Nonfiction–>Fiction.
Please post here.
- Take any brief clip you wrote for the NF unit and make it as fantastical as possible to convert it into a fictional story.
- Write a brief story about a painful episode in your life but transfer it to a totally invented person who is as distinctly different from yourself. Rules: change the gender, age, occupation, body type, behavior, etc. / Adapt the incident to fit your character’s nature and circumstances. Note: in the process you may find you change it so drastically that no one but you would know the episode is the same.
- Write a brief scene from memory (one already written in the NF unit or totally new) narrated by 3rd person POV
1. Eliza sat on her kitchen island, legs swinging in the air, thick from the heat of the oven. Her thighs were spread against the cool, smooth granite. She plopped down onto her toes, her heels quick to follow with a thump on the hardwood, crouching down to peer into the oven’s chamber. Her thighs tingled after being peeled from the sticky marble surface. Her eyes widened at the sight through the glass. Her dinosaur chicken nuggets had risen from their horizontal unconsciousness and begun to meander around the baking sheet. Eliza began to tremble and lost her balance as wobbled on her toes, leaning away from the animated snack. Without hesitation, she turned up the heat and watched their sauna turn into an inferno, returning to their inanimate origin.
2. When you’re my age, routine is inevitable. My morning routine is my most impressive, never straying more than 5 minutes off the average. I wake up at 5 am to my alarm on my cell phone, which acts solely as my alarm clock. My granddaughter set up the texting part once, I think, but I don’t use any other high-tech features besides the clock app. I take the elevator down to the gym at 5:10 and walk on the treadmill for one hour. Bob comes in usually about halfway through and starts his day on the rowing machine. We silently admire each other’s consistency and motivation. When I am done, I go make myself a bowl of cereal and half a papaya at about 6:20. Judy used to make me eat the papaya to get my fiber, but now I just like it. As I said, routine is the name of the game. My game, that is. After I feed myself, I would feed Toby. Today will be the third day where I no longer feed Toby. Yesterday, I forgot and filled his bowl. The kibble sits in the bowl, its smell growing riper and more invasive. I stare at the bowl, my mind spiraling into the sad, heavy train of thought that has been stopping at my brain in every moment of rest. However, it is not in my nature to stray from my routine. I peel my eyes from the bowl and look to the clock. 6:45: Time to read the paper.
3. He watches as they bawk and caw and crow and coo, sucking in their stomachs and lathering their skin with white glue. He scans them from above, clad in neon colored fabric that reminds him of sweet candies and beach towels. He finds them filthy. He doesn’t let them get close to me because, dear God, the germs. He loves when they sprint and scuttle into the big blue water, then he can swoop down into their bags and take their trea
1)
It is dark outside and I am sitting under gross yellow light trying to do homework but I am anxious tonight. I see no stars or moon outside thanks to the glare of this light. The walls feel sterile. Everything is clean, untouched. I sit alone trying to focus but I can’t. A spider is on its web on the ceiling above me. It catches my eye when it starts to drop. Methodically, lethargically, it is coming for me. It is so creepy, so crawly, I want to cry. I am paralyzed. It gets bigger, growing larger with every flick of its leg. It’s as big as my hand now, growing to be as big as my head. I want to run, to move, but I can’t. I just watch it drop on its line right in front of me. A gangly body silhouetted against the black night through the window pane. I see my reflection in the glass and it snaps me back into place. I move to grab my bag. One last glance at the spider and now it’s no bigger than a penny. I leave the room quickly, almost racing down the long hallway.
2) The world is unfurling itself for you to dance in. Can you see the sky open wide? Can you bathe in its baby blue? Can you feel the sun on your neck, traveling down your spine? Aren’t you warm today? Aren’t you full? Of course you’re not. Even though the aspen trees dance yellow on the mountains, even though the wind blows across the landscape the smell of sage, even though the sunflowers bloom bright on the roadsides. You can’t help it. You stare at yourself in a pond, can’t help glaring at your own reflection. Your short hair, your pale skin, your blue eyes. You look old, more wrinkled than ever. You’re old enough to lose things, but too old to be starting again. You wish it was raining today, you wish it were thundering. At least then you would have an excuse to feel so drenched. There are no excuses to be made for yourself today and your blurry reflection is making that clear. There is so much good in the world but you refuse to bask in any of it. You choose only to lose yourself in the water’s ripple, to hate your own eyes.
3) She watched her friend as he walked across the cliff; a body with legs moving in the expanse of sand. He was barefoot and the sun was beaming down, golden and blinding. She squinted just to see him in the distance. He was walking towards a stone labyrinth, a meditation maze on a cliff above the ocean. A refuge. She watched as he followed its winds and zig zags and walls. His arms extended to his sides for balance. One foot. And then. The other. One foot. And then. The other. She felt herself breathing in time to his rhythmic footsteps. She felt herself breathing in time to the ocean lapping on the shore. She felt herself breathing in time to the seagull calling. He spiraled down and down and down. She watched him lose himself to the rocks, to the sand, to the wind. She felt herself disintegrating like sand, melting like glass. A pebble on the shore.
1. It is the hottest day of the year. The mountains offer no breeze today; they sweat rivers and streams. The Mediterranean sun has grown to twice its size, exploding like a supernova, shooting runny bits of its yolk across the sky, yellow impressionist brushstrokes among the clouds. Inside the kitchen, fresh bread is rising in the oven. My grandmother has dough under her fingernails, flour on her cheeks. A fly zooms in the open window. She snaps her fingers, quick but old, and the fly is between her thumb and index finger. Eager to share, she takes a fresh loaf of bread and straps it to the fly. He soars back out of the window, his hunger and delight overpowering the heavy burden of bread. Grandmother then calls the rest of us to dinner.
2. A parked car. Next to the tennis courts I grew up on. I was in the backseat and she was in the front. She climbed towards me, looking at me as though I was her next prey. Frozen in fear, even though I was much larger than her and we were both adults, I stayed still. I had asked her to come here, and she had, so how could I ask her to leave? I knew it wouldn’t be long before she left now, once she got what she wanted. She was a hunter and I was her sport. Tomorrow, she would mount my head on her bedroom wall.
