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.

10 Minute Prompt: side effects

I often use things for their side effect. Benadryl for sleep, cheese for comfort, drinks for camaraderie. Knowing that the thing itself does something I don't care about. Every now and then I drive to feel the steering wheel under my hand, the G-force of getting there, the rough road loud under the wheels. But those times are very rare. Usually I drive to get there, using the time to relax or to laugh, or to get into the mood with some music. Behind the wheel, driving to visit a friend, I get in the car before I have spoken a word to another person that day. My thoughts are crammed in my head, jostling for attention. They start to bicker. I can let them bicker, I can let their conflict set the tone of the day. Or I can listen to music, a throbbing beat with a weaving brook of gentle melody trickling over rocks of tympani, bringing the hum in my mind to a sine wave of harmony. Finally, we are all going to the same place, no one is pulling the other way.

10 Minute Prompt: Wishful Lie

Her green eyes look at me, blink, look, blink. Droplets of water in her hair glitter in the quintuplet bathroom light. Her skin, ripening with fine lines, shifting pores, and eroded chicken pox scars, glows after the scrubbing in the shower. Her clavicles are drifted between shoulder and breast. I look away. She looks away. A Q-tip smooths and coaxes the wax from her ears. Another Q-tip disappears down the lint trap belly button, deeper than any she’s encountered. She brushes her teeth, always, before applying and spreading a dollop of lotion to her face. With the clean and tidy of this wiping routine she steps out of biology for a few minutes. If she does it right she can go a half day without looking like a living, growing, aging, sloughing, flowing, excreting creature.

The start of something good (I hope)

Her yellow hair held itself in tight curls against her head. No ash fell as Jen tapped her cigarette for the third time. She rolled her eyes slightly at the cries of a lost child echoing in the vaulted ceiling, On the bench in the bus station Jen tucked her legs under her. She pulled her skirt down over her knees with one hand while taking a long drag off her cigarette with the other. Her eyes swiveled left under lowered lashes and caught sight of Toolie just coming through the double doors. Toolie held her stetson with both hands in front of her rodeo buckle. As she looked around the station waiting area her right hand flattened the little curl behind her ear. She wiped the pomade off on her stiff new jeans. Jen raised her hand with the cigarette between her first and second fingers and bent her hot-pink nails forward, catching Toolie’s eye. Toolie stifled a grin that beamed in her eyes, tilted her head back in greeting and stepped to stand in front of Jen.



Uncurling her legs Jen shrugged toward the floor and said “Make yourself useful, grab my bags.” She took Toolie’s hand to stand and Toolie stooped slightly to get Jen’s kiss on the cheek before leveling her hat on her head and gathering the three pink and orange paisley suitcases under her arms.

Grandmother's Pinking Sheers

My grandmother came into the T.V. room waving her pinking sheers, brightly proclaiming "It's time to cut my toenails!"

I sat up fast, shoving aside the Parade section of the Sunday paper, scattering it on the floor beside me. "You mean with the pinking sheers?" I leaned forward, leg muscles both ready to launch and holding me down.

"My toenails are so tough only these will do." She thunked her right foot onto the small black vinyl ottoman, grabbed her big toe with her left hand, and swung at it with the sheers.

With a scissoring sound, the tip of her toe was open and blood trickled down the side of her foot, tracing the arch, hooking under her heel and dripping down the side of the shiny ottoman. Blood quickly soaked into the acrylic brown shag carpet underneath. I had been mere inches away, but my hand reached out so slowly I was afraid she'd cut her toe off before I had a chance to stop her. I finally got my hand on hers, and gently closed the pinking sheers. "Now you're bleeding," I pointed out. "Let me bandage it for you." She did not resist as I slid the sheers out of her hand

"Oh, it's just a scratch," she p'shawed, dismissing it with a wave of her empty hand.

Blood continued to drip into the brown shag rug. I looked at the glossy fibers in their long pointy clumps and blinked at the distant decade it must have come from. "Stay there. I'll be right back with a band-aid. Don't move." I ran to get the bandages, knowing that whether she stayed or walked away was entirely a matter of her whim.

After my car was stolen

When my car wasn't where I'd left it, all I knew was it had been stolen. I imagined some junkie driving to his dealer's house, maybe passing out in my car later, pissing himself all over the front seat. This had happened to my friend's car. Or perhaps some crack dealer needed it to transport product across state lines. I'd read about that in the news. Or maybe some thoughtless kids had taken it for a joy ride, whipping over curbs and leaving a burned out hull of a Honda Civic in the woods. That's what happened to my mother's Karmen Ghia 35 years before. No doubt they were laughing as they warmed their hands on the toxic fire.

When the police called a week later to tell me my car had been recovered all I knew was that three juveniles had been arrested while driving it around south Seattle. They had been pulled over in an orderly traffic stop and arrested without incident. So it was the kids, only they hadn't had time to take my car out in the woods to burn it. I imagined three white boys with blond crew cuts and letter jackets high-fiving each other as they drove off in my car. Driving away from the 7-11 after using fake ID to buy a case of beer. I imagined three black kids wearing watch caps, fist-bumping each other as they drove away in my car, driving away from the 7-11 after ditching class in favor of finding someone over 21 to buy them a case of beer.

When I called six months later to find out where the prosecution was I found out the case had been lost in transition on its way to juvenile court. I also found out the two passengers had been 13 and the driver was 12 at the time of the theft. He had needed to sit on a phone book to see over the steering wheel, the officer told me. It was also explained to me that these particular kids had been caught and charged several times with "taking a motor vehicle without permission." That they were too young to be considered full fledged gang members but they worked for the gang by stealing cars since the punishment for juvenile car thieves is so much lighter than for adults.

When I picked my car up from impound The steering column has been stripped of casing to allow easier access to the ignition wires. A hole gaped where the stereo had lived. All of my belongings had been thrown from the car, except for one postcard with an areal photo of the impossibly yellow and blue Grand Prismatic hot spring in Yellowstone. There was no phone book.

When I attended the sentencing hearing of the boy who had been the backseat passenger I found out he was Laotian, as were all three boys. His mother was there, in tears. Through her interpreter she pleaded for us all to see the good in her son, lamented that he had fallen in with a bad crowd of young Laotian immigrants. When the judge allowed me to present my impact statement, I found the sweat from my down-turned palm had puddled on the table.

All three boys pleaded guilty to their charges. The clerk at the Victims' Advocate office told me it was very rare for juvenile car thieves to plead guilty because it was so easy for them to get off. Curious, I looked them up. I found the front seat passenger had recently gotten detention at his junior high school for turning in his homework late. His school was one I drove past occasionally. The driver, twelve years old when he had taken my car, had pleaded guilty as he was waiting trial for another crime. While the charging papers from my car theft had gotten lost in the shuffle, the alleged driver had been involved in a snowball fight--just two months after he had been arrested for stealing my car. The snowball fight turned ugly when the opponents used snowballs weighted with rocks to break a window of the boy's house. The boy took his father's rifle and shot at the kids in the street. One of those kids, seventeen years old, died of a gunshot wound to the head.