February 2012
4 posts
glucktoronto asked: I've always loved how you wrote. Successful dramatizing of such simplistic actions. But, like it says at the top of this 'ask' page, the majority is sad. Why? Is it just easier for you that way? Personally, I think you should change that. If you can raise the sad clown to a high pedestal, then why not slander the dark with a bit of pure unadulterated joy. Summer flings, good coffee,...
3 tags
A Perfect Match
We had spent all of the appetizer and our entrees trying to talk to each other, and now, over the too sweet but beautifully presented dessert, we find ourselves slacking with the effort, eyes lowered and silence between us. We had met at the insistence of a mutual friend, a short, fiery redhead who was hard to refuse. She had sang our praises so much that we blushed for the other person, and felt...
3 tags
One More Night
I want it to be just like the song, she told him. She slipped out of her dress, and unhooked the back of her bra. She let him take her in, the slanted lines of her shoulder blades, the tiny goosebumps that sprang all over her skin. She had to shove and wiggle to get out of the skirt. She left on the black lace panties, the nude hold up stockings and heels. She had planned this. Standing and...
2 tags
A Cold Night
The sidewalk was peppered with salt when she left the hotel, over preparation for predicted heavy snow that came only in a light, fluffy whiff during the afternoon. When she first came to New York she hadn’t known what it was, and her first winter she had asked a friend who couldn’t stop laughing, although it wasn’t the sort of thing you were just expected to know, was it?...
January 2012
6 posts
3 tags
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...
2 tags
3 tags
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...
2 tags
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...
2 tags
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...
2 tags
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...
December 2011
3 posts
“What men call love is a very small, restricted, feeble thing compared with this...”
– Baudelaire
2 tags
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....
2 tags
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...
November 2011
1 post
3 tags
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...
October 2011
4 posts
2 tags
“I always say that I wish to have three sorts of people as my friends, those who...”
– a character from Christopher Isherwood’s The Berlin Stories.
fragments
I am always allergic to something. I observe the bottle of hot pink pills disintegrating into an empty white container as the days pass, and replace boxes of tissues with new ones with the same faint floral prints. I treasure sleep, though I also dread it, the dreams it brings. For my dreams are so lucid, prolonged and detailed, like the most miraculous of movies. Sometimes I hardly recognize...
2 tags
“And I was taught to feel, perhaps too much,
the self-sufficing power of...”
– William Wordsworth, Book Second of The Prelude
3 tags
Letters
(Written for my Letter as Literature class, the assignment was to create an epistolary situation from the text italicized.)
It has been six months since she disappeared. Richard’s trembling hands sets back down the fat, heart shaped perfume bottle on the corner of the bathroom counter, which smells faintly of pink lipped flowers and soft silk slips, and holds his breath—for a minute, then two,...
September 2011
2 posts
3 tags
“But great writing - great writing forces you to submit to its vision. You spend...”
– This Zadie Smith essay is full of wonderful, honest and true moments, which I want to quote from over and over again. I especially like this, about what great writing can really do, and the last bit: “Reading, done properly, is every bit as tough as writing.” I know, it’s a bit...
3 tags
August 2011
2 posts
4 tags
3 tags
The Church
He remembers the church from when he was a boy. Languid summer days when it was hard to sit still in the rows of wooden chair, his feet dangling, not reaching the floor. He wanted badly to swing them except that his mother, in a pretty buttoned up blouse and pearls, would dart him warning looks any time she sensed movement. The pews were often full, with suits and neat pumps, pulled back hair. And...
July 2011
1 post
“As she took the bag she said good-bye again and this time I felt that it was the...”
– Henry Miller, “Via Dieppe-Newhaven”
June 2011
1 post
2 tags
Homecoming
My sister and I used to take these walks along the beach. I hated the feeling of damp sand plastered to the insides of my toes, but she adored the sound of the waves and the breeze that made her usually tame hair fly into wild strands. She still pressed pink shells to her ears to hear the ocean whenever she found one intact. I liked it best when it was late, when the last few couples with laced...
April 2011
1 post
I've been (trying to) write creative non-fiction.
It’s quite hard, especially when I keep falling in love with my subjects.
First it was Laura Flook, the pretty ex-mortician ex-model current designer whose dresses are a delight, and whose macabre stories seem not at all shocking while she was telling them, and her raison d’être, the sweet and adorable black lab named Trocar (after a long metal instrument used to suck out fluids from...
February 2011
2 posts
“I feel love for all this, perhaps because I have nothing else to love or perhaps...”
– Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
Wo Ai Ni
“Wo ai ni.” He said, for it was the only thing he knew for certain how to say in Chinese. She smiled from beneath her half closed lashes and placed her hand, small and slightly chubby, on top of his palm that just cupped the slope of her calf. Her nails were painted an unflattering shell pink and chipping at the edges.
“You know what that means?” She asked. They both knew that he did.
He laughed...
