violetcheetah | Entries tagged with writing

Dear Mrs. Gallagher,

In early October of 2011, I wrote you a brilliant letter: funny, touching, intelligent. Although it seemed perfect, I set it aside for a few days, so I could look at it with unbiased eyes when it wasn't so fresh in my mind, just in case there was a tiny error I had overlooked when I first wrote it.

And then on October 18, my computer died. And the letter was recent enough that I hadn't backed it up. So that brilliant, perfect letter is lost to the ages, not unlike the library at Alexandria. But hey, unlike the authors in the Alexandria library, I'm not dead, so I get to try again. So here goes.

Third grade for me was more perfect even than that lost letter. Of course, second grade wasn't a tough act to follow, so that might have colored my opinion a little. And I confess, over the summer, I was praying to be in Ms. Brown's class (at least I think that was her name), because everyone said she was the nicest teacher, and I was tired of being yelled at and getting an "S-minus" in conduct. When I didn't get her class, I was disappointed and filled with dread.

And then I walked in, and you smiled at me like you were thrilled I was there. It didn't hurt that you knew my mother, but I felt like the most important person in the world right then. I probably wasn't completely sold, but it was a pretty good start.

And then there were the gerbils. I was animal-crazy, and I'd never had a pet, except for a stray kitten when I was five or six, who didn't live long. And now I had two tiny balls of fluff to watch, to hold, to feed. I remember feeding Romeo through the bars, piece by piece, because Juliet would sit on the food dish and reach under herself to eat the pieces in the cage.

I have a confession to make, 40 years too late. You might not even remember this, but someone pulled part of Romeo's tail off, then last half-inch or so. I think you suspected the usual two trouble-making boys, but it was me. As the lawyers would say, there was no malicious intent. Juliet had just nipped him and run to the other side of the cage. Romeo, like a dork, wanted to follow her. If in fact they were male and female, there might have been more going on than I was aware of, but I just saw him heading toward someone who was intent on beating him up. So I tried to stop him. We weren't allowed to open the cage without permission, so I tried to grab his tail through the bars. Well, I guess I succeeded, but he was more stubborn than I knew. I didn't even know he'd left part of his tail until I opened my fingers. Anyway, I felt horribly guilty at the time, especially about getting Shawn and Danny being presumed guilty. But I was too terrified of what would happen if you knew the horrible thing I'd done; some of it was fear of physical punishment, because when you grow up with a father like mine… well, anyway, that was part of my fear, but the other part was just not wanting my adored teacher to be disappointed in me.

Second only to the gerbils in inducing envy was the doggie puppet. I don't remember its name, but it was much loved by everyone in the class. Between the gerbils and the puppet, I probably learned more about sharing than I'd learned in the previous 8 years of playing with my brother and the neighbor kids. I now suspect that the only reason fistfights didn't break out was because you were amazing at figuring out fair systems for taking turns. I remember that we each took turns at the favored chores: taking the absences to the principal's office, feeding the fish, feeding the gerbils, probably some others that I forgot (possibly going outside to clean the chalk erasers, unaccompanied, which was a huge responsibility). It was hard to wait for my turn to come around again with about 30 kids, but there were enough choices that something came around every week.

I remember pottery. That had resonance for me because my big brother had made little containers and ashtrays in 8th-grade art class two years before, and I envied those. Also, I liked mud, so getting to play with it in school was a major win. More than the pots, I remember the owl I made. I'm sorry that it has gotten lost, but when I made it, I was sure that it was the most realistic representation of an animal ever. I was just hitting the point where I understood that drawings and paintings were supposed to look three-dimensional, and frustrated that I couldn't figure out the trick to it: my drawings always looked out-of-proportion. But this looked like an owl from every direction. Over the next couple of years at home, I make modeling-clay versions of about every possible animal, and they sat on the dresser with my real-clay owl.

But more important than the clay, or the puppet, or even the gerbils, was the writing contest. I took it for granted at the time that the whole school was doing it, but none of my teachers in the next years did it. And I'm sure no other teacher threw her- or himself into like you did. There were the art projects, doing illustrations and making covers with marbled paint and chalk. There was the math problem of folding paper in half and making pages, and then making sure they were in the right order: 1, 2, 15, 16; 3, 4, 13, 14. Of course there was the literature side of it. I had never known that you could write a poem that didn't rhyme and that it was still a poem. I remember haiku, and another type with five lines and other rules, but I have forgotten what it was called. We learned about beginning, middle, and end in stories.

It had never occurred to me before that that I could write a book; they seemed like magical things, written by gods with superhuman powers. I had started reading Laura Ingalls Wilder the summer before, but I didn't even dream that I could create something like that. I remember that the book I wrote as a solo author in your class was an… homage to the Little House books, with a pioneer girl making a coat for her mother out of the skins of the rabbits her father had trapped.

But then there was the poetry book I wrote with Stacey Higgs, the one that won a trophy. I was not on a sports team, and I didn't even know they gave out trophies for anything that wasn't a sport. I had a trophy! Someone liked what I'd written! I don't know if I misunderstood, but I thought you told us we'd won the best book in the whole school, beating sixth-graders.

From then on, I knew I was going to be a writer. It was always "a writer and": a writer and teacher, a writer and veterinarian, a writer and neurosurgeon, and writer and astrophysicist. It wasn't until I was at MIT that I thought, "Hey, maybe I'll just be a writer."

Of course, you've got to pay the bills, and there aren't many authors who manage that, so I was an editor to make a living. I didn't do much "real" writing once I started working full-time, but there's something the people who write writing books call "pre-writing," where you kind of free-associate scenes, work on them in your head, mold them before you actually put them on paper. It's slightly more rigorous than just daydreaming, but only slightly. Still, it's apparently more important than I thought. Well, heck, I've been doing that since third grade.

