Fiction.

To Old Friends

“You know,” she says, leaning against railings, eyes upturned to the blinking lights of a landing airplane in the distance, with the city laid out before them, a grid of lights and the steady stop and go of cars pulsing in the streets like toys, “This is exactly the sort of thing I would have dreamt of doing with you, years ago.”

He laughs, a slight, dry laugh. “But now…”

“But now, I think, what are we doing? Really. Are we silly enough to believe that this means anything? That this one evening will cancel out the days and days of answering emails and taking out the trash and serial watching TV shows in bed?”

He places his hand on her lower back, anyway, though her tone and words doesn’t call for it. “Is that what you think we’re doing?”

“Well, isn’t it?” She turns to face him and he can see the gold claw clasp of her necklace, misaligned, dangling near the small diamond pendant. He longs to reach out and fix it.

“I thought we were just old friends reuniting for a laugh.”

“Oh but,” she narrows her eyes and gives him a smile, that smile, that he remembers, that sly flash of teeth and flicker of tongue between her narrow lips—she used to always wear a coat of something, some peach creamy balm on top of them that made them look irresistible, but only when she smiled, for the rest of the time she kept her lips pursed and tight like a frosted fortress, that touch of a tease, “were we ever friends?”

 She said friends like a dirty word, an inconceivable crime. Had they been friends? It is possible that he misremembered. He remembers fucking her, quietly, in the morning, when all their friends were still passed out, asleep around whichever East Village apartment, her soft whimpers and how perfect her hipbones were to grip, and how one night, breathless and giggling at a corner table at an expensive hotel bar she had begged him to kiss her and do no more, but then later she was the one who pressed against him, hungry hands grappling at his belt buckle.

He remembers that they had a talk, once. She had insisted and they were seated outside for brunch but the day was too chilly for that, and he spent most of the time cursing and rubbing his hands close together, while she kept biting her lip. The night before his mother had called with some bad news, awful news, about his father’s progress at the hospital. It was her calm, fixed tone that did it. But he wasn’t going to tell her, and she wasn’t helping anything, with the skittish way she picked at her salad, how she looked at him with this strange light in her eyes, and then when she caught him looking back how she quickly blinked and told him how she was woken up so early by the argument she overheard outside her window. He finished the huervos rancheros at a record pace and told her he had something he had to take care of. He was thinking about booking a flight home, that even though his mother said no, no, he knew.

After that it seemed far easier not to talk to her.

But maybe she was right, maybe they were never friends. “Well, does that mean we can’t be now?”

“Look at you.” There’s a cruelty in her tone, now, a sudden change that surprises him. He looks at her. Her face is flushed from the wine and something else. For a moment her lips are parted, revealing perhaps finally the secret she had wanted to tell at that last brunch, then she breathes in and her shoulders and breast release. She laughs, a clear, theatrical little laugh. “Well, sure. To old friends.”

She raises her glass and he clinks it. They stand for a moment, both looking at the skyline. She tucks the sliver of her black lace bra strap back beneath her dress.  She has gained weight, all these years, no longer that willowy girl but fleshed out, maybe even voluptuous.

“I almost didn’t recognize you.” He says. He had looked and looked again, disturbed by the sense that there was something familiar at the book reading. Or maybe he was just struck by the way she seemed so confident, cocky in the way she crossed her legs and stared straight ahead, alone.

“Oh, I recognized you.” She doesn’t look at him. “Almost as soon as you walked in. I used to imagine how you would be, all grown up, silver haired and gold watched and dashing in a suit.”

 ”Did I meet your expectations?”

“Sure, above and beyond.” She finishes her drink. “Your wife, I’m sure she is quite the perfect accompaniment, too.”

He smiles, and reaches out to fix her necklace. Her neck is hot beneath his touch, and he feels a shock of something at the feel of the wisps of her loose hair.

“Did you expect to fuck me tonight?” His smile stays, fixed, tired at the corners. She nestles the pendant back into place and meets his eyes. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” He looks at his watch. “I should—”

“Go, yes.”

She is still at the railing when he turns to look at the door. Her skirt flutters in the wind and he remembers now, how she used to wear one of the exact same silhouette and drunkenly he had tugged and laughed at it, and how she turned away, embarrassed, and that night when he woke up to pee, how she tucked herself into a ball in feigned sleep, but when he came back she was still clenched there, stiff and small.

