Hello, everyone!  Here's my piece for critique.  It's still untitled, unfortunately.

Some days I feel like

Jeremiah’s little sister,

 

like God’s come to visit

and they’ve locked me outside

 

like I’ve been catching water snakes all day

while they’ve been healing lepers.

 

Like I’ve got kool-aid and powdered sugar

all over my hand-me-down cut-offs

and as God goes to pull a quarter from my ear

I stomp on his foot through his open-toed sandal,

Screaming, “I hate you.  You are not invited to my birthday party. “ 

Picture This

Picture This


The photographs I took this morning—yes, with my clothes off—are still warm from the Eckerd’s photo lab on Denton Avenue. But I’m not some porn star whore. I couldn’t be one if I wanted to.
All I need are some stamps from the post office, which closes in twenty minutes. I should have walked—this stupid bus stops every twenty feet, letting off one person after another. It’s miserable on here. Somebody’s baby is crying. Exhaust filters in through the opened windows. At least I got the last free seat—window seat, just behind the side door exit in the middle of the bus—but it was on the wrong side. A tall kid in a Braves cap, maybe sixteen, looms to my left, leaning against the handrail. His sweaty orange fingers alternate between the pole and a bag of Cheetos. Jesus. His head phones blare Eminem. I fix my eyes to the window, which has a round greasy spot from somebody’s head leaning against the glass. My right hand steadies the crisp yellow envelope in my lap, addressed to Jacob Kirkpatrick of Ithaca, New York. I take shallow breaths, not wanting to take in this petroleum filth or Cheeto-stink or any of this ick. Maybe I’m wise to stay in most of the time.
Old fashioned disposable cameras and one-hour processing at Eckerd’s is perfect for me. Not exactly going to borrow my mother’s digital, you know? I’ve gotta get these photos out today while I’ve still got my nerve up. Even though Eckerd’s is corporate-owned, it didn’t seem to have any silly-ass Bible-belt rules about what they print. The carpet was stained, the ceiling oddly low, and the photo-lab chump (named Heath) amused the heck out of me, though no doubt my pictures provided him significant entertainment too. I sat in the plastic chair next to the candy machine and waited sixty-seven minutes for my pictures to be developed. Heath didn’t look at me once. I bought one palmful of Mike and Ikes, another of Skittles, and ate them one by one. Here you are ma’am, photo-man said when the pictures were ready, steering his eyes from me, looking at the Nikons under the glass counter. Nine-fifty, please. Heath tapped his fingers and blushed. I pulled a ten from my wallet and high-tailed it into the restroom to make sure the pics came out okay.
If I can get through that, I can get through anything. I figure, if nothing else, Heath has a decent story to tell his wife, if not his kids, tonight.
Want to know what Heathie will tell his wife? Not just that some girl apparently shot an entire roll of herself more or less naked, lying on the wooden trunk in her bedroom and in various other places around her house (backporch, in front of the hallway mirror).
Anyhow I bet Heath won’t be two minutes in the door before he’s telling his wife about the distorted waxy skin that covers my tits and arms, the skin-grafted pearly pocks. Why would she do that? Heathie’s woman will ask, perplexed but distracted, stirring Rice-A-Roni or something, suddenly wondering if Heath ever develops nude photographs of hotties he neglects to mention. I’ve got it: an unpleasant image of Heath jacking himself in the break room will linger in her mind, while Heath will go on about how my ear (if you could call it that) is a seared waxy knob on the left side of my head. I got a nice shot of all this while straddling a lawn chair on the back porch. Just for Jacob, so he won’t forget.
The bus halts for the sixtieth time, a car behind us bleeps its horn, and a big lady waddles to the middle of the bus to get off. She sees me and then she looks past me. Only thing I despise more than getting stared at is being looked past. Most people’s glance-time-to-averted-eye-time ratio goes like this: every second of looking requires at least twenty subsequent seconds of looking away for good measure. Most people aren’t completely rude, you know. Poor bastards don’t know what to do when they see me coming. Actually, this particular lady didn’t even look for a full second. Her boots hit each step, one, two, three, and out she goes. It’s a miracle she doesn’t rock the bus.
From the front of the bus comes our newest passenger, her cane feeling the floor, leading her straight to the only empty seat, next to yours truly. Why now? I bury my chin to my shoulder, palm to face. Do you think it’s better to just let the entire world see your mangled face, or try to hide, and only let, oh, half the population notice? Maybe your life revolves around questions like whether to go to school or get married or go Geico or what to eat for dinner, but this factor guides my every movement. My mother says I should just stand proud, love myself, stop hiding. Finish the GED I started four summers ago, get in touch with Jesus. She says I can do a distance ed program if I want. She says I don’t have to go back to the grocery store gig if I don’t want to (trust me, I don’t). She says that if I look for goodness I will find it. Isn’t that just about exactly what you’d expect my mother to say?