Anyway, I have finished one novel and one screenplay, as well as a piddling number or short stories and poems that I'm happy with, two picture books with potential, and the one I'm enclosing. It makes me think of you in part because we studied Iroquois culture in your class, and I picture a similar kind of society.

In addition to the "real" writing, I've written countless letters, both snail-mail and email, which has probably done more to save my sanity than any other activity. The summer I turned 11, my great-uncle Sanford came to visit for a week. I'd never had a grandfather, and I absolutely adored him. I was crushed when he had to go home. We didn't have a phone, so I wrote him letters. He had never learned to read, but his wife read them to him, and then took dictation from him to reply. Later, as he slipped into Alzheimer's, I wrote more to her than to him. I never would have even known her if I hadn't trusted that I could write something an adult would want to read.

In between 8th and 9th grades, I still didn't have a phone, so I wrote letters to my three friends from school. Two of them were not very steady correspondents, but with Sandy, we had a 4-day cycle: I would write on day one and mail it the morning of day two, and she would have it on day three and reply, mailing it on day four. I'd have it the next day, which was a new day one, and the cycle would start again.

After Governor's Scholars, before my senior year in high school, I did almost the same thing with friends from there, including Jason, who became as close to a boyfriend as I was ready for at the time. We also had a 4-day cycle of letters.

Well, that's about it. I just wanted to thank you for that wonderful year, especially for planting the idea that I could be a writer. I'm still working on the "published" part, but for now, it's enough to have written what I have, to have entertained my friends, to have apparently moved complete strangers who read my memoir, and to have learned to take my random thoughts and tame them into coherence.

Love,

Bev

[This story came about because a friend posted on FB about a cricket in his basement, and somehow in the comment thread, I said something about wanting there to be a fairy tale about a cricket only with gender roles reversed to the prince gets rescued, or something, and my friend's wife basically said, "Well then write it, you dork." Well, without the 'dork' part. So anyway, I wrote it.]

The Cricket Prince

There had been an early hot spell that summer, so when the weather returned to normal, the shortest night of the year felt unbearably cold to the cricket; his knee joints ached and his antennae stung. He searched his domain for a collection of leaves or a mound of pine needles, but the strangers had come at mid-day with their smelly metal loudnesses, and they always took away his homes. But sometimes they left a tuft of grass against the straight-straight wall whose stones smelled of hot earth even on rainy nights.

He did not find a grass tuft, but as he approached the end of the wall, he felt, inexplicably, a warm breeze. Barely a breeze at all, just a wisp. He huddled in the wisp for a moment, but then realized his antennae were just a bit warmer than his knees; the wisp was warmer in front of him. He moved forward one stiff hop, then another, and another. Now his knees were warmer than his antennae, so he stopped, and turned, and hopped once back. His antennae told him to look up. Above him was a small ledge, just about the height of a good jump, or at least a good jump on a warm night. He pondered a moment, prepared his mind and body, and pushed abruptly against the ground with his back legs. And then he was on the ledge. And it was warmer still.

In one corner of the ledge, there was a gap. This was where the warmth was coming from. Warmth, and a smell, a mix of the hot-earth stones and moss and something like mushrooms but not quite mushrooms. The smell was good, and the warmth was very good, and his antennae told him he could squeeze his body through the gap, and so he did. And he found himself in another land, unlike the world he knew.

There was the scent of metal, and just a bit of the stink from the loudnesses he knew, which alarmed him, but there was no loudness sound, and no strangers.

There were many strange things, though, which were almost things he knew, but not those things from his old world. There were pieces of almost-trees, straight-straight like the walls, but they were neither living trees nor dead trees. These almost-trees smelled similar to the stink of the loudnesses, and he knew not to eat them.

Farther along, there were other almost-trees, which smelled different from the first kind, and these were softer. These could be eaten, and some smelled faintly of earth and mushrooms and tasted very good.

Everywhere, the ground was not earth but strange stone, smelling of old-world stone but also of something sharper. It was flat-flat, and met the walls in a perfect line. Much of that line also smelled of earth and mushrooms, and in some places of moss and lichen. Here and there, grit had collected, and among the grains of sand were tiny bits of dead insects and spiders, and fragments of the soft not-wood that were even better than the large pieces, and small pieces of grass and leaves, long dead but still food.

As he explored, he realized there was no living grass at all. Nor seedlings, nor trees, nor real moss. But neither were there lizards, nor frogs, nor the ominous songs of birds. And there were no other crickets in all the land. And so he brought his wings together and loudly proclaimed this his domain:

I have left behind the familiar,
The mundane,
To discover a world unknown
By any other prince.
This strange land is mine
And mine alone.

Proud and contented, he settled down to slowly chew a flake of soft-not-wood.

——

The sun rose and set, visible through a straight-straight rectangle above him. His new diet seemed less and less strange with each day, and he molted, then molted again, and now he was no longer a child, but an adult. He wanted for nothing, not food nor safety nor warmth. Yet, he felt something lacking, without knowing what. Each night his wings sang the same song, but the tune slowly changed from triumphant to melancholy. Finally, one night, as he listened to the last notes echo off his domain's walls — mine alone — he realized: he was lonely. So he decided to leave his solitary kingdom and return to the land of other crickets.

