Flash, Again

Another flash fiction, inspired by a class assignment. I wrote this one hoping- as I did in my last flash fiction- to explain the back story elements for the longer piece I am working on. The imagery is kind of clunky and obvious, but I was trying to hit a mood here. Hope it works. The piece is called "Runway."

Normally, the Runway Diner coffee was a draw for Sean. He loved it, the bitter aroma, the thin layer of grease on the surface, the inky blackness. He loved it as much as he loved meeting her here, usually after work, mostly on Sunday mornings when he should have been- told his wife he was- at the gym. He swirled the last dregs around in his cup, bits of grounds clinging to the sides, before draining it.

He glanced out the window, low, gray clouds overhanging the expanse of the airport beyond, the rain starting again to pock the already standing puddles. The lights of the runway blared in unison a sharp red. She was slipping away towards her car, that beat up Saab she had had since college. She had bought a Jeep with money from her last big design gig, but had promptly sold it; debt and the pressure of life overcame the status of the big green machine.

It had been six months since he had seen her, a chance encounter in New York, a night at the Americana, then the crushing emptiness of returning to life at home. It had been this way before, since college really, this pattern. Her absences were crushing but her email had been an oasis, and the meetings, all clandestine and dangerous, his salvation. But it was different now. Or was it?

“More coffee, hon?” The waitress, coffee poised above cup, searched out his eyes but he didn’t turn away from the window. A brown and orange Southwest jet was taxiing onto the tarmac directly across from him, and the Saab was backing up.

“No thanks,” he said without looking, and she shuffled away before he could add his thanks. He fiddled with the bracelet he had given her in New York, now his again. The rain intensified, the jet whirred its engines, and she made the left out of the parking lot and disappeared down Aerodrome Road. He watched her two taillights until they were mere dots in the gauzy streaks of rain, and then they were gone.

It was 9:30. He told her he’d be home at 11:00. Craning his neck he held his empty cup up to the waitress, then settled in to watch the jet’s long, slow arc into the battered sky.

385 words. Harder than it looks, really, when you want to say so much but have to remain silent, so to speak. My story is up to 3,400 words and I'm not even close to being done, yet it seems that the shorter form is such a quick hit, punch in the stomach kind of a writing exercise. I guess when you're stuck saying too much, use the short form...

Yeats and Sadness

I have a favorite poem from Yeats. As I write my current story about love and loss, I can't help hearing it in my mind. It really hits the mark, and contains all of that sadness that I'm looking to capture. Life is all about this type of sadness...unrequited love, missed opportunities, failures. Now if I can just convince my character that he doesn't have to hide his face amid a crowd of stars I'll be on to something. Anyways, here it is in all of its glory...

(Man, I really dig this guy's stuff.)

"When You Are Old"

When you are old and gray and full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true,

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,

Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled

And paced upon the mountains overhead

And hid his face among a crowd of stars.

Truth or Dare

The truth is often a weird, scary place to live. How's that for cognitive dissonance? Can you live in the truth? I think you can, but it's hard, frightening, soul baring.

Take fiction, for example. You can write a character that is very open and honest, but you better deal with the ramifications of that honesty in the work, or your reader will shoot you down with one glance. You can, on the other hand, write a character that is not so fond of living in the truth and what do you have? Probably a closer picture of what life is like for all of us who toil in the real world, with real dreams that are often pinned and cramped by circumstances, who suffer and strive and love and in the end aren't brave enough to do what must be done to fulfill the dreams that are often tantalizingly close. Those are real characters. We all want to see the happy ending, don't we? We all want our characters not to crash and burn. But only the naked optimists out there write those characters into anything other than melodrama or romance novels. Tolstoy said, and I paraphrase (badly), we don't want to read about happy people because they are boring. Instead, give us the tormented, the yearning, the twisted souls. Let's party with those characters! These are the fun folks.

Such it is in life, too. We can think about the safe, the sheltered, and the calm, or we can think about the stormy, gale-tossed little ships out there whipping around in the rain (a cliche...good God, I wrote a horrendous cliche- but it makes sense in light of the end of the post, trust me....I'm a professional, don't try this at home). Those ships sometimes make it to port, other times go down on the reef, but they were making the action happen. And if they make it, whoa, now there's a party. All those lusty sailors cavorting with wine wenches under the Caribbean sun, bodice ripping galore, and a pretty good keg of rum! Such is life in fiction, such is life in, well, life. And, with all respect to Tolstoy, those unhappy characters that make it out of the storm go on to be happy characters after all.

I mean, what's so wrong with romance novels anyway?

Flash Fiction

A new assignment for creative writing, a midterm short. Mine's very rough, but here. It's called "Shannon's Song," and provides some backstory on two of the central charaters I am writing about in "Keep in Touch."

They hit the seat so hard as they entered the cab that the whole thing rocked onto two wheels, listing dangerously close to the traffic zipping by on East 7th. Laughing, she pried open his dripping rain coat and nuzzled into the warmth of his chest. He smelled like faded Polo and stale smoke. The lights from the Venezuelan café blared into the cab’s stiff and acrid interior, casting long shadows across the driver’s neck. From his picture, Sarrif was from Zimbabwe, and, judging from his demeanor, he was in no mood for small talk.

“Where you going?” he said, craning his neck at the massed couple in his back seat.

“Americana. 69 West 38th.” Sean said, easing back and into his soggy companion.

“OK.” And they were off. As they barreled up Park Avenue, Shannon detached herself from Sean, leaning back to fuss her hair away from her eyes, both lost now in the blackness of the cab. He had always loved her eyes. He leaned into her and kissed her, only lightly, before sliding to the window.