This lady must be the oldest person I’ve ever seen. Seriously. She’s got this big straw hat with a fat, fake lily sitting in it, and she’s wearing a green skirt with knitted beige stockings. White, thick-soled Rockports too, which she crosses at the heels. Probably en route to church or Bingo, right? Or maybe she’s got a boyfriend in a home. The hat is a little weird. But I can’t exactly talk shit about questionable hats.
Oh, excuse me, Granny whispers, breathing heavy. Granny opens her purse, pulls out a single pink tissue, and blows her nose very softly. She reeks of baby powder. She turns to me and says―pausing between each dim word―Smile, sweetheart. You’re too young to be frowning that hard. She chuckles, her teeth clicking, and I remain still, eyes to the window.
Do I have to respond to that?
I can feel it. I should have walked.
A faulty gauge, too little water in the boiler, too much heat, as it was explained to me weeks after my fifth surgery, caused the steam engine tractor at the Buncombe county fair to explode, launching shrapnel and pressurized steam at my body. Not Jacob’s body. Mine. On my seventeenth birthday. The last I remember at the fair grounds: craning my neck and searching the crowd for Jacob, who’d left me alone in the way long Wicked Raptor roller coaster line to visit the restroom. I wanted Jacob to come back so he could see me do the cow face (you know, mouth open, tongue hanging out, eyes rolling stupid—which, by the way, always cracked him up) at these little kids who were riding that big old tractor with shiny green wheels. I had those little kids totally cracking up, too, at least until the hissing sound started from the tractor engine, a little bit like my grandmother’s cabbage steamer made, except fifty times louder. About ten seconds later the tractor exploded. The boom, I’m told, was heard as far as the next county.
But they say I’m lucky. That’s surely what the parents of those children who were actually riding that big old steam engine tractor would say. I try not to forget that. But, basically, Jacob took a leak in a makeshift outhouse while I got my skin melted off. He didn’t even have to watch me.
The bus turns a sharp corner onto Main. Only another mile or so till the post office stop. I must, must, must send these pictures today. Otherwise I’ll start worrying and have one of those should I or shouldn’t I? crises.
Well, I tell you, must be a hundred degrees, Granny says. I can feel it. She’s sneaking her look, pretending to look past me out the window, as if that Amoco station were the most interesting thing ever. I never take this kind of bait.
Once my mother caught Jacob in my bed. And, God, was she pissed. The look of boyish alarm on his face. The whole fiasco was beautiful. I had a life back then. The deliciously simple crap we all used to worry about. If only I’d let Jacob go all the way. If only, if only, if only. The pleasure of being Jacob’s first, of ever getting laid, got ripped from me and I’ll bet Granny over here gets more action than I could summon these days. I sure hope he likes fucking Eliza Grace Sellers, of Washington, DC, his apparent bride to be. An intense-looking city-slicker working on her master’s in comparative politics, who did Peace Corp in Chile after she finished up at Brown. All this I learned from the Sunday Asheville Citizen Times while slurping my corn puffs. Just shoot me, okay?
Do you think I should address to these pictures to Miss Eliza Grace Sellers too, or just to Jacob? Or Mr. and Mrs. Jacob Kirkpatrick? Ha. He has no business forgetting me. He’s done well, remarkably well, in “remembering me” department for the past seven years. But he’s gotten distracted. Señor Kirkpatrick 1) didn’t call me last month on the anniversary of my accident, which should be extra easy to remember, since it’s also my birthday, and 2) had the nerve to run that engagement announcement, without warning, knowing that I always read the paper (what else is a girl who’s been confined to a bed for the better part of seven years going to do on a Sunday morning but read about the exciting lives of others?). He didn’t even call. No card. No wistful I’ve been thinking about you. No respect. Thankless pisshead forgot me, obviously needs a little reminder of what didn’t happen to him. It might even enrich his life. Make him appreciate what he’s got. Couldn’t we all use that? Even I know I could have it worse.
It isn’t that I wish it happened to him. But straight-up cheer for his flawless skin and meaningful, med school life and impending honeymoon just isn’t something I can stomach. It just isn’t fair. Had Jacob gotten hit too, at least we would have had each other. At least we might have gone down in Waynesville history together. The couple that burns together stays together. So much for I’ll love you always and We’re soul mates and We were made for each other. If anybody ever tries to feed you that horseshit, run like hell. Trust me, if you think they’ll stay by your side when your number is up to get scorched and scarred and shitty, you’re probably wrong.
It would be a lie to tell you that he dropped me flat on my ass, flaunted about with some new chick the next week, couldn’t remember my name. Jacob’s better than that, which why I’m still stewing two thousand seven hundred days after the accident, the beginning of our end. Well, my end, anyhow. Did I mention that we got voted Best Couple by the yearbook superlative staff in eleventh grade? We got our picture taken in front of an oak tree outside the student center, Jacob’s arm around me. I smiled for that. So did he.
