one thing blog

Joining Amber Haines and Emily Wierenga as we seek our written voices. Playing with fiction and the prompt “Sweater”. I am also attempting to play with a slightly longer piece of fiction this November. I will use this character sketch in it and  this little piece takes my word count to 4354. It is awful…But I am having fun. 

He pulls his favorite cardigan from the closet, pulls it over his vintage t-shirt, his black rim glasses. It was the sweater he bought for that ‘ugly sweater party’ a few years ago and he has since noticed that all theme parties are brief apparitions before a new trend appears. His girlfriends hot pink tights, his moustache. We laugh loudest, rail most extravagantly, just before we fall off every fashion cliff. We scream the loudest at the demons in our own heads.

Martin is a man of strong conviction, though his convictions are subject to change with extravagant frequency and fervor. One day he will fight hard against women in leadership and the very next he will be the most ardent of feminists, astounded that anyone could still hold such archaic beliefs as he had just held the day before. He loves to talk about music and the books he pretends to read but especially what he calls ‘serving the Lord’. To him, the walls between secular and holy are high and solid. To him stacking chairs at church is entirely different from stacking chairs at school. But that was today. Tomorrow he might tell you something entirely different.

He waxes and wanes with the seasons, with the articles he reads, the conversations he has and no man in the history of earth has simultaneously loved and loathed himself so intensely. He is the sort of beautifully broken that women fall in love with from across the room, they stand in line to be the one who can finally save him from himself. The problem is, he turns to sand in their hands, sub atomic particles, he dissolves into the black hole of his narcissism, vanishes from their sight. In the end the women walk away fairly unscathed; somewhere down deep they knew that he had no capacity to love them no matter how much passion he had shown.

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Joining Amber Haines as we seek our written voices. Playing with fiction and the prompt “Stairs”. I know I’m not doing the abstraction exactly Amber…but…I’m having fun. Feeling a character forming…maybe a longer piece to come?

“False image of myself, I beg you: Kill“. She reads it aloud. Then over and over.

A prayer. A mantra.

Kill. Kill. Kill.

She turns around and he is there, watching her. It can’t possibly be chance.

“You didn’t imagine it” she breathes.

Her voice heavy almost hoarse with the weight of it.

“But you won’t imagine it again”.

Rattle passes through her chest as final breath. She climbs the stairs, cries herself to sleep.

Something smells like death.

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Joining Amber Haines as we seek our written voices. Playing with fiction and the prompt “Necklace”

1.

She wears pearls and platinum and is the sort of woman who folds her towel mid way through washing her face. She knows the thread count on each set of sheets and irons them before she makes the bed, miters the corners.

Her children go to bed on time and her husband knows where the table linens are kept, what her ring size is.

She likes to walk into the room and know what is expected, what you have planned. She has advice for you, she will email it to you unsolicited.

She is afraid most nights, that the pearls are going to suffocate her while she sleeps.

2.

She wears silver. Big costume jewelery with fake stones and twisted metal. Her dresser is a suitcase, her home a plane. She rolls her eyes when you talk about invitations for children’s birthday parties, what sort of weed killer to use, how to clean the gutters.

She laughs at your religiosity whilst telling you how the points of light guided her home, how all the stars aligned to help her find herself.

She wouldn’t dare tell you that she is afraid she might float away into space, lose her whole spirit, if she took off  that silver medallion, hung it up in an ensuite bathroom.

3.

She hangs her amber stone next to the tear drop pearl. She doesn’t know any better than you do which is more ‘her’. But she will wear them both with authority and she will make you believe. She shapeshifts to fit your fantasy; make you fall in love with her. She has always been empty enough, that you could fill her with what you believed to be the best fit, she would always believe you were right.

She is passionate in her sway to the left and then to the right but plants her feet one after the other on the solid yellow lines.

She has stopped believing in heroes and villains, but still…if you will rescue her she will clasp that necklace on tight, whisper sweetly what she thinks you want to hear.

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