little stories by Teresa. maybe a few comments.
Fell splat on my face when the netbook was eaten by evil viral demons and I thought she was gone forever. The full size laptop feels like trying to write with a watermelon. We’re back up though, and Nano or no, I will resume and try to write a novel in thirty days, starting now. 1330 words per day. Start your engines.
Thanks to JKFowler for his recent comment and link, which led me to his very fine writing, motivating me to get up off my face, dust myself off, and try it again.
Having started Nano without a plan whatsoever, I think it behooves me to think about what I’m writing. Who-what-when-where-why.
Here are some thoughts:
Who – Characters: I have a kiddo (Sofia), her parents (Jennifer and Stephen), her great aunt, her cousin (Florecita), her grandmother, and one artist (Desiree).
What – Thematically: Announcements. Endings and beginnings. The ways in which we hear other people’s narratives. Photo albums, family stories, wedding and obits in the newspaper.
Where – Place: Santa Fe for sure, other places as well, where characters might intersect in a transient way.
When – Time: Present.
Why/ POV?: Inclined to give each character some first person with an omniscient lurking narrator. Did that make sense?
Okay. Right now, my characters are straight out of central casting – too much rushing, but it’s a start.
What makes the theme / plot move?
Announcements
Who announces what?
Tia Josefa does not announce anything; just reads the announcements of others. She would, presumably, get news about la familia before everyone else because she is looking for it.
Sofia, in common with Josefa, is observant and wants to know. She would also be attuned to new announcements.
Jennifer and Stephen are both professional observers and burned out empaths. They are uncomfortable applying their professional skills to their personal relationships.
Jennifer is hispanic, from Espanola. She and Stephen met in college (Santa Cruz) and settled in Santa Fe to start a business together. Mediation, counselling and conflict resolution. Jennifer leaves to become a sand box therapist for children. Stephen has a side interest in sculpture, metal work arts.
Desiree is a semi transient artist with a quick eye and some street sense. I need to know more about her, but I know she plays with texture and light, as an artist. Tends to be poor; not always, though.
That’s all for now, guys. I know it’ll be brutal for me to keep up with the numbers I need to generate, but I’m just back to work today (had the flu) and at least I’m thinking it through a little.
I haven’t put any little creatures in yet. That is an oversight.
I’ll be back later. I anticipate doing the bulk of my writing over the weekends. Because I work too much. That’s why.
crying out loud. Don’t like some of these nanowrimo features.
Zso. Where was I?
In the airport
Ms. Desiree Staunton listens to people on their cellphones as they rush by on their way to and from. Knits together their snaggled conversations into word blankets and collages made of paper and wood and glass and hair and sells them to the designers guild to put in model homes in developments all across the Southwest. Round shapes, a letter here and there, a confession, a complaint. The corner of someone’s face, caught without notice. An invasion of privacy into a conversation taking place publically and very close to a runway. A runaway, Desiree calls these.
I’ve been involved in hair since I don’t know when. Horse hair mostly. There’s a way to make human hair more coarse, more horse-like. But I’ve been able to work around that.
Ricky, my good friend, my good old friend, he’s been saving feathers for me, and stones. Some really fine stones. I keep them on a shelf above where I sleep, that helps me see them. Stones, feathers, fabrics, hairs, bones, mud, pigments, silks, push-pulled into something new. Other.
This is what it’s like to be a bottom feeder. First of all, we love ink. Ink is invisibility. Ink is darkness. Ink is what we write our history with. Look out there, out there into the vast whiteness. It has nothing to say until the ink drops into its wide open. No turning back once the ink has been spilled.
You want to tell your history, that’s fine, nobody’s stopping you. You want to tell someone else’s history, that’s different. There’s danger there, smells like sulfur, smells like burning cactus, smells like the brushfire or the war that can rush in and wipe out an entire clan.
Once I was playing cards in the back room of a little trailer house in Four Corners and I heard the wind pick up suddenly, and it was like I could see them even from inside, tumbleweeds rushing across the black night and suddenly igniting, igniting like monks in red robes, self immolating and taking down the fragile open country and everything that lives there with it.
