elephantine

fiction friday: karl

    Over a number of years Helen had accumulated almost two dozen students, who cycled through her front door and then clumsily filled the house with music as she sat in a chair beside the lacquered piano bench. When a student didn't get it right after two or three tries, she moved to the edge of her seat and demonstrated the phrase on a higher octave. Sometimes the student hadn't practiced that week; those were usually the ones who were forced into the lessons (and whose mothers chose to listen in during the hour, and who tried to bargain with Helen over her weekly rate). Then there were the kids who truly wanted to be there, who practiced and thanked her and showed up on time when she arranged a recital at a retirement center in town. And then there was Karl, her only adult student, who she was in love with.
    But Karl always forgot to play the E's flat, and he had an unapologetic weight to his fingers which made everything he played sound serious and sad. And there was the difficult detail, too, that he was married. Once when he opened his wallet after the lesson to write a check, a snapshot of a woman's face peeked out through a smudged plastic sleeve, staring directly at Helen. "Is that your wife?" she had asked Karl, feeling embarrassed when he said yes because her mind was already imagining what her own photograph would look like in its place.
    "I'll see you next week, then?" he asked. He was heading toward the door.
    "Yes," she said. "See you then."

    This was a scenario she had considered: refer the students to someone else, sell the piano, throw away the sign that was out in the front yard, maybe cut her hair, or just dye it, and then go away. She would be someone else entirely, meet a man, wear a dress that clung to her hips, never again hear another beautiful sonata spoiled. She thought, vaguely, of Wyoming. Or Alaska; she had been there once, as a child. She wondered if she had a good enough winter coat. But then the next week Karl said, as he sat down on the bench, "You know, this is the highlight of my week, Helen," and that was that. She could not leave. Once he had said that, she could not do it.

    At night, after hours of the house being quiet, she took a seat on the bench. She let her fingers lay on the keys for a long time before playing. Sometimes, even, for a full hour, periodically checking the clock over her shoulder. How long it felt when she was alone; how quickly it passed when Karl sat beside her. Finally, when the hour was up, she played.

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Fiction Friday is an outlet for experimentation while I slowly work on becoming a novelist. Read the rest of the stories here...

fiction friday: delivery

    When she arrived, they were tearing down the stage, packing up the equipment into hardback cases, sweeping clean the parking lot. She approached one of the sweeping men. Gently cleared her throat. 'Scuse Me, she said. Is Oleander nearby? She had a package for him, she explained, tapping the butcher paper wrapped tube tucked under her arm. The man shook his head. She kept walking. She asked another sweeper and was answered with a shrug. But he is here, right? This was met with another shrug. She almost grabbed him by the shoulder, wanting to demand a real answer. But she knew what would happen. She'd done it before, gotten into a fight, had a permanent note added to her file.
    Ah: there. She spotted his feet dangling off the back of one of the semi trucks. Slowly she walked around a mound of trash – which, she noticed, was made up of a lot of crumpled Magic Fries wrappers and burnt matches and neon business cards – and went around the back of the truck, clearing her throat again, and then saying: Delivery for you, sir. I just need a signature right here... while holding out the tablet and a pen, and trying not to look directly in his eyes. When he handed back the tablet his hand briefly touched hers. His skin was warm. He mumbled something that sounded like a thank you. Or maybe it was: now leave. You never knew with him.
    She turned to go. She walked away from the truck, passed the sweepers, and looked back only once: just long enough to see the bright light glowing in the corner of her eye, and hear the laughing that echoed afterward.

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Fiction Friday is an outlet for experimentation while I slowly work on becoming a novelist. Read the rest of the stories here...

fiction friday: the facts

    Serge was always telling me useless facts about food: did I know that Worcestershire sauce was made from anchovies, bones and all? Had I ever heard that coconut water, in an emergency, could be used as a substitute for blood plasma? They were the sort of arbitrary statements that sounded like bad pick-up lines coming from anyone else's lips, but when Serge said them, in his honey-thick Belgian voice, they were somehow endearing. That, and the fact that his enthusiasm was genuine. There was all this stuff out there that nobody knew. It was like he was discovering it before anyone else.
    "Guess what food dynamite is made of," said Serge one evening. He was on the computer, reading one of a seemingly endless supply of More Amazing Facts About Food! articles online.
    "I haven't a clue," I said. He waited for me to guess. I shrugged.
    "Peanuts," he said, after a beat, his eyes widening.
    "I don't believe that," I said. "I think someone just makes some of this stuff up."
    He motioned for me to read it with my own two eyes, as if that would convince me. I leaned over his shoulder and read, adding a little ah-ha at the end. I kissed the side of his face, just above the jagged line of stubble. I said: I'm going to order in. You want the usual?

    If I'm counting right, I haven't seen him for seven years. But I still remember those facts he rattled off. His voice recites them to me when I grocery shop, or times like now, when I'm standing barefoot in my stuffy kitchen preparing beef brisket. A bottle of Worcestershire sits open on the countertop, sauce clinging to the lip. Anchovies... says Serge in my head. This image I can't get out of my mind: all those fish and their glistening thin bodies and their tiny eyes, an endless number of them swimming against the current.
    Anchovy bones, he whispers.
    "Stop," I insist, trying to forget. I picture Serge on a train, and the train speeding away into the distance, until it's just a speck. A trick my therapist taught me, if you have to know. At first I'd been skeptical. I'd asked: but what if the train comes back? And my therapist had said: well, maybe it will. In fact, it probably will. But at least it's gone for a while.

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Fiction Friday is an outlet for experimentation while I slowly work on becoming a novelist. Read the rest of the stories here...

fiction friday: manuscript

    Every Saturday afternoon our stepmother drove the four of us to the ice arena in Somersville. If you got in trouble that week, you'd still get to come, but you weren't allowed to skate. Take Gemma, who'd stolen a ten dollar bill out of dad's wallet: she'd been properly scolded, had to pay him twenty dollars back, and at the arena she was forced to watch us from the benches shielded by sheets of plexiglass. "This is so stupid," she sulked, when I stepped out of the rink to peel off one of my three sweaters. "Why did I even have to come?"
    But we both knew the answer to that. It wasn't really about us skating. It was about our father having some peace and quiet in the house. He'd been working on his novel for almost a year, and these Saturday afternoons were the only time he truly got any work done. Each time we got back from Somersville, the stack of typed pages on his desk had grown the slightest bit taller. The stack was held down by a paperweight that looked like a crumpled up sheet of legal paper, a Christmas gift from the year before.
    "Can I read it?" I'd asked once, and he'd said, "When it's published," then shooed me out of the room.
    But how could I not? I convinced myself that I had a right to. And if you thought about it for long enough, I had an obligation to read it, really, because what if our house happened to catch fire in the middle of the night, and he wasn't able to save his manuscript, and he'd be forced to reconstruct it from memory? If I read it, too, his task of rewriting wouldn't be so daunting. I could help him out. So there: it was practically a necessity.

    In the end, Gemma wormed her way into my plan, of course. Getting involved in things was her specialty. After two hours of searching we found the key to the study, went in, snatched the first twenty pages, and read them as quickly as we could. Then the next twenty, and the next twenty. We were done with what he had written so far in just enough time to put everything back in its place.
    "The kids in the book..." I said to Gemma, grabbing her by the arm before she ducked back into her room, "That's not – that's not us, is it?"
    She understood what I meant: that the kids sounded a lot like us – ice skater aficionados, four sisters. But these kids in his novel were awful. They were bratty. They whined all the time. One of them had even gotten hit by a car because she didn't check for traffic before running out into the street. Who would write something like that?
    Gemma shrugged. It could be, she said. But probably not. "Don't worry about it," she said. "It's just fiction, after all."

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Fiction Friday is an outlet for experimentation while I slowly work on becoming a novelist. Read the rest of the stories here...

fiction friday: goose chase

    She was gone by the time he came back. She'd left the map on the countertop, creased and faded green and all in French, but it was the best he was going to get, and it was better than the ones he'd gotten in the past. The girl had spoken all in French, too, come to think of it – no wonder he hadn't understood a word. Le Trésor, she kept saying, pointing to an unmarked point on the map. Ici. Ici.
    Where she had disappeared to, he hadn't a clue. This kept happening, people appearing, people disappearing. Giving him directions. Telling him things in foreign languages, handing him keys that disintegrated after a single use, sending him on and on. The last girl had led him through a parking lot and pointed, expressionlessly, to a little red car, which was now idling out in the driveway in front of the house.
    He left the house, map in hand. He flattened it out on the passenger's seat, backed out of the driveway, started down the endless switchbacks. Finally they spit out onto a long, straight highway lined with cacti. According to the map, there were close to a hundred miles of it. Le Trésor, the girl had kept saying. It seemed like it should be so obvious. And yet.
    It was almost dawn when he reached the end of the highway. It ended, just like that: there was highway, and then there was not. Where there should have been asphalt, there was a door. He killed the engine. Sucked in the hot, dry air of the desert. Walked to the door. He walked around it, too – but it was the same on both sides. At eye level there was a small gold placard engraved with the words Please knock and below that another one that read Dr. Woo, MD. He raised a fist to knock. For a moment – hardly even a full moment, more like half a moment – he wondered if he shouldn't. Then he let his fist fall on the echoing wood, knocking, knocking.

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Fiction Friday is an outlet for experimentation while I slowly work on becoming a novelist. Read the rest of the stories here...

fiction friday: control room

    Day one. "It goes like this," Collax says. "You lift up this flap, and then you punch in your greencode – you do know your greencode, don't you? They gave that to you in orientation, right? I thought so. Punch it in here, then pull on the lever by your left hand. No, your other your left hand – uh huh, there you go, champ. Voilà. You're in." The screen spanning the length of the room flickers and focuses. Colors fade in. From this angle, pedestrians look like beetles. Worse, you think you might recognize the neighborhood. This concerns you. Collax misinterprets the grimace. "Don't worry," he says. "You don't get to run it on your own until you log fifty hours. At minimum."
    Day nine. Eighty hours logged, thanks to that mishap at the saw factory on Wednesday. Collax stops by, slurping from a styrofoam cup. "You'll get coffee privileges around week six," he says. "Sugar privileges a week or two after that. How's the hood?" It's alright, you say. It's under control.
    Day eighteen. Or is it day nineteen? At noon, an announcement feeds through the ceiling speakers: the annual company barbecue is officially set for June the thirty-fourth. As always, the voice adds, please bring your own plates. Collax never comes by anymore, but you bump into him in the breakroom. "Hey champ," he says. "Day twenty one, already, huh? It flies by."
    Day forty. The barbecue has come and gone. While the meat was grilling, you cracked a couple well-timed jokes, flattered the right people. After that they upgraded you to a room in the primary hall, the same rank as Collax. Now, instead of a neighborhood, you've got a whole city. You've got six hundred thousand people, and they look like specks on the screen instead of beetles. They all look exactly the same, except for – well, except for that one right there. A flick of your wrist and the screen zooms in. It's a boy. He's looking up at you, and he's holding a sign. Hello, it reads, in blocky black handwriting. Hello, up there.