It was an arduous journey back up the steep wall, with many false starts and falls, but finally, toe-claws aching from tightly gripping the miniscule cracks, he arrived at the ledge again. He made his way back to the corner with the gap — but his antennae warned him that the gap was too small. How could this be? He thought of his two molts, such small changes that he hadn't noticed getting larger. But his antennae would not lie. Exhausted and defeated, he half-stumbled, half-slid back down to the flat earth, and even though he didn't have the will to sing, his wings seemed to play of their own accord:

I have left behind the familiar,
Left behind my kin,
Lured by a world unknown.
Only now do I see
This land is my prison
And mine alone.

Each night, he was compelled to call out into the silence, even knowing no one could hear him:

My kingdom is empty,
As am I.
I will sing to a princess
Who will never arrive,
And will continue to sing
For eternity.

I would gladly leave
This empty kingdom of mine
For a tuft of grass
If my imagined princess
Would find me here
And lead me to her home.

He sang his songs for many nights, sometimes lulling himself into dreams in which his princess was real, and led him easily up the wall to freedom. Sometimes he could feel her antennae meeting his, reassuring him, "You're not alone." And always he stirred from the dream and had a moment when he believed. But then each time he came fully to his senses, and knew he was alone.

Until one early dawn.

Grass pollen shimmered on her antennae, and she held a piece of the soft-not-wood in her jaw, testing a flavor that was new to her. She was not a dream. After weeks of aching song, his wings were struck dumb. He had to speak with antennae and toe-claws.

"How did you find me?"

"Your songs, of course." There was a gentle laugh in her touch. "I followed them these last few nights, to the straight-straight wall, to a ledge, through a gap I hadn't known was there."

His soul sank. "Oh. I had hoped there was another way."

"Why?"

"I no longer fit through."

"So? Why do you need to fit through?"

"To follow you back to your kingdom."

She laughed again. "I have no kingdom! It is you who rules a vast domain."

He sighed. "Vast, yes, but lonely."

That gentle laugh again. "So I've heard." Then she held her antennae motionless against his, suddenly somber, and shy. "Perhaps… it would not be lonely if I stayed."

His wings pressed against each other, silent, but prepared to sing. "You would stay here? With me?"

"I have listened to the songs of many princes. They sang for me, but they did not sing to me: they sang at each other, sang of their strength, sang of their power, sang threats. Many songs ended with blows and pain. No other prince has sung to me; no other prince has sung of sadness, of longing. They sought me out; none have made me want to seek them."

"Then you shall be the princess of which I dreamed."

"No. I shall be your queen. For you are not a prince, but a king. No mere prince could discover this new, strange land. There is no other cricket like you. You are the king of which I dreamed."

Crossposts: https://violetcheetah.livejournal.com/82211.html

[Disclaimer: I am an atheist; any similarities between the God in this story and your own God are purely coincidental.]

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Crossposts: http://violetcheetah.livejournal.com/79614.html

Two weeks ago, the prompt in my writing workshop was a poem, Nate Klug's "Squirrels." It led me to write the following poem:

This is my mind today,
squirrels in the corner of its eye,
joyous squirrels but also wasps,
the wisp of grass on the ankle
is mistaken for ominous,
the ankle jerking upward to
meet the smack of the palm
before I realize there is
nothing there to sting me
except that slapping hand,
and then two minute later
the same tickle causes
the same spasm because
I cannot keep the knowing
in the front of my mind,
the knowing that there is
no danger in the grass's caress.

I cannot keep anything
in the front of my mind;
I have read about an eye disease,
macular degeneration,
that robs one of all vision
but peripheral,
a black spot in the middle
that expands with time,
until you look at the world always
with eyes averted
because it's the only way to see,
but you cannot focus your side gaze,
so even what you see is never clear,
and even light casts a shadow,
confusing your eyes with the contrast.

The laminated placard
hanging from the railing
near my machine at work
shifts in the air currents and
flashes at the edge of my view,
making me glance up and over
before I even know that
I'm expecting a person standing,
before I realize that I am afraid,
so that I know there's no danger
a moment before my heart quickens —
each time the glimmer,
then the understanding,
then the lurch of fear,
then shame at the lack of logic.

This is my mind today —
yesterday — July — April, this year and last.
Each day I think
tomorrow I will see
what is front of me.
But today is never tomorrow,
and my mind's eye aches
with the constant futility.

Crossposts: http://violetcheetah.livejournal.com/77515.html

From writing workshop. The prompt was the sentence "You're not the boss of me."

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Current Mood: amused
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[I had actually had this idea come into my head a few days before Butler died, so that wasn't the cause, but it certainly added impetus to actually writing it. I wrote it last night at Write Here Write Now, and I figured it would resonate, but yeah, rather a lot, I gather.

----

Mary's Monologue

I know you fight back tears every time you hear the happy Christmas carols: Hark the Herald Angels Sing; Joy to the World; O Come Emmanuel. And I know you are stabbed with shame as your eyes sting, because it's Christmas, for God's sake. Everyone's supposed to be happy, with lights and presents and candies and eggnog, and eager children with shining eyes, and everyone is a kid this time of year, aren't they, flitting from gifts they want to gifts they want to give, and rush and bustle, and you: are just tired. You're so tired, and you can't tell anyone because you don't want to bring them down, not this time of year of all times. So you let them read what they want to read into the glisten in your own eyes. Well, hide the tears if you want to, but please, please don't feel ashamed. You are no more tired than I was, and I cried every day.

The trip took forever. Even with our one blanket as padding, the donkey's spine pressed against my own tailbone, each hoofstep ricocheting the two bones off one another until I had to ask Joseph to stop and let me walk, but of course walking was agony after ten minutes, with my pelvis splayed in anticipation of delivery, and back I'd go on the donkey. I stopped trying to hold in my urine after the first day, because it didn't do any good; it wasn't like anyone was around to smell me, anyway, except Joseph, and we were both rank with sweat, anyway.