“I can’t believe you flipped off that guy in the parade, Shan. It’s Saint Patrick’s Day, for God’s sake.”

She wrinkled her nose and chuckled. “Hey, I thought I knew that priest with him, Father Cooper, from the Art Center. They call him the painting priest. And you can’t tell me you didn’t see that guy flip me off first. It was like he thought I knew him.”

“Regardless, it’s not very lady-like of you. What would Timothy and Sarah say?”
“Leave my parents out of this, you jerk. I’ve given them enough trouble.”
Sarrif rammed the cab through a puddle the size of a small stream on the side of 37th street. David paid him and they tumbled out onto the Avenue of the Americas and quickly up to his hotel. “Will you come up?” he asked.

“Do you want me to?”

“Of course I do. I always do.”

“What will good old Sharon say?”

“Leave her out of this.” He stared at her as she stood debating, the light from the lamppost carving out the chunks of her face above her cheekbones with bright, fluorescent light, and leaving the space below hollow and black. She thought for a long moment before turning and grabbing his hand to enter the hotel doorway.

In his mind, the years between them hovered over him like a blanket, wrapping him in the warmth and dryness of shared childhoods. The rain cascaded down off of the hotel’s canopy in thick sheets now, but to Sean, it was only the incessant pull of the past dragging him back to a time before wife and family and growing up, to that time when the ghosts of our past are still living and warm and soft beside us, as she was now.

Brush with *ahem* Greatness

I find it funny when I fall into the tantalizing trap, like most people do in similar situations, of believing that I am a character in someone else's fiction. I see it every time I run a writing class. Students will inevitably assume that they are the character in their friend's story. Sometimes the student writers are open, admitting it for all to hear, and other times they are coy, but it happens every time. Some people take it with a grain of salt (they apparently buy into the writer's claim that it's only fiction), others get angry, some sulk. However you take it, I have to believe that, at the very least, you, being the flattered/angered/hurt/embarrassed model of a fictional portrait, at some point entertained the idea that your fictional doppelganger was there on the page staring back at you. And therein lies the danger.

Case in point: I remember in a writing class in college having my professor assure us all that we were not characters in her story about a college writing class. It had been published, so it was out there for us all to see, and, despite the fact that we knew it was only fiction, we all spent hours trying to figure out who was, say, the neurotic pencil chewer, or who was the slovenly, unkempt genius with a flair for description. Truth be told, and she did tell us (repeatedly, emphatically), none of us were there at all, at least not in our true forms. We were there, yes, but only pieces of us. Traits, eye twitches, mannerisms, speech tics, but not the whole package.

Another time, in another class (this time a graduate independent study with the same fiction writer), I wrote a story about a lecherous English professor who specialized in 18th century English literature. Her husband, another of my professors, happened to specialize in 18th century English literature. Coincidence? Surely. Well, maybe. I mean I liked the guy. I liked the fact that he married my writing professor. I had no reason to suspect him of any of the nasty things my fictional English prof. did at all. It just came out in my story...really! Later, in our post-story conference, she gently reminded me that even inadvertent character assassination could be harmful- to my relationship with her husband and, in the future, to my checkbook, as libel is often embarrassing to deal with. Good points, and well taken.

You see, the truth is that all fiction comes from some place deep inside each writer. Who knows exactly where, but it's deep. And what else is in there? Our friends, memories, connections with those both alive and dead. All of those potential characters just milling around in the green room of the writer's soul, waiting to strut and fret again on the stage that is our fiction or poetry or personal essay. And we need to sort that stuff out before we write.

Do I put people I know in my stories? No. Do I put pieces of people I know in my stories? Absolutely. The trick is to make sure they're all mixed up enough so that the new creation is something that is just that: new.

And when I read, I have to remember that the only brush with greatness I can honestly say I will get is when I talk to the writer of the story, not when I put myself in the story whole.

Short Short

One of the most exciting classes I am teaching now is creative writing. Despite the oxymoronic course title (all writing is creative, and this class more aptly should be called Literary Writing), I have really been energized by talking about writing. I even got off my lazy behind and started a new story, so something must be in the air.

I assigned a short short of no more than 200 words as a blog exercise this weekend, and told the class I would participate as well. Kind of a Nancie Atwell thing. But before I go into my own story, I wanted to give a link to one of my favorite writers and a piece of flash fiction she has posted on her web site. The writer is Hollis Seamon, and the her story is called "Natural Disasters." It's a very sad short about the death of a parent and some of life's little ironies that accompanied that death.

So, here it is. It's called "Lunch Break."

He had been planning this for weeks. She would drop by his desk on the way to lunch like she always did. He opened his top desk drawer and fiddled with the wrapped box inside. The red bow was getting worn.

Over the top of his monitor he caught sight of her. She seemed to float down the aisle between the desks. She stopped before his and smiled at him. “Hey,” she said, “you doing lunch?”

“Not yet,” he said, and when she seemed puzzled, he reached into his drawer and produced the box. “This is for you.”

She looked at him over her glasses and pushed her auburn bangs out of the way. “What’s this?”

“Open it.”

She pulled on the ribbon and popped up the red velvet box top. Her eyes focused on the contents inside. Her hand went reflexively to her throat. “Oh,” she said, moving her hand from her neck to the desk for support. Her eyes went to his as if to ask a question. “I can’t…”

But he didn’t hear. He was already moving out of his chair and reaching for the shaking hand that she raised at him as she backed into the aisle.

It's a lot harder than it looks. In the future, I'll post some of the cool shorts that pop up from the class in this spot. Hopefully I'll be able to continue the story,too.

Keep writing!