Weekly 5-10 minute writing prompts from feather anchor adages.
11.10.10
WK 06 | A car raced by
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Anonymous
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Part Two:
As she got older, her journals took on a different format: Lists of things to do, dinner party menus, detailed garden maps and planting schedules, lists interspersed with detailed dreams.
There was the one about the nuclear war and a bomb shelter where survivors lived; she was living in South Seattle at the time, so dreamt of Asians and blacks. In the dream she was fascinated by the way people kept their few precious belongings, the old military black man with shoe boxes lined up just so. A Dutch woman and her son had a little space in the corner where a mechanical china cow poured milk out of its mouth.
There was another dream so interesting to her that she dreamt the very same dream twice. She accompanied an old man, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, to a circular building filled with Renascence art. In the library he shared a charcoal drawing of a tree. The tree crept out of the paper and rose before them as a three dimensional hologram. The branches took on shapes of farm implements, a whorl in the trunk became his dead wife’s face and he wept.
Or the snipet of a dream she recalls where she stopped at a roadside café to get gas and use the restroom. The sun was shining so bright it hurt her eyes. A car pulled out and her Dad jumped out shouting, “It was Flynn, Flynn who wrote this”. As he spoke purple glitter floated out of his mouth and fell on to the dry, cracked earth at his feet. In a flash, a car raced by and he said, “I am out of this world.”
She’d kept some type of journal since she was a kid. When she was in her early twenties, she threw away two boxes of bound, hardcover journals filled with poems, pictures, concert ticket stubs and an accounting of how she’s spent years nine through twenty five.
One time her Grandma Phyllis was visiting from Berkeley and had read one of Fraser’s journals hidden in her room. “Grandma is staying in my bedroom. Her stuff takes up my whole room. Luckily she leaves on Saturday.” Grandma Phyllis confronted her of course, “Respect your elders,” she chided the teenage girl.
Over the years the journals repeated several central themes. Boyfriends: getting them, keeping them, letting them go. Diets: complicated calorie counts and exercise plans that never lasted more than a week or two. Family drama: Mom getting remarried, Crazy Junior burning wooden bound ancient heirloom books in the fireplace because they did not feature God’s word, Dad, getting arrested for dealing cocaine.
She’d warned him. Crazy Junior was on another one of his religious kicks and had been taking an undercover cop to Dad’s house for several weeks. After The Big Goof Off and subsequent divorce, Dad had rented a little house across the street from Fraser’s high school and started dealing drugs. He has a suitcase full of pills, dealt pot and cocaine.
She’d stop over almost every afternoon for a bong hit, lunch and a little Perry Mason. If no one else was around, she and her Dad would play backgammon and she’d skip her Social studies class. She’d described the cop and begged her Dad to stop dealing. He was arrested the Spring of her Freshman year and Crazy Junior moved to Utah and stayed out of sight for the next six years.
She’d always fantasized that a stranger would read her journals and provide an objective analysis of the young girl’s life. She pictured leaving the journals at the Goodwill drop off with a note with her telephone number so they could tell her what they thought of her. She’d always been interested in what people thought of her, she didn’t think she had any perspective on it herself.
A place to think, to be alone and have a thought all to herself. That was all she ever wanted. A silent place, in which the only sound was the sound that her thought could make as they bounced around in there. But instead, she was surrounded by a chaos she did not understand. The street sounds, the shouts of children and adults. Vendors, beggars, business men, women in their fancy clothes. It never stopped. It raced by, they raced by. Time and time and more time, that whipped and left and went, but nowhere. Lost and alone and not quite scared. It was all she knew and all she would ever know and all that would ever be. The street noise that would cloud judgment and in it's own right, keeps those surrounded by it homeless and depressed and underfoot. It is the noise that gets in your head and will not leave and will not make sense.
a liver-colored Pontiac, circa the time of my first marriage, belching smoke and choking down the boulevard, 5 a.m., nothing else on the road yet. The potato-faced woman on the corner, her yellow slip dragging the sidewalk, flips off the driver as he roars past, tattoos flashing. She's waiting for her son who said he'd come over to mow the lawn today--fat bastard's always late, her watch stuck on 3 in the afternoon of yesterday. She takes a long look up, then down, the street, reaches to pick up her little rat-shaped dog, and shuffles back into the house.