I survived, but not without claw marks, some visible, some not.
3. The red brick house down the street on the left corner, an old home. The fruitful tomato garden she had tended to was now suffocated by unpicked weeds. The new owners do not value tomatoes like she did. In the cellar in the basement, she would survey all the red jars, rows upon rows, and pick one for the pasta that night. The rosebush where she got stung by a bee for the first time, simply by touching a leaf. A few feet below it lay her doll, who had an unfortunate slip from her cradling arms and cracked her head on the uneven sidewalk. She had held a funeral; buried with that doll were her outfits she had made for her, a poem, and the end of her childhood. After that, she didn’t play with dolls anymore.
1.
Jeff is forgetting how much lettuce he needs to buy for the fancy salad he planned to make tonight—the one he saw the recipe for on his ex-wife’s Facebook page with the caption, excited to try this PM! He’s frozen in a grocery store still-life, gripping produce in both hands with a pinched expression that he also uses for situations like high gas prices and finding crumbs on bus seats.
Then the produce misters come on out of nowhere, showering the romaine and butter lettuce with room temperature water—the cleanliness of which Jeff questions—that ricochets off an errant leaf of spinach and sprays onto his pressed dress pants and confirms his worst suspicions that the whole world is out to get him.
“You’re sure taking your time,” the head of romaine in Jeff’s left hand yells up at him.
“Are you talking to me?”
Jeff has heard about the produce coming to life in that news story last week about a couple of grocery stores on the other side of town, but he’s never experienced it himself. He looks down at the head of lettuce. It has sprouted a long nose that sticks out like a green glow stick from the rest of its face, smushed and wrinkly like a newborn farm animal. Jeff fights the urge to shove it face downward with the rest of the lettuces and abandon the salad plan altogether.
“Hey hey hey,” the romaine cautions, reading his mind. “Are you sure you wanna do that?”
Jeff doesn’t say anything, because there’s a mother and toddler pushing a cart right behind him and the optics of speaking to a head of lettuce in a public place aren’t the best.
“I know what you need,” it smirks. And then it winks, which is especially unsettling, as its greenish eye makes an audible crunching sound as it closes. Jeff is two seconds away from bailing. He knows from his recent speed dating experience when a conversation isn’t going anywhere.
“To get your wife back.”
“What?”
“You want her back, right?”
This fucking lettuce has some nerve. Of course. Jeff would do anything for her.
2.
It was a silly goldfish from a forgettable carnival. One of those low-commitment prizes you take home in a thin plastic bag and expect to have around for a few weeks at most. They never live too long, and I don’t blame them, either. Circling around and around a bare tank would get old real fast.
I tell this to puffy-cheeked Ellie, who is staring into the abyss of the swirling toilet, trying desperately to catch a quick glimmer of the dead tail fin swimming down down down as I flush it. I glance down at the top of her six year old head, offer her a there, there pat. She starts bawling, clinging to my leg with the force of a bodybuilder and rubbing her snotty nose on my cargo shorts.
I miss him, she says between sobs.
Me too, I lie.
3.
He sits cross-legged with a box of cereal on his lap, tossing pieces in the air and catching them on his tongue, frog-like and casual. She isn’t sure what makes this remotely attractive, but she does know that his right thigh is pressing into her left thigh with enough force that it can’t be accidental.
Her mind scrounges around for something to say. It’s blank.
“So is this your favorite kind of cereal, then?”
He stops crunching and turns to look her straight in the face. She thinks she might keel over.
“No, it’s pretty terrible, actually,” he chuckles, holding out one of the honeycomb shapes between his finger and thumb. He peers at it with scientific attention.
Curious, she shoves her hand in the box and grabs a piece, bites into it with the skepticism of a five-star food critic. Her mouth is instantly saturated with a sugary sawdust like nothing she’s ever eaten. She spits it out and he laughs, following her lead.
“I don’t know why I was eating this–this stuff is horrible.”
She flashes an all powerful smile and knows she’s got this situation sorted.
Take any brief clip you wrote for the NF unit and make it as fantastical as possible to convert it into a fictional story.
We were going to Pluto. I had never been to another planet before. I was pretty excited. I had heard a lot about Pluto. My friend Greg told me that until about 200 years ago, they weren’t even sure Pluto was a planet, and then like 150 years ago, this dude called Robert Pinstein came along and published his infamous paper titled, “Life on Pluto.” The title wasn’t creative, but Robert wasn’t famous for his creativity, he was famous for discovering that human life could be sustained on Pluto.
So anyway, going to Pluto for the first 100 or so years after his paper was kind of expensive, but the price of rocket travel had really dropped over the past few years, something to do with a spike in inflation. I don’t know. I don’t really understand economics, but my Dad seems to be an expert and I’ve heard him mouth the words, “the market is down due to inflation” quite often. He doesn’t talk about much, but economics is definitely something he seems to enjoy discussing. The one benefit, in his eyes, was how cheap the rocket tickets to Pluto were for the summer.
The trip to Pluto was awesome. They had ridiculously low gravitational acceleration – 0.62 metres per second to be precise – which allowed us to basically fly around. I’d say that was my favourite part. We had spent 7 days in Pluto, and I feel comfortable saying it was the best week of my life. I couldn’t wait to go back and enjoy the rest of my summer vacation.
We landed in New York in what seemed to be the middle of the night. The jet-lag on rocket ships was rather confusing to calculate and my brain was exhausted from all that thinking about outer-space. I looked at my phone. Why does it say school starts tomorrow? Holy shit, I completely forgot that each day on pluto is six days on earth.
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Write a brief story about a painful episode in your life but transfer it to a totally invented person who is as distinctly different from yourself. Rules: change the gender, age, occupation, body type, behavior, etc. / Adapt the incident to fit your character’s nature and circumstances. Note: in the process you may find you change it so drastically that no one but you would know the episode is the same.
