Branches, On Writing

Hold Me, I’m Nervous

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In ten short days, I’m submitting this week’s Branches story (#5) to the Glimmer Train Very Short Fiction Contest. I just started it tonight, (Note: tardy as usual. Man, beginning anything is terrifying. Before you know it — perhaps in a matter of minutes, seconds! — it could become something riddled with faults, and faulty creations beg complete, occasionally enraged attention. This tends to make me entirely unpleasant to be around. I never understood some writers’ aversion to the delete key. Oh sweetest relief, purest salvation! It’s all those other keys that have me worried.) but it can’t be posted here until October 31st when winners are announced.

I’ve found that this whole “requiring first publishing rights” concept goes violently against the instincts I’ve honed over the developing years. My first desire when I really like something I’ve done, or if I’m not sure if I really like something I’ve done, is to smear it all over the internet. See what strangers have to say. Instant gratification! Hello, world! “Not cool!” say respectable publishers.

But seriously, I don’t know how I’ll handle that. So how about this: want me to email you a short story? You’d be free to email me back with comments, or say nothing at all. It will be just like a blog post (note to potential publishers: this will not be like a blog post at all): in your inbox. Baby steps. I’d feel so much better just knowing you saw it.

Email me or comment if you’re interested.

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Uncategorized

Hello Baby, Goodbye Somerville

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Seven years ago, a girl named Sara moved in across the hall from me in our college dorm. Four years ago I held a corner of her chuppah. Two years ago she and her husband moved from San Francisco to across the street from the apartment Maria and I shared, and nine months ago she called and asked if I wanted to come to an ultrasound with her.

“Wait, what?” I said.


Sara and Miriam

They’re moving to New York today, two weeks after the baby was born — averaging four scattered hours of sleep every night since. “There has to be a prize for what you are doing,” I said. “Also, instead of helping you pack I’m going to get in the way and take pictures. Tricked!”

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Essay

Sullied

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Or, How I Learned To Stop Resisting Conformity And Love Life

It was for the standard little-girl reasons — prairie life, petticoats, ponies — that my sister and I loved watching Doctor Quinn, Medicine Woman. But perhaps equal blame should be assigned to Laura Ingalls Wilder and her irresistible boxed set of books. She’s the one who had a theme song first. She’s the one with the show broadcast during summer afternoons, when we were all otherwise restless with mosquito bites and squinty-eyed with sunshine. Losing interest in games outside, a land of dog poop and concrete and melting popsicles, we would inevitably settle into cool basement rooms and flip on the television.

It spread slowly across the continent like hostile African bees. Little girls started saying “maw” and “paw” in offensively-imitated twangs. We layered our parents’ paint clothes to look like farm women from the nineteenth century. We hauled out plastic buckets and stirred stone stews, keeping an eye out for swarms of locusts. Laura Ingalls Wilder gave Ye Olde Rural Life its cult-following amongst the young ladies, and I blame her for my eager acceptance of Doctor Quinn, Medicine Woman — and, thus, my discovery of sexy men.

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Branches

Branches #4: Notes On a Funeral

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I don’t know how to begin writing fiction, so . . . I’m not. I’m leaving the beginnings up to other authors, and branching off — from whatever I wind up underlining, dog-earring, generally wanting more of.

Currently reading: Tuesday; An Art Project (Issue 3): “Grief And The Imaginary Grave” by Rowan Richardo Phillips

* * *

Gone gone gonegonegone I choked
on the thought of ending this song.

Understoried. Dead and buried. Do you
hear me from where they buried you?

From where they buried you do you
hear the rhyme I bury for you?

It may or may not have been raining at your funeral, but I knew that this is how I would remember it. It is always raining at funerals, the coffins typically made with a cherry-type wood.

I see damp sod, clinging to the edge of the earth. Your gleaming mahogany casket covered in, let’s say, roses. Slowly descending into nothingness. It’s much nicer this way; there’s a purer truth to the expected. In the rare event a participant does not herself recall the weather or the quality of casket-wood at a funeral, tell her how it was. Your description will fill in the blanks, manifesting it in her memory. Like dandelion seeds, taking root, making room — occasionally other, smaller truths are sacrificed, but such are the casualties of war in a paradigm-centered world. Now she retells the tale. In her story, from now on, there will be rain.

A slow, gentle rain, she’ll say. When it slid down the windshield it was reminiscent of tears. Like the car was crying. Plop, the trees are crying too. Plop, the gas station is crying. Plop the church-top tiles, plop the edges of our umbrellas, plop plop plop the whole world understands. As you can see, the specific volume and speed of the rain are key. Mist may have the appropriate sense of theater, but it lacks catharsis. Hail is overly surreal and besides we would have to move our cars which would be decidedly practical. Thunderstorms are possible at a funeral, but only if you are a demon; they are otherwise too aggressive or ominous and we are not here to tell ghost stories about you — in fact, we yearn for your spirit. We cannot stand you being away forever like this. There are so many parties we were going to invite you to. There are so many times we’d planned on crying in your arms.

Become a ghost. Please. Sift down through the grey clouds like flour and drift into our apple pies. Curl into a rain drop and slide down our windshields. Hover around like mist if you have to. I will conjure you now, with my Ouija board.

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