Pie eyed September nights

Fresh piercings, my ears bejeweled, a passing fancy for a contemporary paragon of a hero on the screen, the serotonin boost from vicariously living through two lovers' frisky flirtations in a piece, the thrill of the remaining hundred pages of a book, tiny joys seep into my days of an adversity.

The world, it crashes every night in my room as I try and shut my eyes. The noise of a bang in my head makes my heart go fast, I run out of breath and lie open eyed. My legs, they ache from walking through February to Fall, I try to catch a breath and hold my stance. The banyan tree leaves dance all night, casting shadows on my bedroom wall, as I try to fall asleep and not lose my mind to the thoughts that come alive like a nocturnal bird on the rise, probing with its beak and a shrill cry.

Like for the nuttiness of sesame seeds hidden in a chocolate biscuit, and the thin layer of ganache fused with hazelnuts in my sundae, I try to reach and look for signs of life in the joys that seep when the sun rises. Akin to a parched wayfarer on the golden sand running toward a mirage, I count my steps and seconds to these trivial glad tidings. I dance in their magic till I am soused, slushed, full and blitzed by their merely fleeting spell. And wake up besotted, and yearn for a beau ideal. I am bruised, and drunk, and on my knees, lost and longing for a love and a life. Gashes open and bleeding to coalesce and paint the ground a scarlet shade of my pain.

Writing Workshop Week 4: A Narrative Imperative

How to treat a kicked dog

It starts with a word, a flinch; stupid, call him that, watch him shrink and there it is, the thing that called, the spark that drew, star over manger, hello, it’s me: the reason. Stupid, idiot, moron, imbecile, thick, dope, fool. I see you, he hears and you say, and he believes because you speak gospel already writ. Poor boy. 

Touch him. Take the cigarette from his lips to smoke yourself; brush ash from his collar; cup the side of his face and remind him the phoenix must burn to rise; administer the sacrament: your breath in his mouth, water to wine to blood to body—evidence but never proof. This is God speaking, Moses, Abraham, Job, blind Samson; are you there? 

Hate him. He is disgusting, pathetic, worthless, hopeless, brainless, stupid, so low, an ant couldn’t limbo under him, and what is he without you, less than even that. Belief in his shaking hand, belief in his widened eye, belief in the knee that is bent, the head that is bowed, the back that doesn’t come straight. He clings, so abandon; return like the arctic sun in summer, leave before he’s had enough. 

Never give him enough. 

Tell him to make miracles—but you’re God, aren’t you the one who should don’t you know how this works? God doesn’t love, not without worship, prostration, blind fucking obedience; ultimate threat: excommunication. So here the miracle comes and you perform a miracle of your own. One word: yes, and oh Christ, is this the time, but it’s never or nothing, and never isn’t nothing, only someday indefinitely deferred. Stupid idiot. 

And he’s yours, broken and breaking more, shattered and nevermind the glue, stitches ripped out and stuffing everywhere, transfiguration via explosion and wood chipper—oh dead boy, don’t you see what a mess you are, don’t you see no one could want you, don’t you see you’re wrecked? He sees and he knows and he swallows and hates himself more than anyone else ever could, but you’ll give him a run for his money. For him—sign the love letter that way, clod, lackwit, halfwit, nitwit, dummy, stupid, so he can read it. No other language passes your lips and why should it? That’s not how you treat a kicked dog. Wind up your leg, oh Lord. 

Kick him again.

For this week’s writing exercise, I sat down to imagining “girlness,” I was drawn to a very young character in my WIP: the daughter of one of the heroines. I imagine her here a little older than she is in the current story. She is disabled, realizing her asexuality and understanding that her status as a “natural child” will always mark her in early 19th century America. The standards that set her apart aren’t going to dismay her, though. Embracing our personal differentness without saying we’re sorry, especially for women and girls, is also a way to break the rules.

Thank you for including me – and all of us – in this opportunity @bettsfic and @books. It has been a great opportunity for me to dive deeper into so much that I love about writing.

