FICTION: Invisible Children

Another quiet day at the office, another little piece of fiction. This is in response to Pictures, Poetry & Prose's Thursday challenge: There She Sat. The picture really spoke to me and reminded me of some of my own teenaged angst, so this one's a little personal.

As always, feedback/criticism/comments are always welcome. :)

Invisible Children

Cassie likes the playground because it is quiet.

Not all the time, obviously. During the day, it's crammed full of snot-nosed brats shoving each other off swings while their airbrushed mommies gossip about American Idol and so-and-so's latest tummy tuck. Disgusting.

But once the sun starts setting, it's different. Better. Silent. Sure, there are still people around: some ugly ten-year-old looming on the monkey bars like a ginger god, a suburban mom in a velour jogging suit texting furiously on a bench (totally oblivious to the fact that her daughter's eating sand), two older kids furtively exchanging money and weed by the fence. They're all off in their own little worlds, too self-involved to notice anything but their own lives.

This suits Cassie just fine. She doesn't want to be noticed. She wants to be invisible. She's gotten really good at it; she knows just how to duck her face behind her long, dark hair and disappear inside bland, oversized sweatshirts. The hunch of her shoulders is expert: don't bother me, don't look at me, don't acknowledge my own existence. She's just a shadow slumped on the end of the slide, a silhouette as muddied and murky as the pond on the other side of the fence.

Her parents are fighting again. They're always fighting. They act like they don't (oh, honey, you know I love your dad, nothing's going to happen, we're just fine), but Cassie knows better. She can feel the tension when she walks in the front door, can taste the alcohol in her mom's good night kisses. They try to hide it from her, restrict their arguments to behind-closed-doors, but the venomous strains of their voices waft into Cassie's room via the air conditioning vent, leaving her with hazy snippets of accusations.

… that office more than you love …

… raised a manipulative little bitch just like her mother …

… don't you touch me, I'll call the …

Don't get her wrong – she's not complaining. So her parents hate each other. No big deal. Nothing to get all worked up about (even though it hurts, oh, it really, truly hurts). Cassie knows kids with worse problems. One of her friends had an uncle who touched her when she was four. Another friend won't get changed in the gym locker room because of the bruises her step-dad leaves behind. And another friend—

Except they're not her friends. Not anymore. Not since they all started high school and decided that Cassie had the easiest life, the most reason to be happy. Her parents have money. They're still married (although Cassie's beginning to wonder how long that'll last). She's fashionably skinny and gets solos in the school choir recitals. She's on the honor roll.

Clearly, Cassie sucks.

So they turned on her. Her friends stopped calling. They sent texts behind her back about how her solos are always just a little flat, how she had "book smarts" but was too naïve. They even started a vicious rumor that Cassie was a lesbian, prompting all the kids at the bus stop to throw stones at her one day after school.

That was when Cassie decided to disappear.

That's all she wants, really. She just wants to vanish into thin air, where no one can make fun of her for things she knows aren't true (but what if they are?), where her parents can't touch her (even though they never do). She keeps her head down in class and turns in average work so that no one can say she's too smart anymore. She swathes her pretty body in baggy, neutral colors so no one will mistake her for being attractive. She smiles brightly at her parents and tries to give them all the right answers, hoping her false cheer will keep them from arguing about her. She asks for nothing. She makes no demands. She just wants to be invisible.

But even that's a lie. Cassie doesn't want to disappear. Cassie wants to scream. She wants to cry and rage and pound her fists against every wall she can find. She wants to howl her sorrow at the world, wants everyone to know that she's sad, she's miserable, she's falling apart at the seams.

And more than anything else, she wants someone to hear her. Someone who will put a hand on her shoulder and tell her it's okay, she's allowed to be upset, she has permission to be hurt. She wants someone to tell her that she's human, not a shadow or a scapegoat, and she has every right to feel like crap because everybody does.

But no one's there. The playground's almost empty now. The drug dealers have finished their trade; the cell phone addict has gone home to wash the sand out of her kid's mouth. Now it's just Cassie on the slide and that freckle-faced goober on the monkey bars.

Cassie stares at the kid for a moment. It's almost eight now. Where are his parents? Shouldn't someone have run up looking for their son, their precious baby, their beloved treasure? Doesn't anybody care about him? Doesn't anybody care at all?

Suddenly, the kid turns his head and looks back at her. They lock eyes for a moment, loner to loner, and Cassie reads the yearning in his eyes with ease. She knows that look well. She sees it every day in her mirror, but seeing it on someone else's face …

Cassie swallows and summons up her courage. "Hey," she calls to the little boy.

