This was written for the Trifecta Writing Challenge . I took the prompt literally and went back to a memory from elementary school.

"This weekend we're asking you to harken back to your grade school days and write a haiku (an unrhymed verse form of Japanese origin having three lines containing usually five, seven, and five syllables respectively)."

 

 

 

At Recess, Alone

Children play, but one

doesn’t join. She walks, content,

beside her own thoughts.

 

 

 

 

A Confession

 

               They sit over coffee, friends of many years, both married half a lifetime now.

               “How’s Jack?”

               “Jack’s Jack.” Grace sighs. “Always the same—like his name. Do you know that’s really his name? Not John. Not Jackson or Jacques or Giacomo. Why would parents name a boy just Jack?”

               Anne shrugs.

               “Annie, do you remember when we were kids, how we used to play being grown-up and glamorous, married to exciting men? I was going to be Graciela and you’d be Anna Maria, and our husbands—“

               “Oh, wait! I remember. Mine was…Thorne, or something?”

               “Thorndyke. And mine was Sebastian.”

               “What romance-novel names,” Anne laughs.

               “And we were going to live in a huge castle on the moors, all of us, each in one of the wings, and we’d ride horses all around the desolate landscape and listen to the voices of the spirits in the air. And our children would be half-wild and beautiful and love the wind and the rain and each other, and they’d have a tragic and passionate relationship like Heathcliff and Cathy.”

               “Now why would we have wanted that for our children?”

               “Because it was exciting and full of life.”

               “Gracie, are saying you’re unhappy with Jack?”

               “No—that would be more interesting. I’m ahappy, I guess—neutral. Somewhere in between.” She leans over the table. “Annie. I have to tell you something.”

 

A few blocks away, Jack, Just-Jack of the plain name, to whom she is not Graciela but the grace of God, is getting ready to clean out his wife’s car. He loves doing little things for her. She walked to the café to meet an old friend, so he’ll surprise her. Clean the interior, vacuum, wash the car.

               He opens the glove compartment and pulls out old badly folded maps, her registration card, the manual, a few miscellaneous papers.

               Then something drops on the seat. He picks it up and stares. For a moment he can’t grasp what he’s seeing.

And then he does.

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Written for the Trifecta challenge. This week's word: grasp.

 

A JURY OF PEERS

They begin to hear the screams just after dark. People stop what they are doing, look up from their dinner or their reading. Spouses look at each other tentatively.

“What was that?”

“It’s that damn TV next door. Comes right through the walls.”

“That’s not a TV. It’s outside.”

They rush to their windows. All along both wings of the building curtains open, shades go up, lights are turned out for better vision. Two figures near the bushes inside the curve of the driveway. A man and a woman?

“They’re just having a fight.”

“I don’t know. Looks like he’s attacking her. Maybe we should call the police.”

“Police don’t want to get involved in domestic things. Neither should we.”

A few go back to what they were doing, raising the volume of their televisions a little higher to drown out the sounds. Most are transfixed against their will, bound to the sight in front of them. The woman is on the ground now, on her hands and knees behind the bushes, blocked from the sight of some of the onlookers. The man seems to be gone, but then comes back, running toward the woman, who screams again. The watchers are getting more nervous now. They are knocking on their neighbors’ doors, asking what’s going on, if they should do something.

Look, nobody’s out there. If it was something really bad, somebody would be out there, wouldn’t they? The police would be here. They look at each other and nod hopefully. Yeah, that’s right.

Rumors start. Maybe they’re filming a movie. I saw some trucks parked around back today.

You know, I think I did hear something about filming somewhere around here.

None can admit the argument is weak. The noise subsides. They go to bed reassured.

The next day’s paper reads Woman Stabbed to Death Outside Apartment House While Dozens Look On.

They drop their heads, cover their eyes with their hands.

God, forgive us.

We didn’t know.

 

 

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Written for Trifecta Writing Challenge. This week's prompt was the third definition of the word weak: "not factually grounded or logically presented <a weak argument>"

 

My entry for Trifecta Writing Challenge this week: using the word "band" in its third definition of gathering together into a group.

Elegy

The last day of July, and I can only sit here and watch it go by. My favorite month of the year, my beloved summer, getting ready to disappear.

