Meg Sefton's Blog, page 51

“flashlando”

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OK so one year a couple of years ago I envisioned a virtual fantastic flash fiction literary event based in Orlando and involving central Florida literary lights as well as other friends and connections I have met online.

At the time of conception, I kept notes on an unpublished blog post. I decided if my ideas materialized I was going to ask guests – central Florida writer friends and admired writers outside of the area – to help present ideas.

This never came to fruition but I thought I would share my notes with the thought that perhaps the ideas may inspire your own fantastical writing and creativity.

The pandemic has been a time to revisit abandoned abandoned projects, old photos, unread books. It has been a time to throw things away, change course, renew my resolve. Maybe this has been a part of your experience as well.

The last time I participated in a literary event in Orlando I did a reading in a bar with other literary writer friends. The task was to do a reading of an original literary piece involving politics. I dramatized an invented dialogue between the then presidential candidate Hilary Clinton and the ghost of Eleanor Roosevelt. Afterwards friends of mine who had come out went out to a bar to dance until late into the night, only weeks before the shooting at Pulse.

I thought I would share a glimpse into this older side of me, my thoughts about a virtual fantastical literary conference. Here is a copy and paste of some thoughts I had for possible prompts for participants and a beginning brainstorm for workshop leaders. Some of these prompts have been used by writers in workshops in Orlando and in other workshops and so I have made notes from time to time. Some are based on my own ideas and stories.

Exercises:

Dream recall using synesthesia Guest prompt Laura Lee Bahr (Like exercise at Kerouac House)

2. Story told from point of view from object that shouldn’t be conscious – Guest prompt from Joe Snyder (Milk Bar, flash fiction workshop, Orlando)

3. A character sees his/her doppleganger in public.

4. Unusual funeral practices.

5. Story in which a skeleton is a character.

6. A favorite toy from childhood.

7. A character inexplicably changes in size, getting smaller and/or bigger.

8. A folktale or another kind of story with a talking animal.

9. A character transforms into a creature who can fly.

10. A corpse who is more alive than most “living” people.

13. A defunct asylum.

14. A decrepit building in a deserted city in a dystopian future.

15. A ghost’s day at a theme park.

16. A child with a secret power

17. Animated corpses in a potter’s field –

18. Apex predator who is loving and gentle.

19. An object mysteriously appears in various settings.

20. A character’s emotional reaction causes a weather disturbance in their environment.

21. A tree that dies in spring and repeatedly comes back to full bloom in winter.

22. People as plants.

23. A birthday cake swallows up a kid.

24. A city has a very unusual fuel source.

Some dream guests, local and futher afield; Stacy Barton, Jessie Bradley, John King, Vanessa Blakeslee, Laura Lee Bahr, Dave Housely, Kellie Wells, Matt Bell, Amber Sparks, Ray Fracalossy, Michael Martone, Kathy Fish, Nancy Stohlman, Susan Tepper, Meg Tuite, Robert Vaughn, Tiffany Razzano, David Atkinson, Frances Lefkowitz, Jason Lee Norman.

 

 

Trash

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Gabby Orcutt

Ms. Trudy was the most beautiful woman Garthalina had ever seen. She was Garthalina’s first grade teacher. She wore shoes with heels on them and a strap that went over the top, like old timey shoes from the movies.

The school was letting out before the end of the year, Ms. Trudy had said to the class. There was a virus that was not friendly and they had to go home and stay inside until it went away.

She then retrieved a large garbage bag behind her desk. Inside were red balls into which she had stuck purple strips of cloth. Pretend these are the virus! she said, tossing them out into the classroom. Let’s put these away where they can’t hurt anyone! And the class batted the balls around until they were all it in a big basket in the corner. Ms. Trudy smiled and clapped for them. Look what you did, class, you defeated the virus! Now I want you to be safe and listen to your parents so you can defeat the virus at home!

The next thing they did was go outside to collect rocks. Each student was to pick one small rock and put it in a plastic clear tube they wore around their necks on a string. It would be their new pet.

I want everyone to give their rock a name, said Ms. Trudy when they were all inside and sitting at their desks again. Every night, I want you to talk to your rock. Can you do that? I want you to tell your rock any problems you may have. Or anything that scares you. Or even anything that is making you happy. Can you do that?

And the class nodded. Some were secretly happy they didn’t have to come back to school tomorrow. Some were sad and confused.

I have something else for you, and she pulled out a big tray of gift bags.

