This is really just leaning into prompt (one of the words from writers write for this month) and constraint (this is a Dr. Stella)
Title: Stowaway
WC: 42
Her fingers closed around the key
Its teeth of brass bit keenly,
Embedded memories in skin
To sow tomorrow’s trouble
The lock revealed itself to be
A compact broken cleanly
To spill its secret blue-green sin
A pin to pierce the bubble
Partly a prompt from Writers Write. Partly a song I’ve been banging my head against this week, which was first inspired by the image below
Title: Orchid Lightning
WC: 750
It was an ordinary winter Thursday. The sky was just burning off the tail end of daylight. A block this way and that way, rush hour traffic was creeping its loud, profane way onward. Here, though, the ground beyond the chain link fence descended, an angular wedge someone had carved out for some reason.Within it, the deep drifts of snow drank the noise right down. Here, it was something close to quiet. Ren wondered if that’s why he’d chosen this spot. Or she. Or they.
The artist, she said to herself. The solution pleased her well enough that she said it again, this time spending a tiny parchment-colored cloud of breath on it—the artist. A gritty gust of wind roared down the train tracks just then, taking the moment’s pleasure with it and calling her out as a fool.
The quiet must be an occasional byproduct, at best. In the heat of summer, everything would carry. Horns and children shouting as they stretched out their games of Ghost in the Graveyard. The seclusion and the vast concrete face of the man-made canyon’s north wall. That must surely be the draw. Or must surely have been, maybe.
She curled her fingers tighter in the rusted-out diamonds of the fence and brought her face close enough to the dirty thing that could almost taste the ochre stains on the tip of her tongue. She scanned the white expanse of the drifts for interruptions—footprints, wheel tracks, any sign of the artist, but there was nothing. She allowed herself a sidelong, half-lidded glance at the thing itself.
The work, she called it the confines of her own mind on the days she forced herself, without turning, past the street at the west end of the fence. The creation. That’s what she called it here. Like this, when the vivid shades and haunting figures called the blood to the surface of her skin and forced her gaze downward.
Last week—another ordinary winter Thursday—she’d convinced herself with a half dozen stolen glimpses that it had grown, shifted, morphed somehow. A new flash of mad orchid lighting hidden in one of the eyes that danced through a streamer of clouds, or maybe a new hint of brilliance in the gem that rested on the forehead of the largest, most arresting of the faces.
But today, time had folded back on itself like a bird with its head under one wing. Today, she had come and she had to admit it to herself: Tte work was unaltered. The creation had been . . . created. And there was no reason in the world to think there would be more, or that one day there’d be an awkward, one-sided encounter: the artist working, Ren holding her breath and looking on from afar.
She took a step back from the fence, one set of fingers still tangled in it, reluctant to let go. There was no trace of the sun any more. It was beyond stupid to be standing here alone, staring into the blackness. With an effort, she pulled free and turned to go.
Just then, there was a hum, all the molecules of air for what felt like miles vibrating. The area inside the fence was flooded with punishing blue-white light. Ren’s first instinct snapped her chin upward. She scoured the night sky looking for . . . what? Little green men? A clanging down in the canyon shook her out of it. She stared in astonishment as figures appeared at the base of the work—the creation. Men. Two ordinary men, though in that first instant they seemed minuscule under the looming figures. But their dark, filthy coveralls snapped perspective into place. Men.
They’d come through a door she’d never noticed before. A dark oblong in what she’d always thought was an unbroken stretch of concrete grey. They were struggling with some kind of equipment. Long, heavy hoses that snaked back through the door they’d emerged from and wands that seemed to be as long as they were tall. Ren’s fingers found their way back through the rusted diamonds of the fence.
What? The wind carried the question away, a plume of breath this time.
The noise answered it, an awful, mechanical racket as water blasted against the concrete. The silver eyes wept. They dissolved, leaving nothing. It occurred to her suddenly that she’d never looked at it straight on before—the creation.
Ren’s fingers loosened their hold on the fence. Her shoulders slumped and she looked away.
My brain decided to take this prompt from Writers Write perversely literally. And so, a strange bit of flash fiction.
Title: Hearth & Home
WC: 1100
The table groaned under the pile of dirty tea cups. Brennis groaned a quarter-tone out of tune with it. The dissonance was agonizing. She probed the thinnest part of either side of her skull with fingertips that throbbed almost as badly as her temples.
“Shut up!” With a desperate, burst of energy, she aimed an ill-advised kick at the thick, rough-hewn leg and regretted it instantly. The tea cups clanged in deafening protest. The table groaned again and the drip of the spigot against the tectonically precarious stack of filthy dishes in the sink grew louder and more disapproving. And, of course, her big toe lit up with pain. “Everyone . . .” she gulped down something that was trying its damndest to be a sob. “Everything just shut up.”