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Fiction Friday is an outlet for experimentation while I slowly work on becoming a novelist. Read the rest of the stories here...

fiction friday: suddenly

    At first it sounded like tissue paper being crumpled, big sheets of it, and Zola wondered, Mama's wrapping presents? before remembering that her mother had gone out to the hairdresser and wouldn't be back until four that afternoon. Though she was alone in the house, she crept noiselessly down the stairs toward the living room. Once or twice she stopped and just listened. If she tried hard enough she could pick out the individual parts of the sound. Like... yes, there. One sharp pop. Then another and another, in quick succession, so that when they were all strung together it sounded like a single unbroken sound.
    No more stairs left. She crossed the living room and the sound grew louder, the way music often did during a long, sad song. What was the word for that? She had learned it in school. Mr. Olstead had scrunched up his forehead when he said it, his eyebrows wriggling like caterpillars. Ah, crescendo. That was it.
    At the window, she saw what it was. The trees. The trees, all of them. The trees out in front of the house – and as far as she could see, when she pressed her left cheek against the cool water-stained window – all of them were blossoming audibly. Already there were creamy white-and-pink flowers painted all over the magnolia tree in the front yard. Spring would not wake lethargically this year. It was coming all at once, arriving before she could hardly comprehend it.

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Fiction Friday is an outlet for experimentation while I slowly work on becoming a novelist. Read the read of the stories here...

fiction friday: runaway

    They had promised her a planet: one warm, white planet that she could build however she pleased. The air was clean and the land was fertile. She could cultivate it, if she wanted to. They'd been watching her for some time and took note of how often she paused on one of her walks to look with envy at a neighbor's well-manicured garden. She could trade all this – here they motioned with their long graceless arms to mean her current situation – she could trade it all for a new life. She could have six seasons, extinct animals reconstructed, her favorite music infused into the air. Anything.
    That had been a week ago; now she stood on the slick surface in disbelief. She was unsure where to start. She knew they were watching, and she had to resist the urge to cry.
    "You're just adjusting," one of their voices said, slipping through the air. "But there's no rush. Try something small."
    She nodded. She murmured, "Maybe a lawn, then." It sprouted from the white surface, richly green. "And a small house. A one-bedroom house." When it appeared, it unfolded from the ground, creaking and stretching as if it had been there for ages just waiting to be called on. She went inside. It smelled of lemon, but both the short metal refrigerator and the cabinets lining the nearest wall were bare. In the middle of the house was a bed made up in gray linens. She'd take a nap, she decided, and then start figuring things out. This life, like the last one, would take some time to get used to.

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Fiction Friday is an outlet for experimentation while I slowly work on becoming a novelist. Read the read of the stories here...

fiction friday: the munros

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    Even if the week had been slow at the restaurant, there never failed to be a line come Saturday morning. At eight o'clock the oldest Munro boy flipped the sign in the window and the middle Munro boy pushed the last of the refilled ketchup bottles across the small square tables by the back windows. The youngest boy, Victor, sat on a high stool in the kitchen watching his father whisk the eggs into a froth in a metal bowl. Mr. Munro had never liked being the cook, but his wife had insisted because he was good at it. He did not deny this. But what he would have preferred was to actually converse with the customers. He often fantasized about how different it would be. Instead of donning a grease-smeared apron, he would wear a dark crisp button-up shirt, ironed smooth each morning. He would spend the day asking the diners, "Everything to your liking?" and lean in gently over the table, resting a hand on the man's shoulder and smiling to the wife. He would offer wrapped mints to the restless children. At the very least, he was convinced that his charm would bring in more customers on the slow quiet weekdays. "That Mr. Munro," he imagined them saying, "He's such a nice man; he runs such a lovely restaurant."

    It would come, eventually. The boys got older, and while two of them went away to out-of-state universities on scholarships, the youngest stayed with his parents. Victor had spent so many years watching his father cook that when he finally picked up a whisk to ready the eggs for that morning's omelettes, he knew the entire menu by heart. It was never difficult for him, and unlike his father, he desired to stay isolated from the dining room. He was taken by surprise the first time his father poked his head into the kitchen to relay compliments from an elderly couple who had been dining at the restaurant for years. "Oh, that's–" stumbled Victor, wiping his forehead. He seemed to have forgotten about the diners entirely. "That's nice," he finally said. "That's awfully nice of them."

    Victor had a boy of his own a few years later, and he brought him into the restaurant and sat him up on the high stool in the kitchen as he himself had sat so many years before. "Do you want to learn?" he offered, but the boy shook his head no. Maybe in time, Victor thought. He cracked the egg into the metal bowl, and then another and another, and for a moment paused with the last weightless shell in his hand before setting it next to the others.

fiction friday: watching

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    It had been a tradition since before Suze married into the family, and this whole time she had kept her mouth shut, because who was she, really, to say anything about it? So she stood by, her face half-buried behind a scarf, watching the boys slide and slip down the thick coating of snow, whooping with laughter, clambering back up the hill and sometimes racing each other to the top because everything, she had noticed, everything was a competition. Nelson, the younger one, had almost choked on a piece of zucchini the evening before because he'd been trying to clear his plate faster than his brother. And once the commotion had settled down, he had gone right back to shoveling food into his mouth with even more fervor, as if what had just happened was already shed from his memory. She could hardly believe it.
    As she stood out in the cold, Suze watched Nelson more closely than she watched the others, thinking that maybe if she did, nothing bad could happen. If she kept her eyes on him, it would be impossible for his sled to careen off its path and head straight into the maple tree that stood near the edge of the yard. It would be impossible for Nelson to slide down the hill with so much momentum that he would skid out into the street where the cars, though driving slowly, were not really driving that slowly. If it had been her son, she would have said something. Or if she hadn't started those fights at the previous family gathering, she would have said something. Yet she had promised. "Please, no scenes this year," her husband had begged of her, as they pulled into his parents' driveway. "Anything for you," Suze had replied, meaning it but not being able to look fully at him.
    Now Nelson was waving to her from the bottom of the hill. Most of the family had gone back inside the house. It had to be her that Nelson was signaling to. She called out, "What's wrong? Are you okay?" feeling the panic reverberate in her voice. Then she realized that all he was doing was inviting her to join them. He feels sorry for me, Suze thought, calling out that she was just fine as she was. Yet saying it reminded her of how awful it was to be standing still in the cold. She rubbed her arms, blew hot air into the scarf and closed her eyes a moment at the pleasure of warmth, as slight as it was. When she reopened them, Nelson was almost back up at the top of the hill. Closer now, she could see the joy in his face. "Hey," he said. "Watch me, okay?" And before she could reply he took off, the snow flying out from behind him, and Suze kept her eyes on him, kept him straight and unwavering.

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Fiction Friday is a small effort to chase a large dream of being a writer. The music in the recording is by Northbound.

fiction friday: the indigo man

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    After following The Indigo Man for three weeks, there were two truths I knew about him. The first was that he never left his apartment on Wednesdays. On those days he had Chinese food delivered around noon, then let the hours pass while he sat in his lumpy maroon recliner watching TV. Across the street, through my binoculars, all I could see were the changes in his expression, how his face morphed from laughter to boredom to a drowsiness brought on by the now empty cartons of takeout. Okay, I figured, so it's just his lazy day. But once, when he left his medicine cabinet open, it provided me a reflection of the TV he was laughing at. But there were no daytime talk shows, no overzealous infomercials. The TV wasn't even on.
    The second truth I knew about him was that he spent the other six days a week making deliveries. He went on foot, a bag slung over his right shoulder and a wool cap on his head that he would periodically remove and peer into, as if verifying something. On State Street, he made six deliveries, skipping only the house with the orange cat sitting on the stoop. Out from his bag came small packages, tied in twine, which he slipped into the mail slots. Forty or fifty deliveries later, the sun had gone down, and I was tired of crouching behind bushes and park benches, and The Indigo Man retired to his favorite bar.
    Three weeks of this and I was ready to give up – and then it happened. One of his little packages slipped from his bag and landed on the sidewalk, face up. I emerged from behind a dumpster, where I'd been holding my breath, almost turning blue, and dashed for the package. "For You And You Only" was written where the return address would have normally been. I flipped it over, and ran my thumb under the flap. But a voice said, "Hey," and the Indigo Man had realized his mistake, had turned back and was standing in front of me. For the first time, I was afraid of him. But all he did was hold out his hand, and wait for me to give back what was not mine.

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Fiction Friday is a small effort to chase a large dream of being a writer. The music in the recording is by Northbound.

fiction friday: annabelle

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    She is born in the winter. It snows that year, and even more so the next year, like thick frosting on a cake, and the winter after that they move to Monroe, where her father has a new job waiting for him. Every day he comes home smelling of flour and cinnamon. She is four when her baby brother is born and nine when he has his accident. Gentle now, says her mother, when she hugs her brother, newly home from the hospital. After a while the scars on his legs aren't so noticeable. When she is ten, her father brings home a dog from the shelter. She insists on naming him Lady and cannot be convinced otherwise. He sleeps at the foot of her bed every night except for one week out of the year when they are on summer vacation. Those days they spend driving down the coast with the windows down and her hair whipping across her face. She collects sand from every beach they go to, scooping it into little vials and labeling them with tape. In the middle of a fight with her brother, he smashes one of the vials on the living room floor, specks of sand everywhere.

    Then she is fifteen and telling people to call her Anna, not Annabelle; then fifteen and a half and she almost crashes the high school's Driver's Ed car, her hands sweaty and slipping on the steering wheel; then sixteen and sitting in a dark movie theater beside Alex Atwood, hardly breathing when he runs his hand over hers. She writes everything down in lined journals, which her brother steals from her nightstand drawer and reads, hooting with laughter, until he gets to the part about him. When she is eighteen she wins a prize for a poem she has written, and her mother hangs a copy of it in the house, which embarrasses her only slightly more than having to read it in front of the senior class at graduation. We all were once young, it begins. Nobody in the house remembers to flip the calendar hanging in the kitchen, and it lingers on July as the months go on. Then, suddenly, she is coming home for the first time from college. Her mother has put new sheets on her bed; how large and luxurious it feels now, after being away. Her father comes home from work, still smelling of flour and cinnamon, and turns on the local news while dinner is bubbling on the stovetop. The weatherman is predicting snow, days of it, the first flakes likely falling in a few hours.

