. Spinning .

"But it would be fun, don’t you think? To ride bikes along the edge of the tracks, and if we got tired and a train came by we could grab onto, you know, those railings that the hobos hold on to hitch rides, and we could relax and just fly along!"

It was obvious to Edward that Deenie had let herself set her heart on going.  It happened that way a lot, just on a simple statement he’d make.

"Oh Edward, come on! We can do it, you know, and don’t say no because I’m too little."

"It was just an idea, Deenie," he said. "I’ve done it before, and it takes too long getting back."

"Who cares?  I don’t have to come back."  She paused, her eyes grew darker.  "Don’t want to either.  Oh let’s!"

"Tsk.  Shouldn’t have mentioned it.  We can’t." he said.

"PLEASE! Please," she said in her most pleading way.  And then she stuck out her lower lip in a pout–the one thing her best friend Edward could never resist. "We must!  You’ve done it before and went all the way across England. I want to do it too."

"No, Deenie.  It’s too dangerous. Go to sleep and forget it." He turned to climb off her bed.

"But you did it!" she cried as he skipped away from her.

"Yes," Edward said, and as he hopped inside her closet and started to pull the door shut, "but I died."

So.  That’s it then.  There really is no God.

Charles Alphonse Caretta leans back in his chair after pulling the chain on the desklight.  The tiny room is lit only in the blue-white glow of the computer screen, a small circle of light that expands outward like a fan, catching just the edges of his face, his chest, his right hand in its beam.  The clutter beyond is clean, belonging to the darkness of the shadows. He should feel something more than what he does, he thinks.  Five years of work–no, a lifetime less his youth spent at St. Anthony’s–and by the twisted paths of numbers, here facing him is proof that God does not exist.

"Let’s pretend, for discussion purposes," Jaworski said, "that at one time there was a God." 

The morning sun slid between the slatted blinds at the windows, striping the classroom with bars of iron grey in contrast to the bright slashes of light.  The professor turned back to face his students.  "What if there is some shred of truth in the theory, and the only difference between the scientific and the once held beliefs of centuries of theologians is the anthropomorphism of a cosmic bang?"

Jaworski eyed the rows.  Two young women in the first row looked at each other with eyebrows raised; this is what they’d heard happened in this class.  They giggled.  A few looked up at him expectantly; others were writing notes.  Of those that lounged against the back wall, sprawled in the sleep-deprived collegiate base of mediocre interest, only one stood out.  A male, dark-haired and neatly dressed.  He leaned forward on his desk, a pen poised on a copybook set at an angle before him, his attention fully on Professor Adam Jaworski.  A cool line of sweat gathered and ran down his back.  Maybe his luck would run out this semester.

Okay, so let me tell you what this is all about.  Dean over at anacronyms has been mentioning the e-book challenge over at Lynn Viehl’s site, Paperback Writer.  What Lynn has come up with and so graciously hosted is a challenge to writers to post free access to a story or novel or whatever on their site by October 31st, and she would link to them on her site.  It’s a terrific idea, free sharing of our work to allow readers some entertainment and for writers, folks to read their work.  She’s also willing to critique a select few, and with her background, this is just a great opportunity for the alert writer.

Then there’s me.  But I do respond to deadlines, so honest, I’m going to have the whole thing up by tomorrow.  Below are links to the story–but of course, I’m rewriting a good portion of it right now–in both Word and Adobe pdf formats, and the cover was here for a while but I took it off because I have this huge white space around the image that I need to somehow figure out how to get rid of, and then the link will be put up on my top right sidebar for a few weeks for easy access and reading.

Now, I’ve gotta get back to work on it all.

It’s safe to ignore this for now—I’m still working on the story, the cover, and the post.

Cooper’s Promise (.doc)

Cooper’s Promise (.pdf)

A scattered few puffs of lone clouds met over the Rockies, blown by the northwest wind into a gathering of a gray ragtag army marching over the plains, stopping to drink at the Great Lakes of Michigan’s banks, holding its breath as it filled in its ranks in a faster-paced mass over the widest part of New York, meeting its enemy and unloading its full charge of bullets of rain into the City, soaking the streets and the alley where the man known as Zeller lay dead.

She sprawled uncomfortably twisted on the floor near the propane stove with a match in her left hand.  Counting to one hundred and twenty, then to one hundred and twenty again.  Whispering another sixty as the thumb of her right hand ached with the pressure of holding down the pilot light knob.  She listened for the hiss of gas that would light the stove.  It never came.  But something else lit up, inside her; an angry frustration that had fed on dreams, digested them and turned them into a volatile bile that tasted sour in her throat.  She was about to explode with the striking of yet one more match.

Mrs. McLaughlin woke up every morning at seven a.m on May 23rd, 1997.  For many years, she would put on her robe, stop to use the bathroom, and head down the stairs to the kitchen and make a pot of coffee and scramble two eggs.  For the last three years at Highview Manor, the aide brought eggs, toast with jelly, and a cup of coffee with cream into room 203 where Mrs. McLaughlin would dig into her breakfast with gusto.