And then we arrived, to a town I didn't recognize, overflowing with people, surly and tired and often drunk. I cried constantly, in front of every innkeeper in town, some more than once, and of course you know, reading this now, that it didn't do any good. If I hadn't already been in labor, I don't know if we would have been offered even the stable. I wept harder when we closed the door behind us, but it was almost joy: so quiet after the rush and bustle of the streets, the scent of the ruminants' dung sharper and cleaner that the human waste that was everywhere outside.

The night of labor I don't even remember clearly, except that each of my screams was always echoed by one animal or another, an urgent bleat or bray or cow moan, and even in the agony that every grown woman I knew had warned me about and none had truly prepared me for, some part of my mind saw how funny it was, and in those moments, I felt God watching, saw him in Joseph's eyes, loving and rueful and sorry, and for just an instant I felt unalone.

And then there he was, my son, not Godly or holy, but squalling and blood-smeared and just like any other baby, and I wept, but not for joy. I grieved. I knew as he nursed that I would live to see him die, that his father conceived him within me for that, because somehow this all-powerful creator of the earth and the waters and the plants and animals hadn't seen fit to make a world that didn't require blood to atone for its wrongs. And not just a ram or a dove anymore, but a human lamb, not one to be simply shorn for its wool but to be butchered. God had stayed Abraham's hand as he prepared to sacrifice Isaac. There was no one to stay the hand of God.

For unto us a child is born? No! Unto me! My baby, from my body, now suckling my breast. To be taken from me now, given to the world that doesn't deserve him, so that the world can deserve him? Maybe I don't deserve him either, because if it had been my choice, I would have fled, not just from Herod but from God, from man, from Joseph if I had to. There were caves, everyone knew about the people who lived there, odd people, but they would have welcomed us, and my son would have been the one to lay me to rest, as it should be. As God intended.

So cry now if you feel like it. Hide in your bed all month. Sleep through the grey days. The world has enough shepherds and wise men out there to make merry and rejoice at the gifts they've been given and give gifts that no one really wants. You are welcome to stay here with me, nestled against the donkey's freshly rinsed belly, working up the strength for the long journey ahead.

Current Mood: drained
Crossposts: https://violetcheetah.livejournal.com/72622.html

I CANNOT believe I ended up following this particular writing workshop prompt, since I loathe Christmas, and never liked Santa. But here it is. The prompt was to write a letter to Santa from your younger self, or one of your characters. This is what I would have written when I was somewhere between 7 and 9 years old, had I been articulate; I remember having each of these thoughts at some point around that age.

-----

Dear Santa,

I'm not sure what I want this year, but I know what I don't want.

I don't want a doll this year. See, I really like the dolls you brought me last year, especially the one with the straight black hair, because I've always wanted to be an Indian and have my hair not frizz and tangle and not turn red at the ends, so, I know this sounds weird, but when I play with her, I pretend she's me as a baby and she's going to grow into what I want to grow into instead of what I really am. And she doesn't look like a baby, really, she looks like a two-year-old, so I can pretend she can talk without feeling stupid. But Jenny's my favorite doll ever in my life, and I want her to always be my favorite, so if you bring me another doll and I don't like it as much, it won't be fair to the new doll, and maybe someone else would love it as much as I love Jenny, so you should give it to them, instead. And on the other hand, if you bring me a doll I like better than Jenny, I would feel really bad about not loving Jenny best anymore, and anyway, she deserves to be loved best. Actually, if you want to, you can take my other dolls and give them to other kids, if you know someone who will love them better. Except Lilly, because she and Jenny are friends, and I like her almost as much and some days maybe even a little more because she's older and can go on adventures.

I don't want any more Matchbox cars this year, unless I can have another U.S. Mail Jeep. Darrell and me have too many cars already, and it gets confusing. Oh, except if the Matchboxes are for both of us, that'd mean he wouldn't get any either, and I don't think he'd like that.

Mainly I guess I just want fewer things, period, at least at Christmas, because Darrell is too old to get many toys anymore, so he only gets like six things, and mom only gets three, and dad just gets the one from mom and the one from both Darrell and me, and then I'm still opening presents after everyone else is done and it feels quiet and weird and the air is heavy and I feel greedy with all the stuff around me.

What I really want more than anything is for the church to have the candlelight service every Sunday night and not just the one before Christmas. I don't know if you have candlelight services where you live, but what they do is, they turn off the lights, and then Brother Bob lights one candle in the front of the room. And he uses that one to light two other candles, and two deacons take those candles and start with the front row on each side, and light the first person's candle, and then while that person's lighting the next one, the deacon moves to the next row, and the next, and then in like five minutes, everybody's holding a lighted candle and there's enough light you can see the hymn book to sing Silent Night, and it all came from that one candle, and I don't know why I love it, but I want to do it every week until I can figure out why I feel so light and full and like crying and laughing and flying and curling up in bed all at the same time.

Current Mood: blah
Crossposts: http://violetcheetah.livejournal.com/72065.html

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[Prompt: Write about something you've always wanted, but that you hope you never get.]

I got baptized when I was 11. I'd been wanting to since I was 8, but I always chickened out when the call went out at the end of service and I'd think about standing in front of everyone and having to say something. It wasn't until I was 11 that I realized I could talk to Brother Bob beforehand, and he could say something for me, and all I had to do was stand and stare at the floor.

The baptism was the next week, and in between we happened to have a revival, so by the time Sunday came, there were three of us. Brother Bob explained what would happen, everything from "The water will be a little cold but not too cold" to reassurances that when he dunked me, it would be quick enough that I would absolutely not breathe in any water through the folded handkerchief he would hold over my nose and mouth. And he was right. The actual baptism wasn't a big deal: I went under, I didn't feel any different when I came up, but because I'd declared my faith in public I wouldn't go to hell if I died.

