Tuesday, October 07, 2003
Resurrecting
I'm back, although the internet is still not available to me regularly. Only three computers on campus are hot.
I've received information about a short story contest, and having just written a story (and little else) recently, I think I'd like to shape it up and send it in. The one catch is that there's a word limit: 1500 max. Thus far, trying to pare it down from 1950 has been an incredible excercise. I've gotten rid of so much! I think because there's a definite reason to cut away, I am less moved to defend stuff that could be cut. I'm forced to really edit. An outside force. It works.
Here's the most recent cutting, but I still need to lose 215 words. Help! Shave me.
Fl--
He held the pills in his left hand as if nesting a fragile person within. He stared at the two tablets and saw only for their inscrutable shapeliness. From across the room, he might have seemed to be studying a mirror in his palm. In the wind that had been blowing for two days straight, there were defined pockets of stillness, and at night these silences had become wild to him.
He began to count of unnecessary things in his apartment. The cheerful oak table in his kitchen, and the languorous piles of paper on top. He grew anxious about the cabinets and drawers, so various items were culled from these compartments and tossed in the small trash bin. He paused over a spool of white thread because it reminded him of his mother, and then he wished she was sitting in the room and nagging him because then maybe the chairs would seem purposeful.
The entire apartment, intermittently battered by the wind, was failing. Its spaces and surfaces, although decorated with prints and books and amateurish photographs, were housing nothing, disappointed, like an audience assembled to a show that is perpetually postponed.
Then he remembered about the pills and wondered where they had gone to while he was shuffling out trash. They were not in his hand or on the table. They were not on the floor or among the eclecticism of the drawer. Now even the tumbler of orange juice seemed lonely.
He laid across the couch with a book of Spanish poems in translation, but he didn’t open it. He just clutched it across his chest and closed his eyes, considering his eyeballs behind their lids until they seemed like the pills he couldn’t find.
The couch was not comfortable for napping, but soon he was dreaming. His mother was on a slowing train he was peering into as if hovering beside, but the early sun reflecting off the windows challenged his view, and then when he could see her, she was never the same age. Her hair color changed each time and it made him nauseous.
She was smoking cigarettes from a white package. He wanted to say outloud the brand name of the cigarettes because he was proud of remembering them, but when he opened his mouth he found it could only open, and there was no air to breath. His lips could not find each other again, and as his panic began to swell he noticed her eyes were closing.
The wind was not quiet howling, but whispered meaninglessly into the trees. He felt buoyant as he followed the front sidewalk hastily to his sedan. A conversation was partially audible from the den next door, or maybe from the television in the den next door. And then some violins.
He checked himself in the rear-view mirror to see if he looked desperate. He hoped he looked desperate. As he backed out of his driveway, a figure was lit up by the red brakelights, and he stopped with a jar.
As he approached the back of the car, he looked in all directions. On the ground, directly behind the rear bumper, was a green plastic sand-shovel. He thought about all the other green shovels that were mass-produced along with this one, then he gave it a toss onto the grass.
He paid for gas at the pump. The few cars that passed the station were some comfort, but they seemed to be travelling too fast, and when they were gone, they were really gone. Glancing into the station while waiting for the tanks to fill, he noticed the lone attendant behind the counter, staring at a magazine under abusive lighting. The attendant would turn the page. The entire tank filled slowly with gas, and still the same page as he pulled away.
On the interstate, he wished he had gone in and paid with cash, perhaps bought some gum, just to have heard the man’s voice, or at least to have seen what was so captivating in the magazine.
He only made it as far as the city, where the many lights made him yawn. Even with all the lights, all that electricity, it was still indescribably dark out.
A female friend had once taken him to this narrow wine bar and he thought it was nearby. He parked illegally and found the entrance.
Inside, he was the only person wearing a T-shirt. It wasn’t eyes or mouths that were as disapproving as all the chins. One had black bristles like spikes on a dog-collar, and they were threatening. A clean-shaven Arab and the blonde leaning into him on an adjacent stool glanced at him, then riotously hid their chins down against their throats and laughed their eyes closed.
A small rectangular chalkboard listed the specials: Chiraz 7, California Chard 9, Berry Mead 8. The bartender did not smile when he ordered a glass of red, just turned one ear in his direction and kept wiping off a bulbous wineglass.