(Source: paintedfictions)

#prose #fiction #short story
/14 notes /10:35 PM

You’d Be Surprised

I guess it’s this sort of wanting to be.

 I was walking in the park last night. It was dark—it gets dark so early now. I didn’t bring my headphones. I wanted to hear the calls of nature, the birds and the branches overhead. But mostly I just heard voices. Phone conversations and late first dates and commands to dogs. That was okay. But I couldn’t hear my own voice, the one that usually didn’t stop speaking inside my head. I was worried. I tried walking away from the people, walking faster, not paying attention. 

I almost ran home. I  shut the door and panted in the dark. I had forgotten to make the bed. There was the pulp stained glass of my orange juice from two days ago still on my bedside table. A basket full of unorganized laundry pressing against the half open closet door. I didn’t need the light to see. There was the overflowing tissues and the ripped up pages of old diaries in the trash. I would glue it all back together, I was half sure, half so tired that it couldn’t ever happen. 

My roommates weren’t home. I was grateful, for that, at least, but also scared, too. They hadn’t been back for a while. Was it some holiday I forgot? Last Christmas I stayed here alone because I had lost track of the days. Funny, right, how you never realize? I needed a new lampshade. The old one—what happened to it? One morning I woke up and it was gone, just the too bright glare of my energy efficient fluorescent bulb. 

I met a therapist once. She had such a lovely office. Calm pretty blue walls and an orchid. She had the loveliest cheeks. I told her that. And she looked unsure, then laughed. I wondered if she was transcribing our conversation into her spiral notebook. I shook her hand seriously at the end and told her I probably couldn’t see her again. She blinked fast and I saw the black mascara flakes in between her lashes.

I was okay, I promised her. I would write her a note telling her so if she couldn’t remember. I wrote her the note the next morning, on a folded piece of yellow legal paper. I never sent it though. I thought she was probably okay, probably meticulously watering her orchid. They are so hard to take care of.

I have trouble remembering the past, my childhood. People always have these stories. Like my old boyfriend. He told me a story about when he was three and was scared by the goats in the petting zoo and ran screaming and how his mother caught it on video and laughed and laughed at the tears streaked down his face. I wondered if he only remembered because of the video but he told me, no, he remembered it in person. 

I remember I had a birthday party once. I was wearing a very green dress with a very full skirt and neat white socks and shiny black shoes. The cake had green icing on it because it was my favorite color. I had trouble blowing out all the candles. And then the smoke scared me, that shy sliver from the burnt candle tip. I wouldn’t eat the cake because I thought it was poisoned.

Was that a real memory or was it because my mother told it to me so much? Whenever she got angry she yelled but after that she would look at me and tell me that story and her eyes looked small and hard.

My job though. I find it nice. I shelve things in the supermarket when it’s late and closed but the lights are so bright it’s like a mid summer afternoon. And I don’t have to smile at the customers and the others are so heavy lidded and filled with sigh that they rarely talk, and I don’t have to remember anything except where the cans and brands go and how they stack one on top of one another, perfect pyramids. 

I buy a lot of nail polish from drug stores. So many variations on the same shades! I line them at the edge of my desk against the wall and have my own little rainbow. But then the papers and receipts pile up on the desk so much they become invisible, or simply coated with dust. I hate the feel of dust on my finger tips. 

Sometimes my roommates look at me funny. Are you okay, they ask, I look at them and say yes, thank you, I am. I think they are okay too. Isn’t that the best way to be, just okay? My old boyfriend said he was in love with someone else. I met her a few months later, at the restaurant that he and I always used to go. When she laughed she opened her mouth so wide you could almost see down the length of her throat. When he watched her laugh I could see that he wanted to laugh too. 

(Source: paintedfictions)

#fiction #flash fiction #short story
/8 notes /11:43 PM

A Lost Cause (part 3)

(read part 1, part 2)

There were things that Claire had never done. She had never, for instance, said I love you and meant it. It wasn’t something she felt bitter about, simply an abstract idea she had never bought into.