I was alone in the cafe, pondering the things I couldn't think of. Things no one would understand. Hell, I didn't even understand them. The vortex had been occupying all of my existence since its appearance a few weeks ago. I don't even know how it infected me. All I had done was notice the swirling and bubbling tide-pool. (It had appeared where none had been before.)
Why had I gone closer? Why did I have to question its otherworldliness? How did it get in my mind like an infection sucking my humanity down further and further and replacing it with something else? I couldn't even describe the replacement.
My thoughts of my friends and family had been replaced with thoughts that almost seemed to glow. Languages I had never heard before circled round and round in my brain. I almost could see time itself as a three-dimensional being striving to suck out the lives of all those around me.
I quit hanging out with my friends, in fact even non-friends and family, I feared for their transformation. Somehow I knew it was after them. A car raced by and caught my attention, I watched in slow motion as a girl I had worked with stepped into the street. Just as she was about to get hit time drifted up to her, kissed her on the mouth, and breathed in her life.
A car raced by. Then those noisy exhaust pipes farted clear to the corner. Mrs. Brewster wanted to complain to her neighbor about the boys in cars that cruised the block to impress the eye-shadowed teenage slut next door. If the girl didn't sit on the porch knitting all day, the hot rods might not race past the row of reconditioned mill houses. Maybe it would rain and dampen their high octane pleasure. Mrs. Brewster had considered putting nails in the street, but then Mr. Brewster might get a flat tire. The neighbor's daughter was sixteen. Two more years, maybe less, and the little tart would be pregnant and move off to be with one of the street racers. She'd get fat, the kids would be surly and the fellow in the flashy car would go to seed like everyone does eventually. And then maybe things would be quiet.
6 comments:
Part Two:
As she got older, her journals took on a different format: Lists of things to do, dinner party menus, detailed garden maps and planting schedules, lists interspersed with detailed dreams.
There was the one about the nuclear war and a bomb shelter where survivors lived; she was living in South Seattle at the time, so dreamt of Asians and blacks. In the dream she was fascinated by the way people kept their few precious belongings, the old military black man with shoe boxes lined up just so. A Dutch woman and her son had a little space in the corner where a mechanical china cow poured milk out of its mouth.
There was another dream so interesting to her that she dreamt the very same dream twice. She accompanied an old man, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, to a circular building filled with Renascence art. In the library he shared a charcoal drawing of a tree. The tree crept out of the paper and rose before them as a three dimensional hologram. The branches took on shapes of farm implements, a whorl in the trunk became his dead wife’s face and he wept.
Or the snipet of a dream she recalls where she stopped at a roadside café to get gas and use the restroom. The sun was shining so bright it hurt her eyes. A car pulled out and her Dad jumped out shouting, “It was Flynn, Flynn who wrote this”. As he spoke purple glitter floated out of his mouth and fell on to the dry, cracked earth at his feet. In a flash, a car raced by and he said, “I am out of this world.”
She’d kept some type of journal since she was a kid. When she was in her early twenties, she threw away two boxes of bound, hardcover journals filled with poems, pictures, concert ticket stubs and an accounting of how she’s spent years nine through twenty five.
One time her Grandma Phyllis was visiting from Berkeley and had read one of Fraser’s journals hidden in her room. “Grandma is staying in my bedroom. Her stuff takes up my whole room. Luckily she leaves on Saturday.”
Grandma Phyllis confronted her of course, “Respect your elders,” she chided the teenage girl.