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Fiction Friday is a small effort to chase a large dream of being a writer. The music in the recording is by Northbound.

fiction friday: in sleep

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    The dream was always the same: it was almost November, and he was ice fishing with his grandfather, and the baby sharks were circling under the thick cloudy ice beneath their boots. He was feeling cheerful, despite the wind numbing the tips of his ears and the unscratchable itch creeping along the middle of his back; these were things that ordinarily irritated him and made him morose. But that day he was feeling good. An envelope had come that morning. From her. There was a photograph, and she moved in it as he rotated it back and forth. This part of the dream he especially liked. At one angle, she looked down shyly, and at another angle, she looked straight ahead with the slightest smile. She was standing beneath a palm tree, an open air market blurry behind her.
    On the back, she had written: still waiting for you.
    He had never made it past that point. Always the alarm, or Judith nudging him awake, or the kids crawling over him, squealing Daddy, or even when there was nothing to wake him: it just stopped, like the film had run out.
    Do you ever have recurring dreams? he asked Ray, over their nightly beers at Smokey's.
    What, said Ray, you mean like... oh, for crying out loud! He'd been looking up at the television above the bar. Then he wiped the corners of his mouth, and turned back.
    What were you saying? Ray asked.
    Never mind, he said. Nothing important.
    The sharks he understood. There had been a field trip to the zoo when he was in grade school and an incident with a zookeeper that had turned out to be nothing, really, but had still scared him, being so young. But the rest confused him. He had never known his grandfather. Couldn't even say a single thing about the old man, so what was he doing showing up in his sleep?
    And, of course, there was the girl. Still waiting for him, but where? But there was nothing more to be seen in the dream. What he had been given was all there was. So in his waking life, he looked. He looked for her when they went on vacation in Santa Monica. He looked for her in crowds at the mall while his wife shopped for Christmas presents. He kept his eyes open. It was all he could do, until it was night again, and time to sleep.

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Fiction Friday is a small effort to chase a large dream of being a writer. The music in the recording is by Northbound.

fiction friday: on repeat

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    After the man in coveralls pinpointed us on the map and gave me directions ("Just keep going straight," he'd said, and I'd replied with, "Well, that's easy enough to remember,") I went back to the car, which was idling with Lynn in the passenger seat. She was staring out into the moonlit fields of red wildflowers that ran down the length of the highway. Not pretty ones; just weeds, really, that would scratch your legs and get caught in your hair if you tried, let's say, to run through them.
    While I was asking for directions, she'd turned the radio to oldies. I turned it back. I reminded her that the driver picked the station; wasn't that one of the first things we'd agreed on when planning this trip?
    "Right," she said, rolling her eyes. "You and all your rules."
    While I drove, she dozed off. She made little whimpering sounds as she slept, and then one long, squeaky snore that I couldn't stop myself from laughing at, and then finally she fell into a silent sleep. A half hour went by, and nothing – the road, the moon, the radio music – seemed to change.
    Then, so quickly: I felt wobbly, like I'd been spun and then halted still. In the next moment, the sensation was gone. I reached over to shake Lynn awake, but she pushed my hand away, laughed, asked what I was doing.
    "When did you wake up?" I asked, and she gave me an odd look.
    In the distance, there was a light squeezing out of the dark. It developed into a small gas station, where a man in coveralls came out to greet me. He pulled out a map like an illusionist pulling a trick from his sleeve. He had dirt under his fingernails, the kind you get from really digging down deep in the earth.
    "Do I know you?" I asked. "I have the weirdest feeling..."
    But he interrupted me. "Just keep following the road," he said, tracing his forefinger along the thick purple highway line on the map. Then he raised his finger up off the page and pointed into the darkness ahead.
    "Are you sure?" I asked. "I'm worried that we missed it. It wasn't supposed to take this long."
    "Like I said," he repeated, "Just keep going straight."
    "Okay," I said, and heard myself say, the words coming on their own: "That's easy enough to remember."
    Back in the car, Lynn had been fiddling with the radio, and it was humming oldies. I switched it, and then we drove on, looking out over the dark fields of wildflowers that were unlike anything we'd seen before.

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Fiction Friday is a small effort to chase a large dream of being a writer. The music in the recording is by Northbound.

fiction friday: soup for a lonely heart

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    Wait for a windy day. Heat up a little butter in the tallest stockpot you own, then dig out the biggest onion you can find. In all likelihood it will be hiding at the very back of your cupboard; the good onions always do that. Chop it up with a recently sharpened knife and toss the pieces into the pot. While the onion cooks, read a few pages from a book you haven't touched in ages, and if you like the way it sounds in your head, tear them out, crinkle them up, and add them to the onions. Don't worry about the missing pages; you'll remember how the story goes.
    If you have any tiny potatoes, toss those into the pot, along with anything else with a thick skin, like that ugly little squash your neighbor handed to you over his fence, or the persimmons that have been sleeping for a week in your fruit bowl. Cook everything until it is so translucent it's hard to see it at all. Fill the remaining space with chicken stock, or vegetable stock, or the rainwater that has been coming down for weeks. Herbs are happy to be included here, a handful knotted tightly with twine and dunked to the bottom of the pot. By the time you've done all of this, it will be evening, and you will be getting hungrier than you thought possible. Maybe, then, there will be a knock at the door, an old friend. He will come with a loaf of hot bread under his arm, which you will tear pieces from with tingling hands. You will lean against the kitchen counter and talk about how quickly this year has gone by. He will check on the soup for you, and season it, and ask where you keep your fine china.
    When the soup is ready, the whole house will be fragrant, and nearly all of the bread will be gone. You will tear the remaining piece in half and ladle the soup into porcelain bowls, licking a drop that lands on your thumb. Your friend will tell you a story about an island he once traveled to that was covered in fruit trees. "We could go there together," he offers. "There's plenty of time." It's past midnight when you finish your meal. Your guest has to leave, and so you change into your pajamas, and wash the makeup off your face, and pour the rest of the soup into tupperware to stack in the freezer. This way the soup will keep until you need it, even if that is years from now.

-

Fiction Friday is a small effort to chase a large dream of being a writer. The music in the recording is by Northbound.

fiction friday: anything at all

Listen to this story here: 

    The thing that drives Zeek the craziest about his mother is that she's always talking to everyone. It doesn't matter if they're in the supermarket, or at Powell Street Laundry, or in the waiting room at Dr. Pinsky's. His mother talks to anyone within earshot. She asks strangers where she can find a nice pair of boots like theirs, or informs them about how bad the traffic was on the drive in, or tells them some humdrum anecdote from her past. When she runs out of the truth, she moves into the imaginative parts of her mind. "I was in the paper once," she might say. "Got my picture taken and everything!" And hearing this, Zeek blushes and pulls on his mother's sweatshirt, whispering, Mom, Mom, stop please.
    Other times, he can't stop her, like when he's sitting slumped outside of the womens' dressing room at Clark's, and his mother is telling the dressing room attendant about the diet she's been on for weeks and weeks, though in truth they've had hot fudge sundaes for the last three evenings in a row. There is even still a chocolate stain on the front of Zeek's shirt in the shape of a fox. But his mother is saying, "You get used it, after a while, all the calorie counting," while zipping up the floor length evening gown that she'd carried so happily into the dressing room.
    "You must have a special event coming up, I imagine," says the attendant.
    "You won't believe this," Zeek's mother says, "But I won tickets to a movie premiere. Hollywood! Here I'm in my forties, and I've never been. But with this dress... it's alright if my son comes in for a second, isn't it? Zeek, honey, come tell me what you think." And though he doesn't want to, he goes in. It feels like stepping through into another world, like being caught in some large, soft web. He sees her standing in front of a three-way mirror at the end of the narrow hallway, blue sequins shimmering all over. Her face is lit up, her cheeks rosy.
    "Excited to go on your trip?" the attendant asks him.
    "Trip?" he asks, and then, "Oh, right. The premiere." The attendant is still looking at him, smiling, waiting. "I can't wait," he forces himself to say, and for the first time in his life, he feels the thrill of the lie. It unfolds. It beckons him. You can say anything you like, it promises. Anything at all.

-

Fiction Friday is a small effort to chase a large dream of being a writer. The music in the recording is by Northbound.

fiction friday: jars

    Judith called his name for what felt like forever, and when he finally took notice, he couldn't believe it had taken him that long, considering the unmistakable way she drew out the a in his name like no one else did. "You finally heard me," she said, running to him, "Hi, James. Can you believe it? Running into me here?" She was panting for air, but smiling in that big way she always had. Ten years hadn't done a thing to her smile or her eyes. After she hugged him – during which he felt his face flush a little, having a sudden flashback to a dark booming gymnasium, slow dancing with her, her body warm – he asked what she was doing here. A conference, she said. Was she here long? No, just a few hours more. Her flight back to Colorado left that afternoon.
    As she spoke, he moved his grocery bag behind his legs, obscured from her view. He hadn't really thought about it, until he parted from her and realized that the baby food jars were sitting at the top of the bag, and he also hadn't, somehow, really gotten around to telling her much about his life these days. He had even kissed her on the cheek before they said goodbye, a detail, of course, he would omit when he was at home that evening telling Cecile about running into his old high school girlfriend. At the end of his story, Cecile only responded by holding up one of the tiny orange jars and saying, "You bought squash. James, you know she doesn't like squash." And for a moment, he thought that Cecile meant that Judith didn't like squash, and he laughed, and then the baby laughed, and Cecile sighed and put the little jar back in the bag.
    "Well, maybe one day she will," he said, and looked over at the baby.
    "And she doesn't like peas, either," Cecile said, holding up another jar.
    "Just hold onto them," he said. "She could soon change her mind."

fiction friday: when we were young

    We lived in a house by the sea. Nobody there had seen a family quite like ours before; we had hair the color of fire, and we were so rosy skinned, and so tall. We had to duck under the doorways of our neighbors. "Twins!" people would say. "We thought that was just a myth."
    But the Colliers – a retired couple, who had never gotten around to having any children – didn't act surprised. Maybe they had originally come from somewhere else. They had a little thickness in their voices, after all. In their pale yellow kitchen, Mrs. Collier pressed pastry dough into tart shells while we eagerly watched over her shoulder. She let us pour the filling in, then we sat at the dining table until they were ready. "Won't Mr. Collier want some?" we asked as we dug our forks in, but Mrs. Collier shook her head. She said he didn't care for sweets, and besides, right now he was in the woods behind their house, harvesting firewood and hunting rabbits for dinner.
    "Oh," we said.
    "Hundreds of them out there," she said. "Mr. Collier could bring you along next time, if you'd like."
    Our mother had taught us to accept invitations, even when we didn't want to, and so we went with him the following Saturday. We linked our arms together, my twin and I, and we followed Mr. Collier at a cautious distance. "Let's turn back," we whispered to each other, shivering, but then we came to a clearing.
    "There!" Mr. Collier said. "You see?" But we didn't see any rabbits. All we saw were stones upon stones, all smooth and gray and speckled with mica. Mr. Collier picked one up, and held it against his chest. He was smiling. We brought the stone back to the house, and then we politely said that we had to be home for dinner.
    They watched us go, waving from the doorway. And the next day, they were gone. No house, no trace of the winding driveway, not a crumb. This is what we remember most from our time by the sea, when we were most awake, when we were so young.

