Using as inspiration the beautiful art of Carianne Mack Garside, a flash fiction or thought through the days of the year. Click on the images to get to the artist’s page, where you’ll find a bit more about the piece and the source of inspiration. Please note that each month’s work here has a separate page (links are in the right sidebar).
90/365 FEELING SATURATED AND GOOD
Word Count: 348
I slogged through the marsh to get to the small pond where cattails grew. I wished I’d worn my boots. The water left from melting spring lay hidden just beneath the wind-swept grasses, puddling around each foot as I stepped.
The water wicked itself up from the bottom of my jeans to just below my knees. I felt the breeze blow cold and bitter on my legs. The cattails, though, were supposed to be well worth the perseverance.
As I neared the edge of the pond I could see the cattails stiff and strong and tall. I readied my bag and knife and headed around to the right, where they seemed unshattered by the hard winter.
The pond was sparkling in the late afternoon sun, thawed and coming back to life. I’d wandered out to within its reach, unknowing until its cold tongue licked my ankles. In surprise, I looked down and saw a gold patch of weeds or something just below the surface a few feet away. I squinted, stretched, hesitant to go in deeper since I had a long walk home and the clouds punched at the sun to cool the day.
It looked like a child, an infant, and I held my breath, afraid and yet knowing I must, must know for certain. I waded in deeper, careful of the slippery mud that sucked at my feet, until I was close enough to see clearly and exhaled in relief.
A swirl of golden pond weeds, clumped in the shape of a human child, complete with trails of swaddling cloth wisping away. It already decomposed itself as the soft waves from my own movement disturbed it and was looking more like a seahorse, its arms now disappeared into its body, its long snout and curled tail swimming away.
Sometime late that summer, sitting and rocking in the cool dim of my den, rubbing the bulge of my belly and wondering who and what it will be, I see the cattails outlined sharp and bold against the light from the window; always and ever, cattails alone.
~~~
89/365 CAN’T DO MUCH MORE THAN THIS
Word Count: 614
The day the old magnolia tree became a fire-breathing dragon I was doing laundry and didn’t notice until it had pulled its feet out of the ground and stood there drying off from the morning rain like a butterfly come out of its cocoon.
It was astonishing to say the least. The colors of spring purple and pink flowers–now scales–open up to the sun. The new green leaves just waiting to pop. The branches all gnarled into a skeleton that sang of bravery and endurance. It was awesome to see.
I watched it take unsteady steps around the backyard, testing its balance, adjusting and learning just like a toddler would do. Then it curled up and slept for most of the day, exhausted, I imagine, from the rigors of metamorphosis.
I was a little afraid, but just had to go out there and see it up close. Oddly enough, in its current stance, it looked just like a magnolia tree. I approached it carefully, quietly, ready to run back to the safety of my own kitchen if it so much as looked like it might wake up. I had left the back door wide open and had my running shoes on.
From deep within it came a rumbling that at first I worried might be a growl then realized it was only the soft snoring any dragon might make. I grew braver and reached out and touched one of its scales surprised to find it so soft, like petals. It was incongruous with its rough and sturdy frame. And quite unexpected, from all that I’d read as a child, it didn’t smell foul or evil at all, but rather like new spring flowers.
I hated keeping the secret from my family but I worried that my husband might call the police or the zoo, or worse, try to kill it. The kids, I knew, would enjoy it but their interest would wane, just like it had with the gerbil and then the turtle that got lost somewhere in the house and never was found. The youngest would torment it and from what I’d seen of it, this dragon was not your usual dragon, but a playful, sweet innocent, unused to the cruelty of a two year-old.
Not every day, but almost, I went out and watched it romp around and it got used to me. I’d sit out there with my morning cup of coffee and a cigarette (another secret I kept) and it learned to trust me. It took a while, but Maggie (as I named it) soon came over to me out of curiosity I think, because it thought it was the only one who smoked. It watched me, and learned how to adjust its own flame down from a crazed giant Bic lighter to a gentle wisp of smoke when it was happy.
Then came the day, decades later, when with the kids grown and gone we decided to downsize to a smaller house closer to where our youngest lived. The hardest thing to leave behind was Maggie. I stroked its still-soft scales and scratched its nose lightly as I explained the best I could that we’d be leaving. I don’t know what brought it to life that day so many years ago, and I hoped it would have a friend among the new family that would be moving in. But I suspected different.
Maybe it will come back again some day, but the last morning I spent with my dragon it softly went to sleep as I pet it. When I got up to leave and turned around, it was just an old magnolia tree.
~~~
88/365 SATURATED
Word Count: 128
To watch an eagle hunting is to absorb majesty and grace into your soul. It makes you want to soar, but gently.
To see the dry gray branches of the maples tip themselves in red, finger polish to accent the new dresses that they’ll wear in spring,
To watch thin wisps of clouds move as a synchronized school of fish across the sky,
To catch the scent of green sprouts pushing heads above the earth,
To breathe in a day unlike the days before, sun-drenched and filled with the song of birds that held their breath through winter’s darkness,
To feel alive and saturated with the promise of renewal, is knowing that if not for eagles, man would never have known that he could learn to fly.
~~~
87/365 CHANGING OVER TIME
Word Count: 160
Remember when I was tall? Oh yes, you must! I could reach the top shelf of the cabinets without this dumb footstool. Now I either drag it over or need to ask you to get the beanpot for me. You easily pick it up in one hand, place it on the counter without a word. That stings. You don’t tease me about my height any more. Yes, that stings.