Being born unable to hear came with a lot of rules. She knew that instinctively, never being told. Smile when people’s lips moved, even though they make no effort to be understood. Avoid nodding. They might be asking for something you cannot or will not give. Stick to your own, if you can. They make accommodations for you, and you for them.

The school for the deaf was far away. It was on a river, but nothing like the one back home, and the people were as cold as the weather. Dyed in the wool Protestants from Puritan ancestors, they wore their collars high and their expressions sour. Nothing like the people back home who she knew, again instinctively, her teachers thought of as indolent and lazy. Easy words of misunderstanding and dismissal.

She was called Joy here, even though her name was really Joie. The teachers corrected her with the signs for J-O-Y when she wrote her name in French at the top of her parchment. She would have to cross it out and write the hated letters given in terse movements of fingers gnarled by hard scrubbing and a lack of moister. These women seemed to have no joy, and she was often surprised that they could even spell the word.

Knowing another life, full of people who loved and accepted her for who and what she was, did not soften the hard edges. She came to the school at age ten and now, two years later, she counted days rather than months. Her mother, with a heart in the right place, said that five years away from all she loved would be enough. Seven, though, would be better. Joie wanted out now, and if her mother knew what they told her here she might agree.

Women could not, according to her teachers, achieve more than hearth and husband, home and children. They drilled this into her and her eager classmates. These girls, for the genders were separated in and out of class, giggled and passed notes about boys. Joie didn’t see the attraction. Boys were fine to talk to, and run after in a game of tag. Some of her finest friends were boys but Joie didn’t understand why girls fussed over them. Most of all, she knew she never wanted to marry.

She avoided telling anything but the most obvious when asked about her family, too. The people at this place would mock her for a mother who was a sea captain, an aunt who practiced medicine and a father she did know. Their rules said everything about her family was upside down and sideways. Everything about it was incorrect.

Her own ambitions, also unspoken, were wrong too. Joie dreamed of making her own way in the arts. Her love of portraiture bloomed here, perhaps the only thing that did besides the climbing roses on the shady side of the girl’s dormitory. She hoped to make a life for herself with her talent, and to one day say she had painted every rich Creole lady and praline seller back home. They all held their own fascination, and deserved a place in posterity.

Like the roses that chose the difficulty of a different path in the shade, but managed still to bloom in profusion each year, Joie imagined thriving. Against the odds, and all the rules, she saw herself thriving on her own. Like her mother who could aim and prime a cannon and her aunt who could save lives with surgery, their Joie would succeed. Just five more patient years, and the rules would all but be forgotten.

Week 3: Stories of a Place

A long finger of water dripped from the side of the boat—recently bailed and cleared of spiders—as the girls hopped in, one from the dock, the other from the lake. It was easier that way. One of them in the water to help guide the boat out of the shallows, away from the rocks and weeds and out into the emptiness ahead of them. Since it was dark, freshwater eels were awake, and they freaked Tracey out but not Meg, so it was Meg who guided the boat out before scrambling over the side.

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Curious that you should mention New Orleans in your post this week, Betts. It was the first place I thought of when I saw the assignment, and the only place I ever long for aside from the sea. So I chose a little musing from a legend of that place who features prominently in my WIP. My gut tells me he was not the kind of man to muse much, but fiction is for standing things on their head, isn’t it?

He would always think of the city as home, though he was not born here and rarely spent much time living within the ramparts. His home was in wilder places, Barataria, Galvez and soon somewhere even further away. He stopped on the cypress plank sidewalk and closed his eyes, breathing deep as if he might be able to catch one last memory with the smells all around him.

The Mississippi River gurgled by beyond the levee. It wasn’t an illusion that the river ran higher than the solid ground he walked on. That was always the conundrum of this place: how did she stay above water? He laughed to himself as he looked to the street with its muddy puddles of standing water. “Sometimes you do not, eh ma belle?”

Swinging his cane, he continued to walk west toward the heart of the city. He tipped his hat, a formless beaver topper with a wide brim that kept his ears warm in the gathering cool, to those he passed. Soon it would be winter and time to move on, but a few more days in this mysterious, sunken place was worth his time.

