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Sit on a Wall

by Jennifer Strange

He watches from his window, his garden, his horse. Every morning, we prepare the horse for a ride to the riverfront and back, and he watches; I know he thinks he has spotted him when he finally pushes to gallop. Just before tea every afternoon, he takes a walk through the garden and peers around every break of hedge to find him. And anyone meeting him for business would assume he had had enough or needed some fresh air to clear his mind for decision, but he has only been sitting distracted so long and must retreat to the window for the real business: has he now set himself at the fountain? The king’s organizes his daily calendar around the great oaf.

But he is gone now.

They say he was once a man of letters who never wrote a false word about the human heart, for he understood it all—the greed, the fear, the love. He managed all the king’s books and all the king’s lies, and he made them all true by visiting the wronged ones and paying everything even. He hosted dinner parties that no one ever wanted to leave, for the company was so rare and the host so gracious: he was responsible for introducing to each other the most unlikely of friends from all corners of the city. He wore shoes no one noticed and lifted his eyebrows just so you knew he had heard you.

But they all say different things about how he fell. The expert in crookneck squash who farms across the cemetery from St. Mark’s says he saw him walk into church one day with his head down and not emerge until the next day, his head lower still. The queen’s farrier says he had long loved the wife of a friend, and that he had confessed only to be spurned. One of the housemaids said he had never been true—that all his good had been a ruse to make the king notice him, to earn fame, and when the king turned out mad after all, he suddenly looked a bit mad himself.

Whatever it was, he turned his face to pie and drink. An excuse to be with friends, an escape from guilt, something to prove he was wheat and not chaff? Perhaps all, but he became an expert in the stuff. Meat pies, berry cobblers, peach pie in season, chicken pot pies, single-crust and double-crust, flakey or with biscuits, sweet or savory. And he knew the right brew for each one. And when he had drunk, he wrote no words whatsoever (though we understand this is uncommon) and forgot whatever company he had kept or abused them terribly with his wit—after only a drink or two, his words revealed clearly all his fear and fawning.

The king had lost sense years before and remembered him as he had been, bless his soul. But we had to remove him from the king’s presence. He had become utterly useless. Couldn’t even read a map anymore, and he added the strangest volumes to the library—a handwritten biography of one of the king’s horses, for example. When he sat for tea, he clattered his cup about the saucer and spilled copious amounts of cream on the carpet. When he walked the gardens, he crouched behind the king and clipped leaves from bushes, emptying his pockets into the fountain while he whistled a minuet.

We gave him a cottage well appointed with books, a globe, a desk with enough paper, a butler with orders to keep a full pantry and never want for pies or beer, and a guard. He was invited to walk about as he wished, though one of the king’s men was to go with him always.

Over those months (or was it just weeks?), the pies and brew pushed out his sides so that we called him again the greatest man in the city. He walked very little and sat very often, with the cook delivering pies and a glass at regular intervals wherever he would go, which wasn’t ever far from his cottage. Sometimes while he ate, he would fall asleep where he sat and not pull to his mouth the spoon he had just filled anew.

One day, his guard called for help—the oaf wished to climb the city wall. So they hoisted him up and he sat. For two days or more, he sat on the wall. His cook brought pies enough for a large family, and he drank barrels. He forgot all that he had ever tried to do. He could not recall a single name of a single person he had ever invited to dinner. He moaned as he looked out from the city.

And then you know the story: he had a great fall. You would not have recognized him if you had seen him. In fact, you would have wondered if he had ever been a man. No horse or man could have healed him: he had a great fall.

The king mourned him, so we too had to as well. He too tried to remember him as he had been, but we could not help remembering what he had become, which was what he really had been all along. The greatest man, the largest man, and so the most pieces we ever found fallen.

The Great Fall

by Tara Wiley

“Did you try calling her mother?”

“Yes. The minute we held the phone up to her ear she started to scream like a monkey. Tell me you can do something. We can’t keep delaying much longer. The kids out there are starting to get crazy.”

“Tell me again. What exactly have you given her so far?”

The voices filtered across the green room, barely distinguishable from the drumming din reverberating through the floors, the walls, beating like an incessant drum against Lindsey’s conscience. They wanted her. Why didn’t she want them?

The voices and the noises pressed in on her, but she was somewhere else, a little girl running through an open field until the prairie grasses were taller than she was, dropping to the soft earth, instantly entering another world entirely. The grasses whispered in the wind; the meadowlark sang, and she sang along her own song for her own heart, lilting and free.

“I don’t think we have a choice, Vern. You need to make the call.”

