Daily Short Story: Friday Edition

Autumn

Fall turned Pia vibrant like the trees lining the street. She thrived off of romance. When he forgot it, she invented some for the both of them.

Walks quickly turned grudging, though, and she worried at the ache in her chest. She felt bruised like a fallen leaf, sap running dry and dull down her shoulders.

Maybe, a whisper suggested, it wasn't really love. 

Not-real-love, as it turned out, just wore her down. The two of them faded away. She lost her autumn color.

She ducked away in a secret place, wishing she hadn't glanced his way, asked him for a midnight walk, worn a blue dress and danced.

He didn't seem to mind.

(A Little Late) Daily Short Story: Thursday Edition

The Weather Up There


Jonah Simmons is too tall.

"Getting to be such a big boy," his mother crooned nervously to him in his infancy, hitching the diaper up around his chubby legs.

"He's tall for his age," said irritating acquaintances, eyeing Jonah as he hulked miserably beside his mother, caught in the act of shopping for extra-long jeans.

"He takes after his father's side," Mrs. Simmons whispers in the cool cucumber-sandwich air of the tea room. 

The girl across the street has hair the color of milky tea. It hangs down her back like a rippling curtain, a place to hide as she peeps shyly out at Jonah. They talk over the white fence that boxes in the Simmons' yard, their fingers searching between the spaces where the paint has grown gritty with dust. 

The girl's name is Mia. Her smiles flashes through the curtain of hair. He can see the curl of her eyelashes, the freckles on her nose, a smudge of makeup on her cheek. 

"How tall are you?" Jonah whispers through the fence. 

Mia's eyes smile a secret as she whispers the number back. 

Just his height. 

Daily Short Story: Wednesday Edition

Spring

"He likes you," the whisper told Pia. Her heart nudged forward, opening like a blossom in spring.

The bud strained to open. Her rib cage was outlined in vines. They snaked down her arms, tendriling around her fingers and bursting into bloom when he first kissed her. 

Dizzy, she spun in breathless circles, unconscious of the blossoms in her hair. The petals sloughed off like skin.

Soon, though, Pia grew up. When he left three months later, she didn't feel terribly sorry. The flowers were already closing, storing away like sleepy eyes. 

Daily Short Story: Tuesday Edition

July 16, 2:19 PM



Sharon Hicks was dismayed to recall, very suddenly one tepid afternoon in mid-July, that she was forty-three years old. The moment hit her suddenly, at exactly 2:19 PM, just as she was bending over to water her azaleas.

She had no family to speak of, save two garden koi and an elderly cat named Mark. Strangely, the thought didn't depress her the way it should have. Her birthday had just passed last Tuesday, and last Tuesday was recent enough for her to still feel significantly forty-two-ish. Her hair might be turning gray, but overall Sharon felt she had aged rather gracefully, and if she had gained a pound or two--well, the occasional midnight caramel was worth it. 

She had dated a couple men over the years, and nice ones, too. Jerry, came the nostalgic whisper. Jerry had been nice--warm, romantic, a great dancer. She'd forgotten the others' names now, but she knew she had enjoyed herself. 

She'd always wanted children. She loved Mark, though, a scruffy tortoiseshell with frizzled whiskers and cloudy yellow eyes. Sometimes, as she lay in bed in a delicious sunny-morning doze, she'd feel him land lightly at the foot of the bed, then the whump of air as he padded along her comforter and nosed his way under the crook of her elbow. She'd crack open an eye, see his familiar squashed-ear, crimped-whisker ugliness, then sigh and snuggle up until noon. 

But it would be strange, if anything was different. Well....Sharon paused. She was sure that having a man in the house would be nice. He'd come home in the evening for dinner. Afterward, they'd curl up on the couch and talk, and if she snorted a little when she laughed, he'd press a reassurance into her palm that said he thought it was sweet. She could imagine Jerry doing that. Jerry, she recalled, had had a rather idiosyncratic laugh, himself. 

Sharon stood stock-still on the edge of her driveway, watering can in hand. When Mark's wet nose touched her ankle, she jumped a little. 

Strange, she thought as she patted his grizzled head. I don't know why I thought about all that. 

She lowered her watering can to the ground and began to pick through her flower bed for stray leaves. She liked to keep her flowers clean; the new blooms were all the tenderest of colors. 

