Literary Recklessness

In an attempt to get myself back into a rigid, impermeable, impervious, impenetrable writing schedule I singed up for NaNoWriMo. I started out strong, got sidetracked, then re-sidetracked, and now I'm about seventeen thousand words behind. I think it's safe to say I'm not going to "win" this year--at least not win by the organizers' definition.

In my opinion, I'm already winning; I'm planting my butt in the chair every day and writing. My prose is not the most brilliant (in fact I think it's safe to say I could let my cats tap dance across the keys for two hours with similar effect), but it is a consistent flow of semi-intelligible words formatted into sentences and paragraphs, and, hey, that's the reason I signed up for this gig in the first place.

Honestly, I'm rather enjoying this guerilla style of writing. As I have routinely stated, I am an obsessive mess. It's not that I shoot myself in the foot; I never stop aiming the freakin' gun. I organize, chart, plot, think, write, re-write, re-write, re-write, re-write. I get a paragraph down and then dissect it for four hours. I am, in many ways, my own worst enemy. This little experiment is teaching me to stop looking back (even if I have to shrink my screen to the size of my current paragraph to do it). It's teaching me that a first round of mainly crap is okay as long as I fix it later, and waiting to fix it later is even more okay. And you know what all this is making me realize?

Writing is fun again.

Who'd've thought?

The Coward

This is a post I just wrote for a Red Room blog contest on saying goodbye. I'm going to share it here because I feel compelled to, and if I don't do it today, then I won't ever. Too much like picking at what's under a bandaid, if you get my drift.

*************
THE COWARD

I was a coward. Hospice had been called and my grandmother’s doctor had told us the end of her life was very near. The thought of her leaving this world left a hole in my heart, a rushing vortex of pain and disbelief. I tried to imagine my life without its most steadfast, loyal and giving part, but I couldn’t. Even though my grandmother had become frail and gaunt, even though the lack of oxygen from the COPD sometimes made her crazy—evil crazy—even though she was an entirely different woman from the stoic survivor I had grown up with, spent summers with, I couldn’t imagine her not being around.

So, I stalled.

I wasn’t oblivious to the wrongness of my choice. The guilt of avoiding my farewell chewed through me like some caustic beast, gnawing at my chest, nibbling the chasm of grief even wider. Still, I couldn’t move to do what I knew was right. If it hadn’t been for my sister pushing me to come, I probably never would have seen her again. But my sister—in the way only a sister can—told me to remove my head from the southernmost reaches of my torso, and get a move on.

Even with my marching orders in hand, I stalled. I called my best friend from high school—a frequent recipient of my grandmother’s endless generosity—and told her my grandmother was dying and that I had to go see her, but didn’t want to. Immediately, my friend stepped up, volunteering to come along, to say goodbye with me, to keep me company. Again the indecency of my actions, of publicizing such a personal interaction, weighed on me, but my fear was too great. To stand in a room and stare unblinkingly at death was a feat beyond my capabilities. My parchment-thin will sheared in half, and I brought along a human barrier.

Her bedroom was dark, save for the lamp curving over her wingback chair. She smiled and I kissed her, trying not to notice the odor of decay, not to yearn for her usual light, powdery scent. She had discarded her glasses, either too forgetful to put them on or too disinterested in the world of the living to care to see what was happening around her. My friend and I sat on the edge of the bed opposite her chair, both staring in discomfort at the gaunt figure half devoured by cornflower blue fleece pajamas. My sister had set up the meeting like a tea party, with cookies, drinks and my grandmother's old photo album. We thought the album might give her a chance for some closure, to say goodbye to the past and the people she loved. She didn’t want to hold it. So, my friend and I flipped through the pages, turning the book to her every once in a while when my memory failed to identify some smiling grayscale woman or man. My grandmother answered my questions with detached obligation, her eyes never lingering too long on any one frame.

I pushed on, knowing she didn’t want to participate, but too deeply enmeshed in the charade of nothing’s wrong to extract myself. No one ate or drank. The darkness of the room seemed to intensify, the walls closing in around us like a cage—like a box. Had my friend not been next to me, surely I would have bolted. Finally, my grandmother told me she didn’t want to look at the pictures anymore, that I should take them home with me. I clenched my teeth against the tears, as I had for so many years when she talked about dying and what she wanted me to have when she went. Back then her instructions always devolved into a joke and a retelling of how her own mother labelled the undersides of objects with masking tape so there would be no confusion as to who got what when she was gone. But, it wasn't a joke anymore. Instead of acknowledging the admission of defeat behind her gesture, I deflected the truth like Wonder Woman with her bracelets, saying she might want to have them around to look at later.