How long had it been since she sang for no one but herself? She didn’t remember how to choose her own song like that little girl creating her own melodies against the Kansas winds’ accompaniment.

In her dream world, on that prairie, the clouds above her began to shift and change, darken into the thick black of newsprint announcing the next young rising star. And the little girl rose and chased the wind, the clouds, the adulations and honors. Like those little ones blindly following the pied piper, she didn’t know. She didn’t know how fickle her new lover would be.

The little girl followed the lover into a woods thick and dark. Each tree had a face, the masks of theater muses Thalia and Melpomene. Gaudy and glaring, laughing and jeering, they followed her every move. She chased Thalia’s beckoning grins filled with praise until Melpomene lurched into view like a nightmare, taking over and replacing the Thalias one by one until all she could see was Melpomene. He cried and accused her relentlessly.

“What brought this on? If we could name the trigger, maybe I could bring her back…”

“I told you, I could only protect her so long…”

A team of knights appeared in the forest. Armed with powerful chain saws, they cut down every Melpomene in view. One whisked her onto his horse and led her into a more pleasant part of the forest where she was surrounded by Thalias, nothing but Thalias. She knew it was too good to be true, all these yes-men, but she couldn’t stop herself. Their praise was a powerful drug. She was giddy and wild on the knight’s horse, singing wildly to the trees as they swayed and sang yes-yes-yes-more-more-more.

“She was sick. She needed rest -”

The little girl grew and blossomed as the forest thickened around her, Thalias pressing in on her. The smiles became too wide. Too bright. The branches began to press into her, whipping against her as the knight and his horse drew her further in. A vine appeared, wrapped around her throat, pulled and constricted until her lovely meadowlark-voice rasped and gasped against its pull.

“The steroid shots were a necessity.”

“Too bad the weight gain became such an issue.”

The knight cut the vine, but it remained around her throat. Another knight came, pulled with all his might and loosened the grip, but it was still there like a hideous necklace. One wrong move by the girl, and the vine thickened and wound back tighter than before. She could not get free. The vine enshrouded her with an insidious snakelike coiling.

The knight’s steed skidded to a sudden halt when a stone wall blocked its path. Quickly, the knight dismounted and lifted the young lady up where she could scramble to the top. She stood there, finally free from the thick trees, raised her head to the skies, and drank in the blue like a cup of fresh water. The height was exhilarating. She breathed deeply as invincibility rose within her. She could not see that the vine had followed her up there, was recoiling even as she stood.

“Okay. So tell me again – she went out on stage -”

The young woman opened her mouth, a meadowlark song rising within her, but when she sent breath across her vocal chords, nothing happened. Clouds suddenly lurched across the blue sky, thick and black with accusations. Weight Watchers’ Next Rising Star? Young Artist Bursting at the Seams. Is Lindsey Losing Her Voice? The vine tightened. She looked down and saw a crowd of admirers. One was shaking his head and yelled out, “Hey, fatso, get a new wardrobe! Show us you can still sing at least!” She was teetering, then falling, falling, falling…

“She missed her cue – “

“The car’s here. We’re ready to go. Who’s going to deal with the crowd?”

5/14/12 Not Quite a Nursery Rhyme

Rewrite a nursery rhyme (Three Blind Mice, Jack and Jill, etc.) from a character’s point of view.

The Dragon’s Lair

by Tara Wiley

My mother always told me not to play with fire. She usually said it while sitting slumped drunk in the wicker rocker in her smoking room, flicking her Bic lighter over and over – zzzzzpt, zzzzzpt, zzzzpt – seemingly mesmerized by the sight and sound. Fireflies would compete with her flickering light as she wasted perfect summer evenings in an endless stupor.

“Pipa, honey, now you remember, you should never play with – “ she interrupted herself with a sharp expletive. The Bic had run out of juice and was no longer lighting up. “Be a dear and go get me another Bic please? I think there are some –“ I stomped off before she finished.

“I know where they are, Mother,” I muttered under my breath. I made sure the screen door slammed shut behind me.

Mama’s smoking room was actually the sunroom off the south side of the house. Merely screened in, I suppose it was technically outdoors. That was how Mama figured she was abiding by the no smoking policy on the rental agreement. In my typical know-it-all teenage mind, the infraction became another reason to judge and despise her.

That was a particularly bad summer for us. My hormones were raging and her drunk days far outnumbered her sober ones. I wondered why she even had me come out for the summer. Lord knows I would have rather stayed home with Dad. I held tightly to the one saving grace of the visit: Georgia emancipated me from the torture of watching my mother self-destruct.

Mama told me not to play with fire. She should have told me not to play with Georgia.