After a while, her thoughts spiraled away like water from the sprinkler in favor of the steady, familiar work. Beside her, Mark rolled in the soil, tail flopping from side to side. When a couple of the neighborhood kids rode by on their bikes, calling high greetings across the road, Sharon lifted her trowel and waved. 

Daily Short Story: Monday Edition

Riding Red


"Don't go into the woods," whisper the flutter of wings in the dovecote rafters. The words fall dry and cool to the floor, mingling with feathers and stale straw. 

The doves are mimicking Rosie's aunts. On this side of the mountains, Rosie has heard, they're mimicking-birds, and they always mock the voice they hear the most. On Jonagold Farm, that is certainly the voices of her three aunts.

"Dangerous. Dark trees, no straight paths."

"Terrible wild animals."

"Poor Amos," whispers Aunt Miranda through tightly pursed lips. "Leaving his child fatherless."

"My father died in the woods," Rosie tells the boy. It's dark in the dovecote. All she can see is his nose, outlined in moonlight, and his eyes gleaming silver. Everything else is shadow. 

"It's not dangerous," he says.

Rosie holds her breath when his hand touches hers, his palm as rough as a stone. 

"I'll show you the way."

Just a little bit starry-eyed

Can I just pause for a moment and talk about what a lovely weekend this has been?

Last weekend had some pretty horrendous aspects to it, discounting the Easter Vigil and its beauty. I had another paper due, and it was consuming my life. There's something kind of awful about being so busy that eating, sleeping, and bathing are no longer priorities. But, yes, that's the way college life sometimes goes.

But this weekend. Oh my.

My blog has gotten more and more personal lately, but I'm going to allow it to swing that way for a moment.

On Friday, I headed to Pittsburgh with some friends for an Owl City concert. There is something surreal about seeing someone who inspires you so much only fifteen feet away.

But get this--Saturday night was even better.

It's totally unprofessional to talk about this online, right? The internet is forever, after all, and I'm supposed to be blogging about writerish things. So I'll make it a story.

Once upon a time, a really nice boy asked a semilonely girl out. Since they were college freshmen and not permitted to have cars, he borrowed his roommate's. She borrowed a floral dress from a friend (isn't it helpful to live with so many other girls?) and skipped other commitments to get ready, long before she actually had to. By the time 6:00 rolled around, she was pacing back and forth and nervously chipping away her nail polish. 

She uses the word 'lovely' a lot when she writes, but it's so suitable. Especially for this evening. 

While I Should be Sleeping....

Today, I was drifting around my room trying to clean, and I started thinking about The Default Sweater. Draft two is coming along, slowly--I have my roommate yelling at me to finish, but right now I'm working through it backwards.

Yeah. Backwards.

I guess TDS sort of falls into a romance category. If it were a movie, it would probably be a rom-com, but I feel odd about that. I think if I approached the story with a romantic comedy attitude, I would come away feeling awkward and embarrassed and stumbling over my own feet. Though I've dated a couple guys, romance has always been a bit of a mystery to me, so the story would be silly, straight from my imagination. The thought of imaging Erin as some desperate woman on a manhunt makes me cringe.

In a way, this goes back to several posts ago, where I talked about female characters. I don't think I set out, exactly, to write a typical romance story. At the time I started TDS, I was a junior in high school. I didn't have a boyfriend. I was significantly younger than the protagonist. The only thing I really had to power the story was a familiarity with the vulnerable feeling of wanting to be loved, and wanting to learn about boys and romance and, yes, Erin's hangup, kissing. However, her preoccupation with getting her first kiss is not just to pass a milestone, and that's why she ultimately doesn't want it from just anybody.

(On a side note, I could write a whole blog post on the invention of the kiss. Kisses are so unappreciated and underestimated. What were they thinking when they tried it out for the first time? And what do you do with something that makes no sense and yet means so much?

This is why the conflict in TDS is perfect for me.)

That, therefore, is my Erin. I don't think it's a "rom-com" as much as a heart story, maybe even a bit of a fairy tale. Erin has a preoccupation with those, too! I love the idea of a contemporary, real-world story that can be written as a fairy tale, taking a measure of that sugary sweetness into a place that's so often unromantic. I love the idea that everything can mean something. There's a reason fairy tales endure, after all. We still understand them in the knock of our nitty-gritty reality, and there's that one grain of truth, and we read it, and think ahhh, there it is. 

So maybe it's something in between--not a fairy tale, perhaps, but distinctly fairylike.