fiction friday: wound

    Once, when he was fifteen, and August was sweltering, he rode his bicycle from his parents' house on the hill down toward Lake Steven. In one moment he was furiously squeezing the brakes, and in the next he was moving in a kind of squiggle across the road. Then he was lying face-up beside the stop sign, one arm hot with pain. A shadow moved over him. "Young man," a woman's voice said. "You took quite the spill, didn't you?"
    Her name was Lalani, and she substitute taught at his high school. He might have had her for math, but it was hard for him to think of anything clearly right then. In her car, as she drove him to the hospital, he had to keep his feet out of the way of a stack of books on the floor of the car.
    "My son's name is David. You must know him?" asked Lalani.
    "Oh," he said. He hadn't made the connection before, but now it seemed obvious: the caramel colored skin, the sharp eyes.
    "He said you've made fun of him," she continued, and now her voice was lower. "You can imagine I didn't like hearing that very much."
    "I don't–" he started, and then stopped. He moved one leg over on the seat, peeling it slowly from the hot leather. They were at a five-way intersection now, and Lalani had taken her hands off the steering wheel and placed them in her lap. He could feel her staring at him. The car behind them honked.
    "Calling him fat, pushing him in the hall – that's what my David told me you did. You did do it, didn't you?"
    The car behind them honked again. For a moment, he considered opening the door and running for it. He could find a pay phone, call his mother at work, have her pick him up. If he cried a little, she would feel sorry for him instead of lecturing him about his bike. But the bike was exactly the problem: how would he explain its disappearance? It would still be back there, crumpled in Lalani's trunk.
    She was waiting for him to answer. In the side mirror, he could see the line of cars growing behind them.
    "It's your turn," he mumbled.
    "Yes," said Lalani. "It is, isn't it?"

fiction friday: the new rules

    It took Anna Maria longer than they had hoped to learn their ways. A month passed before she could prevent herself from talking about the things they didn't want talked about. They forbade talk of science fiction novels, but Westerns were okay; in fact, they liked to hear retelling of lawmen heading west, of confrontations in saloons. They asked her to tell these stories as they repeatedly bleached her hair until it was as white as bone. Each time, afterward, they braided it tightly, smoothing back stray strands with the gel they kept in small silver containers. They had used the same gel to heal her wounds after one of the expeditions, and even the scars had faded.
   It took her longer than they had hoped to learn the dress code (long pants were not to be worn with long sleeves, and she was to always wear at least two layers of clothing) and it took her longer to learn the correct way to cook the fuga how they liked it, soft and undercooked, still green around the edges. One, spitting his fuga back into the bowl, claimed that Anna Maria was purposefully acting dumb in order to be sent back home, but no one took him seriously; he had claimed the same about others before.
   But on Friday afternoons, when she was allowed on the viewing deck, no one had to tell Anna Maria how to act. This part she understood perfectly right from the start. With the others, she stood silently behind the thick wall of glass and pressed her fingertips gently against its cool surface. Until she was whisked back to her room, she remained utterly silent, unmoving. She simply stared out into the speckled black landscape, and without a coherent thought in her mind, watched the earth rotate.

fiction friday: gift

    Standing in the middle of Macy's, his head starting to hurt and his hands shoved into his bare pockets, he doesn't have a clue what to buy for Olga. What does she even like? Between classes, she's always spitting out her hardened gum for a fresh piece, and after wiping the moisture from her lips she uses a half empty tube to apply a thin layer of gloss. He had gotten a little of it on his own lips, just once, from a kiss behind the art building; it had tasted like pineapple. So there was that, but why would he get her something she already has?

    He decides to follow a stranger who reminds him of Olga. Maybe it's the cut of her hair, the way it partially obscures her face. He followers her with caution as she spins a rack of earrings, as she tries on sunglasses, as she zips and unzips a variety of colorful shoulder bags.
    At the perfume counter, the girl finally seems to be interested in something. She sprays two strips of paper, raises each to her nose, and makes a comment to the saleswoman behind the counter. The saleswoman laughs in agreement. Of course, the saleswoman appears to say, then reaches a hand out toward the display shelf.

    "I'm interested in that one," he says, once he gets up the nerve to approach the perfume counter. Ten minutes have passed since he watched the girl stand where he is standing now. Avoiding eye contact with the saleswoman, he points, because he has no better way to identify the one he wants. The box is lavender, wrapped in cellophane.
    "This bottle is forty eight dollars," says the saleswoman, one manicured finger tapping the top of the box.
    "Oh," he says.
    "But the travel size," she continues, "is seventeen."
    Not long after, she is folding tissue paper around the small box and slipping it into a glossy bag with braided handles. Every way he tries to hold it feels awkward. Outside the department store, as the crowd moves past on the sidewalk, he shoves the box into his jacket pocket and folds the glossy gift bag flat, then bends it in half, and lets it go into the dark mouth of a trash can. He spots his bus approaching the stop on the other side of the street. Maybe, if he hurries – but there's so many people in the way. Keeping one hand in his pocket with his fingers curled around the box, gripping it tight, he starts forcing his way through, cutting diagonally in front of strangers, repeatedly mumbling apologies. He doesn't notice that the current of the crowd is what is moving him closer, that they are pushing him along.

fiction friday: light

    We picked up Aunt Sarah that morning at nine o'clock on the dot. She was standing out in front of the Arrivals sign, two bulging mustard yellow suitcases on either side of her. She squeezed into the back seat next to me and flashed a big grin. Her teeth were almost pure white, except for one, which was stained the palest yellow.
    Everything about Aunt Sarah was large: her smile, her curly hair, her figure ("Curvaceous," she explained to me, in case I ever needed to borrow the word), but most of all, her voice. It seemed to boom out of the car speakers. Her voice had the slightest syrupy quality to it, which I was deeply confused about until I learned, many years later, that she had picked up the accent on a southern vacation and, just like that, it had stuck around ever since.
   The entire ride back home, she talked. She told us about how the man sitting next to her on the plane dozed off and snored half the flight, and how she had smuggled an extra pack of peanuts into her purse if either of us were hungry (we weren't), and how she just couldn't wait to taste my mother's famous five-cheese casserole since it had been almost a decade since she'd last had it.
    When we arrived at the house, she was the first one to notice that the power had gone out.
    "Wouldn't be a trip without something going wrong," she sighed, dropping her luggage inside the doorway.

    But since it was summer, sunlight lasted through dinner. The oven wasn't working, but the phone was, so we called for delivery. "Such a shame about the casserole," Aunt Sarah moaned repeatedly through dinner, poking a splintered chopstick at her chow mein.
    When the light in the house began to fade, my mother set candles along the window sills and across the countertops. She withdrew dust-coated board games from the closet and poured Aunt Sarah a glass of wine, then a glass for herself.
    "We've got Monopoly," my mother said, "Or Scrabble. Or there's cards. Sarah?"
    "I think I'll just watch."
    Aunt Sarah joined in anyway, once her glass of wine was depleted and she realized there was really nothing else left to do. By the fourth round of cards, the last glow of sunset was gone, and by the eighth, almost all of the candles had turned to soft wax and burned out. We were reduced to only our voices. We put our cards down.
    Two circles of light appeared at a distance through the living room window. We watched as they came closer, then as they turned away and parked at an angle. Two figures climbed out of the truck and stood in the beams of light, then went to work. For a long time, we just sat there, watching. Then the bulbs above us flicked on. The room burned white. I shielded my eyes. When I was finally able to pull my hands away, what struck me most was how colorful it all was, the palette infinite.

fiction friday: for the taking

    On Fridays, the only day she left the house, Sweetie rode the city buses. There was only one whose route came close to her – the 14 – but that dropped her off downtown and from there she could go nearly anywhere. Once downtown, she waited at the stop in front of Macy's for the next bus. Sweetie didn't even bother looking at the route number. She just got on, waved her paper transfer at the driver, and found a seat.
    Before – when she had still been able to drive – she had always hated the buses. You couldn't see around them, and they went so slowly, and always made more stops than seemed necessary. But now she didn't really care at all. She didn't have anywhere to be. This was simply her brief getaway for the week, and all she was really looking for was a feeling of having traveled, even if it wasn't so far away from home.

    Sometimes another person sat next to her. When the bus became crowded enough it was unavoidable; other times it just happened anyway. Once, the woman sitting beside Sweetie asked where she had purchased her watch. This took her by surprise, and she said, "It was an heirloom," despite that not being true at all. But that was always what happened when strangers talked to her. It made her anxious, and she would inexplicably say things that weren't true.
    And then there was Jonathan. He was young, maybe seventeen at most. She didn't know why he had bothered talking to someone like her, but he had, and then somehow it happened again the following week. He reminded her of her brother, when they were around that age. Maybe it was the smile – she wasn't sure. But he didn't bring out the nervousness in her, and that was enough to make her enjoy the company.

    Sweetie was finding, to her surprise, that she needed less sleep the older she got. Or, rather, she couldn't sleep longer than five or six hours at a time. So in the pre-dawn hours of those days, she sat at the small kitchen table watching the steam rise from a dark mug of tea. She spent those hours thinking about the bus rides. With her mind very still, she could recall exactly how the feel of the cracked seats felt against her skin. It was not hard for her to recall the electronic bell that rang when a passenger pulled the cord for the next stop, or the sound of coins spilling into the farebox. The crescendo of the engine, the water spots on the windows: it had all been stored, two hours at a time. She had soaked in every speck of it, and now it was hers, inside her, available any time she liked.

fiction friday: burn

   Minutes after the television exploded, my mother emerged out of the doorway of the house, clutching what she could: the photo albums, her jewelry box, a paperback with an illegible spine, and a pair of bronze-plated baby shoes. She was panting wildly, strands of cement-colored hair clinging to the sweat on her forehead. She could barely hold her head up to look at my father, who was rushing back from the Cooper's house next door.
    "You went back in," he said. "Why did you go back in?"
    "My God," said my mother, wiping the hair off her face with a shaky palm, "I need to sit down." But she remained standing, swaying. The northeast corner of the house radiated with flames. One of the bedroom windows was broken, the curtains behind it ablaze.
    "Marianne?" he was asking her. "Marianne, are you okay?" But before she could answer, their neighbor, Mrs. Cooper, was at her side, in her robe and slippers. She held a cool washcloth in one hand and a highball glass in the other. Mrs. Cooper hesitated, then set her cocktail on the sidewalk, pressing the towel into my mother’s hands. Everything that my mother had carried out of the house was now arranged on the lawn, circled around her like children.
    "Look at that," Mrs. Cooper said. She bent down, not bothering to adjust her robe. She picked up the bronze-plated baby shoes.
    "Those were Eleanor's," my mother said. Me, that tiny, if you could imagine it.
    "Oh?" asked Mrs. Cooper. She started to say more, but then the whine of the fire engines echoed from down the dark street, and the three of them turned to watch, waiting, just waiting, for them to come.

fiction friday: callum

These last few damp, bluish-gray days are the kind that Callum likes most. He gets up early to feel ahead of the game. In his narrow kitchen, he rewarms and swallows down half a cup of coffee, rinsing the ring out of the cup afterward with a splash of cold water. He does this set of movements with his right hand – the other arm is just a half-limb, ending above the crook where his elbow had once been.
    After dressing, Callum clips the old leather leash onto his dog's collar. The dog has been shadowing Callum ever since he rolled out of bed, breaking away only to eat or to scratch violently at the back of his speckled gray ear. Callum wriggles his feet into the canvas slip-on shoes left on the mat by the door. Outside, on the step, the dog presses past his legs and stretches in the cool morning air.
    They jog up the flat blocks. At the intersection, where there is a shoe repair shop and a little café, the light turns yellow, then red. Callum scans the front pages of the newspapers displayed outside the café. Sometimes he ties the dog to the rusted post by the door and slips inside for an espresso instead of drinking the weak, grainy stuff he makes in his own kitchen. When he does go in, the barista behind the counter is always the same: a spare dark-haired girl, with a soft voice and pretty features.
    "Do you want a punchcard?" she always asks, even though he has told her, several times, that he already has one, and when he holds it out to her it is creased and full of holes.