I understand the meditative life of the tumbleweed, I understand the need to move, to feel the wind catch and carry us somewhere new. I knew about that even before I left Navajo country after the fire. I found my home on water, water green and blue and dark, almost black, where I fell in and never went back to dry land again, not for more than two, three days at a time. Long enough to find myself lurching when I came back to dry land, feeling the hitch and pull of gravity and rotation more strongly than I felt them on the water.
My family’s been landlocked for hundreds of years, most of them. My sea ways made me foreign, weird and unrecognizable as a giant squid, coming up from the deep only rarely, with gifts for my sister’s children, and then her grandchildren, until I am the only old salt on the Navajo nation, bringing seaweed ristras and monkey balls and painted tentacles. I stay a couple days, give them the salty sweet taste of my bottom feeder’s life, and then I leave again, leaving behind nothing but a trail of ink, and a history they can fabricate from the secrets hidden in the bright open sky and the black mesa reaching in the four directions around them.
For me, I add two more directions: straight up into the heavens, and straight down, into the cold, dark waters, where the wild shy ones live, where I feel most at home.
She is at a masquerade ball. She’s dressed as a skunk. Her husband as a raccoon. They pretend they are not together. She is hot in her skunk costume, smelling a sweet musky melon smell rising up from within the costume. I smell like an animal, she tells herself. Her little skunk nostrils flare and her tail rises up, as if to give absolute proof to that statement. She goes to the food table, which is decorated in prison gear, with balls and chains and convict striped tablecloth. She brushes her black and white tail against the table and looks at the food. Popeye is standing next to her, looking at the yam pie and the sweet potato custard. He chooses the yam; she is more interested in the Dagwood pile of cold cuts: salami, pastrami, bologna, ham, pimiento loaf, sweet pickles, hot pickles, cole slaw, iceberg lettuce, American cheese. She builds a mighty fortress of a sandwich and looks for a place to eat where she won’t be seen. She feels ravenous, predatory, nocturnal. Scott walks by in his raccoon coat and she sees that he, too, is sweating, and she controls an urge to go and smell him, rub her scent against his. She is a perfume scientist, blending pretty scents with predatory glands, mixing clove, sage, nutmeg, ylang ylang, lavender with musk, dragon’s breath, graveyard flowers, dirt, the smell of rotting underground. She blends it all together, stirs it with a licorice whip, makes an infusion and douses herself in it for this dead evening. She is someone’s dead relative, she knows that, but not whose, she’s not even sure what species she is now. The fumes she and Scott make rise together and settle over the potluck table, greenish vapors wafting, hovering, dispersing into the casseroles, the pasta salads and the sandwich fixings. The costumed guests wander by, pick at the olives and the little sausages wrapped in bacon. As the perfume settles on them, they fill their plates higher, higher, suddenly ravenous and revolting to themselves, until the entire party is rolling on the floor under the table, mashing foods into their mouths, into each other’s mouths, tearing at the flesh of the melon and the chicken with equal lust, equal abandon, and in the background they could barely hear, through their overpowering hunger, the minor chords of any organ in any moldy cemetery in any old movie with a theme that involves dismembered body parts, oozing bits, and smells that make the innocent turn faint and nauseous. There were no innocents at this costume party, on this Halloween, and all there were fed until they were hungry no more.
First I will tell you a true story. Then I will throw a big bag of words at you, because I can.
True story: About a year ago I was working with a kid who did not talk, almost three years old, no language at all. I spent a few months getting past his fear and hysteria, helping to lead his mother to the A word. Autism. One day, teaming with my therapy partner, she was talking with mom about his learning style. While they talked , I had Lou leaning against me, looking at cards as I turned them over and named them. It was rare for him to touch me, or to sit quietly, or to interact in any social way. I showed him another card and said the name: Violin. And the next one: Rainbow. He took them from me and said: Violin. And showed me the card. Then the other: Rainbow. And showed me the card. Then he danced around the room with the two cards, saying Violin (holding it out). Rainbow (holding it out). First words. Violin. Rainbow. Three years old. For the next few weeks, he kept those cards close, repeating the names. And new words came, all of a sudden, a suddenly opening door.