When she was much younger, her mother had tried to explain love. “It’s when you wake up next to someone and you feel grateful and right,” her mother had said, eyes lifting to the light from the open window in the kitchen.

“Is that how you feel with dad?” She had asked. Her mother had smiled a tense, tentative smile. “Of course, dear.” Her mother started to wash the dishes, and Charlotte carefully inscribed what she said in her diary.

She was very certain that she would be able to compare notes before her senior year of high school ended. She dreamt of the boy who would kiss her after prom and hold her face in between his cold palms.

Her parents divorced when she went to college. It was a practical, amicable thing, her mother told her. She simply wanted her independence back, and her father was away on business so often anyway that it was hardly a relationship. When she called her father he had told her, after a long silence, that there was a misunderstanding. Her imagination reeled for a while, but she soon realized that the divorce made little difference in her life. Her father’s elusiveness simply became more of a certainty.

She went to lunch with her father every so often. Her father looked tired and old and had little to say. He was starting to grow a beard and the silver in his hair was more pronounced.  “How are you,” her father asked, with slow nods when she answered. He was working long hours, still, rarely spending more than a week or two in the same city. Her father asked after her mother as he would a work acquaintance. Charlotte never knew how to answer.

* 

She wasn’t prone to loneliness but boredom, and she was afraid that she was going to be bored without John. She called her mother that night, after an evening of watching her silent phone. Her mother sounded older and older each time they talked. Her mother even repeated things some times, did I tell you dear about Mr. Gregor and his new car? He went whirling down the streets top down and gray hair bellowing. Her mother laughed as she did the first time she told it, and Claire  said, simply, softly, yes, mom.

She would have to visit home soon. Her mother was still asking her whether she was seeing any one. She wanted to answer yes, but it seemed equally exhausting to create an imaginary boyfriend. She wished her mother well and a goodnight. She pressed her cheek against her pillow and stared at the candle like light of her lamp. She was happy, she told herself. But then she had never really believed in happiness. 

#short story #fiction
/10 notes /06:00 PM

A Lost Cause (part 2)

(read part 1)

John had been one of her lovers in college. They had always skipped sleep in favor of each other, fucking on rooftops and in hurriedly locked bedrooms and stained bathrooms of loud bars. They would try to have conversations in coffee shops and wind up breathless, desperate to get elsewhere. She wasn’t surprised to hear of the marriage. Outside of her, he had a romantic sensibility, a kind heart. He had made vague attempts at a relationship, with her, even, dates and hand holding, but she was voracious for other people and would go out and show up at his door long past midnight, the taste of a stranger’s on her breath. He never turned her away.

When she called him to catch up, she hadn’t planned for a seduction, really she hadn’t. She wanted to see what had changed. But she felt no guilt, no. It was inevitable. And surely he understood, knew what he was getting into when he agreed to it. What they had was outside the bounds of time, convention, relationships.

But there had been a hint of finality that morning that she couldn’t shake off. She promised herself that she would not approach him again if he asked. She realized that his wife, a lovely woman she had met, deserved it. Still—she felt a tremble, a quiver between her legs as she remembered the way his arms pinned her wrists behind her back, how tantalizing his breath felt against her neck. She bit her lips quickly and returned her attention to the words in front of her.

 *

Her usual train was delayed that evening, and the platform had an air of suffocating restlessness. She tried to read, but the motions around her made it impossible. She watched a pair of girls in fringed tops and loud lipstick laugh, a hyper enthusiasm that could have only come from a newness to the city, perhaps tourists, perhaps Freshmen, and she felt a pang of jealousy. She got little joy out of her dim apartment and her aloof roommate. She still went on a walk in Central Park with the change of each season, but it felt tiresome, like she was trying to fulfill some standard of appreciation.

She had considered moving away, to an anonymous small town in the Midwest, where she would work for the local newspaper and give the writing thing another try. But that felt like giving up, even more than she already was.

At home she heated up the leftover soup for dinner and ate in in her room while she put on an old Marilyn Monroe movie. She left her window open, and the night air was a bit too cold, cutting into her bare arms. She fell asleep with the movie still playing at the foot of the bed, Marilyn’s breathless voice singing her lullaby.

