$20 for 6000 words

Behind schedule on Snugglekitty but it isn't all from slacking off. I'm working on entering a short story contest. More on this later.

I Ain't Got Time To Bleed

The (almost) final draft of this piece in which I raised Mrs. Baker from the dead. My mommy said it was good.

Daisy Buchanan Can Eat a Dick

In my younger, more vulnerable years, my high school English teacher gave me some advice. I was thinking really seriously about going to college to study management but Mrs. Baker told me to follow my heart because “college is not a trade school.” My academic elitism get the better of me and, when my more pragmatic but less interesting relatives asked why I was studying English, I would declare “trade school is for a recession!”

Then I graduated in a recession and the books I had read did me little good as I drifted from commission job to telephone sales to temp work and back. Kids who had learned trades were employed, married, had children and lives while I crisscrossed the country, building up more debt than life experience in meaningless jobs with pay as miniscule as the impact I made on the world.

The morning I laid, staring at the ceiling, wondering what kept me beating on, a boat against the current, borne ceaselessly back into mediocrity and failed expectations, I remembered the punch line to all of it: That teacher, Mrs. Baker, lost her job a year before I graduated. Last I heard, she was working as a cashier at Walmart. I call that one a draw.

March On, Revision!

Let's celebrate the month of March with a mean little story I wrote while I was feeling down about being an unemployed 20something with writer aspirations.

Daisy Buchanan Can Eat a Dick

In my younger, more vulnerable years, my high school English teacher gave me some advice when I was thinking really seriously about going to college to study management. Mrs. Baker told me to follow my heart because “college is not a trade school.” I let my academic elitism get the better of me and, when my more pragmatic relatives who were living comfortably in what seemed like boring existences asked why I was studying English, I would declare “trade school is for a recession!”

Then I graduated in a recession and the books I had read gave me little solace as I drifted from commission job to telephone sales to temp work and back. Kids who had learned trades were employed, married, had children and lives while I crisscrossed the country, building up more debt than life experience in forgettable, meaningless jobs with pay as miniscule as the impact I made on the world.

The morning I lay, staring at the ceiling, wondering what kept me beating on, a boat against the current, borne ceaselessly back into mediocrity and failed expectations, I remembered the punch line to all of it: That teacher, Mrs. Baker, took her own life two years after I left for college because the cancer spread and, while fulfilling, her job as a teacher did not provide her with the means to effectively combat the sickness. I call that one a draw.

It was from a deal with the Devil

The month of February is almost done and I can say that I significantly failed in my goal to write something new every day. Well, perhaps not significantly. In any case, I built some fairly sturdy launch pads so there's an increasing chance that Snugglekitty won't be a pile of shit. To celebrate, here's yet another unrevised, rough draft of a piece that ultimately might not even go in the book.

2/27 No Title

When Sarah was very little, she had a sickness that grew from her crippled left leg, left her other limbs twisted and deformed. It kept her in and out of wheelchairs until she was seven and the doctors decided it would be best to amputate the leg before the sickness could twist her limbs further. Long summers in the hospital were passed with books about princesses who were swept away by their Prince Charmings, mounted atop white horses and Sarah wished that could be her life.

Years passed and Sarah’s mind grew while her body remained a husk, twisted against itself, against her. Her friends saw past this and loved the girl with the gentle smile whose eyes, smile were a window to her imagination and Sarah could see her stories played out in her friends’ relationships while she read in her room--not always alone; sometimes, when her arms ached, her nurse read to her, chaperoned her love affair with fiction.

The summer after her sophomore year, Sarah met Jesse and one look into his brown, meaningful eyes told her she had found the Prince Charming from her books. Then Sarah began to write. Poems and short stories about the imprisoned princess set free by True Love. A glance down at her broken body would bring her back to the world. How could he love this--lump of flesh?

On days she saw him, though, her hope in Love’s long shot was restored--he was gentle, kind, made her smile, loved her stories, asked for more. And, one day, sitting in the park together in the shade, he told her sheepishly that he had feelings for someone. Sarah’s books had taught her how to play it coy and she probed gently, her heart beating inside her broken chest, longing for the words it’s you.

And, as if to acknowledge how much time she had spent in books, the world played a little word joke on her: it’s your nurse.