Doesn’t your back hurt from shoveling the snow yesterday? Mine does. Well maybe not all that much. It’s just that I’m not used to bending and stretching like that anymore. At least, not in winter. No, it’s fine, I don’t need Icy-Hot on it. It’s feeling better already. Are you sure your’s doesn’t ache?
Okay, so maybe I couldn’t reach the top shelf without climbing up on the counter. Or maybe it was a different kitchen, my mother’s perhaps, not ours, not here where we’ve lived forty years.
Forty years?
~~~
86/365 CHANGING MY MIND (MY MIND CHANGING)
Word Count: 248
The sun filters through the trees, the oaks that cling to their leaves through winter, the cedars and pines too shy to shed their greenery at all. I love the dappled shadows on the ground, playing with the sleepy moss that’s softly crushed under my feet.
I’m going for a walk because it is so beautiful today. Warm and with a stillness only filled with birds that flitter high above. Red ones–what are they called? And larger blue ones that shriek and remind me of the sound the clothesline makes as my mother pulls in the clothes. Shriek! Shriek!
That’s the house where I was born. The last house on this street before the woods. It’s my neighbor’s house. It’s large and the prettiest shade of soft yellow.
Something is singing up over my head. A small brown bird but oh! Such a voice!
This yellow house here is mine. My husband’s somewhere in the back yard, raking. Or cutting firewood. I forgot what he said he was doing.
The woods are dark but the path is dappled with sunlight. We used to walk through here every Sunday. Past the yellow house where I grew up.
Something skitters onto the path just a bit up ahead. A chipmunk? A squirrel? An elephant? Yes, I think it’s an elephant. It’s gray.
I’m not sure of my way home now, I’d best turn around. And ask directions at that house right up there. It’s big and friendly. And yellow.
~~~
85/365 SPACES LEFT FOR SPACE
Word Count: 513
The tsunami washed into her mind through the eyes, ears, and voice of the media. It splashed into its own space in her mind, ebbing and flowing with each day’s reporting. In the next cell of the block, a nuclear reactor reacted in a cement vault she’d built out of words.
She sighed, shut the lid of her laptop, drained the cold coffee from her cup into the sink. Felt guilty that she had coffee to carelessly throw away. Then she got out her checkbook and wrote out several checks, notes, addresses and sealed each with a stamp that lasted forever, thinking that the world was indeed, as fragile as a square patch of paper with a thin whisper of glue. She stared at the envelopes stuffed full of fresh water, bandages, rice, and wondered if she’d done enough.
Each day she checked on the wars, the rebellions, the uprisings, the struggles, the grim tolls of death. She wore ribbons of rainbow colors pinned to her blouse, one for each cause that she cared about, feeling bad for the ones she didn’t know about but were going on somewhere, with someone, a group she felt she should voice opinion about.
She’d cry at the televised news, at five, six, seven o’clock then again at eleven p.m. Kohl-black streaks of mascara ran down her cheeks in trails like the borders of countries that could not get along. She’d started using eyeliner too, top and bottom, in honor of those women she saw screaming out from their burkhas and veils. The eyes dark and pleading, the fists clenched like a baby’s very first time, untightly, a stray finger out of line with the group.
In the morning she’d sit at the table, coffee and toast without butter–real butter that she had and so many didn’t so she felt she should give it up. And her coffee, now taken black without cream or milk because there were children who needed it more. She’d open the laptop and click onto the internet, her breath held in ready for the news of the day. Refill the brain containers with updates, open doors, enter, close doors, build new spaces to fill. The routine would begin and somehow she’d remember to drink the coffee cup dry, to pick up the crumbs with a licked finger, to wash the dishes as quickly with as little water as she could. Then she’d dress and chin up bravely, heart heavy and weighing her down, go out to work for the day.
She’d catch the news on the radio driving, as new as news could be, newer sometimes than headlines on websites, though email alerts came within minutes of an event. Sometimes she prayed in between flashes, or built new spaces to house happenings as they happened to be. It left her exhausted.
The next day it began all over again and just as on each other day, she never did see the old man in his little spot of space at the corner, his hand out, holding his own empty cup.
~~~
84/365 ABUNDANCE
Word Count: 457
She gathered all her old hair ribbons, the ball of twine from the “dump” drawer in the kitchen, and sacrificed the shoelaces from a pair of lace-up boots she hadn’t worn in many years.
She tied the ends together until she had a length of cord that looked to her to be about enough, and made a loop and knotted one end. Then she went outside, sat down on the back porch stairs, and waited.
The clouds trespassed across the bright blue sky, some hand in hand, some lone and stumbling. She was looking for the softest, the fluffiest, the whitest she could see that she’d be able to reach and lasso.
Twice she went back inside out of necessity and hurried back out, afraid she might miss the perfect one. Her neck ached from looking up. She finally brought out a book and a sweater, as the late afternoon breeze teased her with its breath.
She was deeply absorbed in her reading when a shadow covered and colored the page, changing the words with a much deeper meaning, adding an undertone of a sly and sinister mood. She looked up.
There it was, a cloud, not white but biliously yellow and green, humped like an overweight woman held in by waistbands and bra straps and stretched buttonholes. She stood up and slowly swung the lasso in a circle the way she’d learned when she was a kid. It floated, hovered, anxious to chase and capture whatever it was flung out to catch.
