your sister wore it ten years before you, the day you wore two different shoes, the day you stabbed a boy with the point of a compass in geometry because he wouldn’t stop teasing you. He wouldn’t shut up and your mind had gone tv-static white inside and then there was blood.

Fifty, sixty, a hundred of these girls have seen you literally a thousand times, but they don’t know you. They can’t remember from day to day if you’re that girl—if all those girls are the same or different, forgettable weirdos. You are no longer valuable enough to even abuse.

You are that girl and it’s day seventy-eight of no one knowing you. On the bus there is no nod from the driver as you flash your pass, drop your token. There is no question of him seeing you running for the stop and waiting, or pulling to the curb at your corner instead of the next if you ask. He will not hear you ask. He will be startled to find you exist at all. He will immediately forget you do.

You have been ripped from the pages of your childhood, from shaded blocks where identical houses march two by two and you swap in and out of the same three rooms all day long. You have been pasted into entirely two-dimensional scenes, a blurred face, a background actor. You are a walk-on with no lines most days. And when the days go forty minutes at a time, when the schedule goes one, two six, four, three, five seven, it’s peaceful.

Forty minutes at a time, It’s so fucking peaceful.

Write the Year 2021—Week 47: Cling

Truly nothing but the struggle to go on this week. No prompt. No form.

Title: Cling
WC: 60

All I have to go on
is fingernails.
Ragged and ridged,
they are orphans.
They are all that’s
left in the well.
Infinite, the flake scars
I catch with my teeth
and tear. Out and about,
I raise painful pink
birds’ eyes. The throb of it
is some scant reminder:
Stupid. You will need those.
You are barely hanging on.

Write the Year 2021—Week 46: So Swings

A Park’s Triad. Started with an image I saw through the train window, but this then departed pretty quickly from there. There is a literal bell, though, that swings on the underside of the train.

Title: So Swings
WC: 116

The green of afternoon intrudes
With hands on thighs he crouches low
His fingers’ busy gestures call
November’s bluff, its frigid swell
Impervious to magic yet
Incensed to see the tilt rebel
And bake the bricks of crooked streets
So swings the bell

A mirror image close behind
A future far from certain bows
To whisper dull and metal truths
A tug, a sigh, a broken spell
His contemplation incomplete
So swings the bell

The soft of evening knocks the glass
Its copper timid, cool, and blank
As if by accident it fell
And swallowed whole the last of us
The echoes fill the empty well
We raise the gates, admit defeat
So swings the bell

Write the Year 2021—Week 45: Scatter

The tank is truly empty tonight. It’s late and I’m still not done with my work for tomorrow. So just a brief scene based on the word-a-day prompt from Writers Write for yesterday.

Title: Scatter
WC: 300

The alley runs perpendicular to the streets where people live, facing the sun, facing the sunset. It’s a gravel-crunch end-cap flanked by brick houses and the back ends of the businesses it runs along in parallel. It is home to tarry-looking wooden poles, dumpsters pocked with rust blossoms, and weeds in every stage, in every state, in every phase of existence.

Tonight the alley smelled of fresh newsprint. It’s November. Scent carries on the air, crisp as a sheet on the line, even on mild nights like this one. I didn’t have to have my nose to the earth to catch the scent. I didn’t have to run along on outsized paws, zigging and zagging to pick up the trail and follow it. I wondered well before the end of the block what it was I would see when the alley came into view.

There must have been a hundred of them scattered there, slim tabloids, not even in piles anymore, not since the wind had gotten hold of them. Some were still dancing. They tumbled through the bars of the low black fence that runs all the way around the parking lot. They tumbled seemingly on their corners like the choo-choo with square wheels on the Island of Misfit toys. Some wrestled with the bottom-most branches of the bushes planted at erratic intervals outside the fence.

But most lay there in the alley. Their pages flapped listlessly back and forth like so many wringing hands. Rosey, true to her name, nosed at one as though she wanted to catch the headlines. She held the corner of the centerfold down with her paw, smoothing the front page flat. Citizen, it read, its banner stretching above the head of some old, bald white guy, explaining nothing.

Write the Year 2021—Week 44: Noiseless

This prompt.

This random stock image

Title: Noiseless
WC: 700

“It stinks!” Linden’s wail didn’t echo.

The room, though cavernous and nearly empty, was too swollen and blistered for echoes. Its filthy walls, battleship grey from the widow sills down, a mottled, onion-skin white above, sagged and sighed as they waited for the rotted slats of the ceiling to rain down. Nothing here remembered enough of itself to echo.

“I know.” Tel tried not to gag as a wave of black mold, dead things, and countless years rose up as she set the little boy down in the overstuffed armchair. “But it’s . . . “ She scanned the the scene with its violent green mounds of decaying leaves, its empty window frames staring out into nothingness. “It’s off the floor.”

Linden’s knees shot up and in toward his chest. His sneakered feet shoved themselves between the chair’s cushion and the rounded arm as if he’d only just registered all the horrors that might be lurking on the floor.

“It smells bad,” he said, a whisper this time.

Tel heard the exhaustion in it. One rib, then two let go a little at the sound of it, the fist that held her chest tight in its grip easing just a little. Relief. If he was exhausted, he might . . .

He might not . . .

If only, just this once, he were exhausted enough. It was a shitty if only, a shitty thing to be relieved about, and sooner rather than later, there’d be guilt swirling around with that relief. But in the mean time, the boy’s head sank until all Tel could see was a thick mass of dark curls resting against the red slope of his knees, and for a moment, there was quiet, if not peace.