Suddenly words
You might consider your libido as a kind of ornament, hanging on a tree like a ripe tomato, or secret and deep as a trench, ripe and sweet as fresh-squeezed juice. But that’s not how we do it round here. We keep our spirits up, we’re green and crisp as spring salad. We like to showcase our young; reservations are required. At the Odium Theatre every year there is an extravaganza that features filigreed kimonos (most of them in mauve) challenging the deep water acrobats, diving into moats, down gorges, smiling and waving all the way down. The journalists draw pictures of them, smirking like Cheshire cats, jumping down that gorge, making aerial hairpin turns, alive alive alive until there’s a bad moment, could have been just a bruise but instead the truth is a bastard, a dastardly freak who gloats at the bloated corpse that floats downstream until it is washed up in a swamp, a quagmire, a murky, queer and unlikely terrain. The distinguished gentleman stands and with characteristic discernment and an unseemly relish demonstrates his encyclopedic knowledge, his Hail Britannica superiority. After hours he goes home, shoots up, and plays the violin, watches as the sun goes down, where the rainbow smudges the lengthening sky. But never mind all that, indeed, certainly not, it’s not surely, but you jest, and you find this questionable, this questionable judgment that zooms past us while we stand and pontificate. Zip it up, friend, make it work, it’s not me, it’s the esoteric tickle of uncertainty, the chronic temperamental temptations of someone who loves Pandora, the Explora who is no esoteric Cassandra, no hunch maker, inkling spreader, odds wagerer. She is more like coals carried aloft on balloons, leaving their baggage suspended on earth day, the flying Brenda on the wall, bounteous, dubious, glorious, smack down gorgeous, suspended indefinitely by curious safeguards draped in a koolaid smile.
Rainbow Ocean by Thelma 1 at deviantart.com
Bubba likes the pit stop at the Possum Kingdom best. Nice lake there, keep the skeeters down by using industrial strength bug spray, enough to kill the catfish when they eat ‘em. Catfish is good eating. Best fried, but then what isn’t? Think about it: donuts, turkeys, corn dogs, ice cream. There aren’t many things that aren’t best fried. Bubba says the exception is fried pickles, but I like those fine, as long as I got something big and sweet to wash it down with. Only thing about fried food is you gotta have extra napkins or else old jeans, either or.
What changed Possum Kingdom the most, for the best, some folks think, was when the miracle happened. Face of Jesus on a green John Deere tractor seat. Big as life: that seat was muddy from Bubba sitting on it after wrestling with a couple hogs out by Clearwater, and the imprint of his holy hiney was a dead ringer for the risen savior. Bubba’s wife LouNesta spotted it and showed it to me first, I gotta tell you that, but don’t think I’m bragging or nothing, only God can take credit for a miracle. But I took the pictures and uploaded them onto my church’s Face Book page and next thing you know the donations are flooding in, for forty days and forty nights that money was running fast and green as young wine. Bubba’s sister, MayLou, was Dairy Queen that year and handed out over 400 chocolate dipped cones at the state fair, proceeds of which were given to the church, but that was nothing compared to the donations flooding those Paypal gates of heaven. I took another look at the tractor seat after it all hit the fan, but I feel like I should say truthfully I never did actually see Jesus there, just old Bubba’s buttcheeks and a smudge that people told me was the crown of thorns.
I will tell you the story of the scarecrow’s birth. He was born in a small deer farm near where the road passes not far from the second hand tire store. He was born in Bull’s Blood Junction, so small a town that pizza was unknown and meat might be jerky, might be carrion, and might not be had at all. An old town, Bull’s Blood Junction. People said in Bull’s Blood the rain runs red, and every man, woman and child in Bull’s Blood is anemic. This was, of course, because of the scarecrow, his sad life, the cutting, the pain, the heartache, the rotting seeds. That scarecrow, who started out in life just a broomstick and a worn-out petticoat, didn’t scare much of anything until his first Halloween, when Red Duncan brought a pumpkin to the house, and a knife, and a fair amount of whisky.