I’m about to hand these out. These are supplies in case you need them. And some of you need special supplies and I have those for you too. Now you have to be very careful with these supplies. These are special snacks just for this time while we’re away, ok? This is your food if you are hungry. But you have to be careful. I need to ask you to be a little mouse. Only eat a little nibble when you are hungry. Save the rest for another time you are hungry. Ok?

When Garthalina got home from school that day, her mother was tipping over in her chair at the dining table, a big rubber band around her arm, a needle sticking out of her Popeye muscle.

Garthalina had walked home from the bus stop. Tomorrow she would have to start fighting the virus all alone along with her brother and sister. No Ms. Trudy.

She had watched the big yellow bus drive away. Whenever she rode the bus, she liked to sit beside the window and imagine herself in one of the houses closer to the creek. Would it be like Ms. Trudy’s house? She would choose a house made of logs, a stone chimney with smoke coming out. Ms. Trudy would make her grits with sausage and sing like Mary Poppins.

She turned the stove on to boil water for the mac and cheese Granny bought them each week with her government check. Her Mama had shown Garthalina how to boil pasta before she fell in love with the needle. She had shown her how to add the yellow cheese powder and stir it fast so it got smooth.

Social services ain’t comin’ out here now girl, so you ain’t got to worry about puttin’ on a show tonight. That was Mama’s slurry and sleepy Droopy voice, except Droopy wasn’t mean.

They always had to worry they might get taken away, ever since she set herself on fire at the stove and emergency services called it in.

After she ate in front of the television watching her favorite cassette, Garthalina put on her gown and lay on her bed and talked to her pet rock.

“Please, Cindy, let everything be ok. Are you scared?”

Garthalina never had anyone to talk to before.

She put Cindy up on the windowsill where the rock could enjoy the moonlight.

She put Ms. Trudy’s special treat bag in her night stand. She turned off her light and felt a little better. Ms. Trudy was there. She could feel it.

Next day by the time Garthalina woke up, Mama had eaten her peanut butter crackers from Ms. Trudy. Mama had thrown Cindy outside.

Mama spoke in her hard voice then, her Cruella de Vil voice. We don’t keep nature in the house. We ain’t trash.

Holler

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Back of basket woven from Queen Palm inflorescence stems, Cheryl, flickr

When you look at the holler from a bird’s view, you see a young woman with long brown hair emerging from a house from which white paint is peeling and smoke is curling though it is summer. There is a dirt road leading away from the house, a creek running alongside, a swath of maple, oaks, hemlock, sweet gum, the smell of mountain laurel, the cooling breeze.

The young woman carries a basket, one she made, having soaked grapevine in the creek, twisting and weaving the branches together, tying a decorative red ribbon to the handle. The basket contains muffins she made, muffins made with pumpkin, honey, walnuts, cinnamon, nutmeg. It contains a special brew of canned coffee of which her grandmother is particularly fond.

The young woman appears neither too relaxed or too anxious, too overconfident or timid. She walks like a young woman with sense but who has nonetheless been warned about what to look out for. She doesn’t foolishly smile. She’s not dreamy, heaven forbid. Though probably, if she’s like most young women, she’s not without hope for a different life, something that is more, more than the peeling paint house of her mother and father, more than the looking after brothers and sisters, more than the trading in oxy and meth to make ends meet, the new economy of Appalachia.

In fact, she feels guilty about homes where she knows people who have overdosed, knowing herself to be the a cog in the wheel that brought these souls from living to dead. This horribly necessary living has taken her innocence. It’s why she doesn’t foolishly smile, why she’s not senselessly dreamy like youth of a previous era and like youth of the upper crust. Death clung to her, aged her forehead, eyes, mouth. In fact, before her town could mail in the most recent census information, death had been so precipitous – from a double dose of opioids and contagion – it would appear as if almost no one was alive in the whole of the eastern ridge.

Furthermore, a young woman on a road like this was bound and determined to meet the descendent of dead wolf souls, Red, a lonely one, ruthless and cunning, near extinction, desperate. And the grandmother had been tasty though she was ill. Red had pre-empted the young woman’s arrival and had greedily eaten his appetizer. Having begun to feel sated, lips and teeth dripping, he ran back, undetected, to where his clueless main course sauntered ahead, clutching her basket. Then he gleefully fled to Granny’s shack, licked up the blood, hopped into bed.

But crows from upper branches cawed a warning to the young woman. And so she picked up a long branch from the forest floor, long enough to poke open the door without needing to climb up on the porch. When the door creaked open, she could see only stillness, darkness, and death. And she could also see two gleaming wild eyes shining out from her Granny’s bed.