Herb Broughton was one of the other two baptized. He was probably close to 40 years old, and he'd been baptized before, but a lot of people rededicated themselves to God this way. After we'd all been dunked, the three of us and Brother Bob were going to hold hands and bow our heads while Brother Bob prayed. I was disappointed that I ended up between Herb and the other guy I didn't know, so I was holding hands not with my much-loved pastor but with two near-strangers. Herb started to reach for my hand, but then he shifted. He cupped my shivering right shoulder in his big hand. It was a firm touch, but not pushing, not demanding. And as we stood with bowed heads and closed eyes, I could feel the warmth from beneath my skin meet the warmth of his quilt-heavy hand. What I felt was sacred. Safety. Acceptance. Connection. Peace. At that moment, I adored, not God and Jesus, but this comforting man and his palm that brought me the comfort I didn't know I'd been aching for.

I sought him out every Sunday after that. Before church started, then between Sunday School and preaching, then after the sermon was over. We mainly talked, mainly the sarcastic teasing that was the only way I knew to show affection. Not every week, but often enough, he'd put a hand on my shoulder, or sometimes his arm around me to hold the far shoulder, buddy-like, father-and-son-like, and he'd smile with a slight squint that seemed a little self-conscious, and he'd keep me from floating away into the nothingness where I mostly lived.

There was never anything dark in it. I was primed to expect something sexual in any touch, and to suspect even where there was nothing, and it was never there with him.

He was, I know now, the first parent-I-wanted. Less than a year later, my mother switched from that church, where we'd gone all my life, because of a feud with another member. I was adrift again, unmoored, floating.

In 7th grade, there were three physical education teachers supervising a gym full of us. At the beginning of the year, the court was set up with about 10 different "stations," and we were divided up into small groups and rotated through half of the stations each day doing each of the activities. One station was juggling, which was Mr. Huffman's forte. He wasn't there the whole ten minutes or so each group spent, because there were more groups than teachers. But one day, when my group was ending the period there, he came over. Ora Decker excitedly told him that I'd actually been juggling the scarves. Not just two, but all three at once, in the right pattern and everything. He wanted to see, of course, and I wanted to show him, but I knew before I even tried that there was no way my hands could do what I wanted with a teacher watching. I made the attempt, though, three or four times, until I finally gave up and stood still, begging the tears not to fall in front of the rest of the group. I glanced for a second across his face, risking that moment of eye contact in hopes of telegraphing into his mind that I needed an escape. And I saw such sympathy in the curve of his eyebrows that I felt in a way sorry for him. But he was also smiling softly, and he reached out, touched my shoulder for a second, father-and-son-like, and said, "That's fine, I'll see it at some point."

For two years or more, I daydreamed of him somehow becoming my guardian.

He wasn't the last: Mr. Jacobs in 9th grade, Mr. Huffman's wife that year, too. Mr. Berryman in 10th and 11th grades, Reverend Parrish at the same time, Mr. Tyler in the summer program before 12th grade, Mr. and Ms. Lee that last year of high school. Countless others in between, including the foster father from the three weeks I lived away from my parents. Then after I "grew up," there were professors, fellow college students, coworkers, my shrink to some extent, men I thought I wanted to be my boyfriends because that's what intimacy and intensity is supposed to be about. I at least know now that it isn't sex I'm sublimating. It isn't even a parent I want, a different mother or a different father, a replacement. I don't understand what a parent feels like, so that isn't the cavity I'm trying to fill, or if it is, I have no idea what the hole is shaped like or even where it resides within me. I want. I want. It is relentless and insistent and the shame of it makes me back away always from the person I want, makes me shove, bite, run.

Current Mood: anxious
Crossposts: http://violetcheetah.livejournal.com/71543.html

He'd just finished the semester at the Southern Baptist seminary, but he hadn't started preaching yet. He was 8 years older than her, one year older than her brother, and he'd always been so earnest, so gentle, that when she was a child she'd thought he was very smart; he had seemed like a college professor when he was still a teenager.

She only came back to Kentucky once a year around Christmas, so she hadn't seen him since she graduated high school five years ago. Hadn't seen a lot of people from the church, people she'd grown up surrounded by, the one place where no one made fun of her, where the grown-ups doted on her because she could memorize bible verses and then tell you what they meant. The church was home back then, back when she'd believed that she believed in God because she desperately needed to believe, needed there to be some kind power behind everything, some outside meaning underneath all of it, conducting the world like a painful symphony that would someday, someday have a happy ending, even if that day was after she died. It had been four years now since she had broken away from religion, but she still ached for it, for that sureness that there was a higher purpose and that pain was not in vain. She envied the people she'd grown up with, but atheism was as much a matter of faith as belief had been.

Not many people at this New Year's Eve gathering asked her about her faith. It probably didn't occur to them that the devout 10-year-old would have grown into a heathen. But he did ask; not if she went to church, but where? Did they have Southern Baptists in Boston? Yes, but she'd stopped going to church. He frowned, puzzled. "But surely you still believe." She thought, yes, I believe in many things: my friends, music, love; we differ on this one thing is all. She just said, "After a fashion." It wasn't enough of an explanation for him, and he pressed, and she knew he didn't want the answer she'd give, so she softened it.

"I'm a Christian Atheist." He opened his mouth, but nothing came out. She'd known it would break his brain, and there was a certain glee she wasn't proud of, but she realized she'd said it because she truly wanted to explain, wanted him to understand. He wouldn't understand, she knew, but she could still explain, could still try.