“How much?” he asked. The bartender did not hear him or did not think to answer, but turned to pour the drink. An intimate jazz ballad began to creep out of the speakers, and even though he remembered the place was rather small, he could not see all the way to the back of the room. The only color of light in the bar was red, and it came from a source he couldn’t locate. The customers, as they retreated into this void in the back, became grotesque.
He heard the bartender set his glass on the unfinished wooden bartop that smelled like sawdust.
“How much.” The defiant bartender’s face was blank. “How much?” he repeated, as unease spread down his legs. “TALK to me!” He slammed ten dollars down. The bartender paused as if considering whether or not to accept the money. He swept the note off the bar, held it to his face, and smelled it. He breathed in with the bill touching the tip of his nose, like a detective, and laid it gently in the register.
“I’ll give you ten more dollars if you just say something to me.” He held his wallet awkwardly in his hand, afraid of it. “Anything. Just something.” The bartender’s eyes fell downward and he sneered at the floor.
He tried to climb over the bar to see what the man was sneering at, but his foot fumbled over a woman’s purse and his forearm knocked his glass onto the pale wood. There were murmurs of disapproval. He grabbed from a stack of napkins and began to blot at the red puddle. He tried to mutter apologies, but he found again that his mouth could only open. Despite his mopping, there was a muddled stain on the bartop that ruined the unfinished effect.
He stammered away from the bar, turning towar the void to find the restroom. From one dark red corner came close-mouthed laughter and older-sounding voices. The tone of the voices was that of experience and exclusivity, of Eurpean anecdotes and sailing. He could not see their faces, but a woman’s hand rested on the table. The back of the hand was freckled, even the knuckles.
The bathroom was walled entirely out of shiney metal, and set into the wall above the toilet was a cubby hole. On the cubby rested a crude, jade-colored pot. Down inside the pot were a plastic skull and a few white blossoms that looked red under the light. He hummed a melody and admired the vibrations he made off the walls. He felt safe in the restroom with the fake skull and the music he was making. It was respite from all the unease.
He stepped back into the bar confident. His head was sound and he felt ready to sleep. He passed the table again and noticed the hands were now resting on a red package of cigarettes. He snuck up to the table.
“I thought they banned smoking in all buildings” he said, needing a reply of any kind.
He was standing behind the woman with the freckled hand, and she turned to face him as he was talking. It was his mother. She didn’t know how to respond to his statement. She looked puzzled, but her face did not seem to recognize his.
“Mom?”
“Do you have a match?” she asked in a voice like a stage actor. And smiled.
“And smoke, can the adults please smoke?” said the other woman at the table, grinning. They laughed at this shared joke. They all seemed younger than the timbre of their voices.
“Mom?”
The woman beneath him pronounced two words slowly for him. “Stage... Cigarettes.” He didn’t understand. “We’re in a play,” she added, “across the street. You should come tomorrow.”
“What’s it called?”
“The Gopher.”
“Mom, what’s going on?”
“Enjoy the wine tonight, friend?” interjected a man at the table. “Hey, sport, you should take it easy, drink slowly. Enjoy each sip.” The man’s blue blazer covered a striped golf shirt. More silence.
Incredulously, “Dad?”
A bell was rung three times.
“Last call. We close in five minutes.” It was the bartender.
The party at the table rose obediently, but casually, and gathered their purses and keys. They had forgotten him standing beside their table. The woman he took for his mother even muttered an “excuse me” as she backed up from her chair. She left the package on the table, crumpled.
A girl up by the entrance said a “drive safely” to someone already outside. He became anxious about his car being parked illegally, and shoved a few elbows aside as he moved for the door. The girl smiled politely as he passed her in the doorway.
He jogged up the street, then skip-stepped frantically until he was sprinting to the car.
It was there, unticketed.
The drive home was under the greatest relief he’d ever felt. Everything loosened into comfort. The trees lining the interstate were not hideous or solitary. The streets of his neighborhood, as he approached them, were so welcoming. He smiled.
When he turned on his kitchen light, the tumbler of orange juice was still standing rigid on the table where he had left it, and beside it were the two pills.
