10 Minute Prompt: An impactful story from your childhood...

As a child growing up in suburban Georgia my only window to urban life and values was Sesame Street. Then, in third grade, I read a book about a little boy who lived in an inner city housing project, or maybe it was a tenement in Harlem, and who found a little black and white cat in a vacant lot. This was the first sad story about a child I'd read. But also, the story as I am barely able to remember, didn't end so well for the little black and white cat. And the fate of the little boy, who had enjoyed so much emotional attachment with the cat, is lost to my selective memory.

I have often thought of that book and wondered what the name of it might be, and if anyone else read it and what they thought of it, and of course what happened to the little boy. I have heard similar stories through the years of people whose attachments to animals rivaled, surpassed, or supplanted their attachments to people. And in turn I reflect on my cat, Killer, whom I adopted before I could afford cat food. I fed him cheese and raw eggs for four days, and tore up newspaper for his litter box. I made time to sit quietly with him, 20 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes in the evening. He was old enough to spray inside the closet before found an affordable neuter clinic.

Killer always seemed to think something strange was going on when my roommates were on acid. He grew to enormous size, weighing nearly 20 pounds and retained his preference for lap over any other bed. He was named for a punk band, Killer Pussy From the Cult of Planet Playtex, which was written in blurring ink on his white flea collar.

10 Minute Prompt: Use a randomly selected colloquialism to write...

"Man Up!"

In the fifteen foot skiff, rising and falling a good ten feet with every swell, waiting for the top of the next swell before grabbing the rope ladder, so as to climb to the deck of the ship I had traveled all day to get to, I hesitated.

"Man up!" the skiff's skipper stood beside me, a jolly laugh on his lips, hands on his hips, one foot against the gunnel like it weren't nothing. Resentment at his command balled a fist in my gut. The skiff rose, peaked and time slowed as I grabbed the closest rung of the rope ladder. In the next moment I was standing on the deck of the ship with no memory of climbing up two stories of swinging ladder.

"Woman on deck," I muttered to myself. The three men on deck nearby ignored me. Turning a circle I saw a woman coming toward me from a wall of indistinguishable metal features of pipes, valves, screw seals, and ladders. She held her arms open, smiled broadly and warmly, and said, "Go right through that hatch to the galley. There's hot chocolate and coffee to warm you up." I looked in the direction she gestured: all pipes, valves, and portholes.

"What hatch?"

Keep by your Bed

Keep a glass of water by your bed.
I do this, though I rarely drink
and days later I find dust and cat hair
settling in, or I catch my cat dipping
a paw, as if the glass is by his bed.

Keep a book you read by your bed.
I have a stack of half-read books:
I know how the biography ends;
I never want the mystery to be solved;
I hope the lovers never find or fuck each other.

Keep an extra blanket by your bed.
Near the end of winter nights are piled
high with every extra blanket, sleeping
is a tropical vacation.
Then Spring pushes Winter aside.
I fold the blankets one by one,
reach them onto the top shelf,
extra again.

Seafair

The second hand ticked up to the 12 as I poured another soda. I tried not to look at my watch too often, adult customers noticed and scowled resentfully. The minute hand dragged. 14 minutes before the end of my shift. I poured another soda for a sweaty eight-year-old in blue jeans and a striped tee-shirt. His crew-cut glistened in the mid-afternoon sun. I was grateful for the awning over the snack booth. In late August that sun would light the sky for hours after it sank behind the Olympic Mountains. I reached out, bending over the counter to hand the kid his drink and caught something dark out of the corner of my eye.

He leaned in his crackerjack uniform against the high fence enclosing the roller coaster. A car full of screaming teens flew by behind him. His white neckerchief ruffled briefly. His right leg was crossed over his left, right foot balanced on the toe edge of his spit polished black shoes. I sucked a breath in through my teeth. His wide bell bottoms lightly grazed the midway pavement. Each hip bone sported its own short vertical row of anchor-embossed buttons which were joined at the top by a horizontal row just below his waist. Crisp, clean lines of his uniform curved to his casual balance.

Sweat dripped a cool track down my back. His arms crossed, hands flat under his biceps, the flaring collar lay flat across his shoulders. The round sailor's hat, tipped forward on his head, looked almost ready to fall over his face. He was my height, and wiry. Under the dixie-cup cap his face was stone and his eyes burned into me hotter than the pitched pavement. He was staring so hard I couldn't tell what color his eyes were. Despite his relaxed pose, I expected him to pounce. I looked down at my plush flesh pushed up in a ping and red polka dot sweetheart neckline.

....

I can't remember the prompt that spawned these words...

They had long hair, but even at 75 mph I could tell they were men. They were dressed in bright red, yellow, blue, green, and purple baggy tee-shirts and cutoff shorts. And leather sandals. In as much time as it took to whiz past them on the freeway I saw them. Three men stood on the concrete rail at the edge of the freeway. One lept into the air and pulled one knee up to his chest and disappeared beyond the rail. Past them I could see the coffee waters of the cypress steeped Echeconee Creek. "What about the sharp stumps?" my mind screamed, "There are cotton mouths hiding in there!" My mouth hung open, my eyes bulged. By the time we passed the VW Microbus I asked my dad "Who are those people?"
We were driving along I75 in our Rambler station wagon. As usual I was in the back, flat, surrounded by windows.
"Those," drawled my father, "are hippies."

10 Minute Prompt: What is on your walls?

Every event in my life now is memorialized by a photograph. This was not always so. Before digital photography I spent many years between cameras, unwilling to spend money on film and developing. During those years other people would come up to me during Gay Pride or at the Wild Rose on a crowded night, or on Broadway on a Sunday afternoon, and say to me, "I have this picture of you in your fringe jacket!" or "I have this picture of me leaning back on you at Denny Blaine, my crew cut head between your bare breasts. I'll sell it when you run for office." Then they wink.
In the photographed days I always imagined I would fill a wall with the images, the faces, the fancies, the places I had lived. Those photos are still in stacks, zipped in a portfolio. One photo made it into a frame and onto a wall. One poem, a gift from a much older, lascivious step-poet. A 4"x6" black and white photo of my father's family taken when my Aunt Corene was away in the city. A framed piece of wrapping paper adorned with the snow queen and her fire snorting stallions spraying snow and winter ptarmigan at the runners of her sled.

10 Minute Prompt: Rewrite a story that was influential early in your life.

"Fiddle dee dee!" Scarlet flipped her ringlets in the hallway mirror before running upstairs to Melanie.
In her room, as always, Melanie reclined on the chaise, her forearm shading her eyes, hands hanging listlessly. "Do you think Ashley will write me today?"
"Well I do declare," Scarlet hitched her hoop skirts as she walked across to sit on the embroidered foot stool next to Melanie's chaise. "I don't know what you see in him." Scarlet leaned against the chaise so that her arm touched, elbow to wrist, Melanie's hip.
"He is so handsome and gentle..." Melanie started
"Milquetoast!" interjected Scarlet. "Melanie," Scarlet pouted, "Let's go for a walk in the cherry orchard. Come along, it will invigorate you."
"But I don't want to be invigorated." And what if a letter arrives from Ashley? I don't want to miss it!"
"It will wait. I want to walk with you in the evening light. It's so nice this time of day."
"That does sound nice," Melanie lifted her arm to look at Scarlet whose lashes batted prettily in front of her sparkling eyes. Melanie felt her heart flop ever so gently.