With a single flick back of her arm she sent the lasso out up to the sky, sensing the speed of her prey; the timing had to be perfect.
And it was!
The cloud was stopped and yanked back a few miles in its blissfully unaware path. Taken by surprise, it rolled in on itself, tangling up further with the girl’s tightening ropes. Until, completely entangled and unable to fly, it surrendered to the gentle but firm tug down to earth. It landed in a soft thud. She ran over to where it had fallen.
It looked much smaller than she’d imagined. “Oh,” she said. “Oh.”
She bent down to look closer. She listened and thought she heard as small weeping sound. The ground was wet with rain. She loosened the cord, unwinding carefully around it. It was softer than anything she’d touched ever before. It shivered under her fingers. She loosened the last loop that bound it, though she held the cloud gently in place.
She stroked it and cooed, hoping to soothe and comfort it while she thought about things. She remembered to say she was sorry to have delayed it, and then she stepped back and set the cloud free.
~~~
83/365 ALWAYS ADD TO YOUR ABILITY TO SEE MORE
Word Count: 230
While he watched the snow flakes landed, some feet-first and some crashed headlong to the ground. Some flittered, sparkled but many who had hit hard simply lay there bleeding. Many died and disappeared.
They sent more troops onto the battlefield, until the ground could hold no more and flakes piled up as war demanded its just due. He wept for loss even knowing that this too would change, adapt, return again full circle.
Lured outside by sun-warmed air he walked the roadway down to the lake. Branches cut the sky into a stained glass window, recalling memories of Saturday confessions in the silent dimness and Sundays when the church would come alive in song and sparkling chandeliers. It amazed him the same thing could be so different. Like the branches, that in another month would burst with leaves and blossoms. The maples would send out their spinning helicopters on the first spring breezes. Some seeds would shrivel, into skeletons and turn into earth. But some would hide within it, poke their sprouts out when the cold was surely over, grow into trees themselves to send out branches like stain glass windows and helicopter seeds.
He walked a long time before he smiled and turned around. Funny, how on the way back home he noticed colors that must have been painted on the scene after he’d passed it by.
~~~
82/365 IT CAME OUT JUST RIGHT
Word Count: 228
She tried every way she knew how to snow. She started with a light dusting that quickly melted into the March warm ground. She scattered flakes like big fat feathers and they built up quickly. But this was near the end of the winter and she ran out of this size soon as most had been spent in January in a joyful frenzy over a couple of days.
She pondered the problem. She needed quantity. She pulled out bags of medium-sized flakes and waited for the wind to go away. She licked her finger and held it out, nodded, and opened the first bag and shook it gently so that it floated straight and steady. She established a rhythm that seemed to be working well.
First the fine needles of the pine trees, then the soft new buds of maples reached up and held the snow flakes in their cold fingers. Still, the ground scoffed at the blanket that she tried to lay upon it.
She got some help from the dying day and with time and dedication, the air cooled the ground enough to make it more receptive to the snowfall. Soon the grass and even sidewalks and streets were hidden by a coverlet of snow.
Mother Nature smiled. She’d wanted to wear the white dress one last time before she put it away for spring.
~~~
81/365 WORTH DOING
Word Count: 283
He was blue and she was green, nature colors, similar in temperament. They got along very well.
They met at a campus lecture on economics and discovered to each’s delight, that they both believed saving was a much smarter strategy than taking risks or buying on credit. They were likely the only two there who did. After they’d both graduated and gotten good stable jobs, Blue asked Green to marry him and she joyfully agreed.
They bought a house before they had their three children as everything was planned out and timed for the best possible outcome as far as need versus want, temporary versus enduring, the future always considered in all major purchases or financial decisions. Anything worth having was worth saving and waiting for; anything worth doing was worth doing well.
Blue had a few flirtations and a single half-year-long affair. He lost his paunch and took on a purplish cast and Green knew something was up. She asked him outright, “Have you been seeing Red?” and he just looked confused and told her no, if anything, he’d lost his anger and anxieties a long time ago.
She wasn’t going to hold her breath and pout. She wasn’t new at this, and so she waited out his mid-life crisis which didn’t last all that long. She didn’t turn with envy and he didn’t get depressed but life had changed for them both until it set itself right again.
One day he brought home flowers, hugged and kissed her and he told her that he loved her very much and asked if she would forgive him.
“Anything worth doing, is worth saving,” she said, though she didn’t feel it.
~~~
80/365 IMAGINING THE PERFECT
Word Count: 397
The sun rose large and deep cerulean blue. It was going to be a super day.
John packed himself inside his briefcase and headed out to work. He liked his job. He liked working with the numbers and making his bosses happy with his results. They trusted him, no longer needing their input to make the bottom line come out right.
John hummed as he worked, his fingers hovering like a Blackhawk over the keyboard as his mind spun through the rinse cycle and numbers stuck in place around the drum. He peeled them off and stuck them on the chart.
“Wow, that’s great, John!” said the Chief Financial Officer. The CEO agreed, once the CFO had validated the numbers with enthusiasm.
John ate the lunch he’d packed and played an online game of Tetris as he munched through a hot pastrami sandwich with melted swiss that came straight out of the small microwave oven he kept inside the briefcase. He pulled out a coke from the mini refrigerator he kept there too and unpopped the cap. Life was good. He was stacking them up well on Tetris, too.
Suddenly there was a knock on the briefcase.