Plastics

I had two false starts today--the kind where I was like a page in and then thought to myself "this is boring and shitty and not worth revising into something mediocre." I'm much more okay with this draft and, while I'm not going to post every draft of I produce on here, this is a victory over the sub-par free-writes from earlier today. I should add that I plan to keep sentimentality to a minimum.

2/10 Flash Memoir ("Maybe Boo Radley Had the Right Idea")

Aunt Jan sent me a Power Rangers action figure for Christmas when I was twelve because dad had told her I liked “action figures.” He didn’t specify what kind (Star Wars) so, Aunt Jan, all the way out in Ohio, picked one she thought I would like. It maybe wasn’t my first choice of toy but I had a very inclusive community of Star Wars action figures in 1998 so the Red Ranger found a place in my rogue’s gallery of aliens and bounty hunters.

I have a set of oil pastels Aunt Dot sent me from Kentucky when I was nine. I drew her a picture once when I was maybe five and she said it looked “just perfect” framed next to her Calder print. It wasn’t one of those big, extensive pastel sets (it just had the eight colors main colors of the color wheel) but it came with this little booklet about blending the colors to make those eight into eighty-eight.

For every Christmas until I was fourteen, Uncle David sent me a book he thought I would like. My childhood bookshelf is full of Milne, Christie, Doyle, and Stevenson--books I regret not reading as soon as the wrapping paper was off but, for a lot of those years, I was working on building and playing with that inclusive community of Star Wars action figures; I’ve always favored the instant gratification of a plastic spaceship.

Christmas of 2009 was the first year I received more gift cards than than anything else. The Christmas colored plastics were accompanied with notes reflecting the passage of time and my maturity and how I was old enough to want to just pick out something I really wanted. For old time’s sake, I used one of them to buy an action figure. The lonely little plastic robot sat on my desk looking bored; all of my other toys had long been put into storage--along with my children’s books and art supplies.

I spent most of the rest of the afternoon looking at facebook and reading blogs.

Look both ways before you cross that street

This is a first draft I vomited out about twenty minutes ago. It'll probably get revised.

2/4 Flash Memoir (code for "untitled")

There was this girl in high school we all sort of made fun of. Either she was going for the goth look or it just came to her naturally and she figured she may as well embrace it. I mean, she was still a total poser since she came from a good home and had probably had a fairly easy life. Her parents might have gotten divorced and, yeah, that sucks, but this was 2002; grow a pair. I knew her through drama club--this was back when I thought I had what it took to be theatrical or expressive or artsy or any of that gay shit. She always pissed me off.

I guess she thought I was cool; I was one of two asian kids at my high school (we had as little to do with each other as possible) so maybe she thought we were both outsiders and marginalized. Sure I got called a chink once or twice and this kid I only kind of knew made a joke about me eating a dog (for more on this, see “The Only Fight I Ever Got In In high School”) but, for the most part, I had friends and was fairly content for a high schooler. This girl liked to refer to me as “her favorite asian” which was benign enough to just ignore. I want to make it clear I was never actively mean to her or anything--I don’t think anyone really was. We were all just like, “write your poems about crows and darkness. Whatever.”

So, some time senior year, she was absent for like a week, I guess. I had just developed this huge crush on Aimee Keys so random poser-goths weren’t my concern. Anyway, when she got back, she had these new bracelets which seemed to be there to hide the bandages on her wrists but they were jangly and shiny so all they really did was let us all know she had something under them to hide. The scuttlebutt was that she had tried to kill herself that weekend but fucked it up because she crossed the street instead of going down the road--dumbass.

My mom got a call from someone else’s mom and sat me down to talk about it and, you know, if this was a story or something, maybe I would have realized how I should have been there to be her friend and I’d have made that step to hang out with her so she had someone to talk to about... how she really wanted attention, I guess. But that’s not the case; that girl was fucking annoying.

Last I heard, she had gotten married to an accountant and they had a kid or two.

Rerun

This is from Fall of 2006. I wrote it for an assignment on dialogue (I think). It won an award and a contest but failed to make me a stud with the ladies.

Lawns Like White Elephants

As Ronald “Ron” Johansen awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found on his front lawn a very large and very dead elephant. Now, the appearance of a deceased elephant on one’s front lawn is not an entirely foreign sight if one lives in an exotic locale such as the high deserts of Africa, the outskirts of Bangladesh, or certain parts of Wisconsin, but Ron Johansen and his family and his lawn were proud and productive citizens of Cheboygan, Arizona. While Cheboygan, a bustling tourist community in the summer season, is known for its jeep tours of the desert and its proximity to various canyons, it is not well known for its elephants—and for good reason: until this morning, no one had ever seen an elephant in Cheboygan.

