welcome readers & writers! thanks to Anonymous for adding your story to mine yesterday and saving the comments section from becoming a desert wasteland.
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lots of potential, i hope, for a bajillion different ideas about today's photo prompt. if a story, poem or creative non-fiction response bubbles up in you, and you'd like to share it, just click on comments below to send it in. 250(ish) words or less. here's mine:
I cruise this neighborhood sometimes, especially around dusk. Hoping for a glimpse of your life through a lit up, curtainless window. Looking for clues to what I've missed. What class on "having it all together" did I fail to sign up for in college? "Effortless 101?" "Perfection 400?" Is it the fresh, bold color on your dining room wall that makes your children's eyes appear so bright and their hair shiny and soft? If you plant your tulips all in perfect, even rows like that does your marriage blossom too? Does your housecleaning service remember to charge your camera battery before the Halloween parade at preschool? Does your yard man stop at the local stationary store and buy adorable lunch box postcards for you to tuck into your children's lunches?
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When my little ones grow tired of making the loop, I turn up Raffi and sing louder. I cannot stop driving until something shifts inside. Until #1) I convince myself that I will figure it out, too and find the missing piece one day or #2) the elusive response I've spent years in therapy trying to cultivate: I remember that all is not as it seems, that no one is perfect. That all of us struggle in some way. If #2, I pull into my own driveway with eyes to see the beauty that is already mine. On those days I unbuckle my little ones and, heading inside to make dinner, I kiss their chubby cheeks and tickle their tiny pits, reveling in the sound of their belly chuckles. If #1), I pull into my driveway, unbuckle the kids with a gentle squeeze and a soft sigh and head inside to make dinner.
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come write with me!
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When my little ones grow tired of making the loop, I turn up Raffi and sing louder. I cannot stop driving until something shifts inside. Until #1) I convince myself that I will figure it out, too and find the missing piece one day or #2) the elusive response I've spent years in therapy trying to cultivate: I remember that all is not as it seems, that no one is perfect. That all of us struggle in some way. If #2, I pull into my own driveway with eyes to see the beauty that is already mine. On those days I unbuckle my little ones and, heading inside to make dinner, I kiss their chubby cheeks and tickle their tiny pits, reveling in the sound of their belly chuckles. If #1), I pull into my driveway, unbuckle the kids with a gentle squeeze and a soft sigh and head inside to make dinner.
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come write with me!
Spring came over the neighborhood like a bad rash and I was desperate to get out of there.
ReplyDeleteLovers strolled hand in hand in the warm morning sunshine. Children laughed under budding trees and dogs pissed on new green grass.
I had no one.
She died in the spring. I'll hate it 'till the end of my days.
Perfectly trimmed hedges and warm sunlight filtering through brilliant green leaves masked the horror. Just past the spotless foyer, a trail of red droplets decorated the fluffy white carpeting into the dining room. There, the droplets became a pool directly beneath Jainey’s head. Her arms and legs were bent at impossibly odd angles, in complete opposition with everything else in the orderly room. Instead of wearing the macabre grimace of pain that one any other victim of such obvious physical torture would don, her lips and eyebrows were drawn down into a disapproving frown. Even in death it was clear that the chaos her murder caused; disheveled Louis Vuitton suit, bits of the blue and white Alexander Vase (which would have easily earned the madman 2 ½ million dollars if he had stopped long enough to listen to Jainey’s request for him not to break it over her head) and globs of congealing blood in her perfectly coifed hair, etc. would have been met with a harsh verbal thrashing – had the perpetrator not killed her. Unfortunately only the immaculately polished windows, the “eyes of the home” as Jainey called them would bear witness to the complete desolation of the dining area and the grisly murder until at least 6am the next morning when the maid would arrive for the day.
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