“John?” he heard, though it was somewhat muffled. “John, are you in there?”
He gobbled the last bite of his sandwich, washed it down with the coke and wiped everything clean. Then he slowly lifted the top of the case and looked out. “Mr. Watson? What’s up?”
“John,” said the CFO, “we looked at these figures again and there seems to be a shortfall of millions of dollars . . .”
John hopped out onto his desk and carefully locked the briefcase behind him. He took a look at what Watson was questioning, the projected budget for the end of the year.
“I’ll get right on it,” he answered. “I’m sure there’s just a tiny slip of the finger that explains it,” he said. For nearly an hour he played with the numbers, moved columns, eliminated and added cells till the spreadsheet balanced with the number they’d approved last week.
“Here you go, sir!” he shouted to catch Watson’s ear as he rumbled by (preferring, as he did, to drive through the office in a semi tractor trailer).
Watson studied it, tried to imagine how it would play out, then grinned. “Perfect!” he said and zoomed off in a big cloud of dust.
~~~
79/365 DOING WHAT HAS TO BE DONE
Word Count: 555
I’m Princess Thundercloud and she’s Mary Sunshine and we’re off to the lake for some ice fishing. We trek through the snow, she leading the way in a blinding bright yellow puff jacket and matching hat and mittens with fluffy kitties printed all over. I’m wearing seven different shades of gray.
She’s talking a blue streak and I let the words pass by my wool-hatted head, imagining them to be dewdrops melting the world behind me and bringing up tulips and daffodils where she’s walked though. That’s how Jenny (her real name) is, warm and funny and nurturing. Pretty, too. Not me; I’m shaped like an eggplant and have the disposition of a plum already turned prune. We’ve grown up next door to each other and still get together each time we’re both home.
“Lacey, come on!” she sings out. Yes, a strange name for a vegetable but my mother had planned on having a Lacey-type baby and didn’t realize until I was two that I was who I was, at best, burlap or cotton twill.
She is stopped, turned and waiting for me to catch up. Her bucket and pole look like beach toys in her hands.
“I’m cold, Jen,” I hint, appealing to the saint who lives within her just waiting to explode out and rise up into heaven someday.
“We’ve got to do this,” she says, “it’s tradition!”
“Well it’s going to end someday anyway,” I say between huffs and puffs, exaggerated a bit for effect.
“Never!” she trills, and I swear the tree next to me shivers and does its damnedest to sprout leaves.
I get an image of her pushing her way through an overgrown forest, her hair sterling silver, her yellow puff jacket like brand new, a big happy smile on her face, and pulling a sled on which sits what looks like a shriveled purple vegetable behind her.
We head out to the center of the small pond and I set up stools and blankets while she hacks a hole in the ice. She could have just beamed a smile down to melt it and saved some energy.
Two hours of “remember when?” and other memories that make her laugh and me cringe and grumble and we’ve got a bucket in which four fish swim in shock.
“Can we go now?” I ask. We’re out of hot chocolate and my fingers are blue and brittle.
Jenny pulls out her pole, breaks it down and sticks her hands in her pockets, but she doesn’t get up off the stool. She turns to me and there are icicle tears on her chin. “Lacey, Tom left me.”
This time her words catch me like darts stuck into my heart.
“The kids?” I say.
“They’re fine. He left me everything intact. The house, the kids, life is the same except he’s not in it.” And then she starts sobbing, big heaving sobbing that echos off the edges of the pond.
I’m on my knees and holding her, rocking her back and forth, maybe too hard because I don’t know how much she needs, don’t know because in all these years, she’s never needed me. We’re like that for a while and I don’t feel cold anymore. Inside me, I’m a big ripe tomato and not like an eggplant at all.
~~~
78/365 HEALTHY EVERYWHERE
Word Count: 140
When I feel good I am sunshine yellow inside. I’ll smile and it gleams out my eyes. My words bounce and warm whatever they touch and though I can’t explain it, my hair becomes naturally blonde.
There are days when I’m iffy, gray or that muddy mix of pink trying to be green. Green is happy but transient, a hobo who sneaks between winters, reaching out tentative pearls of bud tips on trees, bursting to deep color through summer, changing coats in the bite of the fall.
I feel what I sense is around me. Birdsong starts me singing. Rain makes me cry. Words run in cursive in spirals that loop through my insides, exploring my heart, picking out partners from bins in my mind. I write what the day tries to tell me. I write the color I am.
~~~
77/365 PROCESSING
Word Count: 493
Like a squirrel I stash the nuts into the depth of memory, hoping I can dig them out again or see them grow into a story. I watch everyone, everywhere, and there will always be one or two that look plump and tasty so I blink them onto the film of my mind. Story, I know, will come later.
Sometimes they try to escape, run away and settle into a tale of a New Hampshire moon where of course, they just don’t belong. I’ve saved old Ted Brewster for that, a made-up name for a man who drove up in a truck that could’ve been any color at one time, held together with duct tape in places, but he stopped and changed my flat tire. I’ve cleaned up his overalls a bit for the pages, and he’s aged a couple of years, but he’s comfortably sitting in front of his very own ramshackle gas station smoking an unfiltered Camel.
Some of them meet up and need to be together. Like Dog Girl and Hammer Head. She walked the streets pulled along by six or seven dogs each day. A wispy girl who didn’t appear to have the strength to hold onto a Chihuahua much less the Afghan, boxer, a few terriers, a poodle, and a mutt. She seemed to be unaware she was attached to them, floating through the crowd like a helium birthday balloon. Her name is Rachel.
