Tag: timed writing

“The man was cold as an albino frog.” Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury, p. 104

* * *

“The man was cold as an albino frog.” What did that even mean, Shari wondered. Paul made the comment in an offhand way, in response to her first tentative questioning. His blunt aspect could signal an opening. It could just as well be a warning to change the subject. After ten months together, you would think she could read him.

They’d arrived at the same time, tucked themselves into the corner booth by the stairs, and ordered their usual Chianti and carbonara to split–a student’s date-night splurge. Shari was in the second year of her MFA program, spending long hours scribbling away in coffee shops or typing at the old desk she’d jammed into one corner of their studio apartment. Paul was a medical student. Today had been his team’s first day of dissection. A real human cadaver. Just like an 80’s movie. Gross Anatomy or Flatliners. Things hadn’t changed much. The best way to learn to write was still to sit down and write; the best way to learn about the human body was still to cut it open and look inside.

She was morbidly fascinated by the prospect. But the thing about the frog caught her off guard. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen an albino frog. Much less felt one.”

“They had a tank full of them, in the bar I used to work at in Chicago. I had to fish out a dead one once.” She made a face. “People used to throw popcorn in. Not a good idea, apparently.”

Shari sipped her wine. She’d never actually seen a dead body. Animal or human. She kept picturing the white foamed rubber underside of Haribo frog gummies. And then that made her think of the waxy white sweet bricks of vanilla Tootsie Rolls, the blue-wrapped ones in the Halloween variety pack. She pictured a human figure composed of these two substances, scalpels slicing through it to reveal … what? Red raspberry filling? Breached cavities spilling rainbow-colored Nerds onto the metal table, coils of glistening red licorice, cloudy membranous sacs the color of blue raspberry blow pops, yellow and orange tissue spongy to the touch, like marshmallow circus peanuts.

“Hello? Earth to Shari.” Paul touched her hand gently. “Mind if we talk about something else? Trust me, it won’t do anything for your appetite.”

She smiled. “Of course. You’re probably starving.”

“I remember the young lady very well. What has this to do with me?” Bleak House, by Charles Dickens, p. 268.

* * *

“I remember the young lady very well. What has this to do with me?”

The man made a notation in one column of a steno book and, looking up, tucked the pencil behind his ear. It was an old Col-Erase, a copy-editor’s pencil, one end blue and the other red. Detective Markle hadn’t seen one of those in years.

His mother had edited the personal ads and obituaries in their local paper for decades. “All those people, Joey, seeking and seeking, never looking at what’s right in front of them.” He had a sudden vision of her, looking up from her desk, the blue tip of her pencil resting pensively on her lower lip. She’d had a drawer full of pencils like that, in slim little boxes, a dozen per box. Markle wondered if this man had a similar stash, hauled off from some going-out-of-business sale. Or maybe someone was still making the things, a rolling river of them dropping neatly from a conveyor belt , robotic hands pressing the gummed flaps of the boxes closed.

Markle resurfaced, shook his head slightly. He glanced longingly at the wisps of stem rising from the man’s coffee cup. It had been a long night.

“Well sir, the girl’s mother said she comes in here quite a bit.”

“She does. After school mostly. Sometimes on the weekends.”

“A bookworm huh?”

The man didn’t seem to think the comment required a response. Markle glanced around. It was a tight little shop, with dusty towers of used books spilling from makeshift shelves, piled so high in front of the windows that the place felt like a basement. It wasn’t someplace you would guess a junior-high-school girl would frequent.

“When would you say you saw her last?”

“Oh, I don’t know, about a week and a half ago? If you give me a second I can tell you.” The man licked his finger and rifled through the pages of the steno book. “Here, June 12. She bought this. Cash, of course.”

Markle looked. Seattle on Ten Dollars a Day.

“Seattle’s pretty far from here.”

“It is.”

“Would you please call me? If you see her. Her folks are real worried.” He handed the man his card.

“I’ll do that.”

* * *

The man waited until the tinkling bell over the door was silent, then said “You can come out now.”

