Averil Dean's Blog, page 4

Furnishings

I read the news today. Thousands of people buried under crumbling piles of concrete and metal, people screaming for help as the earth continues to judder and heave. Snow is falling. Freezing rain. It becomes difficult, thinking of it, to stretch the mind toward misery as acute as this. I saw a little girl carried aloft by a sea of men whose hands are raised in thanks and prayer and I thought, oh, she’s smiling, thank god, until I rotated the photograph and realized it was a grimace of pain.

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Mangle

I try not to be jealous. I try to be light and generous and happy to hear about what everyone else is doing. I try very hard not to be the kind of person who would let her self-loathing spill over and muddy someone else’s joy. After all, my home is happy and my health is good, and the people I love seem to love me back. With all I have, it would be churlish to want for more.

But I can’t help it. I envy the people who know how to do things. People who have a career, education, prospects, tale...

100-Word Microfiction IV

Mirror Neurons

She’s sitting across from me, flooded in light. Three heavy cameras are trained on her face as she recounts her husband’s murder. We were in bed, asleep, and then suddenly this guy’s in the room. And his face…

Lost for words, her features undergo a flashbulb transformation: teeth bared, eyes dilated with madness, as if the imprint of that night has been caught on one of those wildlife cameras where a predator walks past and trips the shutter. Later, cradling a bourbon, I’ll ...

The Narrows

They say that every writer has one story to tell. Just one, repeated from different angles and with an array of characters, the variety of which might be so vast as to disguise this fact even from the writer. And while I don’t subscribe to the “every writer” part of that statement or any other, I think there’s something to it. I do tend to circle around the same issues. There are a lot of violent men in my stories, a lot of crime and romantic dysfunction. That’s the top layer.

However, under...

Alignment

It’s 6:15 am and I’m in Redmond, my temporary nest, drinking coffee from a paper cup. I drove here straight from work and ate a bowl of pasta at the hotel bar, washed it down with a bee’s knees cocktail, and went straight to bed with a collection of stories by Mark Haddon and a back-up book on my Kindle. Already I miss my husband and my house, my feather pillow with its washed silk cover, my son, my dogs, my soy milk and Winco instant coffee. I miss the view from my window.

I don’t mean this...

100-Word Microfiction III

The Ring in the Lake

She’s wearing her favorite outfit: A blue linen skirt, cinched at the waist with a woven cotton belt, and her sister’s Coca-Cola tee-shirt to go with it, because that’s what he was drinking when they met. A denim jacket in case it’s cold by the lake. White socks, bra, underwear. An old pair of clover earrings, For luck, From Dad, and three slim bangles that make a shivery noise when they touch. A mood ring with an oval stone that will fade to gray as her body sinks, but f...

Moi

I have a long weekend coming up and I’m not sure what to do with it. What I’d like most is to spend a few days alone, writing, bumming around near this hotel in Redmond where my husband and I like to stay. It’s near the river, and in summers past we’ve rented bikes to ride along its banks and down to Lake Sammamish. Though I suspect the weather will put the kibosh on any thought of biking, there are still bookstores to enjoy, bougie restaurants, an outdoor shopping mall. There’s also a theater w...

100-Word Microfiction II

Let Me Show You

They meet at the door, which she holds open with her foot. He’s lost, reeking of cigarettes, and moves closer with his phone to show her where he wants to go. The font is so large that the words appear broken. They don’t contain an address. He reaches into his coat pocket, Let me show you, wait, and as his hand disappears she thinks, whatever’s in that pocket will decide me, and the pocket’s rather bulky, but not that bulky, so she waits in a parody of obstruction, dumb with m...

100-Word Microfiction

Post-Op

I didn’t know what I’d feel, seeing myself this way. The woman facing me is pitiable, maimed. Two long asymmetrical scars cross my chest: one over my heart, the other low and slanted red like the claw mark of a predator. My nipples are gone, giving my chest a blind quality, or perhaps a muteness, as in one of those horror movies where the character’s mouth is covered over with skin.

Yet my mind is filled with savage joy. The world has taken something from you, and that’s a first. ...

Flash I

The Clockmaker

I’m not where I’m supposed to be. You have a knack for sensing this, and I can mark the beat of silence here and there throughout our conversation, where I imagine you with the phone pressed between your ear and shoulder, pausing at your workbench with a pair of tweezers in each hand and that wrinkle of consternation on your forehead, and thinking perhaps that the background noise on my end is not what you’d expect.

My imagination carries on sometimes—a juxtaposition in...