And Hammer Head, whom I’ve since baptized Julio, is going to be her lover. Hammerhead/Julio is my pizza delivery guy. He’s got nice eyes and deserves to be the romantic lead in a story.
So Julio has had a rough life. His father died when he was only six. His mother held three jobs to keep them fed and sheltered–he has two sisters and a brother I would think. She, worn down from life, aged quickly. Julio started stealing from the local market and Walmart’s to help out. He’s been out of jail and clean for a year when he meets Rachel.
Just when we think these two have met their soulmates, along comes . . . someone I pull out who struck me with the way he bobbed when he walked. Justin (like Justin Timberlake) has a killer smile and Rachel, being the wisp she is, is caught on the upswing of his bobbing.
Poor Julio. Right now I’ve got him waiting anxiously for her to come home. Meanwhile, via the omniscient narrator, Rachel has dropped off the last dog and is standing on the sidewalk talking to the suave and clever Justin.
Uh-oh, I seem to have hit a snag. That’s not Justin. Who the hell is that? I can see him so clearly but hard as I try, I don’t know from where or when, and worse, he won’t go away.
There’s nothing else I can do once they take over the story except watch and write down what happens.
~~~
76/365 FEELING LIGHTER
Word Count: 319
He is jogging through the woods, the old trail that’s been closed to him through the winter months.
There is a breeze that dances with the leaves, picks them up from where they’ve lain since late December, trapped by snow now melted. He notices that some are still bright green, tries to think back to September and wonders why they hadn’t changed, just dropped without a blush of color.
Up ahead the sun touches off the light frost on the brush along the path and sets it sparkling like those night lanterns people stick along their driveways. Or a Christmas mist of twinkling lights spread over bushes. With the thought of Christmas, his mood darkens, deepens. His pace is unset, unsteady. Lilah almost left him Christmas Eve.
They’ve been married seventeen years. What happens in that time to change the feelings that brings people together? For him, it likely was unrest, an early mid-life crisis making all the efforts behind him thin as air, the dreams still up ahead as heavy as a thundercloud. For her, it seemed to be the routine of it all. Even the most organized of minds appreciates a jolt now and then. A trail that forks off to an unimagined place.
And so after going through avoidance, resentment, silent festering, they exploded and actually told each other what was going on. They looked at what they had established, three kids all doing well, a home with just three more years of mortgage, jobs that had kept them more than just secure.
Then they looked ahead and what they saw was not closed doors and tunnels, but paths that wove off in all directions. Each made a choice.
With that his step grew lighter, more a steady pace. He turned to see the woman who jogged a few yards behind him.
“Hey Lilah, hurry up! Look at the sunshine on the frost up there!”
~~~
75/365 A FINE LINE
Word Count: 148
“Come to San Francisco,” he said. “You’ll love it here.”
She wondered if that meant he wanted her there. I miss you would have been clear.
“Well I can come out for a few days next month,” she said.
“That’d be great! I’ll show you the sights,” he said.
She deciphered his words as he was doing well there, glad he moved, and wanted to show it off.
“Okay, I’ll check the airlines and make reservations for mid-month,” she said.
“Great. Looking forward to it,” he said.
He wondered if she really wanted to be with him or just see San Francisco.
She wondered if she should bother packing that new sexy underwear she’d gotten just before he left. Or even make reservations.
He wondered if she’d wear that new sexy underwear.
~~~
74/365 PRAYER FOR JAPAN
Word Count: 279
In the land of the rising sun the people are strangely quiet. Women sit in lines that move by inches or not at all for a while. They are waiting to get food for the family they consider themselves lucky to have. Men climb in and around the memory of buildings no longer standing looking for sons, fathers, daughters, mothers, and wives.
At the center of town, where the daycare stood next to the cleaner’s there sits a large boat. It’s been through rough seas in its time, out to the boundaries to bring in the fish that is sold fresh all over Japan. It was sitting in port yesterday, empty and waiting.
Cars swimming in schools like white mackerel, twisting through streets, racing each other in somersaults, bobbing like buoys in the waves. White cars and trucks with an occasional red one, a blue, but mostly white, because it’s a simple color, a pure and graceful color, no match for the black raging ocean. They sit like drowned mice, or stand on their faces, lay crumpled and crowded in corners wherever the water drove them and left them behind.
A tsunami is a sneeze of Neptune, a hiccup of earthquake, the flap of a butterfly wing. In its wake it leaves waves of people, working to rebuild the world the water has taken away.
And in the aftermath, a grandmother pokes through what she thinks was her home. She was supposed to watch over him, keep him safe and now she can’t find him. How will she tell her daughter? Her daughter and son-in-law, who, despite her confusion and fears, she prays will be home soon.
~~~
73/365 TAKING IT ALL IN
Word Count: 191
She took a deep breath and inhaled the leaf nubs off the maples, the buds close to bursting on lilacs, the yellow forsythia blossoms that tickled her nose.
As she glared at small patches of leftover snow they melted into her eyes.
She was determined to walk a mile up to the park and back but her legs got heavy with branches brought down by the wind, her arms weary of carrying rainclouds she picked off the morning’s blue sky. She set down her load and studied it closely, selected wisps of fog and ate them without chewing, gnawed on a branch sweet with sap. She stretched to settle her meal and picked up the few things that couldn’t be eaten: a green mitten with stars lost by a child, a red ball unfetched by a dog.