“Everyyou shut up.”
The kitchen was empty save for Brennis. The voice was beyond unexpected. It was positively inexplicable, and her spine, by rights, should have gone rigid with shock. But given the sheer intensity of the hangover, sudden movement of any kind was off the table, no pun intended. Besides, it wasn’t exactly inexplicable was it? It was not, in fact, beyond unexpected. Not after the book and the candle and the nonsense a month back.
“So it’s words now,” she snorted. Her chin swung heavily downward until it was lodged in the notch between her collar bones. “Sentences. Sort of.”
“You shut up.” The table retorted. It sounded like a table. It sounded like something solid and heavy that had been sanded smooth decades ago. It also sounded, at the moment, childishly gleeful. “You stop kick.”
“Stop kicking,” Brennis corrected. The automatic reply conjured up the image of her brother Jace, not as he was now, enormous and earnest, lumbering and a little bit slow in more ways than one, but as he’d been at three, at five, at seven, when he’d followed her everywhere so closely he was always stepping on her skirts. “Kicking, not kick.”
“Not kick!” The table rattled the tea cups for emphasis. Or maybe they were rattling themselves. Maybe things had progressed that far.
“Not kick,” she agreed, inching her still-throbbing toe further back from the table’s leg. “Any other demands?” Silence. A minute or more of silence and a desperate kind of sanity inched its way out of the dark corners of Bennis’s mind. Maybe she’d imagined it. Sentences and words and groans, Indignant self-rattling and disapproving drips. The scent of cheaper-than-cheap alcohol hung so heavy over the towering pile of cups, she half expected it to land like diamonds of dew on the straggling ends of her dark hair as it hung down. Maybe she’d imagined the whole thing—the fire, Jace, the book . . .
“The stink.” The table cut into her reverie. “More stink than weight.”
There was a faint tinkling, delicate at first, but building. Brennis’s head whipped upward with regrettable speed. Her brain sloshed painfully against the back of her skull. The cups were definitely moving—vibrating, working their way up to something fierce . . .
“Not good company.” The voice of the table had gone soft, somehow. Placating. “Tiny pretty things. Lined up. Good company. I see you over there.”
The shelves, Brennis thought as her eyes tracked across the room to the nearly empty, dust-caked rows of planking opposite the sink. It knows the tea cups go on the shelves.
The idea was unnerving, even in context. Even given everything. The shelves hadn’t seen a tea cup, or anything else for that matter, in . . . she couldn’t remember how long. Well more than a month. Well before the book or even the fire.
“I didn’t wake you up,” she said slowly. She lifted one hand. Her fingertips flirted with the edge of the table, stop just a breath shy of the grooves they’d come to know over the course of a lifetime. Her hand fell in a fist to dangle at her side. “You haven’t just . . . come to be.”
“Always come to be.” The table’s reply came swiftly, punctuated by another rattle and the affronted plop of a particularly loud drop from the spigot t on to the back of what had once been her best skillet. “Your whole life. The life of the big man.”
“Jace,” Brennis breathed. Another image, Jace only just taller than her now, his shoulders grown broad, but the rest of his body still long and think and awkward. He was bumping her aside at the sink, taking the tea cup from her impatient hands, drying it gently with a faded flour-sack towel and reaching to stack it inside one of its mates on the highest shelf. “You remember Jace!”
“No Jace.” The table stopped and started again. “Yes. Little big one. Jace.” There was something like a murmur from the tea cup pile. A swivel of handles conferring. “And the bigger man.” The words had clearly arrived in conference. “And his big man. And the littler ones.” Another pause, another conference. “Ladies. Not kicking. Not leaving all the weight and stink. Remember. We do.”
The bigger man. And his big man. And the ladies. Brennis’s breath caught, high and tight in her chest. The cheaper-than-cheap liquor burned at the back of throat. Her dad. Her granddad. Her family, all the way back to whoever had made this godforsaken table.
“All of them. All you’ve seen.” Her palm found a few square inches of clear tabletop, somehow. She felt a jolt of realization—of connection. “You remember them.”
“Remember.” The table nodded. It didn’t move, not in the slightest. There was no rattle or threatening sway from the precarious tower of cups. But it nodded. “Can tell.”It hesitated. When it spoke again, a sly note crept into its knothole tones. “But the stink.”
“The stink,” Brennis repeated.
She leaned her weight into her palm and groaned. The table groaned back, but she was on her feet now. She was shuffling slowly, painfully, head-swimmingly across the floor. She was approaching the sink.
“Can . . .?” Her hand reached out and recoiled, fearful of what might happen if her skin made contact with the metal pump handle. A drop sounded from the spigot, wary but accepting.
