Selected short form prose from various Creative Writing sessions, 2019-2021.

Prompt: That drawer doesn’t open. It never will.

The old stubborn oak has fused itself together, clenched teeth in a winter storm. It holds keys, maybe a prayer book, old sepia photographs. It remains next to my bed—once our bed, but now only mine.

Above is the ceiling fan, its wings seared in my memory. I gaze up at it as the night falls, and as the morning oozes in. Sleep is in my memory, too. I no longer remember the safety of dreams, of a warm body next to mine. The sheets stay cold and shadowy, the only limbs my own swimming like sharks through each restless night.

You took the key for the drawer, for that nightstand. It was a skeleton key I rather liked—had dreamt of adorning it on a string to wear as a necklace. I’m artistic and creative, you see. You probably didn’t mean to take it as you quietly and maddeningly folded your loose possessions into cardboard boxes claiming THIS WAY UP. You probably forgot it was in the drawer where I kept those old photographs of the baby, the one we lost that day in the winter storm. You probably weren’t thinking, and for that I wish I could forgive you.

The space between us is wider now, our hearts flayed open and spread across. It’s easier than the space between us on this bed, this cradle we once shared. Our lives are seperate, and now I only have this body, these cavernous spaces, this bed, this ceiling fan. I have this locked drawer, this tiny furniture, these parameters around me. Our tomato plant still lives on the windowsill, and it still seems to grow. The gleaming reds and yellows are the only color here, but I like them just fine.

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Prompt: When I opened the glove compartment, I wasn’t looking for this.

I was shaking, probably sweating, sure my mouth was stained berry red from the lukewarm pinot noir I just inhaled before I took your keys and left the restaurant. Probably seemed drunk, probably suspicious. But when that matte metal handgun—this foreign thing, this throaty, muscular oddity—fell with a thump into my shaking hand, I could not make sense of the events. Everything was screaming in my brain as I threw it under the passenger seat, it curling under the shadow of the cushion, safe from view when the officer approached my window.

What happened next is quiet and still in my mind. All the sound seemed to silence, that gray piece a vacuum for everything around me.

What happened next is nothing. What happened next was a complaint for a tail light out on your Lincoln, the notice placed in my palm, faced down. A smile, a father-like nod from the man with the gold star, and then with his lights he went away, and here I still was.

The heaviest thing was still under the seat next to me. My thoughts could barely form, and instead I thought in shapes.

It had been raining for days when you drove that stranger home, that woman who appeared on our doorstep. She was sure she knew you, but you promised she didn’t.

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Prompt: At the lake, we always wore our bathing suits, but never went swimming.

The roots crawled like serpent tongues up the riverbed, roiling upward into twisted canopies. The older boys had thrown an old rope stolen from the Mitchinson’s farm up over a limb, tied the knot tight, forming a makeshift swing that could reach across the water. We saw they were here today, just as we were approaching the embankment.

Jordan, one of the oldest boys, with his dusty carrot-colored hair, was swinging, one fleshy hand keeping him tethered to the rope, as he bellowed obscenities into the sticky summer air.

The other boys clucked with glee, egging him on to swing higher.

Timmy and Lenny splashed in the water down below, changing his name, imploring him to jump into the lake below.

“If’n he jumps right there, he’ll hit the rocks,” Carla said, eyes big like cue balls, the worry weaving her eyebrows together. We stood close to one another, all scared-like, when I suddenly realized how nervous we both were.

Just then, we noticed Jimmy down below with his fishing net. Jimmy was none too smart, and he was pushed around by the others. Something sinister was about to unfold.

We saw Jordan’s shadow first.

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Prompt: I sat listening to her sandals clack down the corridor.

She always wore heels, no matter the weather. Always looked perfect, not a hair out of place. For a long time when we were younger, I really thought she wasn’t real. And now here she was, faltering ever so slightly, her dollface showing signs of crackings, of fear. I sat on the edge of her uncomfortable velvet chair, out of place, wishing she would come back with a drink.

Everything was gray and white, with sharp lines and swelling shadows. Like a museum for unwell rainbows and fitful sleep.

She swept back into the dayroom, two tumblers of amber liquor in hand, offering me one with a flick of her wooden wrist. Maybe now she would tell me why she had called for the first time in three years.

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Prompt: Once he gets here, it won't matter.

