The Elephant's Den

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The Elephant's Den is a collection of short fiction, short-short fiction, poetry, and other sorts of prose written by aspiring writers, established writers, friends of writers, and anyone else who would like to share. All works appearing on this blog remain licensed to the individual author. Forward writings that you would like to contribute to Info.TheElephantsDen@gmail.com, or use the Submit option below.

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May 25, 2012

Marly and He

Michael Curtis Houck

Marly was dinning with a friend at a street side cafe. The cars were passing slowly, just as quick as the breeze; it was Sunday morning and coffee was served. Jennifer had started to say something, a story of the usual sort from last night, but Marly was more concerned with a gentleman she could see through the cafe front windows. This sir was standing in line and though Marly couldn’t hear him, he was screaming. He was a large man and he had a beard. He reminded Marly of her uncle. The way he would stand around at family gatherings and shout about, while never really saying anything.
He finished his rant and made his way through the lobby and out the door. There he was, standing on the sidewalk ten feet from Marly and Jennifer, who was still telling her story. The sir patted down his pockets and fished out a crumpled pack of Winston’s. Marly continued to watch him as he lit on up, and then, for a spilt second, their eyes met. He was gone in a moment’s time. Jennifer laughed, “and I don’t even know who put it in the trash bin,” she said.
Marly gave a laugh, “Yeah, things are tricky,” she added and the both sipped from their coffee.

(Source: storiesandsuchthings)

May 23, 2012

An Afternoon with Horace Meriwether

Brittany Lauren Pittman

It is Tuesday afternoon, and Horace Meriwether is feeling very much in a sour mood. His ninety-seventh birthday is approaching, and despite his arguments that he is in perfect health, his daughter, Marigold, upon the recommendation of the young upstart, Dr. Bumble, is quite determined that he should have an assistive care provider to stay with him in his home and help him with his daily tasks, as well as to keep an eye on what the doctor so rudely described as “Horace’s deteriorating mental state.” Horace had scoffed at the term “dementia” and had informed Marigold rather stubbornly that an assistant of any sort was unnecessary and would not be tolerated as long as he drew breath, so help him God.

“Dad,” Marigold had argued, “you know your Alzheimer’s is progressing much more quickly now. Someone needs to be here to make sure you don’t harm yourself. You remember why we went to see the doctor, don’t you Dad?”

Horace remembered quite well, thankyouverymuch. So what if he had fallen down? No bones broken, no damage done; there was not even a scratch on his ass! He had glared unrepentantly into Marigold’s tired gaze when he answered her,

“I am the father and you are the child. This is insulting! That Dr. Bumblebee has no idea what he is talking about, and I’m sure he has misdiagnosed me with this ridiculous Alzheimer’s disease that I daresay I do not even have!”

Marigold (who had once been prettily called Marigold Meriwether, but had many years since been married and is now called Marigold Pewter) swept a strand of long, white hair from her brow, closed her eyes for a moment, and pressed her fingertips to her temples. She had been stunningly beautiful in her youth, and as she had aged, with grace, mind you, her beauty had faded into a dusky loveliness that most people could not quite place the root of.

Her mother had died in a car accident when Marigold and her identical twin sister, Lillian, were teenagers. Lillian had died of lung cancer at age fifty-nine, leaving Marigold and Horace the final survivors of their beloved family. Marigold had always known that one day the care of her father would fall into her hands, and decisions like this one, in turn, would demand her attention. The truth of the matter was that Marigold was growing quite old herself, and at age seventy-two, was beginning to tire of Horace’s impudent ways and ridiculous behavior. She was in exceedingly good health for a woman of her age, spending her spare time in such worthy pursuits as hiking, meditation, and water aerobics, but she sometimes wished that she could be allowed to simply be the mother of her children, the grandmother of her grandchildren, and a wizened old woman, instead of the primary caregiver to her father, who had recently fallen from a ladder whilst cleaning the rain gutters in the nude.

This event had, of course, been the reason for the visit to Dr. Bumble, the geriatric specialist, who had suggested an in-home care provider to lessen the burden on Marigold, and to prevent future incidents of this unfortunate nature from occurring at all. Horace had raised hell over the mere thought of a stranger living in his house and meddling with his things, and for the entire twenty-eight minute car ride home, except for the moment when he had rolled down his window and tossed out the brochures which Dr. Bumble had given to Marigold for perusal at her leisure, he had sat in the passenger seat, arms crossed and pouting like a child who had been denied dessert as punishment for not eating his Brussels sprouts at supper.