   There have been days when she is the only person he talks to. The other days, when he goes to the bookshop in the late morning and works until locking up at seven, he at least has Ames and the customers. Though, to be fair, Ames only speaks to Callum when the register jams, or when he's going out for lunch, or when the display window needs to be switched. Last week, Callum changed the display to feature books with white covers. Pure white, like the start of a dream. Ames stood outside the shop, watching him, biting the tip of his thumb nervously.
   "Well," he had said, coming back in, the bell on the door ringing, "It's different, I'll give you that much."

    In front of the café, the intersection light flips to green. They cross the street. A child coming from the opposite direction, tagging behind his parents, stares at Callum's bisected sleeve. Callum picks up the pace, trying to get away from that feeling of wanting to turn around and go back home. Finally, the edge of the university campus comes into view. With its open lawns and winding brick paths, it's the closest thing to a park near his apartment. Morning classes are in session, and there are only a handful of students out.
    They enter through the northeast entrance. The dog is pulling him, so he lets the leash uncoil a few feet off his wrist. They trot past a row of low-roofed administration buildings, then take the wide steps that spit them out into a grove of Yoshino cherry trees.
    He's surprised to see that they're in bloom. Just last week, there was hardly a speck of pink. Callum decides that he'll come back with a camera tomorrow, if he can manage to find it. He'll wake up early, get dressed in his slow and steady way, and come over to campus again. All he needs is a moment, and then they will be his forever.

fiction friday: ma lai go

  I had but a single memory of my grandfather Yuan: on Sundays, when my parents drove us to my grandparents' sand-colored bungalow, Yuan would retreat to the small, single-window kitchen and labor over an egg whisk and a round tin to produce an airy, perfectly round sponge cake. I could remember no visit without it. Yuan hardly set foot in that corner of the house, aside from this weekly ritual. It was the only thing he had any desire to make, and years later, the only thing he had any desire to eat.
  Yuan was unhurried as he cracked the eggs on the countertop, and steadfast as he beat them to a thick and opaque froth. His was an economical man; no movement went to waste. He slowed his stirring as each ingredient was added. Finally, he poured the pale yellow batter into a parchment-lined steamer, which was placed over a pot of boiling water. He slipped a towel under the lid of the pot before leaving the kitchen. "To catch dripping water," he said, when I shyly asked, and I imagined tiny raindrops threatening the sponge cake.
  Those Sundays, the cramped kitchen was also occupied by my grandmother as she prepared the heart of the meal: thick oily noodles, fried strips of pork, leafy vegetables in a pool of glistening sauce, packed bowls of steamed rice. She shouted in Chinese over the hiss and crackle of the food to Yuan, and then in bumbling English to us. "Why her hair so long?" she protested to my mother, meaning me. "She should keep it short. Out of the way."
  After lunch, wedges of cake were served on blue and white porcelain that, afterward, I would help clear from the table and stack by the kitchen sink. Only a few crumbs were the remaining evidence of Yuan's toil.
  "Oh, that sponge cake," my mother always sighed, once we were back in the car. She glanced at me in the flip-down mirror while reapplying her lipstick. "I've been eating it since I was your age."
  "Ma Lai Go," I said quietly. It was what Yuan had whispered to me when he removed the lid of the pot and a cloud of steam rose toward his face. It was the only time I ever saw him smile – as soon as the steam cleared, he always returned to his normal, serious self.

fiction friday: sweet

  Maddy had read a short story about it in some magazine, although now she couldn't recall which one. What she did remember was that you had to bake two pies – one with, and one without. She baked them both on the middle rack, placing the one for herself on the right side, nudging it gently into the oven. Then she wound the timer, and wiped the flecks of flour off her palms.
  She made the phone call with the cell phone her daughter had given her over the holidays. "For emergencies," her daughter had said, but by that week's end, Maddy had discovered that she liked being able to make a call while she was in town; she had even used it to call Dr. Keller when she was held up in traffic and running late to her appointment. Now, in the brightly lit hallway just outside of the kitchen, she dialed John's number.
  "Still coming at three?" she asked, and then, "No, no. No need. Just bring yourself."

  At a quarter to three, Maddy pulled the pies out of the oven. They looked identical: both golden brown, both stained dark purple in a few places where the filling had seeped through. She set two plates on the counter, reminding herself that hers would be the one on the right. Not a good time for forgetfulness, she thought.

  John, predictably, was late. And he had in his hands a small container of cookies, even though she had told him to bring nothing.
  "I baked a pie," said Maddy in protest, but John was already in the kitchen.
  "Two pies, I see!" he said. "I'll put the cookies out on a plate, if you don't mind." She couldn't stop him; he was already setting them out on a platter, placing the chocolate chip cookies on one side and the oatmeal cookies on the other.
  "Taste the pie," said Maddy. She was suddenly holding a forkful of it up to his mouth, cupping her other hand under it. Behind her, on the counter, the pie on the left was steaming from the place she had dug into.
  "Not yet," said John.
  "Go on. Taste it," said Maddy. And be done with it.
  But he looked hesitant. He looked nervous. He looked as though he knew. He broke off an edge of one of the oatmeal cookies, and held it out to her.
  "Only if you try a cookie first," he said.
  "Fine," she said, "But I want a chocolate chip one."
  "Suit yourself," said John. "But I want a bite of the other pie."

fiction friday: creature

   On clear nights, the creature came out of the woods and wandered through our town. My little brother called it the noche perro; he had been teaching himself Spanish ever since a pretty exchange student from Córdoba was assigned to his class. ("Doesn't she speak English?" asked our father, over dinner. "Yes," said my brother, "but that's not the point." Then, to me: "Lindy, pass the butter, por favor.")
   He was wrong about the creature, though – it wasn't a perro at all. It was much too big, hairy, and aware of its surroundings. I had seen it dig through our neighbor's trash cans, and it was methodical in its ways, eating certain pieces and throwing back others after a moment of consideration. I had seen it bury something in the Andersons' garden. I had seen it hide from a cat, retreating into a shadow until the tabby crossed the street. But even when the creature reemerged, it looked uneasy, as if at any moment the cat might come running back and attack.

   Then some of the PTA moms got wind of the creature. They said it was sniffing around the schoolyard. They spoke to the local news, claiming that two of the neighborhood cats were missing. When they realized that the creature was after nothing more than our garbage, they insisted that everyone hide their trash cans in their garages at night.
  "Now this monster will leave us alone," they said.

   When the creature came back, it seemed confused. Where there had once been bins stuffed with dinner scraps and plastic packaging and used tissue, there were now only round depressions in the grass. From house to house, it found the same thing – except at one. Outside of our house, the creature found a brown lunch bag, and inside the bag, my lunch. A peanut butter and honey sandwich. Half an apple. Some crackers. The creature sniffed at the food, gave a moment of thought, and then removed the sandwich from its plastic bag. It ate the bag, chewing slowly, and then took the sandwich in its mouth and started walking back toward the street. It looked back only once, glancing up toward my bedroom window. I saw the the glow of its small, oval eyes, and then I ducked out of sight.

fiction friday: please

   Four hours on the train to Portland feels like a week to Ralphie, whose palms are beginning to sweat at the thought of actually seeing her today, of actually having a face-to-face conversation. How many times has he rehearsed? Too many, probably. An hour ago, just outside of Centralia, Ralphie had walked through the swaying train cars – gripping the backs of seats to keep balanced, squeezing by passengers carrying trays of hot bagels and coffee – and climbed the narrow staircase to the observation car on the upper deck. He had sat in the middle of an empty row of seats that faced sideways toward the broad, reflective windows. The view was limited to marshland; miles and miles of it. In his head, he practiced the conversation again, and then again, and again, stopping only when the train itself came to a stop at the next station.
   Now, back in his seat, he can feel the sweat on his hands. He decides that he will practice once more, and then try to take a nap, so that he will look rested when he sees her at the train station. Then he'll tell her why he needs her to come back home. And it will work. He knows it will. It has to. On this accelerating train, with only two stops to go, that much he is sure of.

fiction friday: diary

   I had been reading my sister's diary for two weeks when, finally, something interesting happened: she developed a crush. Not just on anyone, but on Lee Lebovitz, who aced every math test and snorted when he laughed, but who also rode a motorcycle that was always in the senior parking lot despite him being a junior. In her diary, my sister smothered one of the white pages with lipstick-stained kisses. "Lee Lebovitz," she wrote, in small, tidy handwriting, "you are really missing out."

   In the mornings, when she was in the shower, I continued to sneak into her bedroom and carefully remove the diary from the back of her desk drawer. Before, she had never written more than a page, but now she sometimes filled two or three pages with a detailed account of every interaction she had with Lee.
   "Best day ever," she wrote. "Was partnered up with Lee in Biology!"
   And the next day, "Accidentally bumped hands twice during class. A sign?!?"
   But then, out of nowhere, Lee started walking around campus holdings hands with a girl who had a "stupid-looking haircut, and no personality," according to my sister, who just as quickly became moody and quiet. At dinner, she pushed the food around on her plate until our mother demanded that she either eat or leave the table. She started to go to bed early every night, and sulked around the house on the weekends instead of going out like she'd always done. When I snuck into her room to peek at her diary, she hadn't written anything new for an entire week.

   I thought it would pass. Isn't that what crushes were supposed to do? She'd get over him, find someone new to fantasize about, return to writing her long, zealous entries. But a whole month went by, and the pages remained blank.
   I was bored. I was restless. I came up with the only plan I could think of: I took a piece of our mother's pink stationery, wrote what I needed to, folded it into quarters, and slipped it into Lee Lebovitz's locker after third period, making sure no one saw me do it.

   When the diary entry finally appeared, my sister wrote it in a fresh loopy handwriting, as if it was an entirely new version of herself. Lee Lebovitz, she announced, was now single again. Not only that, but he had smiled at her in the hallway, the type of smile that made her feel a little bit light-headed and very much hopeful.
  "It must be fate," she wrote, "because there's just no other explanation."

fiction friday: you and I

   For all those years, I don't even know you exist. Then, just like that, we are standing in the snack aisle at Kroger, both eyeing the last box of chocolate chip granola bars. You make a suggestion: you'll buy it, then give me half of the granola bars, in exchange for nothing more than my phone number.
   I laugh. "You can't be serious," I say.
   "Come on," you say. "You could even give me a fake number."
   "And a fake name," I point out.
   "That, too."
   "I'm Jenny, by the way," I say.
   "Or maybe you aren't," you say.

   Friday night, we see a horror movie together in the multiplex downtown. Whenever foreboding music kicks in, I stare at the neon green exit signs instead of the movie screen. It occurs to me later that this is a bad avoidance technique. At dinner, I keep seeing green spots on my menu. I decide to ask the waiter what he recommends. "The lasagna," he says. I ask what else he recommends. He explains to me that it's all good, because if it wasn't, they wouldn't put it on the menu.
   "Don't leave him a tip," I tell you, after the waiter leaves.
   "Who says I'm paying?" you ask, smiling.