It was then, as he passed people with a silent greeting, that he realized no one seemed to recognize him. Once, possibly a lifetime ago, he had been famous. He was called a savior of the city then, as were his previously maligned comrades. Even Major General Andrew Jackson gave him thanks by name in a grand speech to the city’s populace. He and the men he called brothers were elevated from hellish banditti to heroes. A brief moment it seemed, but one worth remembering.

The smell of fish stalls and river mud mingled as he drew closer to his city’s center. Women barked out the quality of the catch on the tables before them in loud, common voices. Close by the oystermen from Grand Isle did the same, making a cacophony of eager sound. Every one of them was vying for the American dollar which was still new to this place where reales and picayunes had long been standard currency.

“We are not what we were,” he said, shaking his head and waving to the vendors while passing by.

He turned left onto a street that rose subtly away from the river. Here homes took the place of the businesses on the levee road. The brightly painted shutters of each reminded him of tropical birds standing still in lush trees. Nothing was quiet here. The wind off the river blew the sounds of market day up the street, and the homes sang out the colorful songs of those who lived there.

Thinking about a particular home, where he had often known welcome and happiness, he paused once again. Looking at a nearby street sign, he realized this was not Rue Conti. “Perhaps for the best,” he thought to himself. “What good would it do to trouble Madame Docteur after all? I am no longer welcome in the bosom of her family.” A rueful chuckle rumbled in his throat. He adjusted his cutaway, made of mulberry serge, and continued on.

His introspection kept him from attention to the street, and it was only at the last moment that he jumped back to avoid the spray of mud that flew up behind a buggy pulled by two horses. He looked over, imagining the slight was purposeful, before realizing that he did not know the carriage.

“You are still agile, my brother.” The voice was familiar and would have been soothing without the reference to his age. “I am most impressed.”

“Enough of that, Pierre. You needn’t gloat for I find that you will always be older than I.”

“Such is the fortune of our birth.” Pierre, clothed in a black redingote that was beginning to show its age, stepped to his brother. He smiled, causing his left eye to close involuntarily. This facial anomaly was a lingering sequela from a stroke Pierre suffered years before. “Are you ready for church?”

“If we must.” He took the arm his brother offered him. “The need for Mass does not stir within me anymore.”

“Nor I, but it will keep the ladies of our household happy.”

He did not reply to this but looked ahead to the Place des Armes and the great Cathedral of St. Louis beyond. It was an imposing structure, shining white in the gray sunlight of autumn. Even though he had no heart for the Church itself, he felt a fondness stir within his chest at the sight of this building. “It is the heart of our home,” he said without thinking.

“What was that now?” Pierre turned to his brother with a quizzical glance.

“Give it no thought.” He looked up at the sky and then tugged at his brother’s arm. “Come along now, frère. It will soon rain, and Mass will not wait as we know.”

Pierre chuckled, put his curiosity aside and hurried across the square still arm and arm with his brother.

Week 3 of writing workshop with @bettsfic & @books

Stories of a place:

The place I wrote about was Rokkō Island in Japan, and the surrounding area where I used to live.

I only used the common facts that anyone could find out.

1. The Rokkō Liner is an automated tram that transports people from the mainland to the manmade Rokkō Island.

2. Kobe was hit by a devastating earthquake in 1995.

3. Rokkō Island was made by taking the top off nearby mountains and compressing them to form new land in the ocean.

Tangled Up In Blue:

The tram snakes its way across a thin stretch of vibrant water, a thousand crystalline waves dance far below its metallic carapace. Inside, it carries precious cargo. The kind of cargo that thrums with the rush of blood and the spark of life, the kind that reads the morning paper and taps away at their cellphones. The tram is a noble beast, and it carries its task of transport out with no direction, no driver at its helm. It’s an entirely automated system, ferrying travellers from the densely packed mainland Sumiyoshi to the equally dense Rokkō Island. A commuter tram for many, as Rokkō Island houses few attractions and the heavy boom and bustle of harbours echo from its shores. This island is a freak of nature. It has been stitched together by the hands of mankind, mountains ripped from the earth and shoved into an orderly rectangular form. A picture perfect piece of the modern industrial world.

