DREAM SCHEMES
Word Count: 260
When I was little I dreamed of being a ballerina, like the ones I saw on TV sometimes before my father grumbled and changed channels to football or baseball or whatever sport was in season when he asked my mother to go get him a beer.
When I was a little older, I asked to take dance lessons. My father bellowed and my mother explained that we simply did not have the money for such frivolities. Yet under the tree every Christmas were things I never told Santa I wanted. Clothes and books about uninteresting things and toys I never would play with.
When I was a junior in high school I picked out a liberal arts college I completely felt would be right. After the din raised and fell like dust into the furniture and covered the carpets like snow, my mother said it was distance, and yes, money too, and what was wrong with the one they’d suggested?
The years stacked up like stairs. To look behind made me dizzy and sad. My days are knife-edgy. I am an accountant who dances numbers around on a screen locked into a cubicle that stands in a line of moveable walls. I sometimes imagine myself dancing on tiptoes, floating around in the pink of my dreams. The years slice into each other and dully cut with an overused blade. My father is gone and my mother is fragile and I am living alone.
I am grown but not fully. Because I grew up still pretending at being a man.
Solid stuff. I like the complexity rendered in direct prose. And the nice bang at the end.
Thanks, Steve. I need to tweak the language still a bit, especially at the end, it sort of falls out of rhythm, but I’m happy enough with the rest of it.
you immediately had me with that voice…wonderful. “The years stacked up like stairs. ” yes. and the knives. question – because it’s something i’ve been thinking about: what’s wrong with “my days are edgy knives” rather than “edgy like knives”? i’ve developed a distaste for “like” as a marker for similes. i don’t know why. i think it’s too much like (!) waving a flag…whaddayathink?
Marcus, yes, you’ve picked up on one of the things that bothered me here and I was trying to hide from, lazy sot that I am. I too am disenchanted with the “like” form too commonly used for similes and just plain didn’t know how to get rid of it. But now that I’m been called out on it, I’ll fix it. Thank you. You are a real prick (of conscience).