The dishes will be set, the silverware placed just so. Rossli was in charge of the napkins, rolling them carefully with her pudgy, graceless fingers—I was trying to teach her, but it took time, and I found myself with dwindling patience as I got older and more acute to the trouble boiling up in our house. Our tiny two-bedroom house, with the ‘rustic charm’ that really wasn’t charming or rustic but was run-down and disappointed in itself.

Philip was setting out the glasses and silverware. He was spit-shining them clean and I thought about that being disgusting, but I didn’t have the heart to make him start all over.

Lena lit the candelabra and readied a fire—no wonder she went on to become a firebug—stoking the embers with unwavering precision, locked in some kind of trance.

We all tended to our duties, preparing for this fancy dinner that would no doubt result in shit. Because he wouldn’t return with enough money, and he would be mad at us waiting there, as if we were baby birds with gaping mouths, crying for food and more. When really we had been making due with the pennies a week we were afforded from mama’s sewing arrangements.

Now that I was old enough to help, I could contribute, mostly helping around the village with odd jobs, like picking flowers for the rich ladies and fetching eggs from their kitchen coops. And from that we were making due.

We had stopped relying on anything from him for the last year. Only still did we wish for his love.

Once he arrives, his silhouette will darken the doorway. His boots will trudge over the carefully-swept, creaky wooden floor; he will ignore the mat where all of us place our shoes before entering.

He will demand a drink despite being armed with a flask in the waistband of his trousers. He will drink both and ask for more. He will eat the food mother spent the day making, and he will be dismayed when we say we are struggling. He will pound the table with his fist as the alcohol tentacles through his brain, and he will be embarrassed and disappointed as we all watch his face in fear for the first swing.

Little Thomas will have his toy trains running in a line in front of the fireplace, and my mind will go there when things get very dark. Mother’s bruises are mostly healed by the time he comes around again, so he never sees them when they are at their most shining purple. So if he never sees them form and smudge across her cheekbones, I guess he doesn’t think they were ever really there.

It’s easier to forget things when you don’t see them darken the doorway.

 

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Prompt: Birds under glass

“Why are the birds under glass, they looked so sad, Mommy,” Charlotte said as we left the pet store. I was pulling her multi-colored beanie-hat over her little head; it had come in her little flowered suitcase with the handwritten letter that told me her favorite things and her unfavorite things and what color barrettes she liked and how she liked her toast cut into points with cinnamon sugar.

Charlotte started calling me Mommy about three weeks after my sister never came to pick her back up. It had been a Tuesday afternoon like any other when my sister, who had turned over a new leaf and was thriving and mothering and maternal and all things good for a whole year—was now wiry and gaunt, knocking at my door, wringing her hands and trembling in her shiny-dirty denim jacket. I let her and my niece, little Charlotte, into my pinched foyer and as my eyes fixed on her pacing up and down the hallway I realized she had picked back up again. She had picked the poison again, she had picked the stuff that makes her eyes look frozen and disk-like, the stuff that makes her knees knobby and her hair go unbrushed for months on end.

It was the beginning of a very long run, but this time she had this baby, this little daughter-child, and she couldn’t take her along. But she knew I would.

The birds at the pet store were white like doves or angel food cake but mottled with spots that weren’t freckles. The beckoned with their beaks imploringly and longingly, wishing for food but hoping for love.

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Prompt: She lived on the edge of shared reality.

It was this way every since she was a young girl, ever since it all happened.

Mostly life now was just going through the movements, like walking through water with walls on either side, transparent enough to see the floating objects all around. Like an aquarium, but the sound muted, like cotton balls are in your ears.

This shared reality she chose to honor when she had to, to keep onlookers from asking questions. She was just the girl with no parents, with sisters or brothers. The girl who ended up in foster care and then more bad things happened to. Could it be that just one moment of bad fate can tilt the scales out of your favor forever? She had read about butterfly effects and about Murphy’s Law and all the other comforts humans make up to try to account for things that happen, for bad things that seep into lives they believed were happy up until this moment they can stab on a page with their index finger. And point to it and pick at it like a scab and say here, this is when things changed.

Before this I was better.

Before this, things were better.

Before and before and before.

So now, in these moments she had to share with others, to look like she was happy to be there, at dinner tables and holidays with her adoptive family and their blood children, she would have to talk about school subjects and group projects and wanting to be an astronaut when she grew up. That shared communion that other people seemed to hand off to one another about the trials and trivials of life that connect us all. Even though she was only fifteen, she was starting to see how the gears in the machine turned, and how simply turning up the corners of her mouth could result in a far better outcome than she was used to.