The first slice in a pumpkin’s head is the worst. It’s like the eyes themselves have been slit open and the first thing they see is the slithering ooze of their own brain’s entrails swimming around behind their eyes. Then with a snap, Red pops out those eye holes and Crow is looking out, scared, into the sight of his own birth. Scarecrows don’t usually have hands, you may have noticed that, but they have the deepest craving for them. Red popped those eyeballs out and wiped Crow’s face with a dampened cloth, wiping away the sweat and the seeds that started running down those new cheeks. Red was a happy man that day, twisting the knife as Crow looked out, looking side to side and down as much as he could, for arms that could reach and hands that could grab. Red’s was enjoying his whisky, and gave Crow a belt about halfway through, as he was cutting a mouth that couldn’t decide whether it was laughing, crying, or snarling. In the background there was the sound of a chainsaw; Grey, Red’s cousin, was cutting wood for the coming winter months. In the kitchen, ma was lighting the woodstove and talking about pies.
Crow listened, watched and waited for someone to give him a tongue, but no one did. With his nose, he smelled the woodsmoke and the piney air. Blue, Red’s brother, carried Crow’s head out to the field where the last of the corn lay fallow, and put him on top of the old broom stick in the petticoat that’s been there all summer, surrounded by crows laughing, stealing ears, rabbits snickering, stealing spinach, mice stealing grain, foxes stealing chickens.
Crow was born mad, put on this earth to scare nobody but man. That first fall and all through the winter, Crow watched. He watched the harvest moon, he watched the first frost, he sat up through the longest night, and he counted the stars night after night. A scarecrow with a broken heart needs arms, he said, needs legs, and needs a way to get on that sled on a cold winter night and leave. At the end of his first winter, he learned how to curse, and this put Bull’s Blood into a time of sorrow and need, until the day they gave him arms, legs, a hat, a pair of trousers, and a shirt. He waved goodbye as he rode away in a small wooden sleigh pulled by a sawhorse, over the horizon, to that next harvest moon.
We stayed up all night because of the fire and the hot ashes and the fear. As the sun was rising, I said to Carl, ”Don’t worry now, now that we’ve got some daylight, I’m sure we’ll find them.” Carl is my neighbor, a decent fellow overall, although we don’t agree about a thing. He leaned back in his chair and yawned.
“Probably right,” he said, and gathered up his gear, put his coffee cup in the sink, and left without much more to be said. The ashes that cover a dry, brushy area during a fire hang thick in the air, straining the lungs and sitting heavy on the skin. For the next four days, we all roamed around, grey and wheezing, like asthmatic zombies. Then the rains came.
Puffing up mini clouds of dust, when those first droplets fell, some of us thought we might be dreaming. I did, anyway. If felt cool, wet and dry, heaven washing away the tarnished past.
I had an inkling, and I saw it in their eyes, too, that we might actually have some change in direction, that the powers that be might possibly have it in them to look kindly on us just for a moment, to give us a break.
The rain, at least at the beginning, gave me hope. It cascaded down the dry hillsides and filled the arroyos with the rushing cries of a herd of horses suddenly released from their pen in the clouds. The water frothed under the bridge, began to spread out beyond the edges of the wash, losing energy like a tired old lady at the end of her daily walk. The rain, too, began to tire, slowing in its descent, ambiguous about falling from the sky. Mischievous drops bounced on the driveway, splatting roundness turned flat. The imprint of envy left some drops small and unable to make an impression, impressionable driveways were begging for more, they truly envied the rain, fall, dance, strike, spill, evaporate, reincarnate full again, a cycle a driveway could only dream of from its flattened, squished and gray existence in front of the white two story bungalow.
