story startings- Maggie

Tuesday, April 22

So I've been writing this short story when I've had a free moment or two to spare with school winding down. Here is the beginning. Let me know what you think, lovelies.

She liked to feel the curt little hairs bud in the center of her armpit. As she sat at the table picking through the bowl of peach halves she was systematically cutting in half, she’d absentmindedly move her finger inside of her sweatshirt and feel the tiny bristles like slightly overgrown grass creeping out where she had so meticulously shaved two days ago. The dress she’d had to wear to the party still lay across her couch like a woman caught in a fainting spell, its purple ruffles barely touching the floor.
            Purple had been her mother’s favorite color. Even her casket had been purple when they’d buried her in July. Maggie wore the one black dress she’d owned at the time with the purple heels her mother had bought her for her High School graduation four years before. The shoes rubbed until the skin stretched across her pinky toes was rubbed into blisters full of water, finally popping as Maggie stepped forward to deliver her eulogy. Her toes were swimming while her eyes remained dry. Maggie had forgotten to shave her armpits that day. Later, in the back of the hearse with the hearse driver panting on top of her, his fingers gripped at her armpits and he stopped kissing her neck.
            “You one of those nature loving girls who doesn’t shave her pits?”
            “I didn’t have time. Nobody woke me up.”
            “A 22 year old girl can’t wake herself up?”
            “My mom used to call me every Wednesday morning. I haven’t woken up on Wednesdays for three weeks.” He looked at her face, trying to get her eyes to lock with his. Maggie stared at his crooked bow tie. “Her brain exploded. She was dizzy one morning and her brain exploded. So now I don’t wake up on Wednesdays.”

            “I’ll keep you up til Thursday, babe. You just lay back and let it happen.” Maggie closed her eyes and willed her brain to explode. It didn’t. When his watch beeped at midnight she pushed him off of her and wandered to her car, her underwear dragging along the bottom of her left heel. When she got home that night the raw pink skin on the sides of her pinky toes had glued themselves to the inside of her shoes. Ripping them off made her scream and blood slowly cry from the wounds. This was the first night she felt lonely.

via *

3 comments:

  1. It intrigues the fuck out of me how you share this. It inspires me to to share my, god only knows how many short stories I have started and never completed. I love this, I truly enjoy everything you write and you always fill me with something I can't quite explain. I adore you :)

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  2. “Her brain exploded. She was dizzy one morning and her brain exploded. So now I don’t wake up on Wednesdays.”

    Don't ask me to explain why but that's my favorite line. Something about the rhythm of it.

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  3. Well done on the short story front, I have yet to follow through on that commitment from NULC, but I've been bursting with poetry for now. Cutting peach halves in half, that was a little confusing. But other than that tiny detail I really love the way it's linked by those vivid images - purple heels, purple casket, blisters, blood, stubbly armpits - though the telling is a little erratic (which seems very appropriate for the character), it has a great symmetry and organization; to be cliche, there is a method to the madness. I'm curious to know more.

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Thank you for your words; they light a fire in my heart. You are lovely.