She was wearing a red dress. The kind you’d seen in the movies. It was to be her night. She had waited so long for this.
*
It was finally my turn. My turn to win; to feel loved; to feel important.
I had spent my whole life acting. It started in a small run down café in LA, when I met this middle-aged white man from somewhere in the area who offered me a job in a commerical. I took it, not because I thought that chocolate flavoured pizza’s needed a face to represent them, but because I had to. I had 14 dollars to my name, and I needed a job. Long story short, for some strange reason, chocolate flavoured pizza took off, and naturally, I took off with it.
*
She didn’t think about the break-up too often, but right now, she was. She wondered if he would be there. If he would come to support her, even though they were no longer together. She wondered if he still cared.
*
I won. I looked in the crowd. I saw every expression, every set of eyes, every hairstyle; I saw every single detail; I saw every face. But the one I wanted to see was nowhere to be seen.
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Write a brief scene from memory (one already written in the NF unit or totally new) narrated by 3rd person POV.
He hated the cold. Every bit of it. And today was a cold day.
He hated the cold. Every bit of it. The shivers it sent down his spine. The clattering of his teeth that it gave rise to. But, most of all, he hated the darkness that came with it. The darkness that made him feel weak, feel lost, and worst of all, feel lonely.
He hated the cold. Every bit of it. But tomorrow was going to be a sunny day.
1. The streets are grand in a self-conscious, humble kind of way; as if they would consider it impolite if they were too imposing. So, they hunch their shoulder and squat down. Smoke plooms boldly from chimneys, swirling into the twilight in a dazzling rainbow of colorful billows reaching out to pick up the sun and drag it down towards the horizon in their descent. Lightbulbs shatter against the swinging bats or their snuffers — it’s the only way to turn off a light these days. Darkness engulfs the rooms, dragging them into its gaping mouth; its teeth sink noiselessly into the dormant villagers.
Peering out of the alleyway, she takes a flashlight out of her pocket and kicks herself off of the wall she rests on. She walks underneath a streetlamp, its aura a shield to the night’s wrath. Flicking on the heavy steel flashlight that rests heavily in her palm, she directs it back towards the alleyway from which she came. A shriek emanates from the corner as the darkness recoils into itself, the yellow beam piercing its armor. She grins to herself and tightens her grip on on the flashlight, just another night I’ll spend turning into day.
2. It hurt, more than anything she had ever felt in her 83 years of life. She had just been playing with her grandson, that was all. Normally, she would sit out on the porch rocking her chair back and forth, back and forth, but he really wanted to play, so she acquiesced. Her joints had begun to seize and her bones brittle, that’s why she preferred to rock in her chair. It gave her the appearance of movement without actually needing to go anywhere.
Today, however, she decided to leave her perch and play with her grandson. His ruby red ringlets of hair bounced in the air as he jumped with excitement, handing her an action figure. It was a He-Man figurine, with bulging muscles, flowing golden locks, and sword that protruded from his right hand to a sharp point. He was the perfect man, someone she would’ve fallen for in her youth.
She crouched down to level herself with her grandson and soon their were in the midst of combat, two mortal enemies fighting to the death. He had the advantage of speed and youth, his attacks were unrelenting and lightning quick. She had the advantage of height, her arms extending far beyond his meager reach. Drenched in sweat and anchored down in cramped contortion, she knelt beside her grandson and let him deal the final blow. Unbeknownst to her, he had picked up a nearby stone to crash into He-Man. As he threw his arm down to finish off his weary foe, she didn’t see the rock that he clutched. So, when he hammered it into her finger, she did not expect the sharp pain she felt. She is now left with a scar, a jagged line on her middle finger to remind her of her familial love.
3. Air cracks and blisters as it rushes out with the opening of a door, mittened hands reach in to draw forth an immense turkey. A cacophony of red and green, of brown and white poke out from its inside, the convention swelter bakes the stuffing from within. The herbaceous smell of rosemary crusted fowl wafts through the house catching her nose. It wrinkles and recoils under the unwanted stench. Something was burned. The turkey smells delicious she says — precisely the opposite of what she is thinking. She gets up from her chair and discards the latest Vanity Fair issue. As she nears the perch where the bird lies, her stomach turns once more. The stuffing, which has always been perfectly adequate in years prior, now lay heaped in a dull lump on the plate, her grandmother beside it. Her grandmother looked at her through watery eyes I just don’t know how it happened. She had accidentally turned the oven up to 500.
1. The ice shifts and sighs. She joins in. Hands shoved into her pockets, fingers fidgeting with the paper clip, hair tie, rocks, gum wrappers stuffed into the depths. Shifts from foot to foot and sighs, deeply. The ice cheers her on. The water beneath is moving swiftly, heading towards open ocean, but the ice clings to stay and watch.
The houses on the other side of the river are quiet. Wind passes through frequently, making the dead, clinging leaves of the birches chatter, whispering what they see of the scene below.
It was a rough day. Why is not important, but she is here now, so it was a rough day. On rough days, and there have been many recently, she walks to the river and looks at the stars. The river is full of life in the warmer months, crabs crawling through the long seagrass as tiny toes worry they’ll be pinched. And now, when the sun decides to strip the rest of the landscape of life, it somehow forgets the river. She found the sun’s mistake.
The moon reflects off the ice and the gaps of black, deep water. The stars live in those gaps, glowing from the bottom. In the first month of the year they fall from the sky, purposefully, evading the surveillance of the sun and hiding in the nooks of the wave weathered rocks and tendrils of seaweed. The stars only glow at night, knowing the sun is far and oblivious. Only her and the ice and the seaweed and the dead leaves know.
On rough days like today, she shifts and sighs with the ice for a while, and once her hands are thoroughly warmed, she reaches into the dark water, carefully pries a star from its perch, lets it wander through her fingers and around her hand, asks if it wants to return to the sky or stay here with her, and when they always choose to stay, she places it back to its hiding place, puts one finger to her mouth for a gentle hush, and walks back into the lifeless landscape, feeling the day to be not so rough.