Over the years the journals repeated several central themes. Boyfriends: getting them, keeping them, letting them go. Diets: complicated calorie counts and exercise plans that never lasted more than a week or two. Family drama: Mom getting remarried, Crazy Junior burning wooden bound ancient heirloom books in the fireplace because they did not feature God’s word, Dad, getting arrested for dealing cocaine.
She’d warned him. Crazy Junior was on another one of his religious kicks and had been taking an undercover cop to Dad’s house for several weeks. After The Big Goof Off and subsequent divorce, Dad had rented a little house across the street from Fraser’s high school and started dealing drugs. He has a suitcase full of pills, dealt pot and cocaine.
She’d stop over almost every afternoon for a bong hit, lunch and a little Perry Mason. If no one else was around, she and her Dad would play backgammon and she’d skip her Social studies class. She’d described the cop and begged her Dad to stop dealing. He was arrested the Spring of her Freshman year and Crazy Junior moved to Utah and stayed out of sight for the next six years.
She’d always fantasized that a stranger would read her journals and provide an objective analysis of the young girl’s life. She pictured leaving the journals at the Goodwill drop off with a note with her telephone number so they could tell her what they thought of her. She’d always been interested in what people thought of her, she didn’t think she had any perspective on it herself.
A place to think, to be alone and have a thought all to herself. That was all she ever wanted. A silent place, in which the only sound was the sound that her thought could make as they bounced around in there. But instead, she was surrounded by a chaos she did not understand. The street sounds, the shouts of children and adults. Vendors, beggars, business men, women in their fancy clothes. It never stopped. It raced by, they raced by. Time and time and more time, that whipped and left and went, but nowhere.
Lost and alone and not quite scared. It was all she knew and all she would ever know and all that would ever be. The street noise that would cloud judgment and in it's own right, keeps those surrounded by it homeless and depressed and underfoot. It is the noise that gets in your head and will not leave and will not make sense.
a liver-colored Pontiac, circa the time of my first marriage, belching smoke and choking down the boulevard, 5 a.m., nothing else on the road yet. The potato-faced woman on the corner, her yellow slip dragging the sidewalk,
flips off the driver as he roars past, tattoos flashing. She's waiting for her son who said he'd come over to mow the lawn today--fat bastard's always late, her watch stuck on 3 in the afternoon of yesterday. She takes a long look up, then down, the street, reaches to pick up her little rat-shaped dog, and shuffles back into the house.
I was alone in the cafe, pondering the things I couldn't think of. Things no one would understand. Hell, I didn't even understand them. The vortex had been occupying all of my existence since its appearance a few weeks ago. I don't even know how it infected me. All I had done was notice the swirling and bubbling tide-pool. (It had appeared where none had been before.)
Why had I gone closer? Why did I have to question its otherworldliness? How did it get in my mind like an infection sucking my humanity down further and further and replacing it with something else? I couldn't even describe the replacement.
My thoughts of my friends and family had been replaced with thoughts that almost seemed to glow. Languages I had never heard before circled round and round in my brain. I almost could see time itself as a three-dimensional being striving to suck out the lives of all those around me.
I quit hanging out with my friends, in fact even non-friends and family, I feared for their transformation. Somehow I knew it was after them. A car raced by and caught my attention, I watched in slow motion as a girl I had worked with stepped into the street. Just as she was about to get hit time drifted up to her, kissed her on the mouth, and breathed in her life.
A car raced by. Then those noisy exhaust pipes farted clear to the corner. Mrs. Brewster wanted to complain to her neighbor about the boys in cars that cruised the block to impress the eye-shadowed teenage slut next door. If the girl didn't sit on the porch knitting all day, the hot rods might not race past the row of reconditioned mill houses. Maybe it would rain and dampen their high octane pleasure. Mrs. Brewster had considered putting nails in the street, but then Mr. Brewster might get a flat tire. The neighbor's daughter was sixteen. Two more years, maybe less, and the little tart would be pregnant and move off to be with one of the street racers. She'd get fat, the kids would be surly and the fellow in the flashy car would go to seed like everyone does eventually. And then maybe things would be quiet.
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