Brennis paused. She rolled up one sleeve, then the other, wincing and shivering at the touch of the room’s cold air on her skin. She glanced toward the long-cold hearth. She’d need wood and kindling. She’d need courage from who knows where to light a fire after so long, but later. Later.
“First,” she said out loud to herself, to the spigot and the shelves and the table and the tea cups. “First, the stink.”
A prompt from Writers Write sparked this bit of flash memoir. (of course, it’s about a seed I didn’t plant, but still. The prompt prompted. At least it’s not a poem?
Title: Samara
WC: 500
Darlene and I peeled helicopters in the gangway between my house and the Hickeys’ two-flat. The brick was cool at our backs as the pile of tiny green seeds grew on the flagstone between us. We’d hidden cigarettes under it the summer before. Two, stolen from her mom’s pack and wrapped up in a sandwich bag from my lunch or hers. We never smoked them. Darlene forgot. I went back for them, terrified we’d somehow be caught. I’d torn them to pieces over a sewer grate and lived in fear for days afterward. Today, though, we were flicking feathery yellow tails, their heads split open, in the general direction of the cement beyond our bare feet.
I was methodical. Darlene was sloppy. The pale, rice paper skin on the seeds, I thought, would doom the whole operation from the start. I stripped it carefully away with the nonexistent edges of my chewed-down fingernails. Once in a while, it came away in a minute sheet, leaving me with a wriggling sense of satisfaction. Darlene refused any work beyond snapping the neck or sometimes squeezing the seed out between her fingers. She was growing bored.
“We should just plant them all,” she said.
She made a sudden move to scoop up our pile. I’d just coaxed the translucent sheet free of the seed in my hand. Her impatience stopped the wriggle dead in its tracks.
“We can’t. They need space and water,” I protested, “Their own water. We need to pick the best one.”
It’s what we had agreed. It’s what we had planned, but Darlene’s fist was closing around the pile. A few seeds squirted out between her white knuckles and bounced away. Those that didn’t were crushed under her bare foot as she quickly scuttled into a crouch.
She clawed at the flagstone with her free hand. Her longer nails caught at the thick plastic my dad had laid out underneath to keep the weeds from growing up between the flat, irregular rocks.
“This won’t tear anyway,” she snapped. She thrust her hand toward the house in a gesture of disgust. Her tight fist opened and the remaining seeds pattered like unexpected rain against the window of my sister’s basement bedroom. “This is dumb.”
“Dumb,” I echoed. I set the last of the seeds delicately on the window sill, trying and failing to keep the gesture casual.
“Let’s go do something,” she demanded as she shoved her feet into her thongs.
“Yeah. Okay.” I pushed myself up.
I searched blindly with one foot, then another as I hurried to find my own pair, even as I kept my eye on Darlene. She’d leave me behind if I wasn’t quick enough, if I let her out of my sight. I found the sandals, deep under the bush where she’d thrown them, laughing as she did. I moved to hurry after her, sparing barely a glance for the lone seed on the windowsill. The best one. The one I would not plant.
I just decided on three 8-line poems. They’re roughly following this prompt from Poets & Writers? (Very roughly). I also used a bunch of prompts from Writers Write Word of the Day for the end of September.
Title: Initiate
WC: 49
(Cueca Chilean)
In the sky, a delicious pink hymn
Without pity, hear the cry
Whose commitment was this light and heat?
The ancestors’ final sigh
Yes, the ancestors’ final sigh
Gives the timid galaxy a nudge
And whispers things like, “Smile! Stand up straight!”
In their ellipses, stars hold a grudge
Title: . . . Bang
WC: 17
(Snam Suad)
As the wave
Carves its brave
Path through bright
Lunacy
Trailing time
Without rhyme
Fatal climb:
Unity
Title: Imperious
WC: 26
(Eight-ette)
Rise.
Embrace
the unwise
decision. Trace
the unlikely joys
through sly, chaotic fields.
You have a mandate: make noise.
Take from the moment all it yields
This is an ex post facto word prompt from Writers Write and a Virelai. My rhymes in the first stanza are suspect.
Title: Frantic
WC: 40
Like a brushstroke sea
green blades sway, as free
as song
escaping slyly
from long
dead cacophony
to carouse freely.
Sailcloth poppies drape
in the languid shape
of three
sighs. Their mouths: agape.
Their plea:
one season’s escape
from thee.
A single-word prompt from Writers Write, offering the title. This is an Imaginaerium.