Now, this fine Tuesday afternoon, Horace sits agitatedly in a large, comfortable leather recliner, staring at the television, which shows a Bonanza rerun in all its grainy glory. He is feeling quite contrary, indeed, as he muses over the events of the past series of days. Marigold was certainly losing her mind if she thought he would have some strumpet nurse prancing about his house, arranging and rearranging his belongings and chastising him when he chose to wander outside in December wearing nothing but his tube socks.

“I will have nothing of the sort,” Horace thinks to himself now, as he absentmindedly flips through channels.

Presently, Horace feels an uncomfortable itching in his throat, and coughs a bit in an attempt to stifle the sensation. Finding this measure unsuccessful, and finding his mouth as dry as a well run out of wishes, he struggles up from his seat and makes his way deliberately to the kitchen to quench his thirst, thinking bitterly all the way that at least if he had a nurse, she could fetch him all the soda-pops he could ask for, and he would never lift a finger again, so help him God.

Upon reaching the refrigerator, Horace is met with an array of options, can after can of Pepsi and Sprite and Dr. Pepper.

“Aha,” he thinks, smugly, “finally a doctor I can really trust! I wonder when Marigold went shopping, the sweet girl. She really isn’t so bad, after all.”

He snatches a can, pops the tab, and takes a long swig. Feeling thoroughly refreshed and perfectly independent and sane in spite of his daughter and that ignoramus Dr. Bumblebee, Horace closes the refrigerator door and turns to make his way back to Bonanza or Jeopardy or whatever is on television now. He shuffles across the hardwood, briefly wondering when Marigold had found the time to replace the old linoleum flooring, and how she had managed to do such a spectacular job of it without his even noticing. Horace returns to his comfortable throne, Dr. Pepper in hand, and begins tediously to flip through infomercial after infomercial after senseless news anchorman. He has paused to scoff at a cartoon sea sponge talking to a squirrel, when suddenly he becomes aware of something amiss.

He turns off the television and sits quite as still as if he were a painting done in oils and in a despondent style, pondering for a moment what it could be that is making him feel so unfamiliar and strange. As he is buried in thought, the sound of a door opening and closing jerks him back to reality, where, to his unmatched horror, he begins to take in his surroundings: the array of houseplants, the crocheted doilies on the many unmatched end tables, the large, unassuming gray cat sitting on the rug, the family portraits of people he recognizes vaguely as the Pattersons, who live down the road in the brick house with the rhododendrons out front. Horace begins to sweat as he shuts his eyes tight against the impossible scene before him. These things, these traces of human activity which surround him belong to someone else. He presses his back into the recliner and remembers the Wizard of Oz, thinking as hard as he can, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home,” hoping against hope that these words will transport him back to his own black leather recliner, back to his own television set.

He hesitantly opens his eyes to find a shocked Patricia Patterson standing at the foot of the recliner, dry-cleaning in hand, eyes wide and looking as if she had seen a ghost, or a blue footed booby, or the cantankerous old Mr. Meriwether, who lives down the road in the whitewashed house with the green shutters, sitting in her living room with a Dr. Pepper in hand.

Seeing the helpless, defeated display across his wrinkled features, understanding dawns on Patricia Patterson, who went to school with Marigold’s son, Luther Pewter, and has heard rumors of Old Mr. Meriwether’s declining mental health. Her eyes soften as Horace stares pleadingly into her plain, oval face.

“Oh, Mr. Meriwether,” she sighs gently, with a shake of her head and a glance toward the clock on the wall, “I suppose I ought to phone Luther. Would you like another Dr. Pepper?”

(Source: storiesandsuchthings)

May 20, 2012

Call of Submission!