The toes of two scuffed sneakers could be seen behind the stacks.

“He stopped, puzzled, and opened his hand, examined his palm.” Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman, p. 261.

* * *

He stopped, puzzled, and opened his hand, examined his palm. What she’d placed there, heavy and cool, folding his fingers around it and giving them a slight squeeze as she turned away, was a key.

Looking up, his eyes met hers for a split second, before she disappeared into the crush of people on the concourse. He made as if to follow her, but saw in an instant that it was hopeless. The crowd spilled forward, a river breaking free of a dam, down half a dozen platforms and onto waiting trains, some already whistling and chuffing, like racehorses anxious to start from their gates. He would not find her again. Not today.

He cursed himself, silently, for not grasping her arm, pulling her to him. He’d been afraid of making a scene. But with all this chaos, he might have gotten her safely away from  here.

It was a large brass key. Not modern. An old warded lock key, with a filigreed bow. The scrollwork there suggested, possibly, a stylized letter “G.” The rectangular bit was broad and flat, with little notched cutouts branching across its surface but never meeting, like a tiny map showing the dead-end passages of a garden maze. He had seen a key like this, once before.

“You can’t accuse her of not facing facts, can you?” A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle, p. 27.

* * *

“You can’t accuse her of not facing facts, can you? It’s what she does, after all.”

“Sure. But facts and inferences drawn from facts are different.”

James looked up from his microscope. “So what are you saying?”

At the next workstation Joe screwed two halves of a plastic petri dish together, affixed it with a label, and slid it into an empty slot in a large gridded tray. “I’m saying, James, that FALDA is results–driven.” He articulated the last two words carefully, but quietly, Stressing their significance.

James thought about this for a moment, then began typing figures into the wireless keyboard he used with his tablet, which never left his side, in or out of the lab.

They all had one. It was Compact protocol. Keep your data with you. Upload it at the end of the day to a secure server. Researchers could not access each other’s data, could not even access their own data, except through the official weekly and monthly reports, which were notoriously cryptic.

The idea behind FALDA (the Fibril Analytics-Led Data Assemblage)  had been a simple one. Let the computers decide the course of the research. Scientists had been looking for a cure for cancer for decades with–in Joe’s view–only modest success. The problem was that experiments going on in different labs around the world, with different sources of funding, testing the various hypotheses of ego-driven researchers, were uncoordinated, full of redundancies and inefficiencies.

With FALDA, the strands of data were fed through a uniform series of algorithms. Researchers around the world were suddenly working together, waking up each morning to slightly altered or sometimes completely new instructions, based on FALDA’s high-powered processing of the previous day’s global data dump. No researcher directed the course of the experiments. And only a select few on the Review Council had access to FALDA’s decision-making process.

James stopped typing and swiveled his chair around to face Joe. “What you’re suggesting is not possible,” he said, so quietly he could almost not be heard.

Joe nodded. “I know. Listen, if you don’t believe me, fine. But just let me show you this one thing.”

“It was only one letter, but she carried it up the stairs like a sack of bricks.” From The Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver, p. 358.

* * *

It was only one letter, but she carried it up the stairs like a sack of bricks. The handwriting on the envelope was the lady doctor’s, from Boston, the one with the liquid black hair and long brown legs. Dr. Navya Barsar. Throughout the summer and into the fall, Sydney had been Dr. Barsar’s silent shadow, following her at a close distance as she walked up and down the steep cliffside path into town.

If she closed her eyes, Sydney could almost hear the soft slapping sound of the doctor’s leather thong sandals against the bottoms of her feet. The doctor’s feet were a marvel. Finely boned and flexible, with elegant toes capped in little dark rounded toenails. They were painted a shade that, at first, appeared a glossy nut brown but, upon closer inspection, was a rusty purple, the color of the trembling wands of pollen at the heart of a stargazer lily.