As she walked she grew thirsty. She reached up and pulled down a cloud and sucked out the rain. Her eyes were pale from the snow. Her hair yellowed by sunshine and forsythia flowers.
Back home she skipped up the stairs, refreshed by the adventure, full of ideas she’d taken in from the day.
~~~
72/365 ENJOY IT NOW
Word Count: 387
Samantha was the swimmer in the dolphin tank on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays. Twelve-hour shifts, three fifteen-minute breaks, and all the fish she could eat. They didn’t pay for the towels and robe but they did provide the swimsuits. On Wednesday she was a shark in a sleek one-piece blue-grey. On Fridays she was a manta ray in a white and black number. But on Sundays, her favorite, an angelfish.
Though as a shark she glided through the tank like a needle and her manta ray was as graceful and sly as a ruffle of fox, when she was an angelfish she strutted her stuff, bright stripes flashing, her big eyes aware, and lips seductively puckered. With barely a slow flip of her fins and a swish wave of her tail, Samantha wove between the other fish in the tank like a goddess.
Her friend Mina who did Thursdays asked Samantha to take over her giant squid. Samantha needed the money, her rent was just upped and her car needed major repairs. She hated being the squid with it’s penis-head and its tentacles dragging like ribbons to tangle her up in the plastic seaweed, but eventually she learned to stay up off the bottom and out-maneuver the sharks–the real ones they brought in sometimes.
With the economy tanking and layoffs of fish and personnel alike, Samantha soon found herself doing seven days a week every week. The others had complained about the low pay, unbalanced diet, wrinkled skin and had left. Samantha crammed to learn the Monday eel, Tuesday’s starfish, and Saturday’s school of herring which involved wires and 650 fake herring and intricate navigational swimming.
While eventually they gave her a raise and let her live in the tank to avoid travel time to and from the display, Samantha grew tired of her job. The constant motion, the stress of avoiding the predatory sharks and the lone killer whale, the quick aging of her skin to a pale scaly blue-white, and the lack of gills all took its toll. The inevitable happened.
One Monday morning they found her belly-up in the tank, her fins nibbled away during the night, her large eyes white and bulging, and they fished her out with a net. She was never replaced.
~~~
71/365 TIME DOESN’T FLY
Word Count: 306
There were wrinkles and bulges pasted on by the Night Gnome while she slept. Her children, who should have been tucked up in their bedrooms upstairs called her long distance from cell phones at night and made her talk to little gremlins they called grandchildren. That’s what she gets for letting them play with flashlights in bed when they were little.
Her husband was sixty-three going on forty-two. Her best friend worked out at the gym every morning and had traded her love handles to the Night Gnome for champagne and honey-mixed hair. Everywhere Julie looked, as a matter of fact, people were not at the stage she thought they should be. Except her. Her minute by minute aging process was viewable in a mirror played out like a movie in slow motion.
She noticed it one night when she undressed in front of the full length mirror in her bedroom, something she normally used for checking skirt lengths or colors of handbags and shoes. She nearly shrieked for as she watched, her breasts started sagging. Her waistline bloomed outward. One by one her hairs turned grey.
It was very depressing, needless to say, so she didn’t spend much time there at all. A quick glance now and then, just to confirm her suspicions. She joined her best friend at the gym. She colored her hair. She bought cross-your-heart bras that lifted and separated. It all helped.
Nowadays she’s noticed that time has nearly stood still. Her kids come to visit and she questions them about homework. She has a crush on the young man who brings her lunch. She believes he’s going to ask her out on a date very soon.
When she wants to she dances and when she doesn’t she sits. But she never ever looks into mirrors.
~~~
70/365 BETTER IS POSSIBLE
Word Count: 354
Neruda’s Ode to Laziness sticks to my ass like a half-licked lollipop I might have sat on while I had Elizabeth down at the playground. Fingers point and giggle and I’ll go obliviously through my day with it smack dab on my behind as if it were gorilla-glued on and I won’t find it until I’m undressing at night and wonder how long it’s been there.
Evening classes are rough. I make dinner for Ted and Elizabeth and run out trailing untied laces and half-off jackets and marital communication that fades as I pull out of the driveway. It’s a race to the college, an exercise in patience to find a parking space, and a sprint to class since I usually end up so far off–off campus that I squint in the distance looking for the familiar shape of the main building and take off in that direction.
I’m only thirty-two yet I’m winded and puffing behind twenty year-olds who saunter–wish I knew how to saunter–into the room on the third floor of the new wing behind the courtyard where we’re not supposed to walk until the newly set paving stones are solidly one with the earth.
Neruda’s a kick. I love how he takes the most common of objects, emotions, feelings and flaws and lyricizes them so that you have a mini-second to recognize the punch in the gut you get from the reading just before it knocks you flat on your butt. But this, his Ode to Laziness, was a black cloud following me through my days ever since I read it.
I tried so hard to reach a goal–seeking inspiration–even as I blocked out life itself from providing some kind of clue. I thought it came from inside, looking deep inside myself. No wonder I had come up empty, for I’d let nothing useful in!
So here I sit, five night a week, taking in knowledge like an injected cell floating in a Petri dish. No longer feeling as Neruda said, “as if my ode was never going to sprout.”