The young woman dropped the stick and her her basket and ran. She was no idiot. Who will take care of her family if she doesn’t survive? Sorry Granny, she said to the wind as she sped to the peeling paint house. Let the dead bury the dead, she said out loud.

She retrieved the double barreled shotgun from the wall. She sat on the porch. She watched the sun go down til it set between the folds of the mountains, til a mourning dove sang its nighttime sadness. She sent her family to bed in their innocence – her parents in their stupor which has made them children again, her brothers and sisters in their innocence of childhood innocence.

She sat on the porch with her gun and came up with a fanciful plan. For money, I can make baskets and gather moss, bloodroot, ginger and sell them like they did in Granny’s day, she said. Never mind things like that aren’t selling right now. I can’t think about that tonight, she said.

She knew the meth pedaling was wearing on her, that some nights it didn’t feel worth the dead souls on her conscience, the ghosts that haunt the valley. A loon concerns itself with them, crying out as they walk the vale in the moonlight.

Ice Cream Dreams

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Mermaid by Cyberesque, flickr

Driving through suburban Orlando, kids in back, windows rolled down in the unairconditioned Pontiac, all Shabina could think was: Depressing. But it wasn’t the heat that made her depressed. It was the cloudlessness. No afternoon summer rain to release her from full engagement with Mom duties. Possibly no naptime. Today was all murderous blue. No tucking in with a drink, the kids taking a nap.

She was at the drive through at the ice cream shop. Later she would merge back onto the four lane road to go home. At least she could punch the engine and speed just a little to the red light, she thought, amused. So reliable and powerful, her big purple beast. It had been a gift from her grandfather, willed to her.

The summer of contagion and death had her on the tiniest, invisible emotional edge, like something pressing on her brain but not yet manifest – a tumor, a clot, a stroke of the nerve. Every day, she trained herself to think of something small. Today, it was ramping her kids up for “national ice cream month” and a trip to an ice cream shop offering treats decorated like mythical creatures.

The night before, the children had decided what treats they would order. Citrine would order the mermaid. Darby the cyclops.

In the bath, Citrine had reminded her she was a mermaid. She had dipped under the bubbles. When she came back up again she said, “I can breath underwater.”

Shabina vacillated between indulging the habits of cutesy popular girl culture and trying to keep things at the level of reality, disputing with the child nonsense imaginings. When she was depressed and irritated it was hard to tolerate the cutesy.

She reached for her cool high ball on the bathroom tile floor, but she dropped it and it shattered.

Shabina mused that when Ariel was given legs so she could be a human and be with her prince, she walked as if on glass. Her feet bled. Well at least in the unDisneyfied version, the version her Granny read to her when her Mama was out with all her men. Not only that, Ariel’s legs were a trade for her voice. Her desire to be with the prince came with the terrible price of making her mute. Can relate, thought Shabina, fetching the broom.

She dressed both the kids for bed, turned on the box fan in the living room, put Little Mermaid into the VHS. Like clockwork, the two of them sat transfixed as if under the spell of the sea witch herself.

Shabina slipped outside to the back porch with a glass and a bottle of Jack. She sat like she always did, propped back in her chair, feet up, until the darkness settled her. Then she saw things, heard them. There was the moon silvering the lake, a snake easing itself from the base of the house to the earth. There were ridges of an alligator spine in the water. A desperate cry of a  screech own. She sat on the porch and drank and drifted while her children watched a screen. She hadn’t planned to go this far into her drinking. But the day’s tensions somehow justified the numbing.

Next day saw her hung over at the drive through line at the ice cream shop not far from the road where young women sold their bodies, not far from where Shabina and her kids lived in her Mama’s old house. She put her elbow on the burning metal of the car’s window frame and pressed down. It felt good to burn it, burn it hard. Old cars burned you when you touched them.

Once she had ordered, she set her kids at a table next to the parking lot to eat their cups of melting cream – Citrine her mermaid, Darby his cyclops.

“This is not a real mermaid,” said Citrine, looking disapprovingly at the candy colored liquid with a fish tale swimming in it.. She was only ten years younger than Shabina was when her mother told her not to come back to the house until she’d made money to buy groceries. Narrow hips, walking on glass, losing her voice down the road where girls sold themselves, Shabina learned a certain kind of commerce in a city that pedaled in princess dreams.

“Why don’t you like your mermaid ice cream, honey?” said Shabina, trying for sweetness, choking back the temptation to lose it. The older she became, the more Shabina sympathized with the sea witch.

