The piece I wrote yesterday, “In the Belly of the Whale,” wound up being pretty short, even for flash fiction. If it is too short to be a flash, maybe it’s a flicker?
Something is going on over at the StoryADay website, and today’s prompt is not up yet. I like to at least start writing in the morning, so I’m going to make my own prompt. You can use it too or keep checking StoryADay for an update.
Day 11 Prompt: Write a story from the point of view of an inanimate object. But the story has to be about people. Tell me about the commuters passing by a statue in the park, the people who have owned a rare coin, the women who have slipped on a vintage pair of sunglasses. What stories does a cobblestone in an Italian piazza hold, or a bench along Champs Elysees? What about something ordinary, like your coffee mug, or your pen? Tell me about how it was made, about the factory workers, the delivery person, the sales clerk in the museum gift shop.
[updated]
812.54 WIL
A New Directions Paperback No. 501, ISBN: 0-8112-0765-X, Copyright 1947, printed in 1980, the one with the black and white photo on the front of Vivian Leigh doing her best Blanche DeBois. Her eyes are so far-away looking, they look painted on, like a mannequin’s, her hair in pin curls all around her face. There used to be a little circulation card inside the front cover. The pocket is still there, but the card’s long gone. Almost forty years. Not bad for a softbound book. And there’s life in her yet. You can thank the laminated cover for that.
The book has been places. And not just back and forth to the city on the L train. Not just tucked into beach bags headed for New Buffalo, Holland, Saugatuck. No, it has poked from rucksacks, backpacks, shoulder bags thrown to the scuffed linoleum floors of dressing rooms, backstage at acting workshops or community theaters, hung on hooks in coffee shops and dive bars, tossed in a heap of jackets at cast parties, dress rehearsals, and opening nights.
What fodder for a budding anthropologist. The accumulated tic marks alone. The shy penciled underlining, the bold marginalia—cues, stage directions, pneumonic devices for remembering lines—in the dog-eared pages, buried treasure of ticket stubs pinched tight in the binding.
And here, a thumbprint of hamburger grease from a young, ambitious Stanley Kowalski. The kid couldn’t act, but no one knew that yet. For one season he channeled Stanley, down to the silky bowling shirt—“Perfect!” they said, just perfect—pulled from his own closet. He didn’t need to act, he was a Stanley. And, though she had no idea, he was truly in love with the sweet young college girl that played his Stella. Why buy what you can borrow, right? And so the fresh new laminated paperback was plucked from the shelf, for the very first time, for an extended stay in the boy’s back pocket. Rechecked three times and, finally, returned late, after, by popular demand, a two-week extension of the initial run.
Then look here, from a decade on, a smudge of brown lipstick and, if you bend close and breathe deeply, the faintest whiff of CK One, traces of the girl who played Blanche that summer, in a little theater by the train tracks. They found that if they timed it just right, trimmed a bit off of the poker scene, the train would roar through the middle of Scene Four, playing the part of the streetcar, giving Stanley cover as he eavesdropped on Blanche and Stella in the next room.
A few years later, the book was in the backpack of a quiet high-school kid, his face pressed against the window of the charter bus taking his English class to New York City. The kid was no actor, but he would have made a good Mitch. His mother was dying, like Mitch’s, and he too loved a girl who was a little bit crazy. They were supposed to see the play performed that Thursday night. Instead, two planes flew into two buildings, and changed everything. The boy’s backpack, furred in white dust, lay for months on a shelf, with so much other debris, until finally a volunteer rummaged inside. There was nothing to identify the owner, except, in the front pocket, a copy of A Streetcar Named Desire. Property of the River Forest Public Library. The volunteer made a call, the boy was named, his backpack sent to his mother, and the book, slipped into a yellow envelope, found its way back on the shelf.