~~~
69/365 OUR LITTLE SECRET
Word Count: 213
It all came down to what happened to be playing on the radio while she was spring-cleaning the house. It was salsa, lively and full of sass and bass.
She was salsa-ing her way through the living room, the duster flicking teasingly at tables and lamps, her hips seductively bumping the corners of couches and doorways. It didn’t matter much that the dust flew around in the air. It was happy and she was sure it would safely land somewhere else.
He walked in hungry and tired. Ten-hour days at the office capped by hour-long drives to and from. He dropped his coat on the back of the kitchen chair as he always did and as it always irked her when he did so and he stood there and watched her dance.
She, oblivious to her audience, moved as she had twenty years ago. She’d loved dancing then, feeling the drums in her belly, the guitar guiding her feet, her hands flowing along with the horns. Then she married a man who hated to dance.
He stepped up behind her. She turned and smiled. He put his hands on her hips and tried to follow the rhythm. Until she stopped to take dinner out of the oven, they danced.
~~~
68/365 WHEN THE TIME IS RIGHT
Word Count: 103
The bushes spring back, shedding their hats and mittens of snow. Cardinals chirrup to wake up the trees that send out buds at their branch tips testing the breeze. Birds fly in pairs, the female coos its too early, too cold yet to think of building a nest.
I walk down the driveway, cross the street to the mailbox. The snow has melted around in a patch, green points of lilies stick their noses out of the soil. How does nature know when to sleep, when to grow, and yet, with all of our own supposed superior intelligence overwhelming our instinct,
I don’t.
~~~
67/365 WHAT MATTERS MOST
Word Count: 93
Ideas flash like a matador’s cape through my life, enticing, taunting, frustrating. Red swirling circles waved in front of my eyes, “Here! Take me! Here!” and my fingers lace through the loops with joyful hope. Springs wound tight uncoil and drift loosely into a space that thickens with smoke and blinds me, stings into tears.
I drop my hands in despair, my eyes in my own disappointment. When I open my fist, all I have is what has always been there and that must be enough.
Behind me the bull paws the ground.
~~~
66/365 INFINITE TIME AND WRITING
Word Count: 115
If my words were harnessed in poems they would flow like the wind to the next line, enjambed stories unstopped by the blade of a page.
If my words were music, they’d sing both the chorus and solo, deep and irreverent as an oboe, joy trilling and climbing the stanzas like a good violin.
If what I write was a painting, pastel at the edges, bold at the heart, colors blending and swirled, unheld by gravity’s hand,
the paint wouldn’t dry in an instant but shine for a while like the new morning sky,
and float between strokes of the brush in different levels, dimensions, and depths,
to lift with the North wind and fall with the first summer rain,
and outlive the last moments of time.
~~~
65/365 CONSIDERATION OF EVERYTHING
Word Count: 174
The rain sinks into the snow, melting it by layers, last week’s, the big one before that, the ice in between, all the way down into January’s first now laying tired on the ground.
Patches of grass scattered like meteor strikes on the lawn. Puddles in the low-lying areas, refreezing at midnight into the strength of compact ice. Here is that one wild wicked windstorm, the snow strewn with tidbits stolen off branches bold enough to try to withstand it.
Just off the back porch, a spring robin’s delight: downy nest fillers of my husband’s haircut sometime in the first week of February. Too early now to start thinking of creating a family, so I hope the hair clings to its hold, ready to softly warm fragile spring eggs.
In late December I watched the snow fall, spread in a coverlet over the bed of earth. Now I see Spring cleaning, changing the sheets to the lighter weight dew of the rain. A reversal of season, everything considered in step with the change.
~~~
64/365 PLACID PANDEMONIUM
Word Count: 259
I didn’t think it could happen but some small voice inside me said try anyhow. So I leapt from the roof grabbing at sky and landed with a soft thud on a cloud.
It was awesome.
The wind blew ever so gently from the northeast and I soon found myself over the city. Philadelphia–from way up in the air–looks sparkling clean. Domes offered themselves as a landing but I was too into the trip. Streets were so perfectly straight, narrow in the back alleys, dark, sometimes the glint of sun caught by an old metal chair that someone had probably thrown out. But clean, nothing like they looked when you walked them at night, alone and cold and friendless.
I peeked over the edge, sometimes scurrying back when it thinned into wisps, trailed off on its own, disappeared into threads, then nothing. I saw my old girlfriend’s house where she was likely in bed with her new man. I wondered if she still has that lavender blanket, or the towels we bought together in Macy’s last year. I wonder if she lets him use them. I suppose it’d only make sense if she did.
I don’t remember what happened, likely a shift of the wind. The pavement so hard underneath me, the trees waving fingers above, nail-polished tips of green.
Tough. Must’ve had a good reason. Didn’t have a chance. Dead.
No, I said, no, I’m not! I just must have slipped, or maybe fell down with the rain. But they were already lighting up cigarettes.
~~~
63/365 ACCEPTING THE SUNSET
Word Count: 204
Gracefully, willfully, easing into the bands of fire of the setting sun as it brings down the curtains black and spangled with stars. The last show. That’s how I want to go.
Gray hairs came so gradually, one at a time, here and there and unnoticed until they banded into a streak. Fingers stiff in the morning relax with the day’s work. Stretching and flexing into the birds that they used to be, flying swift and soaring. Knees that have finally learned to bend to pick up heavy loads. It happens; it happens.