Actually, my face made several smiling appearances in that particular yearbook, almost as though somebody knew I wouldn’t be back for senior year. Pretty freaking pathetic that I haven’t got anything better to do than relish my high school yearbooks, wouldn’t you say? Volleyball, Spanish club, ecology group. There’s a cute picture of Jacob and me, with some other friends, serving macaroni and hot dogs at the downtown shelter. We think we’re working hard, we think we’re important, we think somebody might give a fat damn that we were there. But I’m sure I’m the only one who remembers, or cares, or even needs this memory.
Do you think she knows about me? I can’t decide about that. Jacob’s family has some nerve putting that announcement in the Waynesville paper. His mother can rot. I know she probably told Jacob it was good for him to move on from me. And, God, who could say she was wrong?
Jacob stuck it out with me for a good while—most of senior year anyway—but long afternoons changing my dressings and chatting with my mother about my bed-ridden progress apparently didn’t do it for him. Talk of finding a college together, of backpacking through Spain together, of teaching our hypothetical children to know right from wrong―all that talk died down pretty promptly. A bunch of talk, undone, erased, like it never happened. A sort of slow, subtle release, as though I might not notice if he just slipped from me and went off to college and a new life without me, so long as he didn’t let the door slam on his way out.
Sure is a hot one, ain’t it? Granny tries me again. From the corner of my eye I can see the brim of her straw hat bobbing. I watch the window. Ryan Street has changed in the past couple years. Prissy Polly’s Barbeque has morphed into a crisp-looking Jiffy Lube, and a new library is coming up on the block next to the thrift store, in place of the former Skate-O-Rama, the wildly romantic site of my first middle school smooch, circa 1991.
The bus grinds to a stop again, and a neon-clad biker flies by. It’s 4:45. Two more stops to the post. The doors whoosh open and Granny tries to pull herself up with her duck-handled cane. She’s struggling, swaying back and forth. What am I supposed to do, give her a little push from behind? Her big straw hat is lopsided and she doesn’t know it. God help me when I get old.
Granny carefully places one Rockport before the other and scoots herself toward the exit. One hand on the metal bus railing, the other gripping the blue duck bill so hard her fingers have paled. Whew. You all must think I’m a hundred years old.
Cheeto-boy removes his headphones and cuts the volume. He stops his gyrating and says, Not at all, ma’am. Take your time.
Is he kidding?
Granny reaches the stairs, right in front of me. This ordeal has taken like ten minutes and she’s gone maybe three feet. The damned post office is going to close.
The bus driver cranes his neck to see what’s taking so long. When he sees that someone born in, oh, 1890 is the problem, he smiles and wipes his brow.
Granny grimaces and maneuvers down step number one. Sorry for the hold up, folks, she calls over her shoulder.
Between steps one and two, the craziest shit suddenly happens: I see the straw hat fling forward, fly right out of the bus, straight to the grassy bank. She’s sprawled out on the ground, her Rockports soles face-up, her hat half-off. It’s utterly insane. The fake lily gets caught in a breeze and flutters about until it lands in the back vent of her green blazer. I don’t know why, but I think it’s the funniest thing I’ve ever seen, that lily landing there. The way it quivered mid-air, like it was deciding whether it wanted to return to her hat or find a new place to rest. Totally absurd. Reminded me of that white thing floating at the end of American Beauty, except funny.
Everybody’s trying to help. It’s like a contest to see who can help the most. Seriously, does the whole bus need to get up? I feel bad, but this commotion is ridiculous. I stare at my lap, the yellow envelope, trying to think of something else. Anything. Should I get up too? Somehow I’m exempt from all this. I’m the only one not sticking my neck out saying Oh my God, I hope she’s okay. They can handle this. I mean, she hit the grass and pretty much got right up, right?
Sure, they all look worried, but if she’s really hurt, are any of them going to nurse her back to health? Will they visit her in the hospital and endure the awkwardness that comes with visiting injured strangers? Will their prayers do her any good? Will they do her grocery shopping for her? Is anyone going to make sure she isn’t lonely? No. Over dinner they’ll talk about the crazy thing they saw on the bus but forget her tomorrow.
Cheeto-boy has his arm around her shoulder, talking to her, brushing grass clippings off the front of her skirt. Ma’am, are you sure you’re okay? Let me help. He helps the old woman back into the bus, and people find their seats again. He says something about maybe taking her to the emergency room, though he seriously doubts anything is broken. Really, I’m all right. They’re so close that I can smell them: Cheetos and baby powder mixed together. I’ll be just fine. Thank you for your help, son.
I keep my eyes down, staring the black ink scrawled across the envelope in my lap. Jacob Kirkpatrick, 147 Westmont Avenue, Ithaca, NY. I run my right index finger across the letters, feeling how I scratched the ball-point into, and nearly through, the thick yellow paper. Man, was I pissed when I wrote his name. I feel the rectangular shape of the pictures inside, slightly wider than the palm of my hand. My hands look smooth against the envelope, seeming far away and oddly delicate, somehow leaner than I’d known.

