There’s only three because a good movie is hard to find.
Here humbly submitting my revision of the “The Scuba Diver” for writing group.
The song of the week is Get Down Saturday Night.
Tulip and daffodil season now. Looking at dirt gives me such a thrill. There’s so much potential in a good pile of black dirt. Come up trembling, is that the sun on your head?
Be well, all of you.
Sad, sad, ruinously sad. Sputtering rain all day, walking with my hood up. Any little thing is too much for me, the hairy cat’s eyes across the street, the animal distrust from a window, communicating doors closing, I look back and the streetlamps are on.
I wanted to write something jagged, something that cuts.
The rain is coming down with great juicy smacks on the sidewalk. Sirens in the distance, so anodyne, the huddle of a wet neighborhood. My red slicker drying on the coatrack, and the puddle runs down the stairs. Sad- it’s like being happy, except I can think clearer.
All I can listen to is Debussy’s Claire de Lune on repeat, and two songs by Whatever, Dad called Death of the Phone Call and Warsh_Tippy and Zelda.
Anyway, please enjoy this story. I think it’s the best I’ve written yet this year; I think it slaps.
PS: even though it’s raining I would be remiss if I didn’t count my blessings:
Tl; dr: sorry this got so long. I became a writer, probably, because as a child I suffered from can’t-shut-the-fuck-up disease; after everyone went to bed I went to my journal and wrote, urgently, about wagons, for some reason, and also about the Mormon kid I had a crush on. Read the story; I think it’s good.
What’s up yall!
Please enjoy this rewrite of a story I posted here earlier. I had to clean it up for writing group, and it’s in every way improved, if I do say so myself. Content warning: this story deals pretty heavily with sexual assault.
Luckily for everyone (my housemates, the cars next to my car at a stop light, people afflicted with walking past me when I’m singing tunelessly) I’ve expanded to be able to listen to about three songs a week.
This week’s songs are Nina Simone’s Sinnerman (Manic, uninhibited. Fast as I’ve always wanted to go)
Mariah Carey’s Fantasy (in the running for catchiest bop of my childhood)
And Chappel Roan’s album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess (not a song, I know, but worth a listen.)
The house finches are building a nest on the west porch of Spice House. They’re quite obnoxiously exuberant. Who could blame them? Ten years til we’re all underwater. God bless you all.
what’s up yall, happy daylight savings / Ramadan / summer… daylight savings is really hitting this year…
please enjoy this little ditty.
This weekend my computer went on the fritz and I was inspired to write by the collection of short stories Whatever Happened to Interracial Love by Kathleen Collins. [My computer went on the fritz and I went to the Half-Priced books by the Apple store.] Collins is primarily known as a filmmaker, and I like her stories because they often have a strong framing device, and the way she plays with POV gives her stories more emotional weight. And they’re very visual, go figure. The eponymous one is the only one available online, but The Uncle goes hard.
In other updates, I am writing a mystery novella. Actually, I am doing research and plotting and making visual aids until the end of July, when I can take three weeks off and retreat up North and write four hours a day. [And then jump in the lake]
So don’t expect frequent updates here, except when little ditties like this come to me. The story is set in 1920s Kankakee, Illinois. (!) This is the first time I’ve had to make a Zotero tab for a piece of fiction, yall. It is, in fact, my first mystery story and my first piece of historical fiction. It’s a project almost bigger than I am… almost.
Thanks to my Aunt Laura for telling me the family history of What Happened in Kankakee. And for giving me house keys when I most needed a place to go. I have taken significant liberties with the family history. The keys I keep with me.
Enough palavering. Gotta go to work!
PS. There are two types of people- people who listen to music and people who listen to one song for a month. The song of March is Ant Pile by Dominic Fike.
Here I am and now. Tl; dr: story at bottom.
This story is short and ordinary. The song reference is to B.B. King’s The Thrill is Gone.
I owe credit to AB on three counts.
First, (in talking about Agatha Christie – specifically how Agatha Christie introduces rapid-fire a cast of seemingly ubiquitous characters), she uttered the perfect line: “He was a father and not much else.”
Obviously that was the beginning of my story right there.
Second, she bought me more Agatha Christie novels, which was a kindness I took to like a drunkard takes to wine.
Third, she gave me the following advice (that she herself got from someone else): to write a story; wait a year; read it, burn it; wait another year; then write it, again, from memory, having located and amplified the grabbiest bits. I replicated this process except I expedited it to four weeks.
Enjoy!! 🙂
PS: the Agatha Christie ranking, of the four I have read this year, is 1) The Moving Finger, 2) Death on the Nile, 3) Peril at End House, 4) The Seven Dials Mystery.
The Moving Finger would be on my list of short perfect novels, if such a list existed.
The other entry to that list would be Lilus Kikus, by Elena Poniatowska, which I had the incredible good fortune to run across in an out-of-the way little library in Richfield just as I was finishing this story. From Poniatowska and also from Stieg Larsson I am learning to be concrete. If my two years at Acorn were for reading science fiction, examining potentials, and what-ifs, my time at Spice House is for plot, intrigue, misdirection, compulsive reading. Excavations.
It is 4pm and I’ve just blown out the writing candle I’ve been burning since 10am. The room is blue with smoke. Outside, where I’m going, it is spring.
an alacritous star rips into view
sneering at me and the rest of
verveless earth
God, Yes!
Give me some magic.
magic makes little cats of emptiness
magic makes the cats into gangsters
makes pubic hair the titillation presentation
of a whistling teapot
makes doing a headstand seem a reasonable way
to get you back
again
the star which I have blessed with
sainthood, which I need more than food,
farting celestial dust,
comes to a hissing grave
in the forever sea
and the sky is quiet on the subject of what else
there is
without the story I told myself about the star
about who I am
about magic
and if there be
nothing else,
let’s sit and admire
nothing
seems alright to do
Hello! This is a story I’ve been working on for the past few weeks. It’s called “Mountain Dream.” Please enjoy. 🙂
I see you, rattling in the dead end of that hallway. You have bruised your face. That is not the way out. Face forward, go along the hall to a courtyard where the sun shines. Even on you, even you can feel! Say yes, for myself, I will open. And open your throat, you might want to say thanks. Do you know what you looked like in that hallway? Demented and sad, friend, demented and sad.
Liquid faces behind each minute An unexpected friend at the door, The water of birds gathers around the house. Happiness is theirs: they are birds. A bird cannot be happy, only birds! Can be happy Receding from the dead and their roses. The bark of a lonely dog Or a bent sob, self-smothering, Maybe I will see another face. An instant, we seize The wave needs the arm of a starfish for an instant Then, contracting regret, we retch. Unable to ride contact. We wretched- Perpetually- but everything is possible in the morning-
cdzhouse 