"I don't believe in God, so I don't believe Jesus was his son. As to whether the version of Jesus in the Bible is real, whether the historical Jesus actually said all the things that the writers of the Gospels said he said, I don't know." He opened his mouth again to break in, but again no sound came out, and she gentled her voice further. "But even if the Jesus in the Bible is just a fictional character, that Jesus is still an incredible role model. He helps the poor, he's kind to outcasts, he forgives horrible wrongs, he loves everyone. I try to live up to that example. I try to treat others the way the Jesus in the Bible would have treated them. I don't always succeed, but no one does."

His eyes were bright but clouded, like someone with a fever. Confusion, urgency, fear. Sadness. "But that's not enough," he said. "That doesn't earn you a place in heaven."

"Why not?"

"Because. Because you must believe, that Jesus is the Son of God and he died for your sins and was resurrected."

"I can't. I can't will myself to believe that any more than you can will yourself to believe in Zeus and Athena. If your God exists, he created me without the capacity to believe in him. So why would he condemn me for something I have no control over?"

"I don't believe you lack that capacity. You just need to find it within you."

"Well, that's another thing I lack the capacity to believe."

[The prompt for the piece: each workshopper wrote down a noun and a verb on a card, and the next workshopper was supposed to use those two words in three sentences in their piece. My words were "She" and "Broke."

Current Mood: peaceful
Crossposts: http://violetcheetah.livejournal.com/71177.html

From last week's writing workshop. The prompt: Start with the following line, and don't let you pen/fingers stop writing: "That long-distant day when your father took you to discover ice."

-----

I am supposed to write without stopping, but just saying father is enough to paralyze me with scenes, or flickers of scenes, ominous but unformed, the memory of the feeling without the memory of the event.

The flashback I've been having recently is an actual flashback, a "real" flashback. It used to be that I'd slip out of my body and hover over my left shoulder, and I was remembering a feeling, that moment before something happens, but I couldn't' remember the actual event, or events. I felt that something's-going-to-happen feeling all the time growing up, so the flashback was just of that eternal moment, hundreds of times over, infinity squared inside a black-hole singularity. My mind would swirl — I always tried to remember the event, any event, it seemed like if I could just put a scene to the feeling, it would stop. But my mind played dozens of scenes at once, all superimposed over one another on the movie screen until it was just a blur of grey and black.

Now, though, I end up in that night with the gun. Not when he fired the pistol into the wall, not once I'd turned the swivel rocker around and could see the gun pointed at me. I am in that moment in between. I have heard the first shot in the bedroom, known and not believed what it was, heard the second shot and known and believed, and in a second I will be turned around and see the barrel in front of my father's swaying body and vacant eyes. But I have not yet turned, and I do not yet know what I will see, I just know it will be bad, and it may be the last thing I see, and I need to see it, I need know what's going on, whatever it is, it's worse to not know, and right now, I have no idea, and so every possibility still exists, so many variations of blood and smoke and holes, and none can be ruled out.

I can hear the echo of the shot. I can hear it in my shoulder, the back of my left shoulder, as if there's an eardrum vibrating above my scapula, see, I was sitting sideways in the chair, my back against the left chair arm, my right side against the chair back enveloped in the curve of the chair, and my left arm, my left shoulder, out and exposed and I felt the sound there. I am 41 now and it happened when I was 16 and I saw a shrink for 18 years, not counting the crappy shrinks before him, and I described the scene dozens of times, hundreds, to shrinks and friends and in writing, over and over, and not until a week ago at work did I remember feeling that sound in the shoulder, the shoulder I hover above when I dissociate, the shoulder I look over when I don't hear someone behind me, always exposed, always cold, burning cold. I never gave it a thought; I was born with that shoulder dislocated, that collarbone cracked, probably too big for my mother's small birth canal, it's not uncommon, and I did a repeat performance of the same shoulder and collarbone at a year and a half. It's my earliest memory. Not of falling off the bed and dislocating it, not of the doctor's office. What I remember is standing in the kitchen, I remember the tabletop taller than me, and I'd just dropped a crayon, and I was left-handed, very left-hand dominant, but my left arm was in a sling, and it apparently never occurred to me to just pick up the crayon with my right hand, because what I remember is reaching over with my right hand, pulling the sling off my elbow, reaching down and picking up the crayon and standing back up, and then crying because my arm hurt. That's the shoulder, it's never been right, always too loose, prone to popping out of place, weird-feeling, just not right, but not cold and hot and vibrating with the sound of that small snap that wasn't even that loud. That feeling was that one night, and after all these years I know where I am when I'm not here, and it's such a relief to finally know, even thought it hasn't made it stop happening.

Current Mood: pensive
Crossposts: http://violetcheetah.livejournal.com/70975.html

[Trigger warning for physical abuse]

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Crossposts: http://violetcheetah.livejournal.com/70742.html

Although once again I couldn't make Wednesday's workshop, Toni provided this poem as a prompt, and the following is what came to mind.

-----

[Despite the way the beginning sounds, this event occurred not when I was still a child, but when I was 19 and a sophomore in college.]

It was 5 o'clock in the morning, and now it was safe to sleep, the sky not yet blue but not still grey, the half-creatures under my bed and in my closet dissolving to dust in the new morning. I lay with my back to the window, my eyes open, still hungry for daylight, watching the anti-shadow of the window lighten on the wall above my desk. I fell into sleep a few times, as always, always jerking awake at the last minute until all of me could fall at once.