 (To be continued…)

#short story #fiction
/12 notes /07:19 PM

A Lost Cause

His hands reminded her of her father’s hands, the fingers stout, the nails flat and clipped, peeling slightly at the top. They felt soft against the side of her face though, gently pressing half moons into her cheek.

“This is the last time,” he said, and kissed her. Was he reassuring her or reassuring himself? Perhaps it didn’t matter. She returned his kiss just as hungrily, her hand at the back of his neck, fingers sinking into his hair.

The morning light was beginning its slow awakening outside, and she knew that if they didn’t fall asleep before it soaked through the ivory curtains all the way she would not have slept all night.

Right before he left he held her hands in the doorway and looked at her. “What?” She asked, laughing. “I want to remember you,” he said and brought each of her fingers against his lips.

“Goodbye, Claire.”

“Goodbye.” She said. She would shower and dress, in her pressed white blouse and tweed pencil skirt, the sensible patent leather pumps with the kitten heel. She would wear a tinted lip balm and put on a swipe of mascara. Silvia, the receptionist would ask her about her weekend and she would answer, too short, and her desk would greet her, the drab gray of the cubical walls and the faintly buzzing computer.

No one will know, she had whispered, the first time. It was dusk and they were walking to the train after dinner, a mediocre Italian restaurant in the West Village, mediocre and expensive. Their hands had accidentally touched across the table and she thought the candle made a particularly good display of his wedding band.

“I can’t,” he said. But on the subway platform as they stood side by side, she glanced up at him and he grabbed her hand. His palm was hot, slightly damp. He held on until it was her stop.

*

 No one really noticed her, at the office. She  was a copy editor at a lifestyle magazine where glamorous women paraded by every day, with curled hair and lined eyes and structured designer purses. Once, she had thought that she would be one of them. In college she had been the girl who went to her early morning classes with lipstick and a bright smile and ideas about the minute details of Dorothea’s wardrobe in Middlemarch. In high school she had lost her virginity in the back of a car with a boy with greasy black hair and a badly drawn tattoo of a rose and dagger on his upper arm. Her girlfriends had been shocked when she told them with a nonchalant shrug. In fact both of she and the boy had been unsure and the whole thing had been short and painful.

But sometimes after she graduated, after the parties and the stilettos she had spent all of her money and grown tired, she moved back to her home in Virginia. For a year she tried to write a novel. She fell in love (or at least that was what she told people) with a man who owned the neighborhood bar and moved in, talked of marriage. She spent many evenings, drunk, letting him marvel over her body and call her beautiful. She kept it up until she learned that she was pregnant, and the future she would have with him came to her in a series of nightmares that woke her up, screaming.

The doctor at the abortion clinic had kind blue eyes and the operating room smelled familiar, like the fancy pill boxes her grandmother kept. She never told him. She packed a few sets of clothes and moved back to New York.

The job hadn’t been hard to find. She simply asked the women who were her friends in college, all of them with neat mid-level jobs and smart haircuts. The one at the magazine, Amanda, had greeted her with barely veiled pity, and paid for lunch at a sushi restaurant that had just been reviewed in the New York Times. It’s so good to see you back, Amanda had hugged her goodbye, a light, loose hug. When she started working she rarely talked to Amanda, simply met eyes and smiled.

There was a calming sense of repetition to her job, the worm like black letters squirming across the page, the tiny errors she could correct. It was a good chance to listen in to the conversations around her, too, which almost always followed a caricature like pattern of predictability, talk of men and sex and shoes and cooking. 

(to be continued…)

(Source: paintedfictions)

#fiction #short story
/18 notes /04:51 PM

A fun exercise…

For my Brit Lit II take home final, in which I turned this Paul Muldoon poem into a piece of flash fiction.

 He knelt by the grave of his mother and father. The memory of something filled his mouth—dill, or tarragon, perhaps, one of those always freshly sprinkled over the bowls of something they cooked. He could barely tell one from the other. It suffocated him, the memory, the strength of it. And then he remembered her—the woman with the deep green eyes and elegant hands, her bony wrists and shoulders draped beneath the fur of a sea-otter. Where was it? Portland. Portland, Maine, or—yes, Portland, Oregon. But why should he remember her now, in front of the gray barren graves? The taste of her mouth, the small pickled gherkin she brought him once in a jar, laughing.

