Prompt- Film

The trick is-
don't think of their eyes.
The thousands of little judgments- the desperate fantasy-
she is in beds and bathrooms,
tucked discreetly under mattress.

Thin as plaque, white and sick,
she stopped and stared,
her own mirror, her own image,
but her body-
owned by the mass.

Diced and desired, on the cutting
room floor.

Noir Prompt- Essence

He forgot what a man needed to sustain himself. Outside of a trench, where he was once warm. Fed to a pleasant plumpness that he would never again worry on. A loose belt was worth more to Henry Ellan than his physique.
The battle paused. Like the God of War, taking a breath and steeling himself. If the old Gods still walked they were terrified. Finally brought to the level of man as artillery shook their heavenly feet and gas curled up in hellish wisps.
The gas, oh God the gas.
He did not know who used it first. Was it the Germans? Didn't they start the whole mess to begin with? The complex galaxy of political maneuvers and excuses was beyond the Anglican farm hand.
He didn't care anyhow. You didn't need a degree or a medal to see the root of war. His rifle told him more than his commanding officer.
Nowhere else had he seen such a fine piece of machinery. It didn't jam, it loaded like a silk glove and it never got tired. Like this war, fought so brutally that only the earth could protect them.
The essence of war was industry. The machinations of a young mans death.

Henry never saw the one that got him.

Tales Told

She never drank the tea. It sat on her little three legged table, steaming in the crisp air. Wrapped in an afghan she sat on her porch. Rosy cheeks and skeletal cheek bones. I think that she only wanted to watch it cool or dip her paper white fingers in it to steep along with the tea leaves.
I read to her on the days when it was to cold to be outside. That was when she'd call my mother and summoned me. I was thirteen and already sullen, swollen a sense of raw potential that we are unable to identify until it has left us much later in life.
Shivering and pulled in tight to myself I sat behind her porch screens as the light died in it early way and read to her Dickens or Shelley.
"She's alone there, over ninety and all she has is that house, falling down around her ears." My mothers voice was pinched and impatient though she attempted to teach me a lesson in kindness. We were west coast immigrants her in the east and our family was not so much un-welcomed as kindly ignored.
Gossip was nastier in our new home and it afflicted it's victims like some waisting disease. It spread and deepened, rotted without cure. We were not extraordinary in any fashion except for my fathers money and charm and my mothers need to make sense of a small town where none of her urban rules applied.
So, while the wizened eight graders at Bernell Elementary warned me of the 'witch' living next door and even has y mother's book club gossiped about the old womans late husband, she sent me there like the woman's servant companion.
I was resentful but still I read. I could have ditched the old woman. Walked with my clumsy winter clothes sagging around me like an old eave until our kitchen window was of sight. Then I'd take a beeline across the street and downtown where I could luxuriate in the community library, which was heated and smelled like cinnamon and apple cider year round.
But, no. I walked up her rickety old steps and poured her tea and thought that it was perfectly reasonable for my classmates to call this woman a witch.
Although I could not fathom why they were wrong in their reasons to do so.
It was not that she was older than any living member of my family or that her house looked part asylum, part haunted attraction. It was her way of looking at me, as if she was drinking me.
The book was not important and the cold meant nothing. She only watched my shivering hands turn the pages, my lips blister gradually and my own eyes dart over to her for instructions.
Not once did she speak you see. Not to me. I was aware that she was capable of it because I over heard my mothers side of their brief conversations. It was always the same, for two months. "Go take a book from you're fathers study and read to her."
It was an especially dark day, colder for the cloud cover and I was half way through A Christmas Carol when I heard it.
Dry paper caught in the wind. Her voice was slow and airy. I picture it as a weightless thing, to frail for everyday use.
"There has been an accident."
I dropped the book and saw the sky. Red in the distance. Pale, gray smoke mixing with the black horizon just above my fathers office building. The highest point in town was ablaze.


...

Something I'm working on for Esacpe Velocity:

I do what I do every morning. Stand in front of my mirror, and look for age.

