the waiting is over

He stands up, opening his mouth, but it just hangs like some half-deflated balloon.

Her hands are clenched, arms straight and shaking slightly.

They both feel the sickness creeping in, into the stark blue room with the cold plastic chairs.

The obviousness of the box of tissues pisses her off. She slept here the past two nights and that little box had taunted her

soft white sheet peeking out its neck

waiting to be wrung


now it was over 
but she wasn't looking at the little box
the sky instead now mocked her 
blue and open 
despite the cramped darkness all around her
the sickness climbing up into her throat


they didn't speak
couldn't


just walked out of the cold room down the sterile linoleum halls and out 
into to the parking lot past the car
down streets past houses and kids on bikes and people eating 


to the pier where they sat and watched the water 
sway 
it slowly lulled their trembling and soothed their tired eyes 


numbness was a solid wall 
they would have to wait to climb 


for now their two hearts thumped
in answer to each other
close and somehow 

alive 

Flash Fiction

These are two pieces I wrote for a flash fiction class. The assignment was to write 250 word micro-stories.

#1

The train rattled and pulled, suddenly feeling like a flimsy metal sardine box. It was hot and beads of sweat dripped down my neck and clung to the hair on my chest. Of course there wouldn't be working AC in August. Fucking Perfect. The shit-for-brains transit employee had asked me to "please sit down sir, we are sorry the inconvenience, but there is nothing we can do at this time." God knows why I agreed to do this. I hadn't seen Tommy in more than a decade, since the house was sold and I helped him move in with that crazy bitch he was seeing. The day after the funeral, while loading boxes with what looked like dirty clothes, she had asked me if I'd dreamt of my father yet. She said it casually, leaning again the truck smoking a joint. I swear if she hadn't been a female I woulda decked her. I'd done my best to forget that town, and everyone in it. But when I got a phone call at five thirty am yesterday and Tommy was on the other line crying and begging me to come I just agreed. His trial is first thing in the morning and I'm wearing dad's watch. Possibly out of spite. I don't know what he expects me to do for him. They arrested him fucked up and making a scene in a laundry mat downtown, with ten grams of cocaine on him. Fucking Perfect.

#2

Drops of rain slid down the windowpane in a kamikaze plummet. There wouldn't be any visitors until the hurricane subsided. The car had finally died, and at 83, Isabel wasn't anxious about the ordeal of getting a new one. Her son had asked on the phone "How will you get groceries?" Not - however, "What will you do all day in that rotting house?" She didn't much care for Jenny, her daughter's old high school friend who came by twice a week to check on her. To see if I'm still alive, thought Isabel. Jenny had such a big mouth always tastelessly gossiping about the parents of her bratty ten-year-old's friends. With the kids in Seattle and Florida and Joe dead three years in November, Isabel had no interest in socializing with the people who came to visit. They always feigned concern for her obvious reclusive behavior and then asked for updates on her kids and grandkids lives, which she could not give.

The last time her daughter Missy had come, alone, and tried to convince her it was time to sell the house and move into a "community." Isabel threw her glass of gin at the wall, prompting Missy to make up an excuse about an early meeting and quickly drive back to Washington.

Rubbing "Cherry Candy Red" lipstick over her crackled lips, a delightfully wretched thought entered Isabel's mind. I wish I could see Jenny's face when she finds me in my pretty white wedding dress.

AM

Mornings after

fever dreams

Sunrise steals night's eager air

Reality an opaque tapestry

Memory a lost affair

Dawn's light lifts

the sea-grean veil

and i am left feeling greedy

for gambles won,

roads abandoned

Hungry Noise

Surround me in the water

with electric air
breathe a beat
straight to my veins
Sharp
Edges that fray to string
Toxic sound
so nourishing

The bass sinks
into this hungry noise

Cymbal up-and-down and up-and
Smashing me alive

Shackle lost
Abandon claimed

Sway onto fearless planes
that low tones discover

Gathering

Now that we've sobered up

we grab our keys and drive.

Hit these headlight parades

as if we have somewhere better to go

we stop and fill up where little hitchhikers, scurrying, chase

after the vacancy signs

duct-taped to our license plates

we won't keep

these crumpled receipts

The gathering road becomes a yellow blur of fickle faces,

dotted lines

to nowhere

everywhere

I think I had better slow down. Sometimes my mind races into a whirling hurricane and I'm powerless to stop it. I want to just feel life, I want a break from the judgments worries memories associated with everything I experience. I want to be completely present. At the same time my body wants to move me into the present- wants to devour action, gorge on forward motion like a crazed pac-man- and it's always the thinking that holds me back. My impulse regulator is on overdrive, so that when I feel something in my gut I hold back from doing, but never from thinking on and on until the urge has rotted and my body has long since surrendered.

I have meditated in the past and that has always worked, but I think it is more than that. I don't allow (force?) my mind to slow down enough to get into that quiet space. Even before sleep I plow through a wall of speeding thought straight into vivid uncontrollable fantasy. I feel the dream taking me in, pulling me down this or that corridor, yet all I want is rest. Quiet. A dark place to learn to feel again- to relearn what a little baby does- to feel life, instead of thinking all the way through. Until it has passed you by and all your thoughts seem like a leash upon your neck that led you carefully, around the present. Around the places you wanted to see- so fast all you got was a glimpse out the window. Around the people you love, or wanted to love, where all you can remember are a few stray words, the way she laughed. Not the person just the 'specs'.

I have reached that quiet place before; I know that it is really there, and ever since I have longed to return. I think I need to get off this ceaseless subway and hike through those mountains again until I find it.

-Penny

Recording a fall

There is an emptiness inside me

a hunger for a different kind of sustenance

I'm sick of sweets and processed meat, I want clarity, water and wheat

I'm sifting the flour for specks of power the

truth is a burning building and water pours from the veins of those who came to watch it fall

Sometimes I feel like a sore thumb stuck out on the side of the road but no cars come to pass the mass of sheep bray and shove me the wrong way back onto the plastic grass
politicians roaming past with mouths foaming greedy devils in mardi gras masks
selling fear out of shopping bags like doomsayers
to numb dumb humans with tv fumes useless celebrity ‘news’
but when it starts when the oil rigs fall apart it’s all profit and no heart

I can’t close my eyes or my ears or my fists

scribbling on for every son and daughter they shot down told to submit to the draught when they could have taught thirst –
So
I wrote hope onto the faces of little kids disguised as butterflies sneaked it into the water supply and defaced the crumbling structure with my dissent the design
Now it climbs like iron vines over this corporate castle wall and I can’t stop
till I record it all