It wasn’t like the reality of her parents dying that day, that really hot, sunny day, didn’t stick out in her mind a lot. It mostly was always there, like a subdued din, a soft background murmur or an underline below her name that spelled ‘orphan,’ or, ‘abandoned,’ or, ‘left here.’ I guess it depended on what she was feeling that day.

So that shared reality of social cues and societal niceties were out in full force in public gatherings and at school. But when she was by herself, she could let the charade fall back. And that’s when she would write her stories, in the shelter of some dark reality that was hers, and hers alone.

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Prompt: There was everyday magic, and then there was magic reserved for a night like tonight.

Charlotte’s philosophy toward event planning had always been to mark occasions with certain magical elements. She knew there wasn’t really magic; she had learned that growing up when her own should-have-been-marriage fell apart in tiny shreds. By the end, there were only wispy strips leftover that lingered on the cutting room floor. She wasn’t sure there had ever been anything truly good in its place.

But this magic Charlotte orchestrated from her helm at the front of her planning business was portioned appropriately and boxed up with unwavering attention. It was cushioned by tulle or the finest tissue and tied with a big bow. Preferably one that matched the lucky bride’s bouquet.

This magic that she tried to make with her events came from the careful precision she had learned from her father. Being a surgeon, he had such steady hands. He didn’t pass down her untenable anxiety—that she got from her mother. But from her father she had learned to work with consistent intention, and with purpose of the final product.

If all went according to plan, the night’s events would bloom together, and everything would go smoothly. Magical.

Which is why she had been tasked with this very important wedding from this Very Important Client. It just so happened to be the heiress of the Oreo cookie family. Not Nabisco, but the people who invented the Oreo. It seemed complicated and like someone wasn’t sharing something, but she didn’t dare ask and just took the job and began work as she always did. Sometimes she imagined herself to be one of the mice on Cinderella. Sometimes Cinderella was nice and she wanted to give her all the magic she could forage, but this was not one of those times.

The colors chosen were black and ivory.

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Prompt: After the salad was when it all erupted.

There had been bread and aperitifs, if you wanted to call them that. He had swished around some gin and tonic in the only glasses that didn’t have sticky fingerprints, jelly residue, Mac ’n cheese goo left behind. The children seemed to touch everything in the house, their tentacles reaching even the most out-of-reach things. Her favorite brooch that had been given to her by her grandmother ended up face down in a mud pie. Her favorite string of pearls ended up halfway down the bathtub, the strand breaking halfway, the pearls now only like half a mouth of tiny teeth.

As Mona sat pensively in the straight-back chair—those heavy wooden stiff things that he had picked out for their modern look to go with the rest of the kitchen, not even thinking of the practicality of having twin babies—she felt her exhaustion and anger coming up quick from the pit in her stomach. Like before you know you’re about to be sick; in waves, rushes of blood to the face.

It wasn’t even just the children screaming over the crooning Billie Holiday she was playing on the sound system. It wasn’t the sweet potato casserole not coming out right, or the face that he had been 20 minutes late and empty handed when she had asked him to pick up a baguette.

It was three weeks after their discussion—three weeks after she found the lily-scented hand lotion in the glove compartment of his Tesla—that she could spot the lipstick mark on his crisp white collar. As she sat there, the children screaming-singing in a way neighbors and uncles think is cute because then they can go home afterward, it dawned on her that it had not stopped.

And as he finished eating the bitter arugula salad with the mandarin dressing and almonds she had felt inspired to make, and as the lights flickered the way they sometimes did even though they lived in a sprawling Brooklyn townhouse, she felt no need or want to bite her tongue any longer, and before she knew it she erupted. And the next thing that happened was too awful to describe, so when she speaks the words out loud to the police, she only remembers the colors that she saw, and were the children okay?

The unspeakable violence that the newspaper would report happening that day in the nice family’s Brooklyn home, to the nice brunette girl and her husband with the twin babies, was something that would linger in the neighborhood for years to come.

 

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Prompt: We stopped counting after a while.

Usually she came back after 3 or 4. We marked it on our calendar we kept in the bean closet, or the canned good closet, as our Nana had called it.

She would go out for work while we watched the small color TV Mr. Gleason gave to us when he got a new one. Nana used to babysit us when Mama would go out to work, but after Nana got sick and had to go away somewhere—we thought in the hospital—we mostly looked after ourselves.