The boy frowns at her, already distrustful at such a tender age. "Yeah?"

"You want to play on the jungle gym?"

He thinks about it for a second and then breaks out into a grin. "Okay."

So they play for a while, just two kids on a jungle gym, laughing as the sun goes down behind them.

Nobody notices.

FICTION: Direction

It's fairly quiet at the office right now, so I took a little time and wrote. In response to Pictures, Poetry & Prose's challenge, The Square, here's this:

Direction

I stood in the square alone, but you already know this. After all, you were the one who left me there, your fingers slipping through my own, your mouth brushing softly against my ear. You left me with words, but the rain was too heavy and swept them away. I never heard you. I just felt the hot breath of your intentions. When I turned my head to ask you what, you were already gone.

I didn't understand then. You were right there. I could still smell you, aftershave and tobacco smoke, still curled around my being. You were there, and then you were gone. Like a ghost, a spirit, but you were real. I could have sworn that you were real.

But then my eyes opened, and I think it must have been for the first time, because I saw things in such clarity that it made you transparent in retrospect. Bright electric bulbs. Black puddles of hot spring water. And the people, oh, the people, surrounding me in a press of late-night bargaining, their voices rising and reverberating against the stone walls with a strength you never had. They were real that night, so real it actually hurt, because it made me realize that you were never there at all.

I didn't look for you. I knew there was no point. You were a fantasy, a figment of my wildness. You were something I fell in love with when the world was too big for me to comprehend. Even if I'd found you in the crowd that night, I don't think I would have followed. You wouldn't have wanted that, anyway.

So I opened my eyes. I breathed in, breathed out. I asked a man wearing an old trench coat where I was.

He smiled at me and it was shiny like gold. "Don't you know, sweetheart?"

And I did.

FICTION: I Summon You

Well, this may not be any shorter/lighter than my earlier post about Columbine, but it's something. Written in response to Marc's Daily Writing Practice prompt from Thursday, April 16, 2009: Take the first two lines from a song, and use them as the first lines in your writing. I chose "I Summon You" by Spoon, because it was the first song that popped into my head. I hope you enjoy it.

Comments/criticism/feedback -- it's always welcome. :)

I Summon You

Spoon - I Summon You

Remember the weight of the world? It's a sound that we used to buy on cassette and 45, you and me driving aimlessly down highways at night, listening to songs written before we were born. My hand on the gearshift, your feet hanging out the open window. We smoked pilfered cigarettes and sang about fortunate sons, gold dust women, and answers blowing in some distant, unknown wind. We sang and smoked until our throats were raw, but we didn't care. We never cared.

We didn't care because we didn't know. How could we? We were just kids. We listened to Bob Dylan because no one else did. We screamed along with Johnny Rotten about anarchy, but we didn't get the concept. When airy pop music by Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys took over the radio, we turned to Britpop and shouted with Jarvis Cocker about how we were common people, never realizing how much money our parents actually made.

After all, it was just music. We liked it because it was pretty. We liked the delicacy of Neil Young's voice, the raging guitars of the Rolling Stones. We loved that great opening rift to The Doors' "Touch Me," you drumming your fists on the dashboard of my shitty old Celica as the song built to a crescendo. The first time you played me Joni Mitchell, I thought she wrote that song about you – you, so beautiful, so deeply ingrained into my heart that I thought you would always be as constant as a northern star. You would always be there, right beside me, and the world would always be just a set of lyrics we didn't need to understand.

And then we grew up.

Remember the weight of the world? It's more than just a sound now, and we can't drive away from it anymore. It's everywhere, blaring from television screens and radios, printed in bold ink on the front pages of newspapers. Terrorists reducing skyscrapers to rubble. Teenagers shooting up schools. Wars we can't win, enemies we can't fight, natural disasters sinking cities, economies falling to pieces, and I feel it all. I feel it all, and God, how I wish I didn't.

I still drive, you know. On those long, restless nights when the worries get to be too much (how will we pay the bills, how can we make ends meet, how can the world be so different than what we thought it was), I leave my wife alone in bed, get in my newer (but still shitty) car, and drive. I take the roads we used to take together, those long, winding highways, and I smoke the cigarettes we used to smoke together.

And I listen to our songs.

I get them now. Experience will do that for a person, I suppose. I think of my brother in rehab, and I know about the needle and the damage done. I know why Dylan used to rasp about war pigs, and I ache for the unfortunate sons who come back from foreign countries without arms or legs or faces. I hear the words and they rattle in my bones, tense and aching, and I wish I was just a kid again. I wish it was just music, like it used to be. I wish …

But oh, where are you tonight? Where is my northern star, my constant in the darkness? Why aren't you here with me, your bare feet catching breezes from the open window, your fingers curled around your cigarettes? Where is your laughter? Where is your voice? Don't you see that I need you? That it was you who made me feel so light? Can't you understand that it was you who kept the world from touching us?