   After the twelve or thirteenth date, I stop counting. I keep trying to pay for things, but you always tell me I can get it next time. I eventually have to admit to you that I am, in fact, terrified of horror movies. You confess that you were never really that crazy about granola bars. Sometime after Christmas, you give me a key to your apartment.
   "This might be a bad idea," I say. "I'm always losing things."
   "Right. I forgot about that," you say.
   "That's our problem," I say. "Neither of us can hold onto anything."

   Do you remember the birds? All those sparrows in the tree outside your building? It seemed like there were a hundred, at least. They were on every branch, rustling, chirping, coming and going. People could hear them all the way down the block.
   We were watching them from your window. You had just asked if I wanted to get out of the city that weekend, and I was saying, "Yes, but where?" and then, all at once, they abandoned the tree. They became a small dark cloud rising from the branches, rising higher than the rooftops until they broke apart and scattered in all directions. For a split second, the sky was polka-dotted, and then it returned to a single shade of blue.

fiction friday: dogspeak

   I'm already wide awake by the time they start to stir. "Monday," one of them grumbles. The other one yawns. Why are they so slow? Finally the man gets up. I follow him into the kitchen. He gives me breakfast. More, I think. Pour more! But the man leaves the room. I scarf breakfast down, almost choke, slurp water from the other bowl, go searching for the man again. He's back in the bedroom, talking to the lady. Quiet words I can't understand.
   Hey, I think. Hey, mister.
   He pats my head. We go to the back door and he lets me into the backyard. Oh, the smells! The sweet air.
   I do what I need to do. The man takes out a little bag – that makes me want to laugh every time, him with his nose scrunched up. We go back in the house. The lady is standing in the middle of the kitchen, making a sandwich. I sit next to her and think, Give me the sandwich. I use every bit of my thinking power to think this, but she doesn't give it to me. I follow her into the bedroom, then back into the kitchen, then to the front door. She hands the sandwich to the man, and the man gives her a kiss, and then he's gone, just like that.

   Everything in the middle of the day is boring. I climb back onto the bed. The lady sits at her big desk and stares at her computer and talks to herself every now and then. Eventually I fall asleep, and have one of these awesome dreams where I'm running, I'm running, I'm running, and I'm in a backyard that's three hundred miles long and smells like sweet, fresh air, and at the end of it is a sandwich, my sandwich! You wouldn't believe how fast I can eat a sandwich. You really wouldn't believe it.

   The man gets home when it's dark outside. When he walks through the front door, I run around the house like mad, almost as fast as I ran in my dream, but not quite. He's home, I think. I didn't know if he was coming back!
   He gives me dinner. I'm happy. Really, really happy. I wouldn't mind if he gave me a little more, but still. I'm happy. In the living room, the man and the lady are staring at the TV and eating colorful dinners. I try to lick the edges of their plates and they say "No!" and "You already had dinner," but what they don't realize is that I could eat a hundred dinners if they let me.
   "Sit," says the man. When I do, he gives me something small off his plate. I don't know what it is but it's the most delicious thing ever.
   "Not too much," says the lady. "He'll get sick."
   I won't, I promise I won't, I think. Give me lots more. I won't get sick. I'll just be the happiest dog in the world, and in the whole entire universe.

fiction friday: machine

   Without the instruction manual, she was having a hard time getting the time machine to work. If she had the manual, the steps would be spelled out clearly: flip those three switches, but not the fourth, punch in the year, then adjust those two knobs, but not the third, and depress the beveled silver button until it emitted its little buzz of confirmation. Get the sequence wrong and the machine shuddered, as if trying to shake out whoever was inside.
   It was getting late. She needed to get back home, sneak back into her bedroom, and stuff her clothes somewhere deep in her closet. No one had warned her about that, and it surprised her the first time – that she would come back smelling like the past. It seeped into her sweatshirts and stunk up her jeans.
   She tried another sequence. Wrong again. The machine trembled, and for longer than the last time. She dug her fingers into the armrest and waited for it to pass.

   The time machine didn't have any windows, but it did have a peephole. When the shaking subsided, she stepped up onto the narrow ledge and pressed one eye into the red-rimmed circle and closed the other. The time machine's shuddering was undoubtedly noisy, but all she could do was hope that the bushes she had landed in were softening the sound.
   From what she could see of the street, it was empty. Empty, except for a boy sitting next to a dog on a porch a few doors down. But he wasn't – oh. But now he was up. He was coming this way, and the dog was following. She held her breath. She waited for the boy to pass, but he kept walking toward the machine.

  When he pulled back the leaves and his chubby face filled the entire peephole, she let out her breath and cried out. She fell back from the peephole and fumbled around in the tight interior of the machine. The emergency button was here, somewhere, and it was orange, or red-orange – or was it yellow?
   There it was. Yellow. On the ceiling, just out of reach. One big jump and she'd be able to reach it. And then the time machine would disappear – poof! – and spit her out into a random year, simultaneously draining the battery, forcing her to survive on her own for a month, maybe two, while it recharged.
   "Dad!" the boy was yelling, on the other side of the metal shell. "Come 'ere! Look what I found!"
   Now or never. She jumped up. She hit the yellow button, wondered if it was something she'd regret forever, then felt the time machine lift and compress around her body before her feet could touch back down.

fiction friday: my wife, the head

This post is part of Fiction Friday, a series born out of my ongoing desire to be a novelist. These stories are meant to be read independently. They are fictional vignettes inspired by glimmers from my life.

    Every time something goes wrong – which is often, now that Catherine is only a head – she asks me to write it down in the notebook. We’ll document it, she says, and then we’ll brainstorm how to avoid repeating the same mistake. By we, of course, she means me. But it’s okay. I get it. She has better things to worry about.
    Before the decapitation, Catherine engaged in horseback riding, Chinese Checkers, and wine tastings. She has refused to change this lifestyle, body or no body. Take the horseback riding. We'll drive out to the country, past the miniature rusted windmills and fields of toxic lavender, pay a ranch hand two hundred dollars for his least ornery mare, and Catherine keeps falling off the damn thing. But of all the bodiless heads you've met, she's the most determined, I'm telling you. She’s got a death grip on the saddle with those big square teeth of hers. It’s just tough, you know, with all that bucking, all that thrashing.
    In the notebook, I write: Research specialized saddles, and/or smaller horses.
    With a little creativity, Chinese Checkers is almost like the old days. Last week, I used a Sharpie to number each marble – there are six sets of ten, in shades of yellow, tangerine, white, violet, green, and black. Now, during our all-night matches, Catherine shouts out vocal instructions when it’s her turn. Who says you need arms to have some old-fashioned fun?
    Good sportsmanship still isn’t her forte. Lose a game and she’ll heave herself onto the board, splaying the marbles every which way. It’s my one pet peeve, you know? Fishing game pieces out from under the couch? And yet she continues to do it.
    Wine tastings are a different kind of thorny issue. After a couple sips, she’s smashed. She slurs, she laughs at anything, she droops her eyelids, revealing smudged mauve eye shadow. Another few sips and she becomes argumentative, rocking restlessly back and forth on the stool, her eyelashes batting furiously.
    "Do you want some bread?" I ask her. "They’ve got special dips here. You like balsamic vinegar, right?"
    "Don’t look down at me like that,” she says.
    We are at the new winery down the street. These days, there’s one on every block. Around our table – which is this huge oak masterpiece suspended from the ceiling with fishing wire – the other guests become hushed, nervous about our argument. I feel my cheeks flush. I clear my throat loudly and raise my glass.
    "To my beautiful wife," I say. This seems to please them. The clinking of glasses commences.

fiction friday: hobby

This post is part of Fiction Friday, a series born out of my ongoing desire to be a novelist. These stories are meant to be read independently. They are fictional vignettes inspired by glimmers from my life.

   It takes us six months to watch all the movies beginning with A, which we rent from the Video Isle downtown. Grace likes the westerns and the romantic comedies. Anything where someone saves someone else, either from a shotgun or heartbreak. I like the ones with ambiguous endings.
    By October, we have Beetlejuice in the DVD player, Ben-Hur on the coffee table, and five hours until Video Isle closes.
    "I give that an F," says Grace, during the Beetlejuice credits.
    "Really?" I ask. "I didn't think it was so bad."

    Grace starts to lose interest by the time we're mid-way through the C's. She complains that it's all we ever do anymore.
    "But we never went out in the first place," I point out.

    She takes me to a bar that she used to go to before I knew her. She says – over all the laughing and clinking of glasses – that what I need is a date. I say no. She says yes. She says she'll find someone for me here, fix me up. And then she's gone, vanished into some dark corner of the room.
    I order a seltzer from the bartender.
    Grace reappears with her hand hooked around the arm of a stranger. Grace announces that his name is Bill. She whispers in my ear, "He's a surgeon," and raises her eyebrows, like, ahem, look who just won the lottery.
    "Let me buy you a drink," says Bill.
    I point to the glass of mineral water fizzing on the bar.
    "Oh," says Bill. "How about dinner?"
    "Sorry," I say. "I have to return a movie tonight."

    Grace and Bill start dating. At first, she's out with him two nights a week, then three, then five.
    "You guys pretty serious?" I ask.
    "As serious as you and those stupid DVDs," she says.
    "Hey," I say. "You're the one who's missing out."
    "Right," she says.

    Somewhere around the time I finish King Kong, Grace announces that she's moving in with Bill. Her boxes are packaged by Kiss of the Spider Woman; her keys left on the linoleum countertop by Kramer vs. Kramer.
    "Grace?" I call out, but no one answers.

    The very last movie at Video Isle is one that Grace would have liked; I'm sure of it. I call her as the credits run. We haven't talked in years. She and Bill could be married, for all I know. She could have five kids, a house on the lake, a savings account longer than four digits.
    "Grace?" I ask, when a woman answers. "Remember me?"
    She does.
    "Have you ever seen Zorro's Fighting Legion?"
    I hear a sigh. "No," she says. "I haven't."
    "You would like it," I say. "Are you busy? Do you want to come watch it?"
    "Don't tell me you're going to start re-watching all those movies," she says.
    "I was thinking about it," I say.
    "I have to go," she says. "Goodbye."
    "Come on," I say, even though I hear the click of her phone cutting off. "Don't you love re-watching a movie? Hello? Grace? You know what I mean, don't you? You always see things you didn't notice the first time. Little details, or even big things, really big things. There's always parts you missed."

fiction friday: hands (part two)

This post is part of Fiction Friday, a series born out of my ongoing desire to be a novelist. These stories are meant to be read independently. They are fictional vignettes inspired by glimmers from my life.

