story startings- Maggie

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.

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but a word is a bottomless pit

Everything evaporates slowly in an unseasonably warm spring. Firetrucks aren't as red as they once were. Pain isn't nearly as incapsulating in the physical realm. But the pain of the tattoo gun pressing against your cerebellum is what traps you and makes you scream. They'll all leave eventually. They'll leave and you'll be stuck here, glowing finally but glowing alone. You're a neon sign with one letter flashing in helpless murder of a perfect word. Closed becomes close. Close becomes lose. It's all breaking apart just as it's coming together. Syntax and diction are crawling under your nailbeds and what are you doing instead? You nap and you cry, you drink and you fuck. You scream, you laugh, you finally leave your bed just as everyone else heads home. He was British and he wanted you. He was British and you left him standing on a street corner with your dreams clawing at his belt buckle. Home alone on the kitchen floor, that small ice cream drip from last week is sitting right beneath your cheek but you're too drunk to care. This warm spring took all of the fight right out of you. What's left? That lonely drip of ice cream on the unwashed kitchen floor. That smell of him dusted on your clothes. The bloody hope that all this isn't for nothing.

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erasure poem

In my creative writing class this week we talked about erasure poems, sometimes called found poetry. Where you take another work and find words among the sentences, crossing out what remains, and making your own poem from the ashes of the other work. I loved it so much. Here's my take on it. Excuse the picture quality.

a sonnet for the road

These streets that twist and turn in front of my
rearview like I left you that night last spring-
twisted in your sheets, heart breaking, a ring
without a hand to hold its diamond high-
lead me down the same road, the same old sky.
But now my car is empty and I sing
our love song in silence, my lips that cling
to the last taste of you and our last sigh.
The suitcase skyline holds me here although
I try to pack your smell under my bras
and travel size shampoo. But I can't drive
away, can't seem to drive your scent below.
The wheel circles round all of my faux pas.
Without you here all I can do is drive.

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trapped

Hi. For some reason it feels like it's been so long since I've been on here. It's only been a few days but for one reason or another, it's felt like I haven't been allowed to write on my own blog. I was scared to write and I still am a little bit. But I'm also afraid of what will happen if I don't. My heart needs it. (I mean, it also needs to not be afraid 100% of the time but one thing at a time.)

My blog is my home. It's like my baby blankets. It means so much to me and it is the place I feel safest. So when I feel like my blog has been bombed or is being watched I have a hard time wanting to come home, but where else will I go? Ugh. I hate winter.

How are you all? I don't really have a lot to say, but I wanted to check in. Today in my creative writing class, we are devoting the entire class to workshopping one of my stories. *INSERT GULP HERE* I'm very scared. I've been doubting my writing lately. It's the grey weather and the grey spirits around me. I need sunlight and an escape. And also to stop being scared of my own shadow. I'll let you know how the workshop goes. I'd love to share the story I wrote here. I'm very proud of it. It's a bit long but maybe I can share it piece by piece.

Excuse my frantic rambling. But everything feels like that lately.

I love you, readers. Thank you for being here and making me feel brave.

fossil fuels

I wrote this for my creative writing class to experiment with minimalist fiction. I'm pretty excited for how it turned out. Enjoy, loves.

Fossil Fuels

My father bought me a book to handle the divorce. It was a silly book about dinosaurs divorcing. They said crying was ok. Don’t blame yourself. I thought the dinosaurs were lucky because they were dead. Their moms weren’t crying anymore. The book got heavy in my hands suddenly. That’s when the coughing started.

I hated watching my mother cry. I hate when my father yelled. That made us all cry. I thought the divorce would mean less yelling, which meant less tears. The first night in our new house there was yelling but my father wasn’t there. My mother was yelling at God. She was crying at God. The tears in my throat cried themselves sick. They made me sick. The cough carried on with no explanation.

I lied to you earlier. My father was in the house the whole time because he was everywhere. He was my coughing fit. He was the God my mom was cursing. He was my sister’s loud music shaking our new walls. He didn’t buy me that book, though. But he was the dinosaur my book was about. He was dead but everywhere. He was fossil fuels filling our lungs.

My cough lasted for four hours. My mom couldn’t see well enough to drive. She was crying. My sister drove. She had her permit, I think. When we got to the hospital, I read a different book. The dolls weren’t coping with divorce. They were coping with shots. But I was shot too. Shot with surprise. When the doctor came in the coughing stopped. The doctor was a man. He hugged me. I don’t know why I remember that. I made it up. Nobody hugged me. The books hugged me. The fossil fuels hugged me. My dad didn’t hug me.

When we got home the bathtub flooded and my cough came back. My ribs hugged my lungs. They shot them. I was seven and I was getting a divorce from my own two lungs.

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