It was me, my oldest brother, Jack; Marcy, my older sister; me; and my little brother, Leo. We would usually watch the TV for a few hours, and then sometimes we would play a card game or I would play with my dolls and let Leo be the babydoll. If the sun began to set and Mama still wasn’t home, we would start to pick out something for dinner.

No one ever really came around to check on us. We lived in a trailer park, and the neighbors kept an eye on each other as much as they felt was necessary, which wasn’t really much. We were polite kids even if our clothes has holes in them and our hair looked dirty. Once we got older, Marcy learned how to braid hair. Leo’s hair was long like mine, so she would braid our hair in all different styles. We learned that sometimes not washing could be good, because you could braid your hair easier. That’s what Marcy said.

After 9 days, we started to worry. We were running out of canned goods, and the last box of Ritz went to Leo. It was summertime, so we didn’t have school or anyone to look after us, so it had been up to Jack and Marcy.

 

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Prompt: It will be a long time before this house falls apart.

My father said it sternly as he looked over each of our faces.

The questions we had about where Anastasia had gone felt like rocks in our baths. My eight brothers and sisters and I sat at the kitchen table in the center of the dining room, our mother among us. My oldest brother and father each sat at the heads of the table. There was no dispute about the gender roles in our houses, and there never had been.

Our home was set on a working farm in the rich and rolling hills of West Virginia. I often wonder what it would be like to wake up and live somewhere completely different, somewhere I am more than just my work ability and reproductive organs. But it’s those thoughts I keep most fervently to myself, because outside of my mind they become liabilities. Liabilities are why Anastasia is missing from our table tonight.

Despite growing up in the 21st century, my father insisted on living by way of the Bible. He hadn’t grown up in a particularly religious home, and even went away to college as a young man. While there, he witnessed a man being hit by a train, and something in him just switched. He moved from upstate New York to here in West Virginia, where he met my mother and embarked on what he felt was Jesus’ vision for him. Starting a family with his new wife, and living by the way of that book that has launched a thousand wars, drawn exorbitant amounts of blood, and given him this new blueprint of how our family would be.

Anastasia blistered at father’s iron first, and as she got older she began to fight back. Soon she would be smuggling in love letters from the boy down the street, the boy who was not holy. And as her actions worsened, and as she became increasingly insubordinate, my father’s love for her began to wane.

I just watched it all unfold, a catatonic bystander that knew we were on the precipice of chaos.

 

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Prompt: The snow started to fall.

It was wispy and delicate, not like the bleating sheets of rain we had seen earlier that spring. Amidst all the sadness of the year, it seemed promising and new. Like a newborn bringing hope.

The darkness that ensconced our world this year taught us the terrors of that which we cannot see. The indescribable agony and danger, the urgency in fighting something that is invisible and insidious, is one that we all took to bed with us each night. Whether it eclipsed our lives by infecting our loved ones, or just became this ambiguous puddle we managed to jump over, it came into our lives in one way or another, and we could not hold each other tighter to dull the pain.

This sadness that the world has no choice but to bear feels like an anchor in my chest, in my gut. The hope that keeps us buoyant in these turbulent and suspicious waters is the thread that weaves us together, which is where we will be strongest even at our weakest parts. Strength in numbers, you know the drill.

I want for a snowfall to blanket the world in newness, to make brighter our world with the promise of better days. I want to believe there are better things beyond this gauntlet, because it feels like we’ve been stuck on this conveyer belt for far too long.

 

 

Prompt: The baby had no name.

She had been born against her will, as most babies are, pulled from the warmth of the womb and all that she knew. Her mother had passed on her sparkling green eyes and an angry opiate addiction.

So she came into the world with this loud sadness, this little baby, this precious thing full of promise and hope. And after that, her mother left.

“What do you mean, she’s gone?” The attending nurse blustered at the news delivered by one of the assistants.

“She just left. The bed is empty,” the assistant said, mouth agape. “She left nothing behind.”

The attending nurse that evening was a lonely woman. Her name was Violet. She had spent her life as a county clerk. She kept orderly paperwork for city hall, and was never late for her shifts, and baked pies every weekend to bring in on Monday.

“A happy way to begin the work week,” she had insisted. Everyone really knew that Violet was just lonely.

She had fallen in love with a police officer, and for a brief moment in time the world stopped when he said he intended to marry her. It was only weeks later that he asked for the ring back, that his mother would only approve of a Jewish wife. Violet never spent time with a man again after that.

So it was on this night that Violet was working as a volunteer hugger in the nursery. And this baby, this baby with no name and no one to claim her, cried in her arms, and she cried too.

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