2. The green carpet stapled onto the steps is rough and worn, holes earned from decades of bare feet trampling down, to supper, to catch fireflies, to swim in the kiddie pool. A man sits on top of this carpet, head in his hands, just hidden from the light soaking in from the kitchen. Lanky, grey crew cut, shaved beard, icy blue eyes, mouth in a straight line, wrinkles just starting to really show his age. He has a headache.
His wife and grown daughter are arguing again. He knows his daughter is right, but what is he to do. He’s protected her from her own mother for all her life, why didn’t she learn not to come back to this house. But she wanted his grandkids to run up and down those stairs, to explore the overgrown grass of never-ending field, to sit on his lap. She had just hoped her mother would have forgiven her by then, forgiven her of the long list of her wrongdoings that stemmed from her just being there, forgiven her children for growing up outside their grandmother’s grasp. But now she sat in the kitchen after supper, a familiar scene from her childhood, insults being hurled at her, and now her children. And her father sat in the stairs, where no light but all the words reached, his headache growing with each of his daughter’s sobs.
When the headache is about to split his head in two, he stands up, serious in his walk, shoulders perfectly parallel to the ground, steps into the light of the kitchen. He walks in and simply says Stop It.
3. They carry the bikes and roller skates to the end of their dirt road, up another, a right on another, and finally plop themselves down on the warm, sweet tar. Take a second to breath maybe. They’re strapping on helmets and sliding on knee pads already. Mom’s not there, so the oldest does the right thing and shows she’s too cool for knee pads.
She’s not too bad. But she’s getting a little cocky. Maybe a stick will catch her skate suddenly, just for a quick lesson. Sure enough, there’s the stick, now her right skate nears it, she picks her foot up to avoid it, but the stick moves too. Down goes her foot on the stick, down goes her unprotected knees on the pavement. End of the world. Right then and there. Hope she learned her lesson.
1. As I wandered, the grasses around me extended up towards the sky in a reverent arch. They formed a parted sea of sorts, taking my walk for an adventure. I didn’t really get uncomfortable until the rising border made my road towards home dark, scary even. The base of it all grew spikes like weapons. I wondered if they would prick my finger or if the sharp edges were just a show of something or another.
I knew that something odd was up when the lady bugs started growing, when I didn’t have to squint to count them or crouch to catch them. Their wings extended beyond my own wingspan. I wondered how high they could fly, how fast, how long, etc. “That must be exhausting,” I thought, looking up at the porcelain, spotted vertebrate dotting the sky.
I’ve never crushed a ladybug. I’ve thought about it, yes, but always with a bucket of guilt ready to wake me up. But, when those things are looking at you at a scale of twice your own size, you consider why you didn’t crush them before. You hope that they don’t do the thing you never had the gut and grit to do. They’ve got six legs, those guys. I’ve only got two.
2. First thing that crossed my mind was, “How the hell am I supposed to pop this thing back in?” I knew that my knee was pretty messed, fucked up even. I saw a new bump taking up space in one of the hollow spots around my knee cap. I thought about laying there, soaked up and sunbathing while I waited from someone or another to pass by. It really seemed like the wrong move. The shock of the initial dislocation was wearing off, pain was moving along the fine lines of my nerve endings, and I definitely tasted blood. I think I bit down on my tongue when it happened, let lose some iron as I fell into a heap on the sand.
3. She took the garlic and peeled it by hand, used friction as a method of reduction. It got to skin on skin pretty quick, oozing allicin and natural oils, coating seasoned fingers of fine food and intimate dining. “This is how you make that cheese sauce,” she winked. Bags of store-bought-already-shredded-white-cheddar-mix kind. Two of them dumped with heavy cream. The kids called it a heart attack, she called it a blessing in a bite. It was for the hungry ones pressing dirty fingers to the dining room linens. Molten dairy they could scoop up in a hurry and slow them down with the fatty-sour of it all.
And that was the beauty of Martha. She took motherhood to the dish, wrapped it up in boiled cauliflower, fatty sauces, and garlic heavy roasts. The kids always wanted more from her, wanted “More of this, please,” and “More of that, please,” but later, “Mama, more time. Please.” It was a furious digression away from her, times of reverent recipe making and remembrance. Her eldest, tilting her chin, even asking for more beyond the grave. “More from that day, please.” Martha left it all in the slope of her cursive, smooth lines painting cheese sauce on a page. Her fingerprints even printed a bright yellow on that sauce page, sure lines of her marking too afraid to leave lest she get forgotten, somehow
1.
When I woke up I didn’t know why everyone looked so relieved. “Had I returned from the cusp of death?” I thought. I didn’t have time to ask because Mom immediately pulled me into an inseparable hug.
Here’s how it went: I fell off the bed. During the fall I cut the inside of my lip on the corner of the wooden dresser. My mouth started gushing with blood (my brother, Matthew, said that I looked like a zombie) and I went to the ER. Mom patted my head, “Your brother gave you his favorite stuffed bear so you would feel better. Isn’t that nice?” I never even noticed that it was tightly wedged between my little arms.
Mom’s voice starts to become blurry. I stare into the bear’s eyes. “I remember you.” Memories flood my synapses in a torrent of gory pink.
Yesterday, or something like that, I was walking around someplace I didn’t know, but I was looking for cherry blossoms. It was May, I was sure of that, so they had to be blooming somewhere. I spun around clumsily and scanned my surroundings. “I’m in a city right now, obviously I would never find them here.” So I started walking east, or west, or north, or south; I never understood the difference between them. “Ah! A bridge!” I had it worked out in my mind that bridges meant rivers and rivers meant trees and trees meant cherry blossoms.
Disappointingly the bridge only led to a house, not an ordinary one though. It was built out of Yu-Gi-Oh cards that were stuck together with segments of fruit roll-ups and the roof was a Harry Potter book and the garage was a GameCube and the windows were plastered with posters of Dragon Ball characters. “It’s like a Matthew house,” I thought to myself. I heard Linkin Park blasting from inside. I recognized the song because it’s the one that has the f-word in it. I bounced up the steps and knocked on the purple door.