What must have been only a forty minute visit seemed to last days. The alarm clock radio by her bedside ticked away the seconds as slowly as if the internal mechanisms were succumbing to a deep freeze. Finally, I could take it no longer. I told my grandmother we had to get going. My friend said goodbye, gave her a hug and a kiss and then left the room. Alone at last, I leaned over to give her my own kiss, again missing that familiar scent, the reassuring smell of her presence. When I pulled back our eyes locked. In her gaze I saw it, I saw the goodbye that should have been said. The rush of unspoken words flowing from her eyes to mine could have knocked me over, had I let them. I leaned in and kissed her once more, then said—like I always had, like there would actually be another time—“I’ll see you later.”

She died not too many days after. My chance to redeem myself, to set things right had passed. Over and over again I have said goodbye to her in my mind, but it doesn’t count. It will never count. I had my chance and I ran. For the rest of my life I will carry those unspoken words in my heart. I will go on saying goodbye, and she will go on never hearing me.

The Walk of Shame

Liz eased onto her feet. The sheet, which had wound its way around her foot sometime during the long night’s thrashings, trailed her like a train. She shook it off with impatience, more mindful of her body’s nagging soreness than the ridiculous irony of the image.

He had left before she had awoken. The room was a shambles, his belongings scattered across the floor as if abandoned in hasty disgust. In the bright morning sunshine the electric surge that had filled Liz’s heart at the apex of their encounter seemed all but drained away. She felt small, weak and exposed.

“Oh. You've awakened.” Frank stood there, hair mussed, clothes disheveled. He avoided her eyes as he gestured to the far corner. “Your dress is over there.”

“Thank you,” was all she could manage. Liz picked up the soft black garment, puddled it on the floor at her feet and then stepped in, aware of the odd pull of tightened muscles across her back. She struggled with the sleeves for a few moments, wondering if he was watching, wondering if he was aware of the toll their riotous night had taken on her. If he knew he made no attempt to assist her as she fumbled with the buttons. After a few moments of struggling she abandoned the top two, leaving a gaping V at the top of her shoulders, followed by a series of odd bulges and gaps where she had incorrectly fastened the fabric. She turned back to Frank and forced a small smile. “Better?”

Frank’s eyes, hooded with guilt, shifted to the door. “I have work.”

Liz started to nod, but then shook her head. “No.”

“Excuse me?”

“I will not.” She stamped her foot. An aching throb traced up her leg. Was there anywhere on her body their transgressions had not touched? Liz caught the warning arch of his eyebrow, the downward tug of his mouth and altered her tone. “How can you act this way? After last night--?"

“I am busy, that’s all. I told you, I have work to do.”

“And you don’t have time enough to spare me a moment now that your conquest is complete? Have you checked me off of your list, yet?" He didn’t answer and Liz choked back the lump in her throat. “How can you be this way?”

“I am not being any way,” Frank said. He ran his hand through his hair, tousling it even further. “I do not have time for this.”

“And I have no inclination to allow you to leave without admitting last night was special. You… My body… Touched everywhere. Your hands traced the most intimate parts of me. Last night we connected as no others have. Admit that, and I will leave you alone.”

“Of course!” Frank shouted. “Of course it was intimate. I was there! I was! But it is no longer last night. It is tomorrow.”

“I see.” Liz fought the tears that threatened to overspill. “It is tomorrow, and you have work to do.”

“Marvelous; you’ve got it. That is only what I have been telling you for the past five minutes.”

“Then do not let me keep you one second longer.”

He slid from the room like a scolded child, his shamed relief staining the air. Liz limped past the gurney to the window. The leaded panes mimicked the tracery of stitches across her face, the fine, careful lines Frank had sewn all over her body. He had made her. From castaway corpses to single being, he had made her, infused her with this life, and then cast her aside. She pressed her forehead against the glass until it hurt, staring out at a world she would never enter, straining away from the world she would never leave.

“You’re a bastard, Frank,” she whispered. “You’re a bastard.”

You Want to Know About Heroes?

This is a reposting of a "blog" entry I did for a Red Room contest about heroes. Of course, I couldn't let the dark side not have a representative. Apparently, they didn't want to hear from the dark side. Sigh.

Hee hee.

**************

I can shatter bone. With no more effort than it takes you to grab a pencil, I can pulverize your femur. With a flex of my quads I can leap to the top of your house, and with a swipe of my arm, I can topple it. As a child you gazed with longing at candy-colored comic books, wishing to be all that I already am.