Dr. Barsar arrived first, some weeks before her colleague, Dr. Nash, on a tiny motor boat from the next island, which itself was a short seaplane ride from St. Martin, the closest place with nonstop flights from the United States. Sydney had watched from the wharf as the doctor negotiated with the boat’s pilot to help carry her equipment. There was a lot of head-shaking, the man squinting in the sun and pointing up the steep dirt path to the summit at the center of the island. To the place where Sydney lived with Gamma Gay.

The doctor seemed unconcerned. She produced a floppy straw hat from her bag and, in the circle of shade it produced, peeled off two American dollars from a roll of bills. Observing the man’s unbroken scowl, she peeled off one more for good measure, and they were off, balancing countless canvas bags and metal containers like fishing tackle boxes on their arms and across their backs. Sydney had scurried along behind them, watching carefully to see if they dropped anything.

“Without his life, each of theirs fell to pieces.” From Beloved, by Toni Morrison, p. 220.

* * *

Without his life, each of theirs fell to pieces. That was how Kyrin saw it, at least. Kiara wasn’t so sure.

She ran her tongue over her front teeth and grimaced for the mirror. Her mouth tasted faintly of blood and mint-waxed dental floss. She did not floss every day, but lied and told the hygienist that she did. To make it feel like less of a lie, she savaged her mouth with thrice-daily flossings in the week before a cleaning. The hygienist knew, but she didn’t call Kiara out on it. No one called Kiara out on anything. Not anymore. Big Daddy had always been the one to confront Kiara with an objective reality, one not of her own making. And now that he was gone, not one of them was willing to assume that burden.

Big Daddy was a judge. A justice, in fact, of the Michigan Court of Appeals. He died on a Wednesday morning, in the little bathroom adjoining his chambers. If given the choice, Kiara thought, one would surely not choose to die in a gray-tiled bathroom, beneath the harsh glare of fluorescent bulbs. One would not choose to inhale, in one’s dying breaths, faint wisps of Clorox bleach and ammonia. One would not wish, as one’s last glimpse of this world, a foreshortened grid of mildewed grout and a shoe-scuffed rubber baseboard.

All things considered, however, it had not been an unrespectable death. At 9:45 a.m., Presiding Justice Joseph Lee Hendridge put down the morning paper, donned his robe for argument, and rinsed his coffee mug in the bathroom sink. He was seized, as if by an invisible hand, sank swiftly to one knee, bowed his head as if in prayer, and collapsed. His body, curled peacefully in the fetal position, was found by his clerks exactly 25 minutes later.

Kiara had asked once, how Big Daddy got his name. She was told it went back to little Jesse Clark, the first foster child who ever came to live with Judge (not yet Justice) Hendridge and his wife, Ada Lucia, in their modest bungalow at the end of Wynona Circle. The judge was not a particularly large man–about 5’9″ or 5’10” and 185 lbs, give or take–but Jesse’s biological father was just a skinny kid, who somehow managed to get his 13-year-old girlfriend pregnant one star-filled night in their church parking lot. To four-year-old Jesse, there was “Little Daddy,” who he saw less and less frequently, and “Big Daddy,” who took him fishing and taught him how to read. There was “Big Mama” (though only 13, Candice Grimwald was a corpulent young lady, even before she birthed a child), who cried each time Jesse was brought to see her, and “Little Mama,” the diminutive Ada Lucia, who pulled a stepstool to the big butcher-block counter so he could help her make snickerdoodles.

The names stuck. And so, to three generations of foster children to pass through the arched hedges of the little white house on Wynona Court, Judge Hendridge and Ada Lucia were known simply as Big Daddy and Little Mama.

And so it had been for the twins, Kyrin and Kiara, who arrived there one rainy afternoon in late May, two days after their father shot their mother in the chest and, as she lay dying, put the gun in his own mouth and fired.

Hi guys, here’s what I wrote for Day 5 of our June Read/Write Challenge. Hope you’re having fun generating your own literary writing prompts. Keep writing!

“To reach the restaurant we had to climb down seven dimly lit steps into a sort of cellar.” From The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath, p. 78.