A stuffed bear answered the door. He was very well dressed for an inanimate, animate object. He wore a navy blue cardigan that had two round buttons (the third one was gone) over a wrinkly collared shirt. The dapper fellow also had a bright red bowtie on. “May I help you?” His black, beady eyes shined inquisitively.
“I was wondering if you could help me find the cherry blossoms. I followed the bridge over back there over here so they must be nearby.”
The bear tilted his head. “Why do you want to find the cherry blossoms?”
“Well they bloom in May so of course I want to see them.” I was utterly confused at his lack of knowledge in cherry blossoms.
“Hmm, very well I can take you to them.” He placed his paw in my hand and we walked down and up and left and right until we reached a path flanked by trees that went on for miles.
“Here we are.” He plopped down on his bottom and fixed his bowtie.
“Well these certainly are trees, which I believe cherry blossoms grow on, but there are no cherry blossoms here.”
“Of course, the cherry blossoms bloomed in April.”
“Well that can’t be right.” Tears stung my eyes and my vision became muted. “Mr. Bear, can you tell the trees to grow some cherry blossoms right now?”
“No need for that, the trees really want to bloom for you. Can’t you feel it?” The trees waved their branches around in acknowledgement. “Problem is, they haven’t the energy to grow their cherry blossoms twice a year.”
I plopped down with a disappointed thump next to the bear. “All day all I wanted was to see the cherry blossoms, what should I do now?”
He rubbed his chin for about ten seconds and then pointed his stumpy paw down the path of trees that stretched on for days and weeks. “Run as fast as you can, if you’re fast enough you might be able to reach the very last cherry blossoms of the season.”
I gave the bear an affectionate hug, and then I started running, faster than my imagination could have ever taken me. I raced stars and clouds against the hands of time (though I wasn’t quite sure which way they were going). The sky was a blur of ever-changing light and dark and I ran as fast as falling. It wasn’t long before I had traversed entire galaxies, but it still felt as if I had made no progress.
Then I saw the pink petals. Billions upon billions fell upon me from the cherry blossoms trees along the path that had somehow become the size of giants. I deemed the phenomenon a cotton candy blizzard, even though the petals tasted terrible. At the same time, a strange jealousy seized my heart. “How unfair that I can’t see this in May, the month of my birthday,” I thought. I kept running until I drowned in the pink ocean.
I have no clue as to where this memory came from. My eyes snap back to Mom who’s now busy talking to a doctor. My brother sneaks up next to me and sadly whispers, “You can keep him.”
2.
Grandma hates it when we visit because dad always cries when he sees her. She’s usually in a wheelchair these days. Painfully bony arms and legs, shriveled skin, ashen hair; you’d be afraid that a slight breeze would blow her away. She knows she’s withering away. Doesn’t mean she won’t be sassy about it. “Just because I’m 78 doesn’t mean I can’t whoop your ass.” Apparently she beat up a lot of people back in her day, never without good reason though.
Every time it was always the same thing at the hospital. The doctor would say, “she doesn’t have much time left.” Then Dad would say, “I understand.” Then he would turn to me, “stay here, I’m going to talk with her.” Then he would walk out of her room as if his heart had been twisted inside out. Then I’d walk in and see Grandma harboring the sadness of an entire lifetime and another on her face. We would sit together and watch the sky and she would say that doesn’t believe that she’ll be up there one day. “Fuck religion it’s all bullshit.” I wouldn’t believe it either, but sometimes I’d find myself praying to nothing anyway.
We’re on her last week and Dad’s been an absolute wreck. We go to the hospital again today but something’s different. “This is her last week.” I felt Dad’s heart drop to the floor. “I’ll give you all time to talk.” The Doctor walks away briskly to take a call. I look at Dad. He’s hollow, so I go to talk to Grandma first. I close the door behind me. Before I know it, tears are streaming down my face. “I’m sorry.”
Her voice comes out as a croak. “Come here stupid.” I walk over and gently hold her hand. “You’ve been so strong for so long, thanks kid.” She strokes my cheek with her thumb. “I’m gonna miss you.”
“I love you Gram.”
“I love you too bum. Take care of him for me. And if he ever becomes too much, tell him that it’s his fucking job to raise you to be the best person you can be. You are his treasure, never forget that. Now get that dumbass in here.” I leave the room and nod at Dad. Once the door is closed I put my ear against it.
“Mom–“ Dad’s voice breaks. Grandma stays silent. “I’m sorry for everything.”
“Shut the fuck up.” Grandma is seething. “You’re the best damn thing that’s ever happened to me. The only thing you have to be sorry for is fucking crying every time you look at me. I’m not a goddamn vegetable Harry, Jesus.” She sighs. “I’m sorry for making you feel this way.” A pause. “Come sit.” I hear dad’s heavy footsteps. Another pause. “Harry, I’m going to die. Soon I won’t be in your life anymore, and I hate that, I really do. But before I go, I need you to know how fucking proud I am of you. And I need you to promise me that the last thing I do isn’t destroying your life. The kid that’s listening to us right now needs you. He needs you to be his father, his mentor, his family, he doesn’t have anyone else. And sure, you’ll probably fuck up a lot, you already have, but never fuck up your love for him. Look me in the eye and promise me.” A long pause.
Dad breaks the silence. “Mom, I’ll make you proud, I promise. You can rest now, you’ve been fighting so long for us.”
“Yeah, yeah I know” Grandma exhales. “I’m finally free now I guess. I’m glad I didn’t fuck it up with you, you made this shitty life worth it.”
3.
Two-year-old Ryan pushed his five-year-old brother down the stairs once. They were carpeted thankfully. Although present-day Ryan remembers none of this, believing that this story is true fills him with immense satisfaction.
