Category Archives: Playground

23 Oct

The Magic Lamppost

Remember that time when we decided to meet by the lamppost. And you said which one? And I said, the magic one. And you said okay and walked away to class, and later we met by the lamppost and kissed?

You knew which lamppost was the magic one even though none of them were magic. And I knew how to kiss you even though I’d never kissed a girl before.

And later, when we graduated, and I took you down to the lake and you said yes before I proposed, I couldn’t speak because I was so happy. Do you remember that? I never got a chance to ask the question.

We got married, we got jobs, we had our first baby, we moved, we had a second baby. We never had a clue what we were doing. But somehow we always found our way.

I loved every minute of it.

Nowadays, I wake before dawn. The sky is clear with winter’s approach, and the stars are as bright as they ever were. My bones ache and the bed is cold, so I walk in the dark to the kitchen and put the kettle on the old gas range. I watch the blue light flare and hold my hands to its warmth. And in the glow of that first flame, I think about magic lampposts and your silvery touch.

I miss you, my love.

But I trust you’ll know where to meet.

20 May

Hilter Rd; or, Anyhwere Else

Hilter Rd.

Just looking at the name of the road, you expect some evil intention. And when you get there, you see strange beasts scurry behind the house. Someone lowers the shades. You think you see devil horns behind a tuft of grass. And those eyes peeking at you from the second story window remind you of the monster you used to imagine hiding under your bed. Is this house Pandora’s box? Holding all manner of evil inside? And are you the hapless Pandora, who will unleash horrors upon the masses?

You bite your lip, take tentative steps forward, and try to talk yourself out of your paranoia. But then you hear something as quiet as the rumbling of a hungry belly, as soft spoken as poverty. It’s a shushing that, on any other day, might remind you of wind rustling through trees in spring or the collective settling-in of an audience before a symphony. But today, it evokes authoritarian teachers and knees scraping on gravel. It’s gone now, but you heard it coming from within the house. You’re sure of it.

You cannot enter. You simply cannot. So you turn to go; you gaze out at that horizon of possibility and tell yourself that you can be anywhere else. And just as you’re pondering why any road would have such a horrid name, you realize your mistake. The door creaks open behind you. “This is not that road,” you say. And your friends shout surprise and jump from their hiding places. They’re carrying cake and paper plates and balloons and noisemakers. And now, funny enough, you don’t want to be anywhere else but here.

25 Mar

Raincloud

Above the farmhouse down on Highway C, a raincloud hovers perpetually. Old Mrs. Montgomery, who has lived there for as long as anyone can remember, falls asleep every night to the pitter patter of the rain. When she ventures into town for groceries or a haircut, she is met with a respectful silence from the villagers.

Mrs. Montgomery knows they talk about her. She sees them point and whisper. But, of course, they’re all perfectly cordial. They bag her groceries with care and tip their hats and say good morning, Mrs. Montgomery. They know, as does she, that the very livelihood of the village depends on that perpetual raincloud above the Montgomery house. The water from her roof gathers into a river that runs into town. Along the way, it irrigates the crops, keeps the livestock healthy, and powers the mills.

Here’s what the villagers don’t know: Mrs. Montgomery used to live elsewhere. Her husband was a fisherman, and he came home each night, smelling of sea salt and fish guts. He snored while he slept; it sounded like waves crashing on the beach. He was a hard worker; he made good money.

But then the storm hit. The high winds whipped the sea into a frenzy. It rained without end. When the empty boat washed up on shore, Mrs. Montgomery vowed never to gaze upon the sea again. She didn’t want to face the killer of her dreams. So she moved inland.

The storm followed her. It lost some strength as it crested the mountaintops. It shrank when it crossed the desert. But eventually, it settled on the prairie with Mrs. Montgomery and refused to leave. When something sticks around for that long, you have to come to peace with it. Even if it scares you.

Every once in a while, as Mrs. Montgomery is drifting off to sleep, she imagines her husband snoring. She dreams that he lives with her still, here in this prairie house. She dreams that he wakes early and fishes the river of rain. He sells his fish in town, greeting the villagers with a smile. When she wakes to an empty bed, in the disorientation of early morning, the dream seems true. She storms out of bed, mad at him for leaving without waking her.

Down the stairs she runs, and when she steps out the front door, she shouts, “Get back here!” Only the waves of prairie grass respond, shushing her with their plaintive whispers. In the distance, smoke from a few chimneys curls skyward from the village. She looks up at her raincloud and clutches the collar of her blouse. “I’m sorry,” she says out loud. “Forgive me.” She goes back inside.