I'm back, although the internet is still not available to me regularly. Only three computers on campus are hot.
I've received information about a short story contest, and having just written a story (and little else) recently, I think I'd like to shape it up and send it in. The one catch is that there's a word limit: 1500 max. Thus far, trying to pare it down from 1950 has been an incredible excercise. I've gotten rid of so much! I think because there's a definite reason to cut away, I am less moved to defend stuff that could be cut. I'm forced to really edit. An outside force. It works.
Here's the most recent cutting, but I still need to lose 215 words. Help! Shave me.
Fl--
He held the pills in his left hand as if nesting a fragile person within. He stared at the two tablets and saw only for their inscrutable shapeliness. From across the room, he might have seemed to be studying a mirror in his palm. In the wind that had been blowing for two days straight, there were defined pockets of stillness, and at night these silences had become wild to him.
He began to count of unnecessary things in his apartment. The cheerful oak table in his kitchen, and the languorous piles of paper on top. He grew anxious about the cabinets and drawers, so various items were culled from these compartments and tossed in the small trash bin. He paused over a spool of white thread because it reminded him of his mother, and then he wished she was sitting in the room and nagging him because then maybe the chairs would seem purposeful.
The entire apartment, intermittently battered by the wind, was failing. Its spaces and surfaces, although decorated with prints and books and amateurish photographs, were housing nothing, disappointed, like an audience assembled to a show that is perpetually postponed.
Then he remembered about the pills and wondered where they had gone to while he was shuffling out trash. They were not in his hand or on the table. They were not on the floor or among the eclecticism of the drawer. Now even the tumbler of orange juice seemed lonely.
He laid across the couch with a book of Spanish poems in translation, but he didn’t open it. He just clutched it across his chest and closed his eyes, considering his eyeballs behind their lids until they seemed like the pills he couldn’t find.
The couch was not comfortable for napping, but soon he was dreaming. His mother was on a slowing train he was peering into as if hovering beside, but the early sun reflecting off the windows challenged his view, and then when he could see her, she was never the same age. Her hair color changed each time and it made him nauseous.
She was smoking cigarettes from a white package. He wanted to say outloud the brand name of the cigarettes because he was proud of remembering them, but when he opened his mouth he found it could only open, and there was no air to breath. His lips could not find each other again, and as his panic began to swell he noticed her eyes were closing.
The wind was not quiet howling, but whispered meaninglessly into the trees. He felt buoyant as he followed the front sidewalk hastily to his sedan. A conversation was partially audible from the den next door, or maybe from the television in the den next door. And then some violins.
He checked himself in the rear-view mirror to see if he looked desperate. He hoped he looked desperate. As he backed out of his driveway, a figure was lit up by the red brakelights, and he stopped with a jar.
As he approached the back of the car, he looked in all directions. On the ground, directly behind the rear bumper, was a green plastic sand-shovel. He thought about all the other green shovels that were mass-produced along with this one, then he gave it a toss onto the grass.
He paid for gas at the pump. The few cars that passed the station were some comfort, but they seemed to be travelling too fast, and when they were gone, they were really gone. Glancing into the station while waiting for the tanks to fill, he noticed the lone attendant behind the counter, staring at a magazine under abusive lighting. The attendant would turn the page. The entire tank filled slowly with gas, and still the same page as he pulled away.
On the interstate, he wished he had gone in and paid with cash, perhaps bought some gum, just to have heard the man’s voice, or at least to have seen what was so captivating in the magazine.
He only made it as far as the city, where the many lights made him yawn. Even with all the lights, all that electricity, it was still indescribably dark out.
A female friend had once taken him to this narrow wine bar and he thought it was nearby. He parked illegally and found the entrance.
Inside, he was the only person wearing a T-shirt. It wasn’t eyes or mouths that were as disapproving as all the chins. One had black bristles like spikes on a dog-collar, and they were threatening. A clean-shaven Arab and the blonde leaning into him on an adjacent stool glanced at him, then riotously hid their chins down against their throats and laughed their eyes closed.
A small rectangular chalkboard listed the specials: Chiraz 7, California Chard 9, Berry Mead 8. The bartender did not smile when he ordered a glass of red, just turned one ear in his direction and kept wiping off a bulbous wineglass.