Oooh.  I think I’m going to like this one.

Fleeting thought caught:

If my service in the war comes up in conversation, and I am asked by someone whom I barely know, "How was it, really?" my answer is usually to the effect, "It was hot, it was buggy, and it was very loud."

If the fool persists, and if he is fairly full of liquored thought and to a degree, so too am I, and if it is a chance of opportunity where he and I are quite alone and on my own homeground, I may open up my wallet and let fall a photo that I’ve carried in my mind as well.  He’ll pick it up, and stare, unable to hand it back to me.  And through his drunken haze of shock, I’ll sit him down and properly tell my story.

Hah!  You can see the Hitchcockesque influence in my writing from my current reading:  the language, the style, the genre. 

Mayhaps I’m but a sponge…

Oh my.  I suppose that yes, I should have called 911 right away, or even Dr. Shapiro.  But I was only half awake from a bad dream and as I slipped back into sleep I realized he wasn’t snoring, and as I held my own breath listening, I knew Charlie was dead.  But it was three o’clock in the morning and the room was so cold–Charlie always snuck the windows open a crack even in late October, and it was so warm under the covers.  I’d put up twenty quarts of pickles and two dozen pints of cinnamon pears that day and I was very tired, and after forty-three years spent in our marriage bed, Charlie, I thought, could surely lay there till morning.

Another one, from out of nowhere yet it has a place it’s going, Suicide Notes, started today:

Have you ever stood between a man and suicide and failed to be that wall? Have you ever felt the pang of the defeat, the looking back and seeing all the signs you saw listed in that pamphlet they gave you at the service? Recognizing much too late the shading maple trees, the fluff of blue wild chicory, the wide lush pastures that smelled too sweet along the long dark path?

I’d told her all about my father; because she asked so often. A way for us to become closer she’d said. Audrey, my live-in girlfriend, getting lost in sensitivity again.

This is going to be three stories woven into one, a trick of time. 

Life begins with the narrative structure of a story.  Sometimes shattered into fragments becoming poetry.

Poetry is the fragments put together.  Missing pieces, often distorted from the broken edges that never fit again in one mirrored plane.  An image interesting for its different view, unstructured, misplaced pieces changing linearity.

The arc that never falls.

Oh, what a fool he must look!  One of those sad empty-eyed old men dressed in colorless wool jackets and jeans that slept in the stations at night and shuffled and mumbled their way up and down the passageways all day, noticing and taking, rather than looking for, something to eat or a left-behind mitten or cap.

This is towards the end of the new story I’ve been working on for the past couple days and I’m hoping to tie it all in to a neat little climax that will in effect be a resolution and ending as well.  I have been able to follow a linear structure with just a few character revealing backstory episodes and still let the natural rhythm of voice conduct the piece.  This, while keeping a secret that weaves through the story that for once in my writing I’ve known about before it’s spilled onto print all by itself.

Or so I hope I have.

He saw the heat and caught the scent
of yellow on his tongue,
tasting movement of its arc and hearing
daylight, loud as silence. 
Searching, reached out and felt
the shining disc
that burned his sight,
bit down and broke it with his teeth. 
So learned of darkness
of the morning
and the blinding touch of night.

Once upon a willow a small boy sat, unusual for the natural growth in limbs of such rarely afford good climbing.  But by chance, this particular willow tree when young had been struck by a fork of lightning that had split and changed its pattern and it adjusted to survive.  And so, in some way of sorts, had been the boy.

Just a thought, a start of story this early morning that breezed up from the backyard–without a willow tree in sight and yet an image came to mind and I’ve a photo of it somewhere of a willow tree that now stands dying in my father’s yard, but then in which I’m sitting as a young girl.  It is a weeping cherry actually, and the cloud of pink blooms hang invitingly as beaded curtains in an Eastern bedroom.

Where will it go?  The story wants to wander, as do I.

George DePaoli was clearly dying but here’s the thing; it was taking longer than he’d expected.  What he felt had been his final hours had dragged out through the night and into the next day and he only wished for one thing now; that his daughter, Marcia, would stop yelling in his ear.

What would be a better exercise in non-linear narrative structure, in intertwining consciousness of space and time, in changing tense and with it, worlds that exist with those that may not.

Obviously inspired a bit by Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, but I cannot get past the barriers of time as easily, nor float free among the heads within the room.  My use of language still is stilted by the proper form and format, though I beat my hands and head against the walls that hold me in.

How odd, that we must overcome severe restrictions learned in writing and communication, to return to an expression that would be more natural to our minds.  I seek this freedom, this letting out of truth regardless of reception.  And no, not authorly in that, because in reaching this plateau there is a population to be met on common ground.  Though true, their reader’s mind must be as open as the writer’s.