* * *

To reach the restaurant we had to climb down seven dimly lit steps into a  sort of cellar. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dark. Our small group shuffled silently down into the space and, as I reached the last step, I must have placed my weight on it in just such a way, because it gave a great creaking sigh, as it had not done for any of the others. Like a dog, I thought, like the rumbling, deep-throated whine my mother’s old border collie made when it saw you’d come to the last bite of hamburger, pinched between your fingers.

I slowly removed my foot from the offended spot, thinking a gradual motion was likely to produce the least noise. This had the effect of drawing the sound out–unimaginably–ascending octaves from a low thrum to the prolonged groan of a man in ecstasy to–quickly, in the last instant as, abandoning all stealth, I stepped back off of the step and crushed the toes of the little girl and her mother waiting behind me to enter the room–the piercing wail of a hungry baby, cut off and left ringing in the air.

As the sound ratcheted through the pillowy silence, my face burned in the dark. A dozen pairs of eyes turned accusatorily towards me. But at that moment our guide, who had crossed the narrow space below, threw aside a stiff square of curtain, revealing a tiny glass-block window, the metal grommets screaming across the brass curtain rod like a steam engine pulling into the station.

The pairs of eyes all swung around in unison, as a shaft of sunlight sliced through the room, revealing small round tables and curving café chairs. Each table was set for two, with little glass candle holders and crumbling paper cocktail menus. Flocks of dust motes rushed through the air as if scurrying from the light. Through them, I could make out a tiny stage, raised one step from the floor, and a green velvet curtain hanging crookedly to one side.

“Welcome folks,” boomed the guide, “to prohibition-era Chicago, and to the Sugar Jar, the speakeasy that time forgot.”

Hi writers! Welcome to the first full week of free-writing in our June Read/Write Challenge. Grab a book, choose a first line, and WRITE WORDS NOW!

“My meaning in saying he is a good man is to have you understand me that he is sufficient.” From “The Merchant of Venice,” by William Shakespeare, Act I, Scene 3.

* * *

“My meaning in saying he is a good man is to have you understand me that he is sufficient. Sufficient, as in, I cannot point to any one reason why you should not marry this man.”

“Okay.”

Madeline’s mother sat across the table, eyeing her over a narrow pair of frameless reading glasses on a thin gold chain. She nudged them up the bridge of her nose and returned to the brunch menu, suddenly gushing “Oooh, brioche waffles and duck leg confit, with bourbon-sherry maple syrup and fried quail eggs. Can you imagine, Maddy?”

Madeline didn’t respond.

“House-made Berkshire sausage and cheddar-sage biscuits. Honey-poached shrimp and locally milled grits. Really!”

It was as if just reading the items aloud was an acceptable substitute for physically indulging in them, something Madeline’s mother—looking trim and well-preserved in a salmon-pink wrap dress and real pearls—would never do. The waiter came and, after fawning some more over the elaborate concoctions (“Really so creative, so decadent!”) Madeline’s mother ordered a poached egg and toast.

Madeline ordered the same. The toast here really was exceptional. They brought it on a wood plank with salted butter and a tiny white jar of imported marmalade. The waiter turned to leave and, as a distraction or to delay the inevitable for one more minute, Madeline ordered two cappuccinos. Her mother raised an eyebrow. “Oh mom, splurge a little. It will save you from taking your calcium supplement.”

Her mother accepted this without comment, spread her napkin across her lap, and looked at Madeline, with the full intensity of her searching gaze; an intensity Madeline had been subjected to many times but had never grown accustomed to.

“He loves you, I suppose?” her mother asked plainly.

After just a half a beat: “Yes Mom, he loves me.”

The hum of conversation and the bump and clank of dishes being cleared from nearby tables filled the silence between them.

“And?”

“And what, Mom?”

“This is the part, dear, where you assure me that you love him too, more than anything in the world. That you cannot live without him and will marry him no matter what anyone says.”

“Yes,” Madeline said, slouching. “Well I do. I love him very much.”

Their eyes met and held each other. Madeline squirmed.

“Of course you do, dear.” The waiter brought their coffees. “My god, would you look at them! Big as soup bowls, Maddy. What a treat.”