   Dottie knocked on Iggy Stone's door at a quarter past seven. It had been two days since their conversation at the Co-op. Two days was plenty of time for Dottie to reconsider her offer, but nothing had happened in those forty-eight hours to convince her that she shouldn't drive across town to Iggy's one-story home.
    "Dottie," said Iggy, when the door opened, "it's nice to see you again."
    She followed him into the hallway, looking for a place to take off her shoes but seeing no opportunity to. She noticed Iggy was wearing his sneakers.
    "It's a lovely house," Dottie said. "It looks like you're all settled in, aren't you?"
    "I guess I am," said Iggy.
    "And you've been here for…"
    "Four months."
    "Ah," she said. "That's right."
    Iggy showed her the way through the house to the backdoor, which he held open for her to walk through first. The backyard was square, and bordered with a tall wooden fence. There was a path of round stones that led to a small dining table and two chairs. The rest of the yard was a tangle of green.
    "As I mentioned to you the other day," said Iggy, "I'm having a tough time telling the difference between what to dig up and what to leave. It all looks the same to me, you know?"
    Dottie crouched down and cupped her hand around a cluster of tiny flowers. She had to concentrate to not lose her balance. "But you do know these ones aren't weeds, right?" she asked Iggy.
    "Okay," he said. "But what about this?"
    Now he was kneeling, too, his long legs folded beside hers. He was pointing to a plant that at first she couldn't place the name of. In her mind, she flipped through the yellowing reference book that she kept on a low shelf at home. It came to her. "Mountain mint," Dottie said. "Funny, that's not often seen around here."
    They slowly continued around the yard. By the time they reached the side of the yard with the table and the chairs, the light was almost out of the sky. A lamp mounted to the back of the house had flickered on automatically by then, joined by the soft lights cast from the neighbors' homes. Dottie had sunk into such a trance of pointing out and naming the plants that she had all but forgotten her reservations about coming to Iggy's house. Spending this short about of time in his company, and him becoming less of a stranger to her, made those rumors in her head sound even more ridiculous. Iggy wasn't the kind of man who burned down a building, was he? Weren't people who did things like that angry, cynical, unpleasant? People like that weren't kind to middle-aged women in grocery stores, were they?
    "I've taken up too much of your time," Iggy was saying to her. "I didn't realize how late it'd gotten."
    "No, no, it's fine," said Dottie.
    They stood. Dottie's legs felt weak from kneeling for so long, as if all the blood had drained out of them. She rested a hand on the back of one of the chairs and glanced back toward the house.
    "I really appreciate you coming by. I hate to say it, but you're the first visitor I've had," Iggy admitted.
    "Oh?" she asked.
    "I know what people have been saying," he said, and then Dottie felt a speck of hope appear, then quickly disappear as he finished what he was saying: "I guess I don't blame them, really."
    "It's none of our business," Dottie said, her face suddenly burning.
    "It's late. I'll walk you out to your car."
    "No," she said. "I'm fine, thank you."
    He opened the backdoor for her, as he had done when they had first come into the backyard. Her pace quickened as she navigated through his narrow hallway and out the front door, down the two wide steps, and out toward her car that was parked directly in front of the house. Her keys were already in her hand. Before opening the car door, she paused, and looked over her shoulder toward the house. Iggy was standing in the living room, at the window, watching her go. He raised a hand, waving once before retreating.

fiction friday: apartment

This post is part of Fiction Friday, a series born out of my ongoing desire to be a novelist. These stories are meant to be read independently. They are fictional vignettes inspired by glimmers from my life.

    For years afterward, this is what settled permanently into her memory: checks for the first and last months, the short dirty carpets, two sets of keys, one left in a cup on top of the fridge, the love seat she called about in the classifieds, the weekend she reupholstered it, the reverberating parties upstairs, the couple fighting downstairs, the sink that always clogged, the warm sweet scent of the nearby bakery in the mornings, buses thundering angrily down the street, people that yelled after them to wait, neighbors that flirted and laughed in the hallways, the purring of helicopters combing the city, the boyfriend who always called before coming over, him kissing her under her doorway on New Year's Eve, the month she had to call her father for money, the coin-operated washing machines left tacky from spilled detergent, the way the living room smelled like whatever she cooked in the kitchen, the fruit bowl piled high from the springtime trips to the farmer's market, the heat that suffocated the apartment in the worst of summer, the fraction of light that seeped through the blinds in autumn, and the stack of broken-down cardboard boxes she unearthed when the lease was nearly up, all her things barely fitting into them, crumpled bits of newspaper filling the leftover spaces.

fiction friday: jellyfish

This post is part of Fiction Friday, a series born out of my ongoing desire to be a novelist. These stories are meant to be read independently. They are fictional vignettes inspired by glimmers from my life.

        Before summer was over, our parents took us on one last vacation. We drove somewhere I didn't recognize and still can't find my way back to, no matter how many maps I pore over. On our way there, I fell asleep in the back seat of the van, one earphone falling out of my ears. I woke when my brother jabbed me with his elbow. Inside the Walkman on my lap, the disc was still spinning. "We're here," Joshua said, elbowing me again. Our father had parked the van under an elm tree, the only shady spot in the yard.
    The vacation rental was smaller than our house in the city, smelling of soap and wood. The kitchen was equipped with white melamine dishes, wine glasses, a few dull knives, a drawer full of silverware. A laminated card was propped up on the countertop to welcome us and remind us of the house rules: no pets, no cigarettes, and to please refrain from leaving food outside because of the wild animals. My mother read the card aloud while my father unloaded the rest of the van, carrying the cooler in last, which was packed with sliced meat, fruit, and milk. Before transferring the food into the small refrigerator underneath the countertop, he removed an apricot from a paper bag and pushed it into his mouth, extracting the pit after several seconds.
    "I'm going down to the beach," my mother said, fanning herself. "It's certainly hot enough, isn't it?"
    We changed into our swimsuits. My brother and I ran out the door and spotted the shore. We fumbled down a steep hill, tripping over the exposed roots that stretched out of the ground, shaking out clumps of dirt that lodged in our sandals. Joshua flung his shoes off when he reached the sand and ran straight out into the water. He disappeared, then his head broke out of the water's glimmering surface twenty feet up the beach, hair slicked down around his face.
    "Come on!" he called out, but my legs were suddenly paralyzed. I'd just remembered what my friend Rumi had told me weeks before, that she'd once stepped on a jellyfish at her aunt's beach house, and when she ran out of the water, screaming, the jellyfish's tentacles were still wrapped around her leg. They were these long, slimy things that left red lash-like marks around her calves. Her aunt quickly peeled the tentacles off with tweezers and doused her throbbing skin in vinegar, but Rumi's leg stayed swollen for days, the itchiness unbearable as she lay in bed at night.
    It was the most terrifying thing Rumi had told me about, next to showing me the diagonal scar from her surgery that ran down the side of her abdomen. She told the story of her scar almost proudly, but recalling the jellyfish only made her panicky. "I'm never going out in the ocean again," she said. "Swimming pools are just fine with me."

    By the time our parents caught up with us, Joshua had grown tired of swimming, and was back on the beach. He accepted a towel from our mother and stretched out on it, one wet arm flung over his face to shield against the sun. Our mother tried to rub sunblock on his shoulders, but he waved her away, promising in an uninterested voice that he would do it in a minute.
    "Aren't you going in the water?" my mother asked me. She was wearing her sunhat and a purple one-piece that she'd bought from Sears at the start of the summer.
    "No," I said.
    "She's scared of it," my brother said.
    "I'm not scared," I snapped. "I just don't feel like it."
    "Right," he said.
    "Joshua, put on that sunscreen," our father said. "Don't make your mother ask again."
    "What about her?" asked my brother, jabbing a thumb in my direction. "Doesn't she have to?"
    "I'm going swimming," I said in a huff, leaving before he could say anything else. This time I made it shin-deep in the ocean before my legs froze up again. Any further and the water would distort the ocean floor beyond recognition. The rocks were starting to all look like jellyfish. There were hundreds of them, just waiting to be stepped on, waiting for a leg to curl around.
   Tentacles! Rumi's voice shouted in my head. Tweezers! I shuddered and glanced over my shoulder; for a second, I thought of going back. That plan didn't sound so bad. I would smear on the sunscreen, lay as far away from my brother as possible, and nibble on the chilled apricots that my father had brought down from the house.
    Back on the shore, Joshua was propped up on his elbows, hands cupped around his mouth while he called out to me. I couldn't make out the words, but I saw the smirk on his face.
    I went in. I rushed into the ocean until it came mid-way up to my thighs, then thrust my arms out, and dove under the slippery surface. There was little resistence. For a split second, I imagined the jellyfish would find me, surround me, but when I finally opened my eyes, I saw nothing but smooth rocks and little crabs rushing across the ocean floor, everything in shades of blue and green and orange, everything quiet, everything clear.

fiction friday: buzz

This post is part of Fiction Friday, a series born out of my ongoing desire to be a novelist. These stories are meant to be read independently. They are fictional vignettes inspired by glimmers from my life.

   The three of them are at La Casita, in one of the cushy booths in the back, and all Leon can feel is embarrassed about the neatly wrapped birthday gifts on the table. He's almost thirty, for chrissakes. It seems like something he should've grown out of by now, along with scraped knees and spitballs.
    The waitress – her torso tulip-shaped, hair dyed the color of saffron – bends over the table to wipe the glass with a damp cloth. Both gifts are wrapped in confetti-patterned paper, finished with metallic ribbons and oversized bows. The boxy one is from his girlfriend, Noreen, and the flatter one is from his father. Leon’s cheeks burn a pink imperceptible under the low rose light. He regrets eating so quickly. At least then he had something to do with his hands. Behind their booth, a family of starry-eyed folk dolls and shriveled hot peppers hang over the emergency exit.
    Noreen orders them coffee, mindlessly scratching at her jeans as she speaks. Their original waitress seems to have disappeared. The new waiter has a mole above his upper lip that moves when he speaks. It reminds Leon of those old singalong cartoons, the ones with the black bouncing ball.
    Noreen's saying, “We’ll have sopapillas, too. Those are made to order, right? It’s his birthd–"
    "Don’t." Leon says.
    "Sí, sopapillas," answers the waiter. "And three coffees. Cream 'n sugar?"
    "Both, I guess." Noreen turns to Leon's father: "Anything else?"

fiction friday: hands

This post is part of Fiction Friday, a series born out of my ongoing desire to be a novelist. These stories are meant to be read independently. They are fictional vignettes inspired by glimmers from my life.