1) I have been a hat, a bike, a desk, a boat, but I like playing songs on the guitar the most. I want to be a modern day Orpheus. He had a cool life. You know being anything doesn’t ensure you have a cool life, it just ensures that it is something. And that isn’t anything if it isn’t appealing. So I play a lot because it appeals to me. All the time really. I only really break to eat and sleep, I sing all my conversations, cool right? It’s pretty cool I think. Only thing is, I don’t have an audience to play for. One time a girl stopped and listened, she stayed for about a minute, I think she liked whatever I was playing, she bobbed her head and made a face, she didn’t leave a tip though. I wonder how Orpheus made his money. I should ask next time I go back. Maybe I won’t go back if figure this one out though, you know?
2) Olivia was doing well that day, that day her bike was stolen. She had turned in her paper on time, and had nowhere to be for 30 minutes so she decided to get a second lunch. She decided to go to Atwater Dining for this second lunch, she never goes to Atwater, this would be a good time to go. She biked over. Left her bike round back (unlocked she thought she’d be quick) and went up the stairs leading to the dinging hall. She wasn’t that hungry so she went to get some ginger ale first, coronavirus was impending and she wanted to be ready. Much to her dismay there was no soda water. Then she checked the Pepsi, still no soda water. She had to settle for apple juice not the worse substitute, but not what she wanted. She saw a few friends, all sitting at different tables, she chose to sit with the one she had hung out with last, “Hey Ariel!”
“Hey Olivia!”
“I’ll be right back I’m just going to get some food!” Olivia went over to get some food and realized it was vegetarian day in Atwater, “that’s a nice sentiment, vegetarian day, it’s like cultural food day but for vegetarians!” She thought to herself. She got the burrito labeled “vegetarian burrito”, then went and sat down with Ariel.
“Hey, there’s fake meat in there you know.”
“Really? It says ‘vegetarian’ on the sign.”
“Yeah, I got duped too… you should try it though.”
“Ok.” Olivia tried it, it was disgusting. “Yummy! Super delicious!”
“Really? I didn’t like it at all.”
“Me neither.” The two shared a laugh. “I’m gonna go get some cookies then get out of here, I wanna be early to class.”
“There’s an idea! See you later Olivia!”
Olivia grabbed her cookies went for the door turned the corner and her bike was nowhere to be found, “Terrific!” She screamed, “just what I wanted!”
3) His alarm sounded at 7:00 AM, he got out of his bunk bed to turn off the alarm then climbed back to the top. He wasn’t feeling it today. Not that he was feeling it on other days, he just wanted to climb back into bed today. He got up 15 minutes later, no alarm, just will power. He went to brush his teeth and wash his face. He was moving like a zombie. It was 7:23, he needed to be at the athletic complex by 7:30, but he was not yet dressed. He dressed as quickly and quietly as possible (his roommate was asleep), went down the stairs, and unlocked his bike. He needed a song to ride to, he chose his own song, it was the perfect length for the ride. He jumped on his bike, and went over to the athletic complex. He was out of it, but how could he tell, he was moving too fast to think.
1) I wake up on the hot sand greeted by a fish, a billion fish actually, though only the red fish was speaking to me. The others seemed too preoccupied by the missing ocean to acknowledge my existence. The red fish tells me the ocean went away while I was napping on the beach. The sun was so hot that all the water evaporated and the empty ocean basin sprawled out in front of me. The aquatic plants were shriveling in the absence of their water, dying dying dying.
I did not notice the particularly hot sun due to my protective climate suit that I am required to wear. The government began issuing these suits about 50 years ago, when Earth began to be too hot to bear; I have never known a life without it on. The red fish promptly begins to die— the hot air is too suffocating.
I sit on the beach, not quite sure what to do. When nightfall arrives, I start to walk across the dry ocean floor using the moon’s light trail to guide me. I look at the sky and can’t see anything but dark grey. Grandma used to tell me of a time when the sky was so clear that she could see all the stars. She said she would stare at them so long that they seemed to move in front of her very own eyes. Grandma said she used to go swimming in the cool ocean and follow the moon river until her body was too tired to keep going.
So I walk, imagining that I am swimming in a moon river. A whale watches me with his sad eyes and the mermaids cry, unable to move, their tails blistering in the absence of water, dying dying dying.
2) The old man with snow white hair comes into the flower shop every Saturday to pick up one red rose. He does not like it wrapped in tissue or tied with a ribbon, he just asks for it to be de-thorned. The man drives up to the shop and parks his black car in the unloading zone— he knows this transaction never takes long.
The man heads to the cemetery across town, located at the foot of the gently sloping hills that line the valley. He exits his car in the parking lot and slowly walks to the gravestone that marks his wife. She died eight months ago. He picks up last week’s rotting rose and replaces it with the fresh one. Her favorite flowers were red roses— he wishes he gave her a thousand bouquets while she was still alive.
The man is heartbroken because his wife left him for some place far away and long-distance relationships don’t usually work. He wonders how long the hole in his chest will stay open; maybe it will heal when he finds her again.
3) The doctor and his three kids snuck into the hospital late one night with a squirming backpack. Snuck is a bit of an exaggeration, the doctor had a card that allowed him to enter the doors and head towards the imaging wing. Once the man and his three kids entered the x-ray room, they opened the backpack and a small black dog with a green leg cast hopped out.
The dog had broken its leg two months before and the man brought home casting supplies from the hospital and reset the leg himself. The vet demanded too much money for a task the man did every day. But the man now needed to see if the leg was healed and he could not bring the x-ray machine home, so he brought the dog to the machine instead.
He gave his kids lead vests and layed the dog on the x ray table (with sheets on it). The x-ray showed that the leg was healed, so the man sawed off the cast while the three kids took turns holding the nervous dog. Before slipping back out of the hospital, the dog needed to be placed back into the backpack.
The man quickly stuck the dog back into the bag, but did not realize that the tender leg was caught on a strap. As he pushed the dog lower, the man and the three kids heard a yelp. The leg had broken again!