Title: Whereabouts
WC: 107
It was an escape, though only one of us knew
September having slipped out wearing July’s heat
The path suddenly appeared (paths don’t just appear)
Stone steps, climbing to nowhere, offered up a view
One of us ascended, eyes on our careful feet
With the sun not sinking, wondering what to fear
But in fingertip months, “Plenty,” the answer came
And the sunken court, with its invisible crowd
Each burden that should have been mine, declared out loud
In blurred letters that morning, taking shape a name
The teeth meet the tumbler and the pins must subside
The known and the unknown, as we take flight, collide
Just a bit of flash fiction, based on this prompt from Writers Write.
Title: The Obscure
WC: 700
“I woke up in a bed I didn’t know.” Sonya always begins the story the same way. She always, I think, begins it at the same moment—the exact moment when the wire brush she wields has made eight-and-three-quarters circuits of the bottom of the huge cast-iron kettle.
It might not be the same moment. It might just be that so much here is the same.
“I knew it was a relief right away.”
She gives me a pointed look. Her eyes are gray and sharp. They flick like scissor blades from my face to the pump handle I should be working at. I lift my arms and heave once, twice, three times before I feel any answering resistance. Sonya waits for the water to rise in the column, muffling the metal-on-metal shriek. She raises her voice so I can hear her over the wheeze and gush and patter of the water sluicing down into the kettle to mix with the coarse salt and charcoal flecks of a week’s caked-on food.
“No tires squealing.” She chokes up on a the long handle of the wire brush to work at a stubborn spot where the base of the kettle meets the swell of its belly. Her body saws up and and down, up and down with the effort. It’s punctuation and every week I think she imagines that stubborn spot. “Nothing chewing through the screens.” She pauses. She always pauses, her body, the brush, her story always comes to halt just here. “Nothing at the door.”
Something galvanizes her. Some memory of something at the door floods her body—her muscles and sinews—and she heaves at the kettle, tipping it till the water erupts in a wave that slaps at the flagstones, turning them glistening and slate gray.
I helped her the first few times. I tried to help her with the weight of the enormous kettle, but I was only every in the way. I am stick-thin and sleepless. My skin is raw with scratches and my fingers will not curl, so bruised as they are and painful where my fingernails have split and cracked right out of their beds. I was no help at all. I am not sure why I wanted to be any help at all.
I don’t try to help any more. I am fit, Sonya has decided, only for working the pump, and only just barely for that. She sees that I do it, though, each and every week. Only just barely fit or not, she ignores the way I wince in pain from wrenched shoulders and banged-up elbows. She refuses to see the dirt and blood caked under what is left of my fingernails. She pays no mind to what I have endured or what I have inflicted on myself in the days I am not seen here in the kitchen. The days I am not seen anywhere by anyone. I have not yet earned the right, I am told over and over.
Not by Sonya. Not in so many words. Sonya only ever tells me the story—the same story every week as I wait for the sharpness of her glance. I always wait, hoping I might play things out one moment longer. It is my tiny, pointless act of defiance, but in it my imagination flares to brilliant life. I imagine myself refusing. I imagine myself not there at all. I imagine myself having finally found a way out of here. I imagine making Sonya wait a millisecond longer for me to give in. I fail. The sharpness of her glance falls on me, I think, at precisely the same moment every week.
Everything is the same, every time.
I wonder if Sonya looks forward to the day she does not need to tell me the story. She takes no pleasure in it that I can see, and I wonder if she believes there will ever come a day when I know it to be a relief—I woke up in a bed I didn’t know . . .
She should not believe. She should know that she will keep on telling me until the end of time. Mine or hers. Hers or mine.
Prompt from Writers Write. This is three dribbles (100 letters in each stanza).
Title: Rainwater in Mind
WC: 62
I don’t pretend—
at the end
of any given decision tree—
to comprehend
the final, thirsty draw
to rainwater’s
last impressions.
Tongues peep,
half asleep.
Resist the fabled cool.
Survival’s reach
extends beyond
a tepid toast.
By rainwater
you are bound.
Bedecked and damp,
light nearby lamps,
drive off drops.
They rouse and stamp
with rainwater in mind.
Rainwater fully in mind.
This prompt from writers write (which forms the last line here) sparked a (rather unfortunate) memory of my grandmother, who would have turned 106 last week; but it ended up being about my cousin (who is tangentially related to the unfortunate memory, as I was driving with my grandmother to her house at the time). This is a series of Soledads.
Title: Particles
WC: 93
Culvert—a word I didn’t know
Swing set—a thing I didn’t have
I was the city cousin, though.
Type writer—under-bed surprise
Boy doll—big yawn; I change diapers
Undercover, we traded whys
Shoes—dish soap only goes so far
Eggs—water shouldn’t smell like them
Feet on the dash of your first car
Scotch tape—a way to save a stamp
Bad dog—a mall-based memory
The soft snick, you switched off the lamp
Afraid—something you never were
Colored—a word for others’ fears
I never stopped looking for her
MTZQ Telecommuniculturates 