“How much?” he asked. The bartender did not hear him or did not think to answer, but turned to pour the drink. An intimate jazz ballad began to creep out of the speakers, and even though he remembered the place was rather small, he could not see all the way to the back of the room. The only color of light in the bar was red, and it came from a source he couldn’t locate. The customers, as they retreated into this void in the back, became grotesque.
He heard the bartender set his glass on the unfinished wooden bartop that smelled like sawdust.
“How much.” The defiant bartender’s face was blank. “How much?” he repeated, as unease spread down his legs. “TALK to me!” He slammed ten dollars down. The bartender paused as if considering whether or not to accept the money. He swept the note off the bar, held it to his face, and smelled it. He breathed in with the bill touching the tip of his nose, like a detective, and laid it gently in the register.
“I’ll give you ten more dollars if you just say something to me.” He held his wallet awkwardly in his hand, afraid of it. “Anything. Just something.” The bartender’s eyes fell downward and he sneered at the floor.
He tried to climb over the bar to see what the man was sneering at, but his foot fumbled over a woman’s purse and his forearm knocked his glass onto the pale wood. There were murmurs of disapproval. He grabbed from a stack of napkins and began to blot at the red puddle. He tried to mutter apologies, but he found again that his mouth could only open. Despite his mopping, there was a muddled stain on the bartop that ruined the unfinished effect.
He stammered away from the bar, turning towar the void to find the restroom. From one dark red corner came close-mouthed laughter and older-sounding voices. The tone of the voices was that of experience and exclusivity, of Eurpean anecdotes and sailing. He could not see their faces, but a woman’s hand rested on the table. The back of the hand was freckled, even the knuckles.
The bathroom was walled entirely out of shiney metal, and set into the wall above the toilet was a cubby hole. On the cubby rested a crude, jade-colored pot. Down inside the pot were a plastic skull and a few white blossoms that looked red under the light. He hummed a melody and admired the vibrations he made off the walls. He felt safe in the restroom with the fake skull and the music he was making. It was respite from all the unease.
He stepped back into the bar confident. His head was sound and he felt ready to sleep. He passed the table again and noticed the hands were now resting on a red package of cigarettes. He snuck up to the table.
“I thought they banned smoking in all buildings” he said, needing a reply of any kind.
He was standing behind the woman with the freckled hand, and she turned to face him as he was talking. It was his mother. She didn’t know how to respond to his statement. She looked puzzled, but her face did not seem to recognize his.
“Mom?”
“Do you have a match?” she asked in a voice like a stage actor. And smiled.
“And smoke, can the adults please smoke?” said the other woman at the table, grinning. They laughed at this shared joke. They all seemed younger than the timbre of their voices.
“Mom?”
The woman beneath him pronounced two words slowly for him. “Stage... Cigarettes.” He didn’t understand. “We’re in a play,” she added, “across the street. You should come tomorrow.”
“What’s it called?”
“The Gopher.”
“Mom, what’s going on?”
“Enjoy the wine tonight, friend?” interjected a man at the table. “Hey, sport, you should take it easy, drink slowly. Enjoy each sip.” The man’s blue blazer covered a striped golf shirt. More silence.
Incredulously, “Dad?”
A bell was rung three times.
“Last call. We close in five minutes.” It was the bartender.
The party at the table rose obediently, but casually, and gathered their purses and keys. They had forgotten him standing beside their table. The woman he took for his mother even muttered an “excuse me” as she backed up from her chair. She left the package on the table, crumpled.
A girl up by the entrance said a “drive safely” to someone already outside. He became anxious about his car being parked illegally, and shoved a few elbows aside as he moved for the door. The girl smiled politely as he passed her in the doorway.
He jogged up the street, then skip-stepped frantically until he was sprinting to the car.
It was there, unticketed.
The drive home was under the greatest relief he’d ever felt. Everything loosened into comfort. The trees lining the interstate were not hideous or solitary. The streets of his neighborhood, as he approached them, were so welcoming. He smiled.
When he turned on his kitchen light, the tumbler of orange juice was still standing rigid on the table where he had left it, and beside it were the two pills.