1)
The office hummed with a distinct buzzing coming from the fluorescent lights overhead. Aza reclined as much as the rickety plastic swivel chair would allow, propping her feet on the metal bar below the desk and tilting dangerously onto one wheel. According to physics, she wouldn’t fall unless she pushed her center of mass past alignment with the wheel. According to Mary-Beth, the building’s supervisor, she most certainly would.
“Sit your sorry behind down properly, child,” scolded Mary-Beth whenever she caught Aza popping wheelies with the furniture. “You’ll crack your skull clean in two and even the mages won’t be able to piece you back together!”
Aza stared at the ceiling now, bored as the fruit bats that flew by daily with the morning post. They always seemed so tired, their intelligent brains so unstimulated by such mundane work as delivering the mail. That was how Aza felt sometimes as she made calls, sorted files, and actively tried and failed to not listen to every conversation that passed through these walls. The hum of the fireflies trapped in the light fixture left a ringing in her ears long after she had left for the day; she sometimes thought she could hear them from the dormitories a half a mile away.
She turned her gaze towards the stack of documents to her right, threatening to fall off the edge of the desk, and groaned quietly so as to avoid the wrath of Mary-Beth. She hated processing documents; while some of the simple forms could be filled out with plain ink, official business had to be signed in dragon’s blood.
How Aza hated dragon’s blood; it’s stench always lingered on her black-stained fingers for days after she used it, as though the dragon were coming back to life and punishing her for using its life to finalize enrollment verifications and sign transcripts. She used to say a silent prayer to the Three for it, willing the dragon a peaceful passage to the place beyond, but three years into the job, she had long since forgotten she had ever done that.
2)
It was the kind of street where ants lived in pantries, mice lived in rafters, and mail lived in mailboxes forever, uncollected. You might think it would follow that people lived in houses, but this would be where you were wrong. People did not live in houses; they simply existed in them.
On the third driveway down from the great fig tree snoozed an old border collie. Lassie was her name, or it might have been Goose, or Grace; no one remembered. She had once been a well-groomed darling, the mailman would recount, but those were days come and gone. Now, she came and went as she pleased, did as she liked, and ate as her wild little heart desired. It was a wonder she could move about at all, a passing veterinarian once thought. A decade of fending for herself had taught her to take the food where she could get it, however much of it she could get, whenever she could get it. And when “not now, you just ate” had elapsed into fits of coughing and then eventually to silence, the collie simply kept on eating as she pleased.
If you sidestepped the sleeping collie and followed the trail of dried muddy footprints, you would eventually find that your feet had carried you into the house, to a bed that hadn’t been made in over four years. Embedded into its now undoubtedly permanent creases, you would find a man – no, a living skeleton, asleep or as good as. The only indications he gave of being alive were soft, shallow breaths and the occasional attempt to reach for the bottle of morphine on his bedside table.
3)
“Hey, where do you think you’re going with that?” Grace raised an eyebrow over her shoulder in Rei’s general direction, eyeing her and the batter-caked wooden spoon in Rei’s hand but maintaining a firm grip on the large glass bowl in front of her lest it be taken too.
“Nowhere important,” said Rei with a sly smile. Damn that smile.
Grace transferred one hand from the bowl to her hip. “It’s my turn to lick the spoon,” she reminded Rei. “You got to last time, for the brownies, and the time before that, and—”
“And yet here I am, with the spoon,” said Rei, her grin widening. Damn, oh damn that smile. She stuck out her tongue and wiggled it, inching it towards the spoon’s chocolate-blanketed tip. The nerve of that girl.
Grace huffed and shrugged and sighed, perhaps a little more dramatically than she would have were it anyone but Rei. Two could play this game. She waved one hand over the top of the empty but still very much chocolate-covered bowl, leaning out of the way so Rei could see.
“That’s all fine and dandy, but like, guess who has the bowl?”
Grace dipped an index finger into the bowl and swirled it around the side, accumulating an impressive amount of chocolate. She lifted it up to show Rei, who only pretended to look horrified.
Rei lunged for the bowl with the hand not preoccupied with her spoon, but Grace caught her gently by the wrist. Two pairs of eyes rose slowly upward, like two bodies pushing up from the bottom of a lake and surfacing, and the corners of Grace’s mouth lifted ever so slightly with them. Raising her chocolate-covered finger, she dabbed a bit of chocolate on the tip of Rei’s nose. Rei’s eyes closed into a squint, her lashes shuddering at the touch.
Grace pressed her forehead to Rei’s and closed her eyes, resting her chocolate-free hand somewhere behind Rei’s waist. “You know I love you,” she said into the warmth of Rei’s skin.
There was a soft, heavy silence as they stood there in each other’s arms, two bodies melting into one form, two hearts beating together, pounding harder and harder as if willing themselves to escape their bony cages in a desperate attempt to close the gap between them.
“You know I love—” Grace breathed again, softer this time, but Rei’s lips were already there. Grace hitched a breath as they brushed hers, softly but surely, without hesitation. She felt the tangle of Rei’s hand in her hair and leaned in closer, their lips now exploring each other in earnest, as if they were one second away from being torn apart and lost to each other forever. Grace felt a light shiver as Rei lowered her hand slowly down the nape of her neck, traversing the space between her shoulder blades and settling at the base of her spine, just below the knot of her apron. Rei’s other hand set the wooden spoon on the counter and joined its twin, pressing Grace’s hips ever closer to her own.
Grace’s lips migrated leftward, tracing a line from Rei’s mouth to her ear. “You know I love you,” she murmured.
Rei placed a kiss on Grace’s collarbone before settling her forehead once more on Grace’s. “I do,” she breathed, gripping Grace’s waist and turning them both sideways. “You must be a fool but I do.” She lowered one hand, twisting slightly as she reached for the counter. “And I love you, and I will never stop loving you and all that cheesy shit, but like, guess who has the bowl now?”
Grace opened her eyes to see Rei pull the bowl off the counter and zip away, cradling it in her arms and cackling like an eight year-old who found the candy stash.
“You heathen!” said Grace, crossing her arms in feigned disbelief. “You traitorous monster, you thief!”
Rei just smiled.
Damn that smile.