See, there was a rope around my heart, a slipknot, with a long length leading out my back beside my spine between my shoulder blades. Most of the time, it was slack; but I could feel it, portentously heavy, knowing what was coming sooner or later. Sometimes it would catch on something as I walked, or a hand would reach through the back of the chair I was sitting in and yank, and my heart would be jerked back and out of my body completely — I could feel it, almost see it, hovering in the air two feet behind me — and I would have to stop where I was, stop what I was doing, stop thinking, even, and wait for it to fight itself back into my chest, thudding hard as it played catch-up for the beats it had missed. It was important not to move while my heart was missing, because if I wasn't precisely where it had left me, it might not be able to find me.

Whenever I tried to sleep, of course the rope dangled over the edge of that cliff behind me, all the way to the bottom, and the sunlight never reached that far down so the half-beings there never dissolved even when it was dawn where I was, and they pulled the rope like it was attached to a church bell. I had to resist each time until the angle was just right and they pulled the entire belfry of my body down with the bell, until my chest and the rest of me fell with my heart down into darkness. It was still painful, still terrifying in the pitch-black at the bottom of the cliff, but at least I was whole, and I with my heart could slowly work my way up the rock face and back into the world.

I lay that morning as always, resisting the pull, too tired to be afraid except for those moments when my chest was empty. I watched that window anti-shadow as I failed to fall and waited to fall. And then something new happened.

I heard a soft noise behind me, through the open window. It should have been the unremarkable wingbeats and coo of a passing pigeon. Except at the same moment, I saw the grey shadow pass in front of me. I saw the noise, I heard the shadow, and my heart nearly left my body, but I was backwards and the rope pulled at my heart through my sternum, and my sternum did not give and I fell forward and sideways and up and not back, and I was in the space between the feathers and the song, I was within the dove, clothed in down and above the ground.

It was a second. Not even a second. But it echoed, reverberated like my drumming heartbeat. I had fallen forward. I had fallen upward. Forward existed, upward existed. I had been there, all of me, whole. I had flown. I did not yet conceive of a future for myself — didn't dare, couldn't dare, to think more than a week ahead because the weight of even imagining that impending time was one of the things that could crush me — but I dared imagine a single second of a possible future, when perhaps I would maybe fall forward again.

Current Mood: contemplative
Crossposts: http://violetcheetah.livejournal.com/68869.html

The random detail about getting ice cream ended up leading somewhere I'm not altogether unpleased with.

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Current Mood: apathetic
Crossposts: http://violetcheetah.livejournal.com/68682.html

I wasn't able to attend the writing workshop this Wednesday, but Toni usually posts one of the prompts on his Facebook page. This one (a poem, Joanna Klink's "Some Feel Rain") didn't strike a chord in me overall. But there was one fragment that resonated, and I ended up with this blog post.

[Trigger warning: sexual abuse]

( Read more... )

Current Mood: tired
Crossposts: http://violetcheetah.livejournal.com/68566.html

I guess this is a companion to my short story "After the Sun." It came into my mind yesterday while listening to Hem's "Half Acre" for the umpteenth time.

-----

Dirt farmer

I sweep the floors every morning.
I do not take the braided rugs outside to shake;
I snap them like whiplashes in the hall,
and I gather what falls to the floor.
Each week I beat the window screens
against the same floorboards; it leaves marks,
but the flecks of wood add to the bounty.
Every fortnight — more often if it's windy —
I take the dust and dander and grit
to the pit the dead tree roots left.
I layer my treasure with holey shirts —
the earthworms prefer flannel — and I water it
with the soapless washwater
from my laundry and dishes and bath.
Yes, I know what the neighbors think,
but the snow melts and steams away
from the growing mound in February,
and in March I am ready to harvest.
I fill the narrow boxes I've made
between each inner window and storm,
and I hold back some washwater now
when I saturate the pit's new layers.
I plant six of each bean, the peas, the lentils;
four yellow squash, four green.

I thought I truly believed;
why else thresh the screens and carpets,
sponge my skin with a meager bowl of water?
I did not know I'd had no faith
until a bedtime lamplight check showed
that first fault-lined distension in the surface
and beneath the cracks, like verdant lava,
the tender life ready to erupt.
My shriek sounded not like joy,
but like someone burning, or grieving,
bringing the nightshirted neighbors across their barren field and mine
and into my spotless house and still I screamed until they saw
that nubbin.
It was not until I saw them see that I believed.
In silence we gazed at the soil —
this was soil —
and laughed tears and held each other
before shyly pulling away and taking leave.

I put out the lamp and lay on the sofa,
wanting the sun to wake me through that same window
where it would draw its first new being in years
up from earth and into light and life.

Current Mood: tired
Crossposts: http://violetcheetah.livejournal.com/68106.html

Both of these were originally written in 1999 at the latest. The first was inspired by news reports from the chaos going on at the time in Eastern Europe. The second was inspired by a documentary on The Learning Channel — back when TLC had educational value — about the planned flooding in China for the Three Gorges Dam hydroelectric project, and some of the sites that would be underwater, or would become islands. Anyway, there was a temple, Buddhist? Confucian? The details are fuzzy, so I'll just say, the poem is based loosely on real events.

-------

Across the border

I watched a woman spit in a soldier's right eye
just before he put a bullet through her face.

From the cover of the briars by the side of the road
I saw another girl weep and plead and finally nod,
agreeing to the toll this bridge troll would take.
Then once his snaps were undone she recanted;
it took four aides to pin her limbs against a tree
while payment was rendered. Even I could see
he would have to kill her for going back on her word.
Still, he kept his promise: he led her over the river
to freedom before his knife opened her throat.