As the rain fell, a child sat in the bay window and watched as it ran from the driveway into the street, gutters filling and running fast into some unkown adventure. She sat there for what seemed like forever, and must have fallen asleep. When she woke, she found she was no larger than a mouse, and that she was riding a wide green leaf in a rushing stream to who knows where. She reached into her pocket and drew out a small, unfamiliar book. “How to Get Along in Any Language at All, Wherever You May Be,” said the title page, and she opened it to see how she might begin.
“Chapter One,” she said aloud, and looked around her as she noticed that the rain had finally stopped and her leaf had come to dock in a quiet green yard.
This is an example of an exquisite corpse. It’s a collective freewrite project. Everyone in the group has paper. Write for a predetermined number of minutes (5 minutes per person in this example). At the end of that time, everyone hands the paper to the person on their left. Looking only at the last line, everyone continues to write, and then passes it on again after five minutes. Continue until the papers return to their original owners. Again, looking only at the last line handed to them, the original writer finishes the piece. Thus, each person has a beginning and an end, with all the middle pieces having been handed around. This one took 30 minutes to create.
Collectively written by Teresa, Rosemary, Jan and Mike (did I get that right, guys?)
There in the firelight sits a man, a dog, a chunk of meat and a knife. On the wall is a florid oil painting of a peacock walking across a garden, while a pale lady in a silk gown with a dangerously low bodice, wearing piles of yellow curls, sits on an ornate bench, holding her pekingese in her lap.
The man is drinking something: ale, if he’s been working with his men out on the moors; red wine, if he has guests of the more refined variety. But no, he’s got a chunk of meat and a knife. Let’s give him some crusted bread and devonshire cheese while we are at it. His complexion just got a bit higher, and one notices that the pale lady in the portrait appears to be looking at something over a low hedge: the gardener, is it? He’s a fine rustic lad, with a simple name, like Thomas or young Will. She’s looking at him over the hedge, while the pekingese is staring off the canvas at the meat lit up by the firelight.
The man and his ancestors have been in this home with its drafts, its wet stone walls, its brocades and warming pans, for over 400 years. This man, like others of his line, craved travel in his youth. He was the first of his people to travel across the ocean to the wild open west, the muddy roads, the rutted wagon trails. He was the first to break a palomino on the open range, the first to trade in furs and leathers and strange stories sent back across the wide seas. His letters to his father, who was staying in Constantinople with his second wife, were full of lies, and had more of truth hidden in them than he wanted his father to know. His mother, she of the pale hair and the lusting eye, was gone by then. She’d died of a fever one year when the garden was neglected, and the fruit trees had a late cold snap in May. The gardener was found leaning against a wall, dead of a bee sting, according to the parish doctor.
The man’s name is William, after all the Williams in their long line, and his eyes are not a pale hesitant blue like his mother, or a distracted grey, like his father. His eyes are green, the green of seas with warm currents, the green of coastal treasures, the green his descendants would see in the land beneath them 400 years later as they flew over New Zealand, or Brazil, or the western coast of Canada. Green turns to blue and then wanders out into the ocean, where sailors have travelled months at a time to reach the islands of tropical dreaming. The man’s name is William, he of a long line of Williams from chilly lands who have travelled the world in their younger days for hundreds of years. They have travelled to green islands and warm countries: palm trees, coconuts, lava flows, rice fields, machetes, oxen. All things foreign in a world spinning and gradually growing smaller, slower and coming to a resting place.
The pale woman’s descendants travel the world now on thin, light titanium bikes, wearing clothes that wick away moisture, and meals in tubes. They, too, love ale, all her green-eyed daughters, grand-daughters and great great grand-daughters, their friends and lovers. All of them love adventure, and slobbery dogs and frisbees, and all of them love the feeling of otherness that carries them in their strong female bodies through places where the fair-skinned woman with yellow curls and her pekingese were never able to go. And all of the woman’s sons and grand sons and great grand sons keep going back to their place by the fire, century after century, to their ancestral hall, and wait for the women to come home.
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