First Post

Hey everyone. I didn't have a lot of new stuff ready when Jenna emailed me but I do have this snippet that I wrote a while back. I'd love to expand on it, so let me know if you have any ideas. One thing to note that probably isn't obvious from this section is that the narrator, Billy, refers to himself in the third-person. So, it's actually a first-person story.

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And if Billy could just walk through a supermarket and buy his groceries every Sunday, his bag of oatmeal, his three dozen eggs, and his six fucking pounds of lean beef, well, would that be too much to ask?

Billy had just been minding Billy’s own business, there in the fated cheese aisle. Billy was looking for the large containers of low-fat cottage cheese, all that muscle-building and testosterone-pumping protein inside just begging to be spooned out and digested, converted into fuel that Billy would put to better use, you better bet your ass, than the sludge-pudge belly-bursters with their carts full of barbecue chips and cherry cola and Hostess Ho-Ho’s, which these Ho-Hos who walked the aisles could suddenly snatch off the shelf with a fraction of their former remorse because “chocolate was an antioxidant now.” Ha! As if that could possibly slow the fury of the righteous heart attacks boiling up their fat tracks en route to their overworked and exhausted arteries, God bless the disadvantaged workers of the world, big and small.

(Billy, as you’ve noticed, doesn’t see anything wrong with anger if it is an honest and righteous manifestation of the truth.)