I make my decision and make my way to the bridge.
I brace myself against the milestone and lift my skirts
and gaze past his scarred ear at that other shore.
That tree: I will walk across this bridge and
past her throatless body and stand beneath that elm
and I will wash the blood from my thighs in the river.
I will leave the blood here at the border,
and I will never speak of it or soldiers or martyrs again.

-------

By the river

Ancient wise words
inscribed in slow calligraphy on the long tiles of the temple walls.
There was no need for stained glass or gilt altars,
just the soft curves and sure lines left by men who knew
what matters is the message,
who died at peace, sure that the message would last the centuries.

They could not see
the soldiers coming now across the bridge to the stairs in the cliff,
following the orders of a leader afraid of anything so calm
that it might slow the white-water river surging through him until
he could hear his own words
and know that his message would not survive on the stone above his forgotten grave.

But priests and pupils
hear the soldiers' march and see the sure words blur through their tears.
They kneel beneath the tiles with faces lifted as if the words could flow
like water from the walls to fill them, but each mark is solid and true,
strong as the soldiers' steps
as they march up the steps to break what a thousand years hadn't touched.

A bowl of ink
sits on the floor; they were to have practiced their own calligraphy
with slim brushes on the parchment laid out at their feet.
The young boy stands and struggles to take down a tile as tall as he,
then turn its back to him,
dips his brush, and uses his beautiful strokes to write the lies

of the soldiers' leader,
words he was ashamed to have even heard, had never dreamed he would write.
The ink-stained hands of his mentor lift the stone to its place,
then move to take the others down while each student dips his own pen.
They have inscribed nightmares
on every tile and rehung them backwards by the time the soldiers arrive.

Each soldier knows
what is written on the true faces of the stones, but not one dares
to destroy anything that holds the writings of his general and god.
They kneel as they have been taught and recite the words they see,
then rise and step back
through the door to begin the twilight march down the cliffside.

Decades will pass,
and the young boy will learn, and teach, and grow stooped with age,
and with time spent bent over parchment and pupils, and friends' graves.
The general will die in exile, and the teacher will scrub faded ink
from the back of each stone,
turn each tile and lift it into place until he is exhausted.

But another set of wrinkled hands
will lift the last piece, and when the teacher turns he will see a soldier
who has climbed this mountain before. The soldier will kneel
as he was taught by his own mentor before he heard of his general.
He will leave his uniform shirt by the ink-stained bowl,
he will take the student's shift offered by the teacher,
and for the first time in decades, a calligrapher's brush
will call his fingers home.

Current Mood: cold
Crossposts: http://violetcheetah.livejournal.com/67811.html

I found a cello in May. It had been there for 20 years, and I'd never heard it.

I got a copy of U2's "Achtung Baby" in 1993. My father died in February, and I remember making a cassette copy of that CD to play on the plane ride, because I didn't have a discman. I listened to it after I got back, sometimes several times a day. I listened to it before I cut my waist-length hair off and then shaved my head, and I listened to it afterward. I didn't really like the messiness and noise of it at first, but I was drawn to it, then soothed by it.

I haven't listened that much in the last few years to music that's been in my life since my teens and early 20s; there's too much new stuff crowding it out, new hooks to follow and obsess over. I had to make a conscious effort a few months ago, to put on my iPod Nano some of the music that iTunes said I hadn't played in the three years since my old computer died and I had to start a new playing history.

I also ride the train, with it's rattles and drones and people having conversations, so I got some noise-blocking earbuds. I'm not a music conneseur, so I don't invest in expensive headphones, and the first pair I got were pretty good, the second pair somewhat better. But when they died, I got a pair of also-inexpensive Koss buds, and I realized there was a difference when I first listened to a Tori Amos album and was like, Oh, hey, right, she plays piano. I frequently hear bass lines and harmonies that I haven't noticed before, and each time it happens it stops me and makes me smile.

I got off the subway in Davis Square in May, headed to the monthly Queer Open Mic where I was going to read a piece of my own writing. I'd started up "Achtung Baby" on the ride there, and I walked up College Avenue wrapped in a cocoon of nostalgia and angst and comfort. And then someone started tuning a cello. It was behind me and to my right, and I stopped and looked back and across the street, expecting a busker. But there was no one there. And even though I'd turned, the cello was still behind me and to the right. It took me a full fifteen seconds to first suspect and then be sure that it was coming from my earbuds. By that time, it was overtaken by the drums and staticky guitar and vocals, but I could catch glimpses of it peeking through like a somber sun through bright clouds. I was aware that my head was tilted to the right as I walked, and that I was wearing the type of grin people don't normally have when they are not talking to someone else. But I couldn't help it. It was like leaning against a wall in the house you've lived in half your life, and hearing a click, and a hidden door opens across from you, with stairs leading to a cool stone cavern, and realizing you've walked above it hundreds of times, thousands, and never known it was there.

Current Mood: contemplative
Crossposts: http://violetcheetah.livejournal.com/67436.html

[Obscenity note: This passage contains 7 "f---"s, all confined to the same paragraph.]

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Current Mood: complacent
Crossposts: http://violetcheetah.livejournal.com/67208.html

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Violet Wilson

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Violet Wilson

Entries tagged with writing

letter to Rita Gallagher

The Cricket Prince: a sort of fairy tale

God's memoir: The father's word

A poem from a poem

being my own boss

novel: "Touch" chapter 18

Mary's monologue

A letter to Santa

novel: "Touch" chapter 17

A partial case study of attachment disorder.

A matter of faith

The ringing in my shoulder

Novel: "Touch" chapter 16

vignette: flying

novel: "Touch" chapter 15.2

unsafety

Poem: "Dirt farmer"

Two very different poems with "River" in the titles

A secret cello

Novel: "Touch" chapter 15