He remembered their long talks, about the Monarch butterflies and their milkweed-hunger.  How the earth and the sky would darken when they came down in their fluttering dark wings, so that you could barely tell one from the other. “A wing-beat that may trigger off the mother and father of all storms, striking your Irish Cliffs of Moher with the force of a hurricane.”

“Milkweed and Monarch ‘invented’ each other,” she told him.

He looked up, out of his memories, at the tiny white flowers in the shoots of the Cow’s parsley in the samovar in front of the grave. He’d mistaken his mother’s name, “Regan”, for “Anger.” As he knelt by the grave of his mother and father, he realized that he could barely tell one from the other.

(Source: paintedfictions)

#flash fiction #poetry
/4 notes /06:05 PM

There was a few weeks when all she did was cry.

In the mornings there was the too bright light from the window despite her pulled shut blinds and in the day there was the endless cups of something coffee tea steaming hot something that burned her tongue and trips to the corner store to stand and stare at colorful narrow aisles, blinking, and the dark skinned man behind the counter with his curled dark hair shaking his head. 

In the evening when it got cold and colder still and she was alone huddled beneath the pale dead blue of her blankets, knees pulled to her chest, fingers sunk into either side of her head, rocking and crying and remembering, it was the worst. The glaze of the sunset across the sky was lighting the visions that came alive in her head. 

The way he brushed her hair and held her hands, kissing the tip of each finger, the way he woke up and the cologne he sometimes wore that smelled like leather and cognac and amber and the way the stubble he was always trying to convince her was a sexy touch felt against her skin, prickly and violent and

The way he looked at her, right before, the way he squeezed her hand and the sadness sunken in his cheeks and the way she knew but couldn’t have—

Alone in her room, her swollen bottom lip, her aching eyelids, crying, as if it could turn back time and erase erase erase like the way he used to pretend to erase every part of him that wasn’t good (enough for her). 

The way he said those words. The way she felt a flutter of unease every time her eyes settled on his wrist. The way he promised he wouldn’t, not again, not with her.

The way she realized that she never knew him at all. 

(Source: paintedfictions)

#fiction #lit
/14 notes /10:48 PM

The Rocking Horse

Sometimes I start stories like this that I discover later and end up really liking. But by then I’ve forgotten what I wanted to write about in the first place, and I have tons and tons of these introductory openings, possibilities scattered in my folders. Where have these ideas gone now that I’m trying to write a novel? It shouldn’t be much more difficult than starting a short story, and yet…

My grandmother kept a rocking horse in her room. It was a worn, sickly looking thing, with dust smudging its desperate eyes, mane matted and woven with balls of dust.  It used to be brilliant and red, she told me. Now the paint was faded so that it resembled splotches of dried blood, and when the wind from the window rushed in it struggled to creep back and forth, back and forth, moving with a painful slowness. Whenever I went there, I tried not to look at the rocking horse, and to look at the shelves on the other side of the room instead. Grandmother had rows and rows of books, in English, Russian, French. I loved the slim, small volumes of foreign poetry I couldn’t understand. I sounded the strange words out loud and imagined that they were written for me. If grandmother was in a particularly good mood, she would let me open her old boxes of love letters and broken jewlery, tattered lace that smelled like decayed perfume. I asked her to tell me stories from her youth, the explainations behind the dedicated boys with beautiful handwriting named Benjamin or Tristan and grandmother always shook her head with a secret smile. Someday, someday, she said. 

I told her she should write a novel about her life. I was convinced there was so much to it. In old black and white photographs she always looked beautiful. Even as a shriveled old woman, her small green eyes still sparkled, and the patterns of wrinkles around her face couldn’t hide the mischevious life beneath. I didn’t like looking at her hands, though, the veins were blue and obvious, the skin stretched thin and brittle. Grandmother held her hands in a particular way, fingers lightly crossed at a soft, elegant slant. I imagined her as when she was young, often, imagined myself as growing to live exactly like her. 