The problem was, Billy had forgotten whether the cottage cheese in this particular grocery store was put with the rest of the cheese or with the milk, which it often was, even though it was called and therefore was a cheese; refrigeration requirements notwithstanding, the perpetrators of such inexcusable organization ought to be blasted in the chest with a rifle. There are precious few things can be taken for granted in this world, and while it apparently asks too much of the Lord’s tendency toward intervention to separate the earth’s land and people according to what by rights ought to be theirs, society would be settings its standards far too low if it sat by and let the same situation develop in miniature in its own local grocery stores and supermarkets.

This, then—the finding of the cottage cheese—was Billy’s mission, and Billy’s bane, when he felt a finger tapping on his shoulder, surely what the rhinoceros must feel of the pecking from the birds on his back. Billy turned around only because he assumed, naturally, that the offender was an employee with the answer to his cottage-cheese question. Instead, he saw a twenty-something child of predominantly Irish descent in a backwards baseball hat. The child pointed at Billy when he turned around, and said, “Oh my god, you are the Indian from DeathKillers 2!”

Billy sized the child up. Billy is always sizing people up, because people are always smaller than he is and who doesn’t like to feel big? Thus reassured, Billy looked down at the child’s basket and stuck his hand inside to shuffle the contents. He really should have known. There was no cottage cheese. Billy turned away to resume his search.

“Uh, okay…can you…Mike! Hey, Mike! Come here! Excuse me.” The child again. “Hey, can I get your autograph?”

Billy tried to ignore him but the tapping continued. “Here, just use my grocery list.” So Billy grabbed the list and scanned it. But his suspicions proved acute: no cottage cheese.

Billy had been right all along.

“Autographs on the website,” Billy said, and let the grocery list float to the ground. “Twenty-five dollars. Where is the cottage cheese?”

“What? Twenty-five dollars? Oh come on, who’s going to pay for that? Come on man, I’m a fan. I own DeathKillers 2. How many people can say that? You’re like a C movie star. Matt! Hey, dude, look—it’s the Indian guy from DeathKillers 2! Oh come on, man, just sign my grocery—”

Billy felt a surge through his veins and he seized the child’s shirt and pulled him in close. The child’s lips quivered in puerile fashion.

“My people,” Billy said, baring his teeth, “are called Native American.” Then Billy took a large breath in order to thunder: “Where is the cottage cheese?”

Billy heard a splat-like sound and thought that maybe the child shat himself, but it was just the grocery basket, which had fallen to the ground.

“I’m sorry please let me go,” the child said, wriggling now and trying to worm his way free. But Billy had too tight a grip for worming. “I don’t know where the cottage cheese is, you psychopath! You fucking crazy Cherokee!”

Though well aware of his cinematic shortcomings, Billy was nonetheless ideally suited for certain parts, thanks to his uncanny ability to bypass those higher intellectual functions that are a hindrance in times of acute stress and to assume a more primal role. His most famous: Clawing Bear the DeathKiller. And while Clawing Bear the DeathKiller is just a character in a movie, a ruse, a charade, the primordial nature on display in this near-cult classic is real, as innate to Billy as a blink.

And there are moments, like this one in the grocery store, in which Billy is unable to contain the DeathKiller inside.

Of course to others, it is never such an artistic transformation taking place but something much less creative; they will blame—not at the time of course, but later, when they look back and recall being, let’s say, thrown into the eggs section of the breakfast aisle and then repeatedly and furiously kicked in the ribs while lying fetal in a giant pool of shattered raw yolks—they will blame without fail Billy’s temper, Billy’s volatile hormones, Billy’s uncontrollable rage. What the doctors called his “problem.”

But at this moment Billy had another problem, less important but more immediate, and that was the tazers. How the police had arrived so quickly Billy would never know. Billy suspected them from time to time of following him in anticipation of a misstep, waiting to pounce and send him back behind the thick bars. Their tazers ran lightning all over and through him until his legs gave way, and all the personas inside Billy’s head, the angry with the thoughtful, came together in dream as the titan met the floor.

objectively disordered

Hey all. I've been collaborating with a friend on a webcomic, and currently have a draft of the first 15 little vignettes. Instead of posting it all here, I have published it here. I would love any and all feedback you have for it. If it helps you with visualizing, the dashes:

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Indicate a break between episodes. So all the text in between those would be one comic page.