She stayed on her feet as long as she could. Twilight was gathering outside. The splintered window panes, half of them with wicked arcs of glass still clinging to the grey, unwholesome wood, looked out to the west, to the south. She’d have the ambivalent mercy of light for another half an hour yet.

She paced the perimeter, taking contorted exaggerated steps to avoid unspeakable things heaped high against the walls and slumping out toward the center of the room, out toward the overstuffed arm chair, eerie and alone in the absolute center of the room. She moved as quickly as she dared, as quickly as she could and still remain close enough to silent not to rouse the boy curled in the chair. She needed him to sleep.

This was the tightrope she walked as she fought off her own exhaustion, her own panic. Her mind ran races with scuttling things in the corners of the filthy room, trying to come up with somewhere, anywhere they could go next.
Somewhere empty like this. That’s what she needed to find. A place where he’d be less . . . overwhelmed, where the only thing he’d notice was the stink, and the silence of the rest of it would let his eyes close, let whatever it was inside him settle.

“You know this one?” The sound of his voice nearly peeled the skin from her bones. He was far from the chair, staring up at a thick, clumsy heart drawn in spray paint lifetimes ago. “You can hear this one, right?”

He turned to her, hopeful. Tel crossed to stand beside him.

“I can see it. A girl and a boy. An arrow.” She rested a gentle hand on his thin shoulder. She hoped it was gentle at least. “I can’t hear like you can. You know that.”

“I know that,” he repeated dutifully. He didn’t know that. He would never know how silent the inside of Tel’s head was. “It was her grandfather’s.” He turned and gestured to the chair. “The only one who loved her. And he only loved her a little.”

Tel found her fingers twined with his. She found herself following as he stepped with ease around the puddles and piles and hungry places where the floorboards gaped like mouths. She found herself following, sinking down on one rounded, stinking arm of the chair as Linden hopped up on the other with sudden energy. She found herself listening to all the ghosts of this room had to say.

Write the Year 2021—Week 43: Oversight

Weird response to this Writers Write prompt, which doesn’t land in a number of ways.

Title: Oversight
WC: 700

The afternoon is almost done. Emily knows this from the sun. It’s behind the house now, dragging its ragged orange sherbet way down the sky. She knows it from the tick of the clock she hasn’t looked up at in twelve-thousand, two-hundred, and forty-six ticks, but counting isn’t the same as looking. The ticks are exact. The clock hands wobble up and down for everyone else.

About quarter to three.

Just after five.

Almost midnight.

Emily goes by the ticks, not like everyone else. Not like her sister, Tess, who was supposed to be back one thousand, four hundred, forty-six ticks ago. Tess is not late. The clock hands will wobble when she comes through the door with brown paper grocery bags and car keys dangling from her finger.

Everything fine? Tess will say and Emily will write the number of extra ticks in the palm of her hand. Everything fine, Emily will say.

Tess will be back before everything is not fine. The baby sleeps for fourteen hundred ticks, at least. Tess has counted. It’s not something to trust to wobbling clock hands or even the sun. The baby needs a lot of things when he is not sleeping and Emily doesn’t know about any of that.

Emily knows about peeking through the cracked-open door and the squeaky floorboard she has to heel-toe over so slowly. She knows how many times the baby’s sea monster ribs should rise and fall while she holds her breath so that she can say Everything fine and Tess will smile. She won’t even go see for herself right away, because she trusts Emily with this.

There are twelve-thousand, seven-hundred, and twenty-three ticks now and it is almost time to sidestep down the hall again and shut her left eye tight so she can watch and count ticks and breath and ticks and breath and ticks. Twelve thousand, eight hundred ticks is almost thirteen hundred. Emily can tell without looking that the orange sherbet shreds are gone from the sky—that the back of the house is all furry blue shadows and even so, Tess is not late, Tess is not late, Tess is not late.

She sidesteps down the hall early. Her left foot almost forgets the squeaky floorboard. There’s a shrill chirp before she pulls her toe back and slides the rest of the way, with the peeling wallpaper dragging at her back. Her heart is beating fast, too fast. She thinks for a second she’s lost count of the ticks, but the number knocks at the inside of her forehead. Twelve-thousand, eight hundred, and sixteen.

She squeezes her left eye shut tight and presses her right cheek to the door frame. She swivels her chin to peer around the big, solid hinge. The sea monster ribs are not rising and falling. The sea monster ribs roll from side to side, battling with waving fists, kicking feet, an angry red planet.

Emily freezes. The baby is not sleeping. She loses count of the ticks. She feels the memory of the last time dig its fingers into her sides. She claps her hands to her ears, waiting for the screams from inside the room, from inside her. She feels her thighs come up swiftly to meet her belly. Her knees, her forehead scrape the door, pushing it wide.

The big, solid hinge squeals like the beginning of something terrible, but it’s quiet then. Everything is quiet except for a soft, rustling sound, fists waving, sea monster ribs rolling. Emily picks herself up. Everything fine.

She creeps forward, a slow heel–toe. She is checking on the baby like Tess thinks she does, all the way to the wooden bars and the mint green sheet pulled taught over the mattress. She crouches at the last second with her palms spread wide, spanning the bars. Her face sinks like the moon until her eyes meet the baby’s.

The sea monster ribs quiver, then still. They resume their rise and fall, though the fists wave, the feet kick. The angry red planet dims to something pale and pulsing.

“I was expecting someone more confrontational,” Emily says.