“Mermaids aren’t pink, Mommy.”

“But that’s cotton candy ice cream, like the drive thru lady said, the kind that goes with Ariel.”

“I don’t like it.”

Shabina picked it up and dunked it in a trashcan not far away. A small, irrational thrill ran through her.

“That was mean, Mommy.” Citrine merely glowered, her arms crossed like a school marm.

“You’re mean,” Shabina retorted, knowing herself to be ridiculous in the face of a child. She had said that kind of loud. Then hoped no one was watching.

Naptime was good that afternoon. Something had broken in the air and she could try again with them when they were were awake, when she was watching them splash in the plastic pool out back.

Dylan wouldn’t be back to see her for a while. He had said kids turned him off. Why did she still love him? He wasn’t even their father.

When the cicadas come out at twilight there is a bath of sound. Like the humid air, it surrounds you and you are suspended as in a sea. She has never broken from this sea, nor had her mother or her mother’s mother. They were cursed with what they had, with what they knew, with choices they were offered, and with consequences meted out to them. It was how things were.

Even with the sound of the Amtrack in the distance, Shabina sat on her porch, her mother’s porch, night after night, mute, feet bleeding.

Condensation

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Condensation by Eddie Welker, flickr

In Florida in the summertime, we populate the windows of the sleeping. We cling to glass, climb up and out, searching for a view to the inside of homes. We blanket cars, cover toys and bikes left outside, grass, bushes, flowers. Even roller coasters and theme parks, shells, driftwood, ocean piers. We bring rot and disintegration, destruction. But we are slow in our action.

We are a cousin to fog which in winter and spring warm air rises from the earth at night when there is no cloud cover to swaddle it to the ground and hold it in. Or warm air from the Gulf moves over the cooling peninsula encouraging our cousin fog. Or maybe sometimes these two fortuitous events occur together and a thick blanket is formed.

We are warm air meeting cool. We exist at the point of contradiction.

We knew the earliest Americans, the Spanish Conquistadors who killed them with disease, fugitive and free slaves, the Seminole Indians, the early Florida cowboys whose cows were affectionately blanketed by moist droplets as they lowed and grazed in pastures of spreading oak draped with Spanish moss. Our cousin fog knew the first orange crops and trains which carried their yield.

We cling to Ms. Myska’s window of day 122 of the worldwide pandemic of 2020. She has secreted herself away inside her apartment, her air conditioning humming. She is one miniscule human dot on a teaming landmass which was nonetheless larger when the earth contained more frozen water. Back then, it was a time when things were drier, when Florida was less humid. Now, Ms. Myska lives in a jungle with roller coasters down the street, tourists from Germany who come to see alligators in cages, families who watch killer whales breach chlorinated waters.

We observe the moods of Ms. Myska in her little glassed in box. We observe her when she has spoken to her father on the phone, her sister, her son. We observe how these different interactions affect her. We observe when she is happy, when she is sad, when she cannot sleep, or when she sleeps all day.

We observe when she must put on a face covering to do an errand in her yellow car she parks out front in the lot. We observe when she opens the screen on her tabletop and speaks with faces or turns on the screen on her wall and simply observes faces and people moving around some artificial set.

The world will come to naught. It will rot, disintegrate, be destroyed. On the news of the world on Ms. Myska’s screen, people are wheeled from their homes on stretchers. People are put on machines in hospitals where they fight for every breath, where they fight mentally with hallucinations, with demons. They lose all contact with the outside world. Those most sensitive to this may die of broken hearts more than flooded lungs. It is unknown the comparatively deleterious effects of either. The ones who survive come back as if from war.

We are reasonably sure of our own existence, of continued moisture in the air, in oceans and other bodies unless of course the earth is thrown off from its track. If we disappear we will go in a flash. Our demise will not be recorded on a screen yet we expect no recognition, no fanfare. There will be no one left to report our loss. We have no feelings about this. Our contingency is simply a fact of our existence.

We watch Ms. Myska shop compulsively on her screen with money she does not have out of anxiety for a dying world. She operates in a world of delusion but she always has. People always have. We say this not without affection. How much less interesting the world would have been without humans, humans caught up in their own emotion and destruction.

We cling to her windows and watch her and wait to disappear with the burning sun only to appear again in the early hours of morning as if in response to the call to matins. We say our prayers for the wee child Ms. Myska though she is an old woman. We pray our piece for her continuance, for her protection from disease as long as the Fates will allow. We even pray she would experience some measure of happiness not through her screens, but maybe through something small and real. Her little white dog perhaps. Her gentle plants waiting patiently on her porch for a drink from her hand.