1.
The pretty accountant behind the Plexiglas window smiled as she slid me my converted bills, and it was then that I vaguely remember thinking that humans weren’t supposed to have that many rows of teeth. Just one, I recalled, would be the normal amount. The accountant had at least three. Three rows of human teeth — ordinary, flat, white molars — winked at me before disappearing behind the close of a matte, red mouth. I must have been staring because the accountant smiled again — lips pursed closed this time — and leaned into her little mic stand and said “Can I help you with anything else, ma’am?” with the clear implication of being done helping.
I flushed, shook my head, fumbled the receive, said “Yes, no thank you,” and hurried away from the exchange without taking my money. Being caught looking was dangerous but lingering was even more so. I shoved the encounter under the bed of my brain and determined that it was safer to forget.
The speakers in the airport came to life. “Attention flyers. Due to severe weather conditions all flights have been temporarily grounded. Please stand by as we clear the runway.”
I grabbed the sleeve of a passing tourist. “Severe weather? Why are they clearing the runway?”
The tourist pulled their sleeve back roughly, squinted down at me with the one eye in the middle of their forehead. “Can’t you hear the cats and dogs? Look outside.”
I looked outside and sure enough, cats and dogs were falling from the sky. I heard the rain of thumps as their bodies hit the pavement, heard their barks and their yowls as they scrambled to get footing. On the ground, a Zamboni was acting as a snowplow, sweeping their still-squirming bodies into a tall pile on the side of the road. I watched all this with my mouth hung open.
“Christ. Didn’t your mother teach you it’s rude to stare?”
2.
The mousy-haired man had a toothache. It was a molar on his left, third one down if you were counting from the back of his mouth. He had no idea how he got it; he brushed and flossed three times a day and even started to cut back on sugar last spring because his doctor told him to and his wife agreed, saying it would slim down his figure back to his college years, back to when they first met. Yesterday had been his birthday, and while his family celebrated with fat slices of chocolate cake, he hadn’t allowed himself to take a single bite, even though chocolate cake had always been his favorite and there was nothing in this world more tempting than the sugar shiny gloss of a dark chocolate ganache. He had kept himself in check.
There was no explanation for why he would suddenly get a toothache in spite of all this, so he began to have the awful suspicion that maybe instead, it had always been there; that maybe he had been born with it and that it had waited in his gums for forty-two years, dormant as a demon, until one Sunday morning his wife had asked him if he wanted eggs with that and as he sat there thinking about if he wanted eggs or not, weighing pros and cons, she got impatient and slid some on his plate anyways, and at that point he still hadn’t made his mind up about the eggs, but the kids were looking at him expectantly from the other side of the breakfast table, and he felt the pressure radiating from their wide eyes, so he picked up his fork and bit down on the eggs and felt such a deep stab of pain in the left side his mouth that his eyes watered and his fork clattered to the ground.
It was as if a black hole had opened in the cavity of his tooth, sucking up the screaming ends of all the electric receptors in his brain and making it impossible to think about anything but the toothache in his mouth, this throbbing, enamel epicenter of his internal earthquake. He shouted something garbled and gripped the edges of the table; his knuckles turning white, his family staring, his eggs lying limp on the flat of his tongue. He squeezed his eyes shut and rode out the waves of pain as it crashed over him inescapably, one after another. And then, just as quickly as it came, the black hole disappeared. It winked out of existence, leaving just dull ache and empty silence and, hot on its heels, a heat of embarrassment that cooked the tips of his ears. He felt a profound sense of shame, as though he had slipped and shown his family a side to him they definitely shouldn’t have seen.
His wife, stunned, asked him if he was alright. He decided not to tell her about his theory of the dormant toothache, although at the time, the suspicion had started to seep into his mind like a soggy ceiling, dripping into a bucket on the ground one slow drop at a time. The man felt a kind of dread for what would happen if the bucket were to overflow. If the room were to fill with water. He didn’t want to see what things, long buried, would rise to the top.
The man nodded, swallowed his eggs, and pretended nothing out of the ordinary happened. To his relief, his family played along. And all through breakfast, lunch, his kids’ soccer practice, dinner, TV, and bed next to his wife, the man ached.
3.
She comes home to a bowl of water. A round, medium-sized, see-through, plastic bowl of water sitting on her desk, right where she last left it. The only problem is that when she left for school this morning, it had been a fishbowl. As in, there had been a fish swimming in the bowl. A deep turquoise betta with a beautiful, billowing tail. She had won it two days ago at her school carnival. She spent the entire afternoon at one booth, tossing bean bags into baskets, losing ticket after ticket, until finally the man took pity on her and that fish had become hers. She had been planning on naming it after she got back from school today. She had been brainstorming through all of her classes; she had finally settled on Blue, after the beluga.
So it’s quite a shock to her when she comes home, opens the door, and sees a bowl of water sitting at her desk. No fish.
“Maybe granny moved it to a bigger bowl,” is her first thought. And so she goes to find her granny, who’s fixing her hair in the bathroom mirror, and asks her where he fish went. And to her horror, granny points to the toilet.
She asks how it died.
“Overeating,” her granny says, then laughs, a short and loud ‘HA’ like she’s just now getting the joke. “Lucky bastard.”
“But how,” her granddaughter presses. She was sure she had set aside the right amount in the morning.
“Your little brother said he wanted to feed it. Dumped the entire container of flakes inside. Fish probably thought it was in heaven.”
The granny notices her granddaughter’s silence and glances down to see her clenched fists.
“Don’t get too mad at your brother. He doesn’t know better. He probably thought that was the best way to show his love. He loved that fish too, you know. Just loved it too much.”
These words did not make sense to her at all. If her brother had loved it then why did he hurt it? How could he dump all that love and not see that it was too much? That it was going to choke? It was the dumbest way to die.
She stomps out of the bathroom and hears the muffled sound of her brother’s squeal somewhere in the house. The soft pattering of feet as he runs and hides.
She was going to find him. She was going to find him and strangle him. She was going to love him to death.