The Elephant’s Den is a flash-fiction blog. A collection short fiction, short-short fiction, poetry, and other unique forms of prose and written expression by writers, friends of writers, and anyone else who would like to contribute. Submit via our Tumblr submit option, or E-Mail at Info.TheElephantsDen@Gmail.Com

(Source: storiesandsuchthings)

2:20pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/Zt-MywLqMdzN

(Notes: 3)

Filed under: Poem Poetry Fiction Creative Writing Story Short Story Reading Writing Literature Spilled Ink Submission Submit Life Memories Memory Reblog This

May 20, 2012

Loving You

Mandee Price

Early morning shakes
Smooth skin, fingertips
Searching for nothing
Finding it all the same
Wandering and wondering
Old serenades ringing in my ears

Love was never a question
For questions are only answers
Hiding
Quiet
Coy
To be discovered

I always believed in you
In the ideas you poured
Out into the world
In the stained glass windows
You fashioned with
Fragments of us
Beautiful
Broken
Blended
New

You looked at me
With the ice in your eyes
The grass and the water
The sky and the trees
The brooks and the mountains
The sand and the blossoms
All the things I love were there
Staring back at me
How could I look away

You kissed me softly
So fast, but time didn’t know
Really we were frozen
The world forgetting to move
As we stole all the breath there was
Every glint of hope
Every spark of faith
Every promise of safety
Every sliver of joy
All of it was ours

Loving you
It never began
Never ended
It was just
What I was made of
Then and now and always

You’re my eden

(Source: storiesandsuchthings)

2:18pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/Zt-MywLqL-xS

(Notes: 4)

Filed under: Creative Writing Spilled Ink Blory Poetry Poem Writing Write Read Reading Love Read THis Reblog This

May 18, 2012

Parkway

Brittany Lauren Pittman

Watching the mountain mist from the window of my father’s pickup truck as we climbed along the parkway, I thought of eagles and things with wings which must have eyes much keener than my own feeble pair to find their way through this opaque screen of condensation. As often as we made this eight hour trip from Fayetteville, North Carolina to Bethelridge, Kentucky, I never got bored and I never stopped loving the mountains and all the wonders they presented for me to behold, the tiny frozen waterfalls in the rock faces and the great mossy boulders which seemed so precariously arranged atop one another, like some balancing act in a circus. We sped along the curving, curling, tilting roads, the three of us, my father, my baby sister, Sydney, and me, wedged into the three seats of the cab. I was thinking about birds in particular at this moment, when we approached a lovely spot, a scenic lookout over the Blue Ridge Mountains. My father pulled off the road and parked, and I started from my reverie in a joyous, childish ruckus, excited for the chance to get out, stretch my legs, and take in the view.

His favorite part of the trip was beating his own best time, making as few stops as possible and driving fast back to his hometown and all the familiar things he knew he would find there: old Ford tractors driven by old farmers wearing old trucker hats and humming old songs; his mother picking tomatoes and cabbages and corn and peas from her garden plot, and the smells in her kitchen of good country meals all day; children outside playing in the hills and the creeks and the fields, two children in particular, born in the same month of the same year, my father’s youngest brother, and my father’s oldest son. I never could understand his hurry. As much as I rejoiced in seeing my Memaw and Poppy and my half brother, Corey, who lived with his Granny, and my uncle Eddie, who listened to KISS, and all the cousins there were to play with together in the creeks and the hills and near the cows in their fields, I loved ever so much the travel. I adored the trek and the mountain roads, and was always begging my father to stop the truck so I could get out and breathe the high altitude air into my little lungs and stand at the edge of the top of the world, looking down at the squares of land beneath, like one of my Great Granny Pauline’s beautiful patchwork quilts, but made of earth with trees and farms, and stitched invisibly together so harmoniously that I was almost certain no God could have planned things more perfectly.

I didn’t understand his hurry, but I understood the peaks of mountains, the tops of trees, and the way things looked when I was seven years old and a hundred feet tall. Now I understand the desire to “get there” and to be in a familiar place, feeling loved and the sense of belonging. Now, at 21 years instead of seven, I understand being relatively young and frustrated and wishing the road was shorter and the drive was quicker and the way was easier. As far as my father was concerned at the time, we small kids were something of a burden to him, a package, beloved however it may be, which he had to carry along in order to reach his ultimate destination, his home. My whole life, I have a felt like a passenger. Today, on this eight hour trip, I feel like an adventurer; like a runner towards a goal, and like a woman reading a map which I have henceforth been unfamiliar with. On this day, with my cousin and my book of maps, I feel the urge to be in the place I want to be in, and the impulse to stomp the gas pedal fast, steering in the direction of my loved ones. I want to belong, and I want nothing more than my father wanted all those years ago, to be familiar amongst a crowd of familiar faces.

(Source: storiesandsuchthings)

May 16, 2012

If We Keep Falling

Michael Curtis Houck

If we keep falling,
we will eventually
hit the ceiling.