The noble creature’s carcass didn’t seem to be harming anyone or anything—though its presence probably wasn’t great for the grass. Ron wondered if he might be able to just leave it there and let it decompose and, hopefully, fertilize his lawn and make it greener than Steve Schuster’s lawn next door. Walking cautiously around it, Ron found that there was no note or anything attached to the elephant to indicate its origin and, stranger still, there didn’t seem to be any tracks or drag marks around the lawn. It was as if the beast had materialized in that spot for the sole purpose of confusing Ronald Johansen. A minivan drove by carrying Cindy Martinez’s boys to Tomahawk Middle School and Cindy Martinez to the Southwestern novelty store she owned in town. Next door, Steve Schuster walked out to the sidewalk in his bathrobe to pick up his newspaper. For everyone but Ron, it seemed, it was a perfectly normal Tuesday morning.

Loosening his tie and rolling up his sleeves, Ron stretched his back and shook out his arms and legs. It had been a long time since he played third string fullback for Cheboygan High School intramural football league but he figured it would come back to him. He sized up his adversary. The elephant was very large and, dead, looked very much like a large boulder. Ron tried to make a mental projection of the best way to roll the thing to the curb; that would be the easy part. Calling the Cheboygan Sanitation Department and explaining to them that they needed to come and collect a two-ton dead elephant, that would be difficult.

“Mornin’, neighbor.” Steve Schuster, newspaper under his arm, was waving at Ron as he walked back into his house. He didn’t seem to notice the impending man v. nature battle that was about to take place between Ron and the elephant.

“Mornin’,” replied Ron. He didn’t know if Steve had heard or not since he was already inside. Had they known each other better, Ron might have asked Steve to help him roll the dead animal off his lawn. Taking a few deep breaths and glancing briefly at the sky in silent prayer, Ron launched his whole body weight into the elephant on his lawn. It didn’t budge. He attacked again. Nothing.

“Honey? What are you doing? Where did that elephant come from?” Rhonda Johansen, Ronald’s wife of twenty-three years stood on the threshold, dressed for work with a travel mug of coffee in her hand.

“I don’t know. I came outside this morning and here it was. Can’t get the darn thing to budge.”

“Well …well where did it come from? Is there a note or something on it?”

“No, hon, I checked. Think we ought to call poison control? I was pushing up against it just now.”

“Why on Earth would we need poison control for that?”

“Well maybe it’s poisonous. Like some snakes have poisonous skin.”

“Snakes are reptiles.”

“Elephants are reptiles, right?”

“What?”

“Like Gila Monsters and Rattlesnakes.”

“No.”

“What?”

“Elephants aren’t reptiles, silly.”

“Then what are they, then?”

“Marsupials? I don’t know. Honey, what are we going to do about the dead elephant on our front lawn?”

“I had thought about leaving it here. It might decompose into fertilizer.”

“We can’t just leave it there. What will the neighbors think?”

“I don’t think they’ll notice.”

There was a moment of silence while the Johansens thought about this. Though it was still early in the morning, a monsoon cloud was forming in the North. The morning sunlight, not yet obscured by clouds, reflected dully off the elephant’s back. It was Rhonda who broke the silence.

“We can’t just leave it out like this for everyone to see.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right.”

“Can we cover it with blue tarp?”

“I suppose.”

The Johansens went into their cluttered garage and, after moving some boxes around, emerged with a paint stained blue tarp.

“We’d better get Ronnie to help us.”

Ron went inside to wake his daughter, Ronnie.

“Where did the elephant come from?” asked Ronnie, wiping sleep from her eyes. Cheboygan High School had a late start today. She had hoped to sleep in.

“We don’t know. Help dad and I cover it with a tarp.”

“Okay.”

Together, father, mother, and daughter, they covered the once magnificent beast with the paint stained blue tarp, weighting the corners with some desert rocks and the lawnmower. Rhonda refilled her travel mug and watched the blue mass, breathing with wind, shrink and disappear in her review mirror. Ronnie looked forward to seeing a boy at school and went back to bed. Alone with a tarp—covered elephant, Ron smoked a cigarette and remembered the newspaper was still on the sidewalk.