It Only Takes 100 Words

I used to run a prompt-based community called 100 Word Stories on LiveJournal. Every other week I’d leave a prompt — usually a word or a short phrase — and open things up for members. The only caveat was that the finished piece had to be exactly 100 words in length. It could be original fiction, fanfiction, or even poetry, as long as it told a story in 100 words.

Often, I think about that community. There’s a definite art form to telling tales in limited word count. Maybe I’ll open it up again, or start a new one here on WordPress. Would anybody be interested in participating if I do? Participation would never be mandatory, and stories can be left (and commented on) in comments.

What do you think?

A Ghost Story

I finally shook off the shackles of indecision (begone, writer’s block, and stay gone) and wrote my (short) ghost story for my own writing challenge. The story clocks in at just under 500 words and lives here – I hope you enjoy it.

4am

In the hospital the night after surgery, stuck with tubes and needles pumping Dilaudid into my veins, drifting in and out of consciousness. 4am is my time to be awake, not a time of day to love or to hate, it’s just there, heavy and relentless. At 4am my mind likes to trick me into remembering everything I’ve done wrong and every injustice, real or perceived, large or small, because darkness lends itself to introspection. That night I fought against the narcotics, wanting to be rid of their vulgar unwelcome dizzying side effects. Little else to do, I turned on the television, the one tucked up into the angle of the ceiling. Flip: one channel. Flip: another. Flip: a third, a fourth, and so on, settling on Cartoon Network and Adult Swim. Watching television is a form of sleeping, I read once, I believe it was in that bible of wisdom Messages from Michael, and the statement resonated with me whether or not the book was channeled. That night television wasn’t a form of sleeping, not with Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex on and as I watched, realizing it had to be the final episode and the rest of it would forever more be ruined for me — if I remembered what happened — I told myself that if I could just pinpoint the dub voice actors and remember their names, recognize their voices, convince myself who they were, I would make it past this post-surgery night into the next day. There, Crispin Freeman and there, Mary Elizabeth McGlynn and so on. I had to struggle to put names to the voices but was proud of myself when I could because I’d just come through many hours of surgery and knew at least as far as useless trivia was concerned my brain would be all right after all. Night nurse Patrick stopped by and took a seat in the visitor’s chair and watched Ghost with me for a while before he turned to me and said in all my years as a night nurse I’ve never stopped in on a grown woman watching Cartoon Network at 4 in the morning and I thought two things. The first was welcome to my hell and the second was what a way to be a trailblazer for feminism: one anime at a time.

Flash Fiction: Go Big or Go Home

“I suspicion” — that phrase always did drive me a little bit crazy, but since it was Grandma Ellen I could afford to cut her some slack, so I suspicion it was — “there’s two types of people on God’s green earth.” She looked at me expectantly and because I’d always been dutiful in my own way, I obliged her.

“What types are those, Grandma?”

She grinned, wide and gap-toothed, and her eyes narrowed as she surveyed the front lawn. Two fingers went up, reinforcing her suspicion. “Those who go through life afraid of fucking up” (again, that grin, like the f word was so evil it merited a special smile) “and never do a thing ’cause of it, and those who fuck up royally and learn some of life’s richest lessons as a result.” She turned keen eyes on me, looked me up and down like I was on display in the window of Harris’s Department Store downtown. “I know which kind you are, child.”

I hadn’t been a bona fide child in many years. Since before I ran away, since way before I became a mama myself. Since before I found the courage to come back home. I did it for her. For Grandma, so she could meet her great-granddaughter.

She didn’t miss a beat or a chance for judgment, but I loved her no less for her honesty. “You’ve done more than your share of fucking up, Linda Sue. I guess you’ve done it enough for five or six normal girls. But you never were content to be like everyone else.” For a moment I was worried she’d bring up the business with my stepdad and the knife, but she just winked and spoke in code. Sarah was there, playing with a kitten in the grass, and even Grandma seemed to know there were some stories my baby was still too young to hear. “You always had brass ones,” she practically cackled, “and I always did admire you for it. Don’t you dare ever change. Keep on fucking up, so long as you keep on learning from it.”