18 Jan

Strays

Alvaro stood near the pedestrian bridge on the Avenida 10 de Agosto. Barely anyone noticed him. Cars whizzed by on the big, busy road. Drops of milky water fell from the bridge beams. Exactly three cats had crossed the bridge, and Alvaro was waiting for the fourth. Four cats never cross the bridge in one day, the older boys had told him.

Grabbing a stick from the sidewalk, Alvaro tapped out a reggaeton beat on the hollow metal pillar; no one paid him any attention. He’d been counting the cats for days now. In this neighborhood, he’d seen at least 15. Junior had told him not to believe the big boys; they were just messing with him because he was motherless. Kids can be cruel like that.

Let them laugh, Alvaro thought. Murderers. No one was going to talk him out of counting cats. One of these days, he’d see the fourth one. Perhaps he’d have to stay here all day, waiting by the dirty pillars of the bridge, inhaling the clouds of black smoke that spewed from the red and white buses that labored up the road; perhaps he’d have to keep begging food from strangers, to sleep in the shadows of the bridge and befriend its spray-painted pillars while he waited for whichever came first — the fourth cat, or his father, who left and said he was going to the sky to find Mami and bring her back from the place where she lived now, higher than the top of Cotopaxi.

Quechua graffiti on the bridge beams — mostly misspelled and mixed with Spanish — proclaimed the injustice of the city and its crooked politicians. Rats, it called them: ratas, ukucha. She appeared from behind him, the fourth cat. Taking a tentative step onto the stairs, she peered back at Alvaro and meowed at him three times. Under the bridge, Alvaro stood speechless and breathless at what he thought he’d heard: “mijo,” she’d said — my son. Venturing forth, Alvaro extended a tender hand toward the cat, noticing the patch of white on her chest that looked like the snow-capped top of Cotopaxi. Whether or not she’d cross the bridge to the other side mattered no longer; he only wanted to touch her. But the moment was over too soon when some passer-by with a job to go to climbed the stairs and scared the little cat off the steps.

Years have passed since then, and though he has sometimes seen that same cat lurking in the shadows, following him around the city, he has never touched her, never heard her speak his name. Zig-zagging across the busy streets, digging through the trash, and crying for remembered milk, Alvaro has become a cat himself.

The above was another exercise from my MFA residency. The objective: write a 26 sentence story. It has to be in alphabetical or reverse alphabetical order. One sentence has to be one word long; one sentence has to be 100 words long. You can substitute some other letter for x or z but not both.

22 Dec

A Who’s Perspective

What can I say? We are heavy sleepers. The tinkle of a glass ornament as it drops off the tree, the crackle of a tray of ice cubes, the scraping of soot in the chimbley — these things don’t wake us from our slumber. Our dreams are far too captivating to succumb to such distractions.

I remember mine that night. It began with the sound of footsteps trudging through the snow, a loud staccato crunch. It was so loud, I covered my ears. But then I realized I had no ears. I was, in fact, the footsteps — or rather, the boots marching through the snow.

And then it stopped. All went silent and white. The smell of snow was overpowering. I felt light and airy, like I was inhaling a long, intoxicating breath of the freshest air. Everything was so white. And it was so quiet, I didn’t realize right away that I’d been falling through the air beside enormous structures of crystalline ice. I was a snowflake.

I fell toward a horse pulling a cart. And naturally, I became the horse, huffing in the winter air, feeling the strength of my body as I trotted along. I became the cart, creaking under a load of timber. I became the wheels of the cart, meeting the road with my never ending surfaces. I rolled over the earth, became the stones, the gravel, the dirt. I rumbled with the vibrations of each speck of dust, each grain of sand and grit. And then I fell through a funnel of an hourglass and landed amongst my family and neighbors in the town square.

We were all specks of dirt at first, but our faces materialized over a span of long minutes and hours. And then we told our stories.

The communal dream happens every night. But it seldom has the same clarity it had that night. Everyone arrived having journeyed from earth to sky and back again. Emily Sue had been a flash of lightning, a lily pad, a crocodile and a rainbow. Lulu had been an oaktree, an acorn, and a crow. Uncle Stu had been the fog, the mist of waves crashing on rocks, a gull, and a green hermit.

We all had achieved the Who ideal. We had lost ourselves amongst the grains of creation.

When we woke up the next morning, just a few nails and wires remained on the walls of our homes. There was so much space, so much emptiness. It was miraculous. Having dreamt about everything, to wake up to nothing thrilled us.

We leapt from our beds and convened at the town square. There was nothing left to do but to grab the hands of our children and siblings and parents and sing. “Fah who forays! Dah who dorays! . . . “