I don't know. I don't know much of anything these days. I thought it was supposed to be different. I thought I'd have the answers by now. But the answers I have only make me hurt, and if this is what growing up is like, I'd rather just be with you again.

So come home. Come back to me. Make me feel young again. Make me who I used to be, before I understood too much, before the world crept in, before the music started killing me. There's still a place for you here, nestled into the passenger seat, stitched into my heart. I need you. I beg you. I've got the weight of the world now, and I summon you here with my love.

But you never come, and the music never stops.

FICTION: Hunger

In case I am breaching internet writing prompt etiquette (and I hope I am not), I am going to disclaim this here and now: I only repost my own responses to prompts in my blog so that they can be collected in one central location. I won't hotlink images, or post responses that are not my own. I just like posting my stories on my blog because I like the idea that all of my writing can be found in one place, should anyone want to read my work.

If anyone managing these wonderful, inspirational prompt sites would rather I not repost my responses here, please let me know and I'll happily comply. :)

So, in response to Pictures, Poetry & Prose's challenge: She dreams of something more ...

Hunger

The girls enter the diner giggling, young and pretty in too-short skirts that reveal too-perfect thighs. They sit down at the booth and order a mountain of food: pancakes, hash brown, bacon, biscuits with sausage gravy. When it arrives, steaming hot and glistening with grease, the girls dig in with gusto. Their bony fingers pick at sausage links, glossy lips sucking soda pop through straws as thin as their arms.

She watches them from behind the counter. She remembers fifteen. Fifteen, when she was so hungry for life she could eat an entire turkey and not gain a pound. Ambition and innocence burns everything it touches, even the most saturated of fats.

She wants to tell these girls, I was like you once, but she knows they wouldn't believe her. They would never believe she was once so stunning, so thin, so desirable that she walked runways for Dior, wore haute couture gowns made of nothing but swan feathers and silk, was made up like a geisha and photographed for Vogue. They'd laugh if she told them she had rock star lovers at sixteen or a closet full of $500 shoes before she turned twenty. They would take one look at her sagging breasts, her support hose, her swollen ankles, and they would howl like banshees until their full stomachs ached.

And maybe she doesn't want to tell them. Maybe it's best that way. Let them believe they'll always be a size zero and turn heads every time they cross the street. Let them think they'll never be anything less than radiant. She doesn't want to go over to them and tell them, I used to be a princess, and look at me now. She doesn't want to break their hearts. Time will do that eventually. It always does.

Instead, she just watches them eat their breakfasts, these pretty teenaged girls, until their plates are as clean as their toothpaste-ad smiles. She watches, and she dreams of fifteen, when she was something more.

FICTION: Potluck Girl

In response to Daily Writing Practice's prompt-of-the-day: potluck. Just a little drabble, but I like it, and I hope you do, too. 

Comments/feedback/criticism are always welcome. :)

Potluck Girl

She's a potluck girl, a stew of odds-and-ends deposited by the men she loved but never loved her in return. She watches Monday Night Football and still roots for the Steelers, just for Mike, who she hasn't seen in six years. Her iPod is a mishmash of genres: Richard's bluegrass, Danny's indie bands, Alex's gangster rap. She still wears kitten heels for Bobby, who always hated that she was taller than him and eventually left her for her more petite best friend.

"Get over them," her friends tell her. "Find yourself. You need to be you."

They make it sound so easy, but it's not, because they're all still inside her, churning and bubbling, their memories hot to the touch. It's too late to get rid of them; they've all melted together and are stuck to her bones.

And maybe her friends are wrong. Maybe these men make her who she is. She's Tommy's chambray work shirts, Beau's chai tea, Andrew's skinny jeans. What if all these men have made her who she is? What if that's the way it's supposed to be?

But deep down in the black, hot kettle of her heart, she knows better. She knows. Nobody should ever be just an amalgam of other people's leftovers, because when you take those chunks away, all that's left is a thin, weak broth that tastes of nothing, nothing at all -- and that thought terrifies her to the core.

So she keeps them all inside her: Jack's cheesy science fiction novels, Eric's appetite for Korean cuisine, Bart's dark fetish for handcuffs and stilettos. She lets the pot keep boiling because she can't ever forget them, even if they've already forgotten her -- and she's wise enough to know they have.

After all, who could possibly remember someone who can't even remember her own self?