They cry. All night. Voices in the dark, shouting, screaming, pleading. They scurry across the earth, unable or unwilling to pry themselves from the role of victim. "It's too hard," they say. "It's too hard. Help me."

I did, at first. To shut them up, to win myself a decent night's sleep. I saved the first one. A sweet-bodied guy with shining chestnut hair and eyes to match. As I convinced his assailants they had chosen the wrong victim, he took in the carnage I wrought with those dark, wide eyes. After the electric terror faded, after the sting of being rescued by a chick had eased from them, I found those eyes were the same as the rest of him--sweet and grateful. I let him thank me. All night. He eventually dozed off, but the screams kept coming. I stared into the blackness and wished for them to stop. The sirens echoed their wails--one passing so near it started my boy out of his exhaustion. He rolled onto his side, blinked those stupid doe eyes at me and said, "Aren't you going to help them?"

I got up fast, was out of there before the shape of my head had smoothed from the pillow. I left him lounging in bed, confident that now he was safe, his hero was going out to save the rest of the world.

I went and got a drink.

Then another.

Then another.

Behind me, some bastard at the pool table smacked his girlfriend in the face for sloshing his beer. I let him.

There were other times I felt more generous. Times when a rapist was found mangled and stuffed in a trash can. Times when a serial killer stopped killing and the cops thought they'd somehow lucked out and managed to jail him on unrelated charges. But for each of those times there were scores where I heard, and did nothing. Times when I just didn't feel like getting involved.

I can still hear them. Despite the four window air conditioners I have running at full-tilt, despite the music I play so loud it throbs my eardrums and gives me vertigo, I can still hear them screaming for me. I turn up the volume, and pray for sleep.

So, what do you think of me now, kids? Do I fit inside your hard-lined squares of colorful ink? Do my words fill in the bubbles?

Am I your hero, or what?

A Post A Month? Bad Form!

The laxness of my recent postings (and visitings) is shaming me. I've always been a one-track-minder, able to focus intensely and exhaustively--but only on one thing at a time. You want me to chew gum? I'll chew gum. I'll chew the crap out of it. Just don't ask me to walk while doing it.

This post is short--painfully so. And largely without purpose, except to apologize for the lateness, to promise that I have been doing good things in the writing arena whilst away, and to stress my sincere hope for returning to regular posting as soon as I master the multitasker role.

I am on facebook, where the brevity and immediacy of contact is easier for me to handle at this point in time. So, if you're there, stop by and say, "Hey." I also have a twitter account, but if you think these updates are sad...

Until next time (when I hope to have better, more interesting things on which to expound), be good, enjoy the remnants of summer, and write and read happy!

Pencils Down

I don't remember much from the time my mother fell suddenly, gravely ill a few years ago. I don't know if my brain, sensing imminent meltdown, scrapped the majority of the unpleasant details, or rather if the predictable monotony of tiled hospital hallways, harsh lights and rows of uncomfortable wooden chairs simply lent itself to melding events into one long, indistinguishable haze. Either way, the days did indeed bleed into what now seems a single, ageless track of sunlight from horizon to horizon. One of the few individual events I can recall is sitting at my parents' kitchen table, feeling detached from everything around me, idly fingering random scraps of paper that my mother had allowed to accumulate on her "desk." One piece lay separate from the rest--either from earning some elevated rank in the hierarchy of chores, or ostracized by the distasteful quality of its nature--its edges curling in as if to protect my mother's perfect, swooping script. The note said, "Bleach tub handles."

It struck me then--as it does again now as a friend's father lay on an operating table, his life teetering on the edge of devastation--the potential absurdity of a final note such as that. There was my mother, mostly dead, struggling for what little life she had left in her body, and the final message she left to us all was that the fucking shower knobs had some mildew. While I can smile at it now, I can assure you at the time those words made me confused, angry, sad and horrified. But now, after having gained a bit of distance from the situation, I'm starting to think it wouldn't have been such a final goodbye. For her, anyway.

We go through lives with the expectation of reaching very old age. We live our lives drowning in a sea of tomorrows, of laters, of getting-around-to-its. For those of us who will dodge sudden death, we will weave a tapestry of our existence for as long as we can, until someone comes along and says our work is nearly finished and soon it will be time to put it down forever. Once those words reach our ears, we'll look back at the long, interlocking threads of our lives and begin to knot off the frayed edges. But for every one loose end secured, a thousand more will catch in the breeze, mocking our attempts to seize them. Reading all the classics, learning how to surf, eating escargot just once--those once trivial wishes, made monumental with the approaching end, will never come to fruition, and so our tapestry will remain ragged, undone. And the worst is, we will be fully aware of this. We will look at our amalgamation of lazy days (the very ones we are already apathetically conscious of) and wish to have filled them with greater things, thread-knotting things, tapestry-finishing things. We know this just as we know most of our little monkey brains will acknowledge the truth of this, and continue sleeping in, slacking off and ignoring the Jeopardy countdown song playing in the background. It is a disheartening thought.