Grace is often small.

you will go out in joy

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Emma Forsberg, flickr

It had become ridiculous. Victor, a musca domestica, a common housefly, had gained passage into Ms. Myska’s apartment via the cellophane packaging of a crusty French loaf. The arrival of the groceries, having been scheduled to arrive at 11:00 a.m., had nonetheless caught Ms. Myska unawares for she had fallen asleep.

“Oh!” she said, starting bolt upright, realizing what had happened. Sure enough, the packages were on the threshold. All seemed well enough, however: All seemed in order and the milk and cream were cold.

Still, Victor had found his way in.

For days, he had bragged to Jasmine, the wild leg of a landscaping foundation plant and Ms. Myska’s porch plants – Flaming Katy and Donkey Ear – that he would find a way to observe what was happening inside and get fat from the dog food Ms. Myska put down for her little Coton.

What he hadn’t counted on was Ms. Myska’s sharp senses and reactions. Greedily, he had secreted himself away inside the cellophane for a quick snack of French bread crust while waiting for her to open the door and let him inside.

When Ms. Myska spotted him she shouted out in alarm, her second “Oh!” of the morning. She crushed him dead, instantly, while he darted about. His body was unceremoniously scraped away.

Though Ms. Myska hated this condition under which she would have to accept her bread, she acknowledged her responsibility.

Victor’s children were not far behind in gaining access for they had become concerned. He was a hard father to live with. He had never given them any breaks. Still, that did not mean they wished him dead. And he had meant his hard regimented style for their benefit as they would soon understand.

Like Victor, they all bragged to Jasmine and Donkey and Katie they would do what their father had not managed to do and live long and happy lives with Ms. Myska in their natural state of commensalism, giving birth to baby flies and getting fat.

What they had missed was the early cautionary and leavening influence of a mother who had died young while they were but pupae. “Know your limits” she would have whispered to them in their self contained infancy. “Don’t become too proud, for surely you will know death too soon.”

Victor’s children managed to ride in on packages and groceries, to squeeze in between cracks in the screened porch.

Ms. Myska kept her outside door open during certain hours of the summer to enjoy fresh air, to water and tend to her houseplants, Donkey, a succulent, and Katy, a Kalanchoe blossfeldiana, and it was mainly during these hours that Victor’s children managed to gain access.

Jasmine, the landscape plant on the other side of the porch, stepped in at times and said something. “Chillax” she hissed as she rode the waves of the wind. But they were too busy plotting their way to the grave.

“We all have self destructive tendencies,” Donkey Ear interjected sagely one afternoon from his place on the wrought iron shelf.

What did he know? thought Katy, laughing to herself. But it was so like him to sonorously opine with a wisdom beyond his abbreviated age. She allowed him this indulgence.

They would all die one day. Even Ms. Myska would die, thought Katy. They would all become husks while something inside would be set free.

Katy had heard a priest on tv read a revelatory passage from the text Ms. Myska read every morning: “You will go out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands.”

Katy often wondered about this. She wondered how there were some people who thought carefully of the nature and future of the earth. She wondered if she would be celebrating along with other plants, humans, and geologic formations called mountains.

She thought the passage a little too hopeful, but she tried to stay open. Maybe there would be a new earth one day. She had to admit humans seemed insanely hopeful sometimes. But Ms. Myska seemed ok. If she wanted to read it in her book and believe it who was she.

a word from me to you

I want to say a more direct, personal hello today, not my usual fiction. I hope you are ok. It is such a stressful time.

Sometimes my posts may seem irrelevant in the face of so much. But everything I write comes from a very deep place. Sometimes people mistakenly believe that fantastical work is mere escapist. Often it is not. People in pain often find their survival there.

My last fantastical post was written in a lonely time of trying to figure out how to connect during a time when covid-19 is not disinviting itself from our cities. I passed by my patio window and in my semi-hallucinatory, gone-crazy-with-loneliness observed a stray jasmine branch from my apartment complex seemingly reaching down towards the plants on my screened in patio.

Today in thinking about another small fictional writing project, I am considering moving on to a family of flies who insinuate themselves on my existence when I keep my patio door open. Proud flies, show off flies, flies who observe and gossip. Characters may come back such as Donkey, my succulent plant, and Katy, my Flaming Katy.

It is important to find community in loneliness, no matter how fantastically you populate your community. Over the years I have revisited Janet Frame’s “Snowman, Snowman” an amazing story of a mysterious man of snow who talks to a snowflake. I love it. And I am always inspired.