The tram, the Rokkō Liner, announces its destination to the passengers in singsong Japanese and again in a similarly musical yet somewhat mechanically clumsy English. Many, many foreigners, live and work on the island. Stacked into towerblocks and gated housing complexes, these expats make their livings in finance, shipping and translation. The early dawn illuminates a sea of suits, Japanese and foreign salarymen shuffling to work. Their faces are lined with stress and their company-issued tie clips shine in the newborn sunlight. One of them trips and falls, his briefcase letting loose a deluge of papers onto the pristine pavement below. He looks up at the sky, a tangle of telephone and electrical wires crisscrossing from granite apartment to granite apartment, and beyond that a vibrant cloudless blue. His suit is scuffed and he’s grazed his palm, but no one stops to help him up. So he’s left to shake himself off and pick himself up, as his spreadsheets and quarterly reports are pulled away by the soft morning breeze. He sighs and that too is snatched away by the wind. His boss isn’t gonna like this one bit.

His boss, the one who requested those quarterly reports to be on his desk by nine am at the latest, is sitting on the Liner reviewing a book his wife recommended to him, on Goodreads. He’s giving the thing, an American book called All The Pretty Horses, five stars. He’d sat down to read it one evening, with a glass of port in one hand and a cigarette in the other. After three refills of port and eleven more cigarettes he was done and, despite his insistence to the contrary, there were tears in his eyes. And tears freely flowed again when he conversed with his wife about the book over breakfast. Something about the book’s message of freedom and hope was inspiring, and made him hark back to the days of his youth. He was once a young revolutionary student who campaigned to end uniforms and for the school to stop getting funding from the nearby American airbase. He used to be a free spirit, used to wear a beret to school and sport Groucho Marx style glasses. Used to quote Karl Marx to teachers and Keats to fellow students. Used to organise film festivals, write in the local newspaper and mitigate street showdowns between young Yakuza members. And then he’d grown up. Life had caught up to him, forced him into a suit and pushed him through the sliding doors of a faceless office building. And he’d lost the joy in his life, crushed by timesheets and shipping mandates.

The review he was writing, on his wife’s account, was full of beautiful prose and cascading metaphors. He unleashed his creative streak, the one the grindstone of society had oppressed, and crafted an excellent essay-like review of McCarthy’s book. While writing this, his mind filled with such raw emotion, he let loose just one more tear. The teenager sitting across from him pretended not to notice him wipe it away with his shirtsleeve, which had been neatly ironed the day before by his wife.

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Writing Workshop Week 3: Stories of a Place

3 facts of public information:

• Puntan Dos Amåntes, or Two Lovers' Point, overlooks Tumon Bay in the north of Guam.
• The legend varies depending on who tells it, but they all agree that two lovers who were unable to be together tied their hair together and leapt to their deaths on this point.
• There is a bell that matches other points around Japan that share the same story.

3 facts of private information:

• The weather could not have been more perfect that day.
• I was there with my father and brother.
• Far below the cliffs swam a pod of dolphins. It was my first time seeing them.

We visited Puntan Dos Amåntes on one of the first days we were on Guam. From the moment I stepped off the plane I felt like I was home in the most bone-deep and sincere way possible a child of my tender years could endure. The smell of the jungle mixed with ocean, the impossible blue of the waters, and the soft sway of the palms conspired to draw tears from my eyes every time we left the hotel room. I couldn't explain it then and I can barely explain it now; it was like the island was asking me where I had been all this time.

Two Lovers' Point was the capstone of a beautiful park above Tumon Bay. Though it is the most popular spot for tourists on Guam, I don't remember any crowds or really anyone other than my father and brother being there. I remember a statue and a viewing area that looked different than it does today. I remember looking out at where the ocean met the sky. I remember my father telling me to look down, that there were dolphins below us.