Georgia Peach Ramsey (I kid you not; she even showed me her birth certificate. She was strangely proud of the ridiculous name) lived across the street in a sprawling, columned southern mansion. The one story, two bedroom rental property Mother snagged for the summer probably housed Georgia’s grandparents’ slaves at one time. Sometimes I thought I woke up to low-pitched moans of caged souls crying out from the ancient wide pine planks under my bed.

Those wide planks lined all the floors of the rental, and they creaked as I trudged heavy-footed to the kitchen for my mother’s lighter. I didn’t find one in the usual place, so I started banging around noisily through drawers and cupboards looking for matches or whatever, punishing my mother’s never-ending hangover headache with each slam. Bad enough I was stuck with her sorry butt all summer; now I had become her enabler too (learned that term from Dad’s counselor), helping her feed her nicotine habit. Just what I wanted to be doing.

I was about to give up when I found a small box of matches wedged between the sugar jar and the back wall of a cabinet. They looked like they’d been there a while. I absentmindedly tested one out and nearly singed my fingertips as the flame quickly engulfed the brittle wood. I repeated my mother’s expletive. The word felt sharp on my tongue. I wasn’t one to swear, but I thought I’d try it out. Usually I contained my rebellion to guilt-free practices like slamming doors and banging cabinets.

I was a good girl in most respects. Really, I was. Ask anyone except my mother. I made all the right choices, was the teachers’ pet with my straight A’s and people pleasing behaviors, never got involved with the wrong crowd. Until Georgia, a one person wrong crowd if there ever was one.

You Can’t Burn What’s in Flames

by Jen Gregory

My mother always told me not to play with fire, that’s why I love watching things burn so much. She was on me about everything, constantly nagging me, telling me what to do, what to wear. Leave it to me to find a match box on the street and forget to take it out of my pocket before she washed my jeans. She was certain I was a smoker. You can only be accused of so many things you aren’t doing before you think, “Dang, why don’t I start smoking? I’m in trouble for it anyways.”

That’s how it all starts with privileged kids like me, somebody riding us too hard. That’s why I’m here in a juvy court room waiting for some uptight, bald, overweight judge to decide how long I need to be locked up for starting one tiny little fire. It was hay in an old barn, not like I was trying to kill somebody. Sometimes you just get bored, that’s all it was.

“We don’t play with fire Matthew. It could hurt someone, it could hurt you.”

I heard her voice the whole time I was doing it, lighting that fire. I could hear her tss-tssk everytime I struck a match on the side of the box. She’s just scared of fire but I think it’s pretty awesome, can’t take my eyes off of it really. I buy matches all the time, sit somewhere private and light one after the other. Sometimes, I bring the little orange smoking flame up under my hand and hold it there just to see how long it takes the pain to bother me. Every day it seems like I can hold the match up a little longer. I’m getting good at it. My palms are covered in little pink scars. My mom thinks I have some sort of drug problem. She’s had me tested, sent me to three counselors and one psychologist that put me on some crazy medicine. Two days of that stuff made me feel like a crazy person, so I just pretend to take it now.

“Matthew, tell me about your childhood.”

“It sucked.”

“Why did it ‘suck’ Matthew?”

“Just did, don’t most? How was your childhood Dr. Phil?”

“I can see you don’t want to try today, do you?”

“Not especially.”

“Then why did you come?”

“Because I had to, I’m fifteen. I can’t drive. She controls my life.”

“Did you tell her you didn’t want to come here today?”

“No point in that doc, have you met her?”

“So your mother is controlling. Do you find that frustrating?”

“Nah, it’s a trip. Fun.”

Interesting prompt

You come across a pack of matches that sets off a series of uncanny events. Start your story with “My mother always told me not to play with fire.” End it with “And that’s how I ended up in the middle of nowhere—naked.”

4/30/12

Make a list of your daily routine during any given week: wake up, shower, drink coffee, walk the dog, drive to work, go to lunch, have dinner with friends, etc. Choose an event from that list and use it as the starting point for a scene, but transform the mundane into the complicated by introducing something unexpected. If, for example, you choose driving to work as your starting point, disrupt the ride with a phone call, an accident, a radio broadcast—something that changes what would normally happen. Write a story from there.

True Love’s Waltz

by Tara Wiley

Skipping, tripping, like two gazelles bounding across the African savannah: Faye loved the foxtrot most of all. Buoyant. Free. Almost a bit dangerous in its speed, skirting loss of control with the wildness of an Italian Miglia race car driver with each turn; yes, the foxtrot made her feel utterly alive.

Charles, dear Charles, always the steady one, much preferred the waltz.