When my grandmother died my mother was exhilarated to throw out the old horse. She never really loved grandmother and always treated her as a guest in our house. She didn’t need to explain, I guess. My grandmother was the sort of woman who always stayed distant. It gave her great allure but not much warmth, and I imagined she must have been very strict. I was happy to see it go. After that, though all of grandmother’s drawers and boxes were open to me now, I hesitated in going to her room. My mother asked for help in sorting out grandmother’s things, building big cardboard boxes marked donate, sell or keep, but I couldn’t go and see them.  My mother didn’t understand. She knew how I loved to sit in that room when grandmother was there. But I told her I was scared of ghosts, though it wasn’t true, and she went up there on her own, spending Saturday afternoons sifting through these countless things of old.

Years later, I left the house in Virginia and went to Paris for university. It was a marvelous place, and perhaps the only place I ever felt free. I loved walking along the Seine on rainy mornings, watching the pale buildings fade into the gray sky, and the small shops where a bell would jingle and a plump woman behind the counter waved a jolly “bonjour!” I spent much of my time sitting by the window reading, book after book, most in English, a few daring attempts to read in French. All my friends loved discussing the decadents and where to find the cheapest wine. I felt like I lived in a movie, a dream. 

One afternoon, I stopped in a small antique store on the way home. I had become obsessed with the idea of owning a vintage fountain pen, and one that wasn’t very expensive. I stared hard at the tiny objects beneath the dusty glass counters while the shopkeeper hummed to herself. There was nothing I was looking for. I glanced at the rest of the store and stopped at something tucked behind a pile of books and old photographs. It was a brighter red than I remembered, but had the same grayish mane and dead eyes. It was my grandmother’s rocking horse. But it was impossible.

Excusez moi, I said, and asked about the horse. The shopkeeper looked puzzled for a moment, then shuffled over to look. I wasn’t mistaken, it was the same size, the same despairing eyes. The woman didn’t remember where it came from, or what it was meant for. Sixty Euros, she said. I had no space in my room and not enough money and no reason to own it. I smiled and said merci, and went home. It must have simply been the same model, a simple coincidence. 

That night I dreamt of my grandmother, sitting alone in a vast room at a school desk, scribbling with a fountain pen. She was young and beautiful, but her hands were gnarled and old, and in exquisite cursive she wrote over and over the words “rocking horse.” There was rain rattling against the windows of the room and a lightbulb overhead that fizzled. The next day, as soon as it was late enough to make up for the time difference, I called my mother. “Darling! What a lovely surprise!” She said, forcing enthusiasm into her sleepy voice. 

I updated her on school and Paris. Then I asked her about grandmother’s rocking horse. “Do you know where she got it?”

“Oh, I don’t know. She’s had that thing as long as I can remember. Wouldn’t let anyone touch or play with it, either. Kept it like something sacred.” She paused. “It used to scare me to pieces when I was a child.”

I took in a breath. “Do you think you could tell me about grandmother sometimes?”

“Well, sure. One of these days when you come home. We can go to tea and have story time. Sounds good?” 

It didn’t, really. I wasn’t going to be home for a long while, and I wanted to know now. But I told her it sounded like a lovely idea.

My father died a few months before I was born. It was an awful car accident that my mother adjusted to very quickly. I was born very small, and the doctors worried that I wouldn’t make it.  In lieu of grief, taking care of me became my mother’s obsession. She was still working as the receptionist at a small law office, and as much as she wanted to dedicate every second to cradling baby me, she couldn’t afford to lose the job without my father’s income. She turned to grandmother for help. Soon we were spending so much time at my mother’s childhood home that it became silly to maintain my mother’s own apartment. And besides, the apartment still carried traces of my father she didn’t want to think of. She said it would be a temporary thing, moving to grandmother’s, and I think she did mean it, at the time. 

I remember certain weekends, when I was four or five, my mother put on beautiful bright makeup and beamed at the men who showed up at our door. She always introduced me to them right away, and I marveled at their big hands and thick smiles. Sometimes they’d go out together afterward, and grandmother would shepherd me to her room and read me stories from her big books of fairytales, or they would look uncertain and wander off without her, and my mother would play with me for the rest of the night, twisting one strand of my hair between two fingers all the while, always with a bit of a look of surprise on her face, as if she didn’t quite believe that I was alive, hers. 

(Source: paintedfictions)

#fiction #short story #writing
/7 notes /03:12 PM