It’s nothing like my mother’s generation though. Women in their forties don’t have despairing fits in the bathroom anymore.

If I so chose, I could reach down and pluck the Pen from its case. Swipe ‘careful but quick’ over the offending line or blemish and watch it disappear in the mirror which is not quite a mirror anymore.

My husband has it set for the Dow Jones run again this months issue of Playbill on repeat. He makes movies and I write about the past. There’s no magazine dedicated to my particular brand of media but I make some good coin still.

It’s funny, how profitable being a historian can be. No one bothers to read back issues of anything. We are all pushing into the future, right? Space is waiting above us and humanity is ready for the dive.

But, we aren’t all young anymore and sometimes I think I’m the only god-damn woman in the world who would keep her crows feet if it wasn’t for fear of media backlash. Book sales being what they are my face needs to be behind everything I publish.

So I look past the stock market and lean in. A twenty four year old stares back. Her face wise in a way that would have horrified me at that age when I used to stand in my bathroom, posing and preening trying to convince myself that I pretty. Everyone on the fucking planet is pretty. Today I wonder if I am wise.

Sixth Sketch

Woman’s great weakness is that she fears herself alone. All life comes from our bodies and we fear it so. You, sister, do not. The writer envies you, and the past she sees in your eyes. Clear as stitches, your hem drags the ground, pretty and gritty. Drinking ‘till dawn the sun blinds brilliant the work you’ve wrought. Children and gowns a plenty. Beautiful things come from the mother still young. You know that every day is Turkish coffee, cooling softly. Bitter, sweet, thick, invigorating and gone. You thirst, and take the sours, like rain falling on your pretty linens.

The Art of Looking Away

When I am not looking at you-
I am seeing you. As eyes, see
so lip and nail, tendon and vein.

You make me feel smaller-
nothing in diameter, ugly
as tar. My hair, is mangled,
my stomach sits wrong, mouth,
it betrays me with wrong footed
nonsense.

I speak in teeth, not tongue and say-
"I would have you, if you'd have me."

Excerpt from 'Haunted' ch.1

She was alone in mourning him. The sun was hot, the sky was sick and blue. Summer carried on oblivious, as if his death touched nothing, destroyed no world but her own. Beside her she felt her mothers hands, thin and cold even though it was hotter than hell and she wore her widows weeds, black and all. Sam thought that crying ruined her face. Like pouring water in a leathery bag of bones and shaking it. Her shivering sobs rolled through Sam, water, her mother was made of nothing but water.
It was cruel to believe that no one cared for her fathers death but her. Although her mother sobbed and his students stood in a row like dominoes, black, white, black. She wasn't crying because her grief was not a god-damn spectacle for these people. They came and in an hour there would be food, longer still and the black weeds would lay tossed on the floor. They may forget, in a week, that they even went to a funeral. When finals ended and her father's class dispersed he would e a footnote, something mentioned when talking about death, sudden and tragic.
Clayton, the boy who came to dinner from time to time to talk about politics and himself, set a hand on her shoulder. She rolled it away, she didn't have to look up at him. His cologne announced him. His shadow made her colder. He loved her father's book, and he called Clayton his best student. She was his best, she loved his book and was reading the manuscript for his second. She overheard some twenty something’s in the back, talking over the priests drawl. It'll be brilliant...published post-mortem.
A bell was ringing and Clayton tried to say something about being sorry, about the way she was feeling. Didn't he hear it? That bell in the back of the graveyard? Small, not a church bell. It was high and clear. Sharp enough to cut through to her, bypassing the dispassionate speech, the empty promise of life eternal. Sitting up, looking down the row of Christmas Card family she laughed bitterly. The priest stopped her mother gasped everyone looked, stared openly at her. She got up and imitating her father exactly stalked down passing his coffin, heading for that bell. Before she left the artificial green turn laid out in front of the coffin she turned and pointed at the priest.
"Your a real son of a bitch. Don't you know? There’s no heaven or hell, we wouldn't fear dying if there was." Silence. Like a knife that can't cut anything but itself. Again, she laughed and went to find that fucking bell.