In contrast, take my mother. Fine, talking one minute, on the floor the next. Her list of tomorrows was still--to her, anyway--full of potential, stretched interminably in front of her. Those damn shower handles would be tackled at some point, as well as all the other things she'd planned to do. Had she died then, she would have left her tapestry balled on the floor, frayed and unfinished, and she would have given exactly two shits. The rest of us would have stared at that stupid little piece of paper, trying to glean some sort of mystical, hidden message from its dearth of letters, but she would have slipped away thinking everything was still in place to be finished before the big finale. And that almost seems the kinder path, kinder, at least, than being handed a ticking alarm clock and sent away to do the best one can with the remaining hours.

After reading the note that day, I almost went into the bathroom to clean those knobs, to bleach the fuck out of them so when she got home it would be taken care of. I didn't. A spell hung over that scrap of yellow paper with its official green lines and red margins. It felt in that moment that if I set screwdriver to those knobs, if I squirted one ounce of Tilex, the thread holding her to the planet would snap and that frayed remnant would be the one to finish off the raw edge left undone by that piece of paper. I put the note back on the table, just where I had found it, and went to go see if my dad needed anything. Spell or not, my mother did recover--against the most tremendous of odds--and those fucking knobs finally got their comeuppance.

***********

To my dear, dear friend, I send out well-wishes and healing thoughts for your dad. May his tapestry continue to grow by yards and miles in the years to come.

Lightening Up

A week ago I was at a nearby antique store. It's a pretty cool place, located inside a monstrous old factory. The rows of antiques flow from massive room to massive room, the walls dematerializing from sheetrock to exposed brick as the spaces become less "done" and truer to their history. The aisles loop around, taking shoppers back from the final, huge warehouse space and back into human-scaled territory. I followed the u-turn of rows--like a rainbow slumped on its side--to a veritable pot of gold. Around the corner I found waiting for me a used book section consisting with numbers of science fiction and fantasy rivaling that of any new book store. And these weren't just some grandad's old, beat-up collection of seventies serial sci-fi (although that category was represented), there were tons of modern authors like Gaiman, Williams, Salvatore, Hamilton, Harris and Reynolds. Every category from steampunk to high fantasy had a representative in attendance. I ended up grabbing an armful of two-dollar bargains, seizing the opportunity to both expand my bookshelves and explore some new-to-me urban fantasy. I also picked up a Philip K. Dick complete collection (I've been dying to read the real Minority Report), and a handful of random, easy-on-the-brain fantasy titles, including a new Redwall book from Brian Jacques (I have a thing for mice and squirrels with swords).

In all, the selection I chose was fluffier than the usual--nice, short, fun books. And that made me start thinking about the term "Summer Reading" and why we feel compelled to lighten our mental load during the hot months. Does it have something to do with our old schooltime habits? Tossing our proverbial pencils in the air as the last bell rings and turning to more leisurely pursuits? Or is it embedded in our need to shed the heavy weight of winter? As our parkas, boots and sweaters are peeled off, as our diets become leafier and infused with flavors of citrus, do we continue to jettison of all things bulky and cumbersome? As soon as March has a firm hold on us, the tables at the bookstores entitled "Beach Reads" come creeping into the center aisles. I don't go anywhere near the beach during the summer (despite the fact I live a mere twenty minutes away--it has something to do with heat, sharks and sand sticking to my sunscreen like Shake-n-Bake), but I nevertheless gravitate towards this pile of printed matter like a bird towards the equator. I like to think it's my inner Peter Pan calling the shots, the little girl who used to sit on the lush grass and read under the shade of a giant tulip poplar insisting I take some time to run through the sprinkler just for the heck of it. It's hard to deny her that urge; the pure, uncomplicated enjoyment of the shade, a nice swing, and a good book is hard to match.

Summer inspires much in all of us: a compulsion to try our hands at gardening, a yearning to put match to charcoal--and if you're from the Eastern Shore a desire to sit at a table covered in newspaper and pound the shit out of crabs while eating corn and guzzling beer. But, most of all, I think summer reminds us to find the fun in life, if only one chapter at a time.