Independence

Maybe it's a state of mind,
that you're either in,
or without. Like the baby sparrow
stranded on the street-side,
wings too weak to right itself up.
Mama-bird keeps sighing inside
that panoply of pine. Must have been others
when the nest turned over. They're long gone now,
so levity's proven. There's another siren.
Maybe you saw it as a shiver,
nestling to borders, instead of
how it's steadying itself again
before chancing on horizon.

Imagineers

“We are imagineers,” he intoned, upending the chicken carcass onto its knobby pimpled back. “You and me both. We imagine each other within this space,” he swept his arms to either side, a knife in his left hand. “And we hope that through our intellectual prayers, not that we want religion to factor into it, even tangentially so, we hope that we will eventually become in each others eyes what we have yet to be ourselves. Are you sure you want to do that at the counter?”

She had been listening across the island, half to his latest dinner prep rant, half to the televised concert playing near the kitchen’s dividing wall. The studio on screen, a terrarium filled with dusty light, housed the medieval music quartet like lizards in a fourth grade classroom, housed in an artificial habitat. She imagined herself there, and wondered if the stale air was really just the churning self-consciousness of the uncommon instruments, recycled like captured acoustics. She turned her eyes to the knife in his hand, now pointing at the sewing in her lap. Grinning as if just waking from an afternoon nap, she closed and opened her eyes in an exaggeratedly dreamy state.

“Maybe we should switch places. Your knife to my hem, my needle to your bird,” she said, deepening her voice to sound threatening, but playfully harmless, like a previews voice-over, or the hero of a spaghetti western. Their play had these buffers, these screens, the effort of translating to hide behind. They remained distant and knowing within certain limits. “I’ll hem where I damn well please.”

He raised an eyebrow, then tensed his shoulder muscles into a knot at the base of his neck, wadding them up into the newly freed space in his mouth, frozen in a mock “O” of surprise. Then he let the muscles go, sending ripples down each arm and a pink drop of chicken juice to the tiles below. The oven beeped, surprising him.

“Now look what you’ve gone and done” she said, shaking her head in disappointment. “You’ve gone and held up the chicken! It’s not going to quarter itself, not if those months in the stockyards taught him anything.”

He nodded. “You’re right. Now’s the time for it to really start fighting back.” He grabbed the bird by the tip of both wing, and held it up standing. “Chickens of the world unite! Poultry is death!”

She smirked and started to formulate a witty retort, something having to do with making a red sauce, but she wasn’t able to fit the words together and gave it up. This hiccup in their banter froze her in a burp pantomime.

He dropped the bird and went at it with his purposeful cuts. The tip of the knife stretched the skin, breaking it in all the right places, opening up the space between the thigh and breast. Each joint split from its desired part with a sickening, muted crack that would have easily ruined her appetite if it had lasted longer than a split second, but she still felt it in her own thighs and breasts, where her wing would attach to her side. A red vein, or bruise or blotch, she was unsure, glared out like a no vacancy sign in a darkened hotel window. As a child, she once watched her mother dismember a chicken, accidentally puncturing a hidden tumor in the bird’s breast. A bloody spray fanned across the white kitchen wall, and despite several coats of paint, the stain remained, peeping out from behind a coat track. She would parade her friends by the spot on their way to Dr. Peppers and afternoon cartoons.

The chicken lay separated, now a tray of tiny selves. He dipped his hands in a tub of softened butter that had magically appeared at his side. “Now,” he said in a heavy Southern accent, “we add just a touch of butter.” His fingers flayed around the undersides of each piece with such precision, spreading butter as if out from the most miniscule crevasses in his finger tips.

“Was this sensual?” she thought. “Is this the moment when I slide an arm around my lover’s waist, wrist deep in edible lubricant, and kiss his neck passionately while the Righteous Brothers began to play softly in the background?” This was the result of endless sleepover screenings of that early nineties romance. Every fantasy turned into slippery love making on a pottery wheel.