Soon I’ll begin to mourn for the sensuous nights, with their warm seductive breezes and the way the air smells, the leftover scent of the sun baked into leaves, grass, juniper shrubs. The way the crickets band together in the trees, their songs loudening as the days shorten, raging against the dying of the light.

Standing under green canopies in sudden summer storms, waiting for the brief chance to run to the next tree, the next doorway, trying to outrun the rain as we try to outrun the onrushing fall.

And when July turns over on its back and August eases in, with it comes the loss that will be one year old this month, the not-yet-over grieving, the longing for other years; and the cricket song repeats over and over “she’s gone, she’s gone, she’s gone.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Certain Shade of Blue

The center of a sapphire opens and spreads like a peacock’s tail; we fall into it and it embraces us like a fairy’s cloak that makes the rest of the world invisible.

 

 

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This is my entry this weekend for Trifextra. The challenge is to write about a color in 33 words or fewer.

Cracks at the Heart of the World

 

The fears and loves of my life are defined by cracks: the ones my father has always made in the air around him, the ones in my own mind. 

When I was fifteen and he was in one of his tirades, I ran to my room, broke a bottle of cologne, and cut myself twice on the arm with one of the shattered pieces. I remember feeling happy at the sight of the blood and the terror in my parents’ faces.

My loves: the museum where I work, its broken pieces of ancient and medieval art. Paul, whose marriage shattered a long time ago but can’t be discarded, whose daughter is broken and needs the glue only both her parents can provide.

When Paul told me he was married, I went home and broke a set of wine glasses. But I stayed with him because he was my best hope for mending myself.

My father is dying, and I don’t know how I feel about it.

I sit by his bed in the hospital with my mother, holding her hand, marveling at how her love for him has never wavered in spite of his difficult ways. I think about Paul’s love for his daughter. And I wonder whether I will ever be able to love that way.

I see the breath trickling from my father’s lips, and suddenly it is as if something is escaping from him and flowing into me. I remember his stories about Vietnam. I feel their underbelly: the horrors he experienced and could never forget. I remember how he hated his job but kept at it to support my mother and me. I feel strength, sacrifice, love. I feel that my father is showing me how to survive.

Will it be enough? Enough to help me survive, too? If this is his legacy to me, I must accept it. I must forgive him, Paul, myself—and learn to love unselfishly. To mend my own cracks.

 

 

This was written for the Trifecta Challenge. This week’s challenge was the following definition:

CRACK
3a : a narrow break : fissure <a crack in the ice>  
  b : a narrow opening <leave the door open a crack><cracks between floorboards> —used figuratively in phrases like fall through the cracks to describe one that has been improperly or inadvertently ignored or left out <a player who fell through the cracks in the college draft> <children slipping through the cracks of available youth services> CRACK

 

 

Trifecta and Flash Fiction Challenges

Man of Wood, Man of Myth

 

 I feel the wind and the years fly over me, on this beach where eternity hangs so close. The sea seems still today, almost as thick as custard, as though from here I could walk with bouncy, sloppy steps across it to Europe. Where he is.

It’s my birthday, and I’m alone again. But not entirely, even though I’m without Michael. Part of him stands in front of me, in this once-living wood. No longer living, like the love he once claimed to have for me. At least the tree still has the life he gave it in this sculpture. He laughed when I called it the man of myth. But he never gave it another title. I told him what I saw in it—in the thick trunk, the abbreviated arms stretching out toward the sky—the image of Poseidon rising out of the ocean. The sea god, a man not tied by any cord to woman. Nor is the artist who created him.

It’s my birthday, and my gift is wisdom. The sea may alter the sand and the earth, weather and age may rot the wood, but only indifference can kill the heart. And if love lives on in one, it will not die.

I stand with feet spread apart in the sand and raise my arms in the air.

 

 

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This piece was written for two challenges: Trifecta and the Flash Fiction Blog Hop.

Trifecta: write a piece of between 33 and 330 words using the following definition:

fly: 3a : to move, pass, or spread quickly <rumors were flying>  

  b : to be moved with sudden extreme emotion <flew into a rage>  

  c : to seem to pass quickly <the time simply flew>

 

Flash Fiction Blog Hop:

Use the above photo and the words custard   cord   birthday   alter   myth