December 2010
2 posts
Last Christmas
She was walking along the rows of perfect, pastel colored houses just outside of Regent’s Park, looking up at the sweet windows trimmed with silver and blue lights, and inside each, a scene like a dollhouse, or museum recreation of what real life was meant to look like. In one the mother pushed a bow topped present beneath the tree, tastefully decorated with gold lights and delicate glass...
Anonymous asked: I miss your writing. Haha, not to push for a new piece; just, whenever one comes around, you should know, there's a lot of eager readers awaiting, no matter what it is.
November 2010
1 post
Anonymous asked: so, which workshop did you go to, Laura?
October 2010
2 posts
Anonymous asked: Do you revise your writing as you write, after you write, a little bit of both, or not at all? Do you revise to different extents the stories you publish here vs. other works of yours?
2 tags
Invisible Bodies
In my dream I held you, and when I awoke I felt your body disintegrate into the cold morning air, leaving just the tangled bedsheets and my fingerprints indented in the pillowcase. Missing-I say the word and it still gives a bitter sting against my tongue. What does that mean, missing? Like losing my favorite pen or that extra set of mail keys, like the absent pupil and her empty school desk. But...
September 2010
4 posts
I killed an insect with my bare hands, a quiet, gentle death. It was a small black winged thing, slow moving, and I pressed it between thumb and forefinger, feeling nothing in between. Its light body fell between the cracks of the bed.
-
It is when you need it most that hope fails you, and the littlest things, a dotted red paper cut, an ancient stain where lips kiss the rim of a mug, the...
Anonymous asked: Can I use random excerpts from your writing if i credit your tumblr?
The Days
You get old. You get sad. You get lonely.
You wear old clothes with worn elbows. You count the scars on the underside of your left arm, small red marks across from those long cold nights. You huddle within the long sleeves of your sweater, rubbing palms warm and raw. You watch the raindrops and the umbrellas pass, bleak flowers blooming across a busy street. You make tea and watch the steam,...
July 2010
6 posts
“It’s—”
She’s frantic, begging for understanding in his eyes, thin hard nails clutching into pale skin. She squeezes her eyes closed and it looks like it hurts. Her hands, usually so small, so frail, grip so hard he feels out of breath, locked in. He’s calm, composed, of course, breathing evenly and he sees that she knows it. Her lashes struggle against the faint red curves beneath her eyes....
“Like him and every writer I’ve ever met, I’m driven by the love of a story that,...”
– from Kathleen Alcott’s lovely essay over at The Rumpus that is well worth the read. It’s absolutely true. Part of my never ending need for adventure, relentless observations of the details around me (and thus the ability to work them into stories) stems entirely from...
“I think that here lies the sense of literary creation: to portray ordinary...”
– Nabokov, “A Guide to Berlin”
1 tag
Afternoon Smoke
How can anyone smoke during the day?
Cigarettes are for late, cold nights, that orange flickering tip demanding recognition, a luscious lip painted to show up exactly at that moment of a drag from the golden end, and part with an exhale of cool, sharp breath. But Marilyn watches the neighbor, the girl, with a seemingly endless stream of cigarettes from noon until midafternoon, the gray ashes...
June 2010
6 posts
Anonymous asked: I'm just curious since a lot of what I've gotten a chance to read here involves a cigarette in some way. Do you smoke?
(I am so bad at titles please suggest one?)
She was entranced by the other girl, the perfection of the other girl’s silhouette, the long straight hair and fluttering silks pressed against her body, a lean line unwavering in the summer wind. The other girl reached for something in her leather satchel with double stitched edges and gold clasps. The other girl threw back her head and laughed, her laughter pearl beads painting the...
Anonymous asked: your writing is amazing. If you ever publish a book, I will definitely buy it. (which means..you better write a book soon!)
Crash and Burn
It’s that, well, I don’t know what you’re looking for. It’s that the sparks when we touch and the glitter against your hips defy reason. It’s that the black leather pants and electric blue strike on your upper eyelid haunts my dreams in streaks of color and screaming laughter. It’s that under the flashing lights and between the punches of the songs, I lose the...
An Evening
He sits watching the ghostly flicker of the orange candle flame in the trap of its translucent holder and listens to the splatter of the rain against his window, wondering. His lover, with the golden-green eyes and freckle kissed skin, the bony fingers and curls of hair on his chest, the name that sounds like a song, his lover is gone and he thinks, won’t return. Was it only the weekend, the...
“Life with you was lovely—and when I say lovely, I mean doves and lilies,...”
– Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
May 2010
4 posts
A slightly insane project for June:
30 stories in 30 days? More or less insane than a novel in a month (because that was easier than I would have expected)? Can I do it? Do I really want to try?
Home
When we get home we’re bigger strangers than we’ve ever been before. You start soaking the dishes we’ve already cleaned in the sink. I go to water the plants, but the bright red and yellow tulips along our windowsill have become dead, crisp pieces too bruised to use as bookmarks. We eat dinner in silence, with the orchestra of a careless fork scraping the bottoms of our fine plates. I ask if I...