Old friends are more than just time-honored. Little left to say not just because its been laughed over before. Knowledge becomes wisdom, wisdom useless in spaces where letters are instant, learning is a matter of touch.
Good things become better, more cherished if they’re not forgotten. The sun that has risen a thousand times still surprises if just a shade off, a moment behind.
Voices are softer, smiles are much brighter, laughter comes from inside the soul. This is the journey, more than half over, victory in each step taken not further, but closer to the sun setting in its orangey-fire glow. This is how I want to go.
~~~
62/365 GLIMPSE OF A GENTLY MOVING LANDSCAPE
Word Count: 338
Going through the pictures she found one of the backyard taken twenty years ago when they first moved in. It looked barren, thin sprites of birch, evergreens plopped here and there like miniature Christmas trees on a white tree skirt like the layout of a Lionel train that whizzes through a toy town. It had all grown up since then.
She went over to the kitchen window but it was not enough. She opened up the door to the backyard. It was March and in the middle of its reluctant move towards Spring. The hills were gently rolling down to the woods where dark feathers of branches built in layers to block out the nearest neighbors. They’d planted pines no bigger than a toddler in the hopes of privacy invaded by new houses being built. She couldn’t see the houses now except for kitchen lights in early morning, and the flickering bluish lights of television screens at night.
The garden fence was nearly sunk beneath the winter snow. There was no trace of where the roses bloomed in a little plot of paradise it took her many years to shape into a horseshoe on the hill. Yet all around the trees had reached into the sky, reforming the horizon, raising it higher and higher and moving shadows in the summer nights to places where they’d never reached before.
She felt so small. As small as a child must feel in a crowded room of grownups. It surprised her that her small patch of earth was moving all around her, would go on without her, reshaping this same view for someone else. It would move so slowly that only a photograph could show the changes that the eye and mind would miss. Just as she had learned to live without the noise of children, streaks of snowsuits flying through the scene, and him, who she had thought would live forever, she knew that even trees someday would reach their height and new ones sprout to change the world again.
~~~
61/365 A WELCOME THAW
Word Count: 356
Spinach, yes spinach. The melting snow pulled away from a small patch of autumn-green grass and it reminded her of spinach. She hated the broccoli of trees, the lettuce of lilac leaves, and above everything else, she hated spinach.
Why did everything have a dull edge to it? Why every silver lining cloaked in a cloud? It was her, she understood that; she was an anti-Mary Sunshine, yet the world hadn’t exactly showered her with moonbeams and stars. Everything received had been earned with her blood. Everything gained was at cost. Why should she pretend to take joy in the tiniest of spring promises, the thaw of a small patch of snow that promises spring and yet realistically, will insist on at least one more dump of wet white winter.
So with spinach in mind she trudged through the snow on the sidewalk that for some reason had blown back again and again after each shoveling. This she took as a sign. Give up, it said, protect yourself, and she pulled the walls back around her, slammed and locked both doors in a carefully structured response. Her glass capsule froze into ice and she slid through her day without melting. Efficient, clear, hard-edged, popsicle-person at her best.
Three steps before she reached the end of her day at her own doorstep, she was hit splat! in the back with a snowball. It near cracked her ice wall. She turned viciously, ready for battle.
And faced a small boy in an adorably blue snowsuit, his snowflake blue and white mittens coated with evidence.
“I’m sorry!” he said, his lip quivering, “I’ve never done that before.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet,” she said, her anger cooling as it melted.
“Honest!” he said. He started to cry.
She walked over to where he stood on the small but growing patch of autumn surrounded by winter.
“Well, this snow is old and hard,” she said. “Let’s go over here, where the snow hasn’t melted much yet from the sun. She scooped up a soft fluff of snow, watched as he followed her lead. Smiled despite her best intentions.
~~~
60/365 THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT
Word Count: 350
With a photographer’s eye for detail he found the chrysalis of the Monarch Butterfly at the stem of a ripening tomato. Once camouflaged perfectly, as the tomato reddened it became visible, the soft green space capsule with its gold band glinting in the sun. He carefully cut the stem a few inches above the fruit, tied a thread to its end and suspended it from the lock of the window in his living room. He set up a tripod and several times a day he clicked an image to catch its progression.
In a few days it changed, darkening to near black, its shape elongating as its natural rhythm metamorphosed into the thing it would become. Wings sprouted, legs grew, antennae lengthened, all hidden within.
The tomato plumped and colored from yellowish orange to a vibrant blood red.
The photographer caught it all on rolls and rolls of film. Soon it came down to hours, anticipation of emergence, excitement of new form and life.
He watched as it emerged, shedding its home like a skin. A small wet clump of insect that struggled to learn its new place in the world. He watched it unfold its wings, flare them out to dry, to strengthen, to lift it up into this strange environment though its eyes were on the sun that shined through the window.
A slow flap of wings, stretching in incredible beauty. It knew it was no longer a crawling thing, but it knew it must wait, patient, each minute counting, until it could fly.
The tomato too was growing, near bursting. It too knew its time was near.
The photographer knelt close by, knowing this was a moment he was privileged to share.
The butterfly spread its wings, orange and black, like living stained glass. Once, twice, testing the air.
The tomato ripened to its fullest, and, spurred by the flapping of wings, dropped from its stem, and to the horror of the photographer (who forgot at this point to take photographs, so entranced was he by the effect), fell to the floor killing the butterfly beneath it.
(True story.)
~~~