“Glide-and-turn, dance with me, waves of the ocean, we move – ah yes! Bliss, my love!” he would croon with the music. And dancing with him, Faye fell in love with the waltz, too, simply because he loved it, and she loved him. She would never forget that moment.

One step here, a turn there – and then, the twinkle, where the choreography of their lives intersected on a dance floor in Toledo, of all the unromantic places in the world. She had just begun her career in competitive ballroom dancing; he was a seasoned veteran of three whole years. On that fateful day in 1952, it was in the middle of a twinkle during the foxtrot: Faye’s partner, Roger, tripped somehow, fell, and horrors! Broke his ankle! How, in the middle of such a simple moment, could this have happened? Why, fate, of course.

Charles found her afterwards, sobbing in the holly bushes behind the dance hall. She was devastated, and with her usual flair for the dramatic, she had given over to the full weight of her angst with a royal fit. Charles did the thing he knew best: he danced with her. She was, at first, quite the unwilling partner, until his steady waltz steadied her, and she found herself utterly transported in his arms.

Those early years were a delicious blur of travel and silk, accolades and trophies, late night soirees under the light of the moon with their friends and competitors. Faye threw away the expectations for a woman of her era and flung herself, instead, into the life of a performer. Childbearing years flew by in a flurry of pivots and pencil turns. No matter, Faye consoled herself: she had Charles. What else did she need? Sure, in the quiet early morning hours when the rigors of the life left her aching and bruised, a momentary pang would catch her breath. She would brush it aside and curl up a little closer against her true love.

Change came, slowly but surely. The competitions changed. Their bodies changed. The trophies slowly gave way to participants’ souvenirs. Their friends began to drop out: pregnancy, injury, or fury over loss. Charles and Faye watched and wondered when their time would come. One night, Charles found Faye sobbing behind the ballroom again. He took her in his arms, tried to begin a waltz like that time: it always made the world right again, the waltz. But this time, she refused to take his hand and crumpled instead into his embrace.

“Oh, Charles, tell me we won’t be like the Williams-” the couple they had grown closest to, who had recently left the circuit bitter and torn. Their relationship did not survive. “-or the Rogers-” the couple who ‘accidentally’ got pregnant, and forced a suburban lifestyle upon themselves with resentment and coldness. They slept in separate bedrooms. Their daughter was destined to grow up scorned, foremost by her parents. “Tell me we’ll choose happiness. Tell me –” the sobs took over again.

Lanie and Fred

by Jill Clingan

My writing prompt was to write a story based on this photo.  When I looked at the photo last week, I thought through different scenarios for a story.  Perhaps they just had their 50^th wedding anniversary party.  The couple is still in their party clothes (I named them Lanie and Frank one early morning).  If I had on that dress I wouldn’t want to take it off yet, either, even if the party were long over.  Frank’s tux might be a little tight on him.  I think he had knee replacement surgery a few months ago and got a little hooked on daytime TV rather than walking the neighborhood.  Now that he is dancing again, though, maybe he and Lanie will start going out to the VFW and spending their Friday nights sweeping across the dance floor.

I even had this idea that while they had danced and laughed through their 50 years of marriage, their life had been hard.  Maybe doctor bills had piled up or bad investments had drained their nest egg.  Maybe they had lost their home, and then for their anniversary their sweet children bought them this tract house in a modest but friendly neighborhood.  They were dancing outside because they had a backyard again and because Lanie could once again hang clothes on the line.  Maybe their children had blindfolded them and taken them to this undisclosed location and voila!  Here was their surprise 50^th wedding anniversary celebration and gift of a house all wrapped up into one happy day.

That’s as far as I got in the story, though, because I kept getting stuck on the clothes on the clothesline.  What is hanging there, exactly?  I see some lavender pajama pants with lace trim.  Are they cotton or a polyester blend?  They look kind of big for Lanie.

And what is that green thing in the middle?  A slip?  Knee-length pajama pants?

Whose plaid pajama pants are hanging on the right?  Lanie’s?  Fred’s?  Those legs are awfully wide.

And then I started to panic.

I am supposed to come up with something creative to write from this photo prompt, and I can’t get past those blasted pajamas hanging on the clothesline!

The most creative thing I could come up with is that their children, whose silly sense of humor matched that of their carefree parents, hung out the pajamas the two of them had been wearing since the 90’s.  Perhaps that is the secret to a lasting marriage: long-wearing, tacky pj’s.

Actually, in a moment (just one!) of distraction, the pajamas on the clothesline reminded me of my neighbors growing up.  The wife’s name was Laynie, now that I think about it.  She always hung her bras and underwear on her clothesline.  And her collection of wigs.