Several years ago in my previous married life I wrote of a baby shoe lying down next to a painted line on a road. I am guessing it was something I had seen and started thinking about. That was a long time ago. In my story, the shoe and line talk to each other about life, about their differing roles and importance in the world. I mistakenly opened this little piece up for critique and was accused of being inane and I won’t say what else.

People will get upset sometimes if they think you are not creating “seriously.” And yet you can create quite seriously with nothing else than what you can imagine. And the creatures and objects you can imagine can make profound commentary on us and our world, our politics, our behaviors.

Not only that it can be downright delicious and funny to write this way. I guess that may be what made my friend so mad, to think I was laughing?

I am sad to say the talkative jasmine of my last post who dreams of a primeval earth when animals and plants shall rule again has been, in my own world, literally “cut down.” I saw it coming and wrote about it in fiction.

What it meant in the story on a symbolic level is that those who speak freely and subversively flirt with danger. But flirt we must and if we can, like Jasmine, laugh despite people sometimes believing we are not “serious.”

Speak your truth. Don’t go gently.

Love,

Meg

flower friends

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Jasmine by Sarah Walkington, flickr

In central Florida on a morning of the pandemic, a leg of a Pinwheel Jasmine bent down to Ms. Myska’s screened in porch to say hello to friends: a potted four petaled Flaming Katy with a florist’s heart and a brand new succulent, a Donkey Ear.

Somehow this leg of the jasmine had escaped the sharp whirring string of the dark hatted man’s butchery. On this secret side of the otherwise manicured lawn of the complex, Jasmine’s white flowers bloomed in profusion as if in response to the Flaming Katy who, beyond all reasonable expectation of her owner, a neglectful Ms. Myska, was still alive and celebrating her survival.

Ms. Myska’s purchase of the  Donkey Ear in the midst of the pandemic had been an act of faith. Jasmine had heard the woman say Donkey may have brothers and sisters. The woman planned to buy potting soil and pots and propogate him from clippings.

Jasmine tried not to laugh. She had seen how the timid Ms. Myska had stayed inside during the city’s contagion, sometimes even closing her blinds during the day, as if this could protect her. But Flaming Katy would get defensive if Jasmine laughed. She was the most loyal potted plant Jasmine had ever known though Jasmine actually knew no other. Jasmine was happy enough to support the old woman who seemed ancient to her though in people years was probably not so old.  The woman was lonely.

During the day, Jasmine nodded her free limb to her friends who sat on the floor of Ms. Myska’s garden apartment. They only spoke to each other at night when Ms. Myska was in bed, asleep. They spoke of the birds and the frogs and the insects who had come to life in the wake of the hiding of the humans, in the pall of sickness and destruction. They spoke guiltily but of dreams, their dreams of a time primeval.

And yet Jasmine knew her limits. If it got out she had been talking the night away regarding her gleeful subversive hopes she would be cut down, only to be thrown into the massive iron teeth with the other wayward limbs. In the summer, in the heat of the day, she tucked herself deep within the bush, emerging only for the quenching nourishment of rain when she laughed and opened her mouth. Katy and Donkey would laugh too for Ms. Myska would place them by the screen where they could enjoy a cooling mist.

It was a good summer for flowers. Difficult for people. But wasn’t that just the way.

Sutton County Drive

I highly recommend this work of a friend. And all of his work.

Rejection Letters

They left San Antonio at four in the morning. Their mother had given no explanation for waking the boys up, dressing them, and loading them into the back of their station wagon. The younger boy, Paddy, couldn’t wake up. He stumbled around sucking his thumb and clinging to the stuffed rabbit that he slept with. Charley, the big brother, was old enough to know you don’t get up in the middle of the night and drive away.

“Momma, where are we going?”

“Your grandmother’s. If we leave now, we’ll be there by lunch!” She stuffed her clothes into a suitcase. “She’ll be so happy to see us!”

Charley stood in the doorway of her bedroom. He watched her, tried to suss out meaning from her face.

Two hours later, the sun rose behind them as they cruised along the empty interstate. “Mommy.” Paddy was rocking back and forth. “Mommy, I…

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Dance

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Tango in Black, Zabara Alexander, flickr

A magic man came to town. Promised me I would dance. (I couldn’t walk.) Offered me his hand. (If I took it I would change.) Taking it, I felt electric. I felt tears. I didn’t want him to see me cry. But he did and smiled. I began to move.