He looked up at her as if reading her thoughts. “You really want to make out with me right now, don’t you,” he deadpanned. She could see the edges of his come-on under the sarcasm, which tended to be the case with men, or at least the men she’d been with. So far, it was unclear whether these ironic dressings added or took away from the impact of her love making. It was obvious to her that she and the men liked it, but who more, and who out of necessity? A lute took a solo in a spotlight downstage.

“Did you know that food photographers glaze their hams with motor oil,” she asked. He stared at his hands, contemplating licking them clean or washing them in the sink full of dirty dishes, and nodded absentmindedly.

A poem

Just in time for Mother's Day! I hope it's not too emo. Help breaking into stanzas would be good.

Jackie O. once said "let your children go and they will take you to the opera when you are an old woman." Her words speak to mothers who struggle to loosen the chrysalis walls of their embrace and not the ones for whom their children are vague, well-intentioned concepts, like conversational Russian in Iowa. The unconditional soft places to land. Not the sharp cornered furniture carefully maneuvered around that leave scars when one is not so careful, scars that are all you grow to notice in the mirror, 'til eventually you notice nothing, undifferentiated muddy grays a relief from recognizable colors.

A short story and a prose poem (not original, just interesting reads)

Hello! It was great to see everyone who made it today.

Here are links to the short story and the prose poem I mentioned, which Kat's story reminded me of a bit. The short story (the first link) has very little to no immediate action, the whole story is told almost entirely through flashbacks. I think this is a neat device, particularly if you prefer writing in a descriptive and/or stream-of-consciousness style and find plots to be a chore.

http://www.fantasticmetropolis.com/i/sorrow/full/

http://community.livejournal.com/greatpoets/2370194.html

short story (Rebecca H.)

Hastily thrown-together outline of a story... Let me know what you think it needs more (or less) of, I guess. Thanks.


Mary wanted her Dad all to herself. She didn't know what to do with herself at home when he wasn't there, feeling unwelcome in every room, even the empty ones. Her Mom was almost always home and almost always silent. She'd spend big stretches of time buried in crossword puzzles or staring out the window. At one such time Mary asked her Mom what she was thinking. "Wondering if I should sell you to the gypsies," she said. "They came by when you were at school, gave me a good offer." She wasn't smiling.

Mary ran to her room and cried all afternoon. She repeated her Mom's story to her Dad, who laughed and said "yes, you be a good little girl and listen to your mother" and told her stories of gypsy children traveling the country in rickety vans to dance in the streets for tourist money. He made her threatened fate sound both scary and fun and he punctuated the stories with tickles 'til she laughed so hard she could barely talk as she begged him to stop. That night when she tried to sleep, though, she couldn't stop thinking about how her parents' stories more or less matched, couldn't stop feeling that was somehow her fault.

Her older sister Jenny never got this treatment. Her Mom talked to her and even occasionally smiled while doing so. Teachers at school treated Mary with this same double standard, joking with the other kids while shooing her away like some pesky dog. She wondered what was wrong with her. She studied the other kids, how they moved, how they talked, what they wore. Laura Tenenbaum had lovely blonde ringlets that gleamed in the sun and shook when she laughed. Missy Edwards always had a rapt audience when she showed pictures of her prize-winning border collie. Tina Smith won a statewide competition for her flute playing and got to leave Algebra early to go to private lessons.

Mary kept careful notes on who stood out and why. Slowly she endeavored to obtain these qualities herself. She stole a chunk of Laura's hair, the collar from Missy's dog, snuck into Tina's flute case and plucked off a handful of keys. These items, along with similar talismans from other classmates, she placed on an old sewing mannequin in her room that her Mom no longer wanted, claiming there'd be no one to sew school dance dresses for any more. Mary gazed lovingly at her growing collection every night, felt like she was piecing together the perfect self. Before bed she'd place a blanket over it so to her Mom the whole thing just looked emblematic of her messy room, of a neglected interest in sewing.

Her secret ritual made her feel more powerful. She started talking back to her Mom and to teachers. The other kids treated her with a "hands off" respect that they hadn't before. She started hanging out with boys who threw cherry bombs in the school toilets. She felt fearless and tough and alive. That is, until the new girl, Andrea Brent, ripped a chunk from her hair one day.