From her spot on the grass, little Sarah smiled. “Brass ones, brass ones,” she sang. All I could do was laugh.

“Go big or go home, right?” It’d always been my guiding mantra. “Love you, Grandma.”

Grandma Ellen still smiled, but I caught the glint of tears in her eyes. It was all right. They were just her way of saying I love you too.

Flash Fiction

A Leap of Faith

(For B.)

My criminal mind sloughed through the stow, the stone, no, the snow, and that was a critical mind, critical mind. Remember, I asked myself, remember the days when the words came out correctly the first time around, when what I saw in my mind’s eye and what I heard in my heart correlated to what fell off the tips of my fingers, not these butterflies that panic to escape, backwards and criss-crossed, tied up in mash. The day I meant to type “the legal parameters of the case have yet to be determined but the evidence is solid and points clearly in one direction” and typed “flying backwards, we die slowly in one emanation” instead and didn’t even know it was the beginning of the end of the transformation, the mutation, the slow suicide of healthy cells into rude abhorrent bullies pushing everything else aside. Oh hi, you have brain cancer (can we) it’s inoperable (oh my) three to six months (I’d better get my) affairs in order.

That first night, I picnicked. I didn’t panic, I picnicked, it was my favorite thing about this intruder inside my skull. We went on picnics filled with treats and glory. I didn’t know I could but after that first night, so exhausted I thought it was nothing more than hallucination, I grew to love the freedom and intimacy of these trips, these backsplashes, these journeys into never-was and always-was, the way Jack (I had to name the tumor so I could own it) led me to the most fantastic places in my memory banks. A trip to the penny candy store at age five to buy wax lips and Nik-L-Nips, perennial favorites, to play the jukebox, to watch the evening go by snug in the arms of my momma. One time I took a picnic on the perimeter of a high school prom, complete with the goofiest purple chiffon anyone had ever seen and a matching nosegay and a boy named Peter Cliff who didn’t even try to fumble past the snaps and clasps and eye-hooks that worked their way up my back. I sat back, ate my pain-au-chocolat and drank my pinot noir, me and Jack, and laughed at how awkward it was and wondered what Peter Cliff was doing these days. Probably a dot-com millionaire, we decided, but Jack had seduced me into staying with him and enveloped me in darkness. Take me on another trip, I implored him and he obliged, devouring another part of my cerebellum to make it possible.

I love you, I told him.

And I love you too, he replied, folding blackness around me.

What can we do to help, friends said when what they really meant was how far can we stay away? You are a disease, you’re contagion, you’re a reminder that we are so mortal and as such not the perfect beings we think we are and I said nothing, nothing, but answer when I call, heed the signs, care for yourselves. I had a secret lover who gave me all I needed. Sometimes he was tall and slender and dark-haired and other times he laughed like a drunkard and still other times he bellowed at the top of his lungs, draped in leather and spikes.

Was there ever a time, I asked him, where life was so simple?

Yes, he said, I’ll take you there, I’ll take you to the time when you were seventeen and so full of amusement, when you and your girlfriends sat in the coffee shop and pretended to like the stuff but secretly doctored it with gallons of sugar and cream, wearing blue jeans and denim jackets and laughed about how when you were little, you fought over the Beatles like they were prizes for each of you to claim. I’m marrying Paul, you said, and they were so jealous you’d gotten to him first.

Right, right, I forgot about that, I told him, laughing from the bridge up above, legs dangling over the side, a glass of absinthe in my hand. I wish you could take me there forever.

I can. Jack, the ever-attentive, the clad-in-black bad boy of my dreams, the closer-to-John-than-to-Paul one I’d ended up with, told me that all it would take to be there forever was a simple leap of faith.

What are we waiting for, I asked, and when he stood and took my hand I rose with him and in that moment, in the moment we took the leap together, I had never felt so free.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes: Originally posted to LiveJournal, based on the prompts “blue jeans” and “the Beatles.” B. passed away about a year ago.