I had never seen dolphins outside a zoo before. These ones were so far below us that it was hard to see them in the shadow of the cliff, but then they started jumping. These creatures, jumping for what I can only imagine as joy, seemed to be putting on a show for themselves, for how could they see us so far above?

Writing Workshop Week 3: Stories of a Place

NB: I don't write poetry. And yet here is a poem (of sorts).

I get off the tube at Embankment and
Ride the escalators coming all the way up
From the deep, hot Northern line, or Bakerloo,
Or the shallower, chummier District and Circle;
Leave the station on the southeast side and turn right,
And go yet further up, pushing my burning legs
Without stopping up the flight of stone steps to the bridge—
Take a deep breath of dirty grey air to scour out my lungs
After underground's muggy heat.
My shoulders drop.

The first bridge across the Thames here was built
By Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who perhaps predictably
Built it a suspension bridge. It didn't last as long
As his famous railway, but the same chains that held it up
Now keep aloft the Clifton Suspension Bridge,
Across the Avon Gorge, over a hundred miles west
On the other side of England.

Being from the West Country, I knew Brunel
Long before I ever rode his Great Western Railway
All the way to London. Now redundantly his statue sits
Casual as anything in the middle of Paddington,
As if the station's very vaults and marble didn't
Spell out his name.

I stretch my legs into the familiar fast walk
That lets my stride eat distance without seeming to hurry.
This London pace is familiar, like a winter coat in October
Pulled from under the bed. I don't live here now,
But my body still remembers.

The footbridge thrums under our feet, the crowd from the station.
A long way below, the massive coffee-brown expanse of the river,
Its sucking mud, and only a handful of feet beneath that,
Brown too, as brown as the detective's pipe in the collective imagination,
The rush and thunder of the Bakerloo line.

While Brunel's Hungerford Bridge barely outlasted him,
This matched set of footbridges, flanking in the middle
The Southeastern main line, are younger than I am. Apparently
They had to dig the foundations by hand so they didn't
Crack the shell of the underground tunnels below
By unwittingly disturbing one of the bombs from the war
That sleep secretly in the river mud.

When I reach the middle of the bridge, I slow to a dawdle,
Stop, lean my forearms on the grubby white railing.
A saxophone wails Baker Street from further down,
And couples take smiling, windblown selfies together, as
A train rumbles south behind us.

I look east and downriver. See Waterloo Bridge, traffic
Like tiny beetles crossing and recrossing,
See the to and fro of people on the South Bank, and see
The skyscrapers of the Square Mile and Canary Wharf beyond,
Small as toys from here.

They've moved Brunel, in the years since I left,
From his pride of place, between the platforms
And the steps to the underground, to between
Platforms eight and nine. They moved Paddington too—
The bear, I mean—and the first time back I looked for him
To sit and drink a coffee on his plinth by the shops,
And I was lost.

In the middle of this wire-thin span across the fat old river
I too am small, even to myself, small and light enough
To be lofted by the wind like the Banks' kite, soaring up
Into the clouds and exhaust fumes and plane trails
Above the city.

Paying Attention

So, my observations for week two come to you courtesy of my sound-focused brain, plus the fact that I have been (sadly) attending a lot of funerals lately.

A couple of weeks ago, I couldn’t step outside without hearing birds singing like crazy, but I noticed that it’s a lot quieter lately. However, cicadas are making up for the lack of birdsong. I noticed, too, all the landscaping, mowing, and construction sounds in my neighborhood. The whine of a weed whacker, the bassier sound of a mower, rattling stones in the bucket of a payloader. This made me look up and notice a dead tree that needs to be taken down and beyond that, the cemetery up on the hill past my house. It’s an old cemetery and not very active, but just last week, I attended the funeral of a family member. That made me think about the eulogies I’ve heard, and the things that people do and don’t say at funerals.

Below, the piece inspired from these observations. 

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wrote this for week two of the workshop thru @books w @bettsfic , image ID under the cut

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