   Everyone in town knew about Iggy Stone before he came. Word had spread fast: he couldn't hear too well in his left ear; he had recently broken off an engagement; his father owned a great deal of land and forest. And there was another thing about him, too, and people liked to talk about that part the most. They whispered about it in the frozen foods aisle at the Co-op, over cocktails at the Clarks' anniversary party, and under the privacy of their moss-blanketed roofs. They talked about Iggy until the moving truck rumbled into town, and then nobody dared talk about it at all, or even bothered to talk to him.
    Dottie was the first person to introduce herself to Iggy. During her weekly shopping trip, navigating her cart through the displays of vegetables, she noticed him in the aisle ahead of her. He was sorting through the hot house tomatoes. Yanking on her cart – it had a bad wheel, and kept pulling to the left – Dottie maneuvered toward him and cleared her throat as she approached.
    "Mr. Stone?" Dottie asked. "I'm sorry. I don't mean to bother you."
    She was surprised at how young he was. And how his hands, cupping a vine of tomatoes, were so clean. Nails trimmed short. For all that had been said about him, she had expected someone a little more rundown.
    "I'm Dottie," she said.
    "Well," Iggy said. "Dottie, it's nice to meet you."
    His voice, too: so crisp, like the words had been scrubbed clean. Dottie pointed at the tomatoes. "Been a bad year," she said. "Even in my own garden, the poor things look like berries."
    When he didn't respond, and looked away over Dottie's head to the other side of the grocery store, she wondered if it had been a mistake to approach him. She should have just kept her mouth shut, she thought, and kept going past. But then Iggy rubbed the back of his head and said cautiously, "I've got a few plants in my own yard. And weeds, lots of weeds. I can't tell them apart sometimes."
    "A weed is just an unwanted plant," Dottie said. Before she could stop herself, she added, "I can take a look, if you want."
    "You wouldn't mind?" asked Iggy. His eyes had brightened. "You'd take a look at the backyard?"
    The murmurs that had gone through town for weeks came back to her again. They had said so many things. But his bad ear – that hadn't been true, had it? She was standing on his left side, not speaking very loudly, and he hadn't even leaned in closer toward her.
    She glanced at his hands again, at those clean, careful hands, and reassured herself that he deserved a chance. They were wrong, Dottie decided. Whatever they said about him was wrong, because someone like that would never have hands this clean.

fiction friday: ferries

This post is part of Fiction Friday, a series born out of my ongoing desire to be a novelist. These stories are meant to be read independently. They are fictional vignettes inspired by glimmers from my life.

    My grandfather owned the only gift shop on the island. On Mondays, Ma had been dropping me off there to stay out of trouble while she stretched and sighed her way through her physical therapy appointments at Dr. Pitt's clinic. I didn't like being dumped at the gift shop, but Ma promised it would only last a few more weeks.
    "My shoulder's been feeling a lot better," she said, and then added quickly, "and, besides, the insurance will only cover another two sessions. You have your books with you, right?"
    I nodded. The faded gift shop sign was coming into view. Further down the street, cars were being directed into lanes for the next ferry. Ma put the blinker on and glanced over at me with tired eyes. "I know grandpa can be kind of…funny," she said, in the way someone says that expired milk smells funny. "But try to humor him. And, Lee, for God's sake, brush the hair out of your face."

   Inside, my grandfather was bent over the counter, testing pens one by one on the obituary page of a newspaper. They were the kinds of pens that had tiny, flat boats in them that shuttled through the water when you angled the pen back and forth.
    "Huh!" he cried. "All in working order."
    He looked up. It seemed to take him a minute to recognize me as kin instead of a customer. He pushed himself off his stool with his big, pale palms and grabbed the pens.
    "So it must be Monday," he said. "Your Ma's still taking that art class?"
    "For a couple more weeks," I said quickly. He didn't know about the car accident, or Ma's torn tendons, or the physical therapy. It would just make him angry, Ma had said. My grandfather had an unexplained hostility toward driving, and hearing about something like that would send him through the roof. Instead, she'd told him that she'd enrolled in an Adult Ed class. "Just to do something different," Ma had told him over the phone, cradling the receiver between her cheek and her good shoulder.
    She was good at lying. I was not. Before my grandfather could dig for more details, I mumbled, "I've got homework," and ducked into the cramped office in the back of the gift shop.

     It wasn't long before I was interrupted by voices arguing. One was my grandfather's; the other belonged to a woman. I cracked the door open and pressed my ear against the sliver of cool air. "Is accident!" the woman was saying. "Mister, is accident."
    "Look," my grandfather said. "That doesn't matter to me. Someone's gotta pay for it, 'cause it's broken."
    "But is accident!" she tried again. "I just looking around."
    "Lady, this ain't a museum!"
    I closed the door. I had just remembered about the earphones buried somewhere in my backpack when the door flew back open, and my grandfather forced his way into the tiny office. With the two of us in there, the room felt warm.
    "Tourists," he grumbled. He grabbed the broom that had been leaning against the wall and slammed the door shut. I stared down at my notebook paper, at the messy handwriting, the letters slanted as if cowering away. I couldn't even make out the words.
    When I emerged out of the office, he wasn't sweeping. He was standing at the front window, his back toward me, steadying himself against the broom as if it was a cane. I stepped over the pieces of fractured ceramic from the mug that had been knocked off the shelf. One piece had half a whale painted on it, its eye black and beady.
    "Can I – do you need help?" I asked. I heard Ma's voice in my head. "Or," I said, "I can test some pens, or something."
    He didn't reply. I walked up to the window to see what he was looking at. The ferry had just pulled away from the dock. And on my grandfather's face, the look of sorrow was unmistakable: regret that he wasn't on that boat himself, that he was stuck here, so close yet so far away. I didn't know how, but I understood that much.
    "I want to go over to the city someday," I said. "I mean, it's what, a twenty minute ferry ride? But Ma doesn't want to take me."
    "You do?" he asked. His face softened. He seemed about to say something else, but instead he broke his gaze from the dock and turned away from the window. With the broom still in hand, he started to make his way over to the fragmented mug. I followed him.
    "Hold the dustpan, will you?" he asked.
    "Okay," I said, and we huddled around the broken pieces.

fiction friday: thump

This post is part of Fiction Friday, a series born out of my ongoing desire to be a novelist. These stories are meant to be read independently. They are fictional vignettes inspired by glimmers from my life.

   After the concert, we drive the long way home. We're both too awake, too giddy, too high-spirited to go back to the house just yet, which is stale and stuffy from the trapped summer heat. So we drive. Instead of turning left at Holly Street, you take the hard right that bends down the hill toward the lake. Night joggers are out. Every few seconds, their reflectors catch the headlights of passing cars and light up like a photography flash.
    You roll down both our windows. "Beautiful out," you say, but I'm lost staring into the glossy night.

    I'm in that same daze when the car hits something. It's a thump that feels like we're going fifty over a speed bump – hard and quick. You say something sharp that I can't make out.
    "What happened?" I ask. "What was that?"
    "I don't know," you say, but I think what you actually mean is, I don't want to know.
    You keep checking the rearview mirror, shaking your head, shifting in your seat. There's no shoulder here to pull off onto, and there are cars behind us. The windows are still down; I feel, for the first time in weeks, cold. If you are, too, you aren't showing any signs of it.
    The road curves. We don't say anything else. Out of the corner of my eye, I see your hands tighten on the steering wheel. The road, too, becomes tighter, narrowing so much that I wonder if it might collapse into a single lane, forcing us to swerve onto the sidewalk to avoid oncoming traffic; but just as I have this thought, it widens again, brightens up. A sodium street light flickers on as we pass underneath. Out of the darkness, a jogger appears. Somehow the road has brought us back to the lake, coming from the opposite direction.
    When we reach the spot, you pull off the road as much as you can – which is hardly at all – and let the other cars pass us. You punch the hazard light button with your thumb and tell me to hang tight. I watch as you crouch in the middle of the street, craning your neck, frowning. There's only pavement and yellow paint.
    "I don't know," you say when you slide back into the driver's seat. "Maybe it was nothing."
     How could it be nothing? I want to ask, but it doesn't seem like the right thing to ask.
    "Let's go home," I say instead.

    The house, miraculously, is not stuffy. It's warm, but not stuffy. We shed out of our clothes and into pajamas, open the windows, and set the alarm clock. That night, I dream that we're in the car again, and that we hit something again. It's all the same until we go back and check. This time there's a tiny little man in the middle of the road, hiding under a cello case. The case has our tire tracks burned into its pebbled texture, like a tattoo.
   "Are you okay?" we ask. "Are you hurt?"
   He peeks out. I recognize him; he had played in the concert that night. He'd had a solo. There had been a standing ovation. Here, curled up under his cello case, he's still wearing his suit, and the collar is damp. He's been crying, but when he sees us, he smiles.
   "Oh, yes," he says. "I'm fine."
   "Are you sure?" we ask, relieved that we didn't run over anyone's cat, or a family of raccoons.
   "Of course," he says. He gets up and wipes his eyes. He starts to drag his cello case the rest of the way across the road. "You don't need to worry, kiddos," he says. "These things happen all the time."

fiction friday: bamboo

This is the first post of Fiction Friday, a series born out of my ongoing desire to be a novelist. These stories are meant to be read independently. They are fictional vignettes inspired by glimmers from my life.

Except for the bamboo, Maya loved everything about the house. It had skylights in the living room, a tiled kitchen, an extra bedroom that could, maybe, be painted baby blue when the time was right. But the backyard was half eaten up by the bamboo, so thick she could hardly thrust her arm through it, and when she finally managed to, the joints along the stems scratched her skin, as if warning her to back off. This is our spot, it seemed to say. Our roots run deep.
    What she wanted was a little garden. She wanted arugula, beets, and snap peas. And a sunflower. Her sister's garden had one, a bright burst of yellow amongst the leafy folds of green. "It's nice, isn't it?" her sister asked, when the two of them had stood in the narrow path that ran down the middle of her garden. "Well, besides the slugs. You have to keep those little suckers in check. You put out cups of old beer, and presto, they're good and drowned. It's gross, but it works."
    But maybe Maya's garden wouldn't attract any pests. Bigger miracles had happened before, right? Maybe she wouldn't have to put out traps for them, or empty the traps when they became bubbly and discolored. The thought made her mouth taste sour. Think of something else, she told herself. Like mint. Mint and cherry tomatoes. Or butter lettuce. Or sage.
    Back inside, the house was rich with the sweet smell of fried onions. Johnny was hunched over the stove, spatula in hand, little specks of oil splattered on his shirt. He'd always been messy when he cooked, but somehow the food turned out tidy and precise. He turned when he heard Maya come in, lifting a sliver of onion to his parted smile. "Five minutes," he said.
    She put silverware on the table. She shuffled the scattered mail into a pile and tucked it under a book on Johnny's desk. Bank statements, bills, pre-approved credit card offers: it was always the same, always more of the same.
    "I met the neighbors this morning," Johnny said when they sat. "They're retired. A little crotchety, maybe, but nice enough."
    "Did they say anything about the bamboo?" Maya asked.
    "The bamboo?"
    "Yes. The bamboo. Does it go into their yard, too?"
    "I don't know, Maya. I barely talked to them."
    "I just wish it wasn't there. Our yard is already small enough. You think we could dig it up?"
    "Really? I don't think it's so bad. Actually, I think it looks alright."
    "There's no space."
    "Space for what?" he asked. He broke his gaze from her to take a drink. Maya watched the muscles on his throat tighten as he swallowed.
   Johnny wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and picked his fork back up. He began again, "So, the neighbors, like I said, they seem a little grumpy, but they–" and Maya shifted her focus to the window behind Johnny's head, a perfectly square window, curtainless, that looked out to the backyard.
    She could see the leafy tips of the bamboo, just barely, and she felt a kind of heat start to build up in her hands. Tomorrow, when Johnny was at work, she would find their moving box that was still packed with the yard tools, find the shovel and the pruning shears and her barely used gloves, and she would kneel on the soft grass in the backyard and she would get rid of the bamboo herself, no matter how much it scratched up her arms, no matter how much her body ached from it. She would clear the yard, and dig her hands into the soil, and start anew.