Well... my writing mojo is coming back! Thank goodness-- it's just in time too, because as a new English major in grad school, I definitely need to have a mojo! I think from time to time I'll post some stuff here in a desperate effort to get free feedback for assignments! I would love to know what you think!
These are all FICTION-- shortshorts (short stories about 250 words or less). I welcome feedback. What do you hate? What do you like? What is left unanswered? Where can I do better? Which one do you like best? Thanks friends!
Much love!
My death
Darkness surrounds me; even the muffled echoes of her voice seem so very dark to me. Something has changed. I know because the muted voices are talking about me instead of tome now. But, nothing is different; I am still here in my room, just waiting.
Then, a bone-chilling breeze envelops me, yet, somehow, it seems to set my skin, my ears, my throat, even my eyes on fire. My heart beats faster and I am climbing the walls in a frantic effort to make the searing pain stop. I have no memories; I cannot remember anything before this moment and it is as fingernails on a chalkboard, this terrible noise in my head that gets stronger and stronger until, weirdly, I know that I will not make it. Someone jerks at the blanket at my middle and it is my only and fervent hope that she knows what she’s doing and this will end quickly; I think there was a time when I felt no pain.
I am screaming now at the top of my puny lungs but no one hears me. Someone finally flips the lights on. And, I am born.
Voices of my sister
Her eyes bolted open. The room was still and quiet, as expected, but there was a tension in the darkness that had her hackles raised and she drew her summer quilt up to her chin, turning away from the oscillating Cool Breeze fan. There! She heard it again. The blood-curdling scream had echoed through the dark night like fireworks on Independence Day, waking her from a dead sleep. Her parents hadn’t heard it, she knew, because the rhythmic growling from behind their door was as steady and as loud as it ever was. Whoever it was, was close, maybe even in the house. Where’s Jen, she thought, panicked now that she saw the empty twin bed on the opposite side of the room. Katie softly tiptoed down the steep farmhouse staircase, shaking and sweating, terrified to see what she knew she would find.
She stepped slowly, cautiously down to the bottom step as a stream of cold sweat traced an eerie path down her clammy, adolescent chest. A lock of hair fell across her face and she squelched a scream of her own at the sudden movement. Her left hand reached automatically to the light-switch on the wall; her fingertips snapped at the toggle and her eyes adjusted to the light. The shiny new blade of her mother’s butcher knife was on the linoleum in a pool of her older sister’s blood. Jen stood there, staring at the blood dripping from her wrist as that creepy look washed over her face. It was Jen’s mouth spoke, but it was the five-year-old alter ego, Meg’s, high pitched voice that said pitifully, “I just wanted to see what she would do!”
The trouble with brothers
“Ain’t no rest for the wicked,” her brother used to say. He was always getting into trouble, trouble her parents couldn’t afford, trouble that made them old, trouble that turned her mother’s hair white at forty, as her father’s smile lines faded behind the worried crease in his brow.
She had hated him for it. Not your average sibling rivalry, but a deep and pervasive hatred that burned in her throat when someone asked about his “situation” or his “issues” at church as she nimbly avoided their questions so as not get stuck in the gossip mill. She hated him for destroying their family, ruining every Christmas, every birthday with some fit of rage or depression that sucked her mother in and made her weep. She hated him for taking over everything. It used to be just pot, but the health teacher was right. It was a gateway drug, a gateway to hell, for all of them.
The state police banged on the door, demanding to be let in, to search the place. Before her dad, clad in only his tightie-whities and old man T-shirt, could get the back door open, large, dark lumps of Kevlar, muscle, and gunsmoke barreled into the living room from every window. Then she saw him, pipe and lighter still in hand, glassy-eyed looking up at the ceiling, immobile.
They all just stood in their pjs and stared. Stared at him, relieved and disappointed to find that he was still breathing. She hated him for making her into the kind of person who wished her brother was dead. It should have been “ain’t no rest for the family of the wicked” because he looks pretty peaceful now, she thought angrily.
Bananas and beauty queens
That first sip of something cold feels amazing when you have an empty stomach. Shana’s wispy blonde hair whipped around her face as she roared over the winding, country cow trails in her yellow Jeep. The tug of the seatbelt smooshed into the soft chub of her belly, hips, and chest. She had always been a bit squidgy around the edges and never minded. She was beautiful, blonde, and as Beoynce says “bootylicious.”
The berry-bananna smoothie curled its way around her tongue and slid down her sore throat as she wept, the salty tears stinging, as her hair smacked her eyes. Shana loved food, rather she loved the experience of food. Her imagination traced the path of the ice cold smoothie further and further into her body, and she envisioned it coating her stomach like the Pepto commercials. She had skipped breakfast this morning, in anticipation of this delightful tragedy; the emptiness in her stomach screamed for satisfaction.
Shana cherished these Saturday morning trips to the Juice Factory in town, relishing the solitude in her Jeep, the wind in her hair, and the freedom from her perfect mother. It was the only time away from the farm, this excursion to the “library.” Her mother, once Alabama’s Teacher of the Year and Miss Alabama in the same year, prized a quick mind and a slender waist, neither of which did Shana possess. Today her trip was poisoned by the broken record of her mother’s cruel southern drawl in her mind, “It’s time to mind your girlish figure, Shana.” The Jeep screeched to a halt and she purged the offending smoothie from her imperfect self.