And when we look
down, our feet will
rest gently against

the fan blades,
dangling soft enough
to scrap the dust off

as they pass.

(Source: storiesandsuchthings)

May 15, 2012

Ritual

Michael Curtis Houck

From the sink to
the trash bin I
spilled this mornings
coffee grounds—
for this I hope you
can forgive me.

(Source: jesusfuckingmahoney)

9:45am | URL: http://tmblr.co/Zt-MywLX1JVN

(Notes: 3)

Filed under: Poem Poetry Creative Writing Spilled Ink BLory Read Reading Write Writing Lit Read This Critique This Coffee forgive memory reblog this

May 15, 2012

Letters

Mandee Price

The letters are still in a drawer, in the room we danced in. All the paper is gentle now, the faded script a simple reminder of the many times I’ve quietly unfolded each sheet. I still bring them out from time to time and recall the ease with which we exposed ourselves in the beginning. So very young, but so old. Even then, we were already so far from the raw and untouched state of those who found themselves around us. Nothing could have explained the feeling in the pit of my stomach each time I disentangled the loose leaf to find your words. No sage conjectures, no careful perceptions, no calculated account could have revealed the weight each solitary sentence would hold. Even our own promises couldn’t really be understood, not in the beginning. Maybe not even now. But as I recall the early days and I think of the flecks of disjointed color, somehow both out of place and completely at home in your eyes, suggesting their mystery could not be distinguished on a whim, I believe it all. I believe in the broken pieces we united then, I believe in the tools we destroyed them with, I believe in the reparations so painstakingly made, I believe in the promises neither of us could keep. I believe in me, and I believe in you. And it’s all still there, those letters in a drawer, in the room we danced in.

(Source: storiesandsuchthings)

May 12, 2012

Fire Pit

Michael Curtis Houck

And that one night
that our friends came
back in town—it was
for Mothers Day. We
sat out by the fire and
roasted marshmallows
for smores and drank
and laughed and glowed
in the dark.

The look on your face
expressed your heart,
happy, and that night
you slept hard.

(Source: storiesandsuchthings)

1:17pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/Zt-MywLLeZNi

(Notes: 3)

Filed under: Creative Writing Poetry Poem Spilled Ink Blory Read This Critique THis Mashmallow fire submit follow smores reading writing reblog this

May 12, 2012

Times

Brittany Lauren Pittman

The back porch is sturdy, wooden, and screened in from the ever-mounting summer mosquito population. The wall thermometer’s red line rests at the 70 degree mark, and a gentle breeze occasionally causes the screened wooden door leading to—or from, depending on where you stand, of course—the outside world to stir ever so slightly. This night, like all others, the porch seems grey around the edges where the light filtering from the adjacent kitchen window does not quite reach. It isn’t quiet or eerie, just the sounds of the odd car driving past, perhaps a patron of one of the nearby bars returning to his bed with a one-time lover to explore for the night, or some mother’s child creeping in past curfew to take his chance that the heavy old door won’t creak. The crickets and tree frogs and neighborhood cats all chirp and click and call and go dutifully about the activities that wild creatures often find themselves obliged to at these dark hours. Inside the house, a television remains awake while its watcher has fallen asleep on the couch, and its sounds reach the porch, muffled but certainly not abashed at their presumptuousness.

In cushioned wicker chairs, and having assumed various poses of comfort, rest three teenagers, two Pauls and myself. We are talking and laughing and smoking out of a glass Sherlock pipe, carefree and invincible as any recent high school graduates could ever hope to be. Each of our trio is bound for a different university, and we have determined that we will spend every day and every night of this bittersweet summer basking in our freedom and youth and relative beauty. We pass the pipe around on this night, same as every night since graduation, but we know, each of us, that tonight will be the last evening of the sort. June and July seemed so languidly to have passed, with days and nights to spare and be had as they came; but August has rolled in on a gust of wind such that carried us friends from the first to the twenty-first in what seems so absurdly short an amount of time that I often find myself checking the clock to be sure it isn’t sneaking around and skipping over minutes, hours, or entire days when it thinks I’m not looking. At the moment, I am reaching for my cell phone to do exactly this, when my best friend, Paul, not my boyfriend, Paul, looks over the pipe at me and sighs one of his disapproving sighs. Paul does not believe in cell phones and takes personal affront when one is used in his company.

“Settle, Cujo, I’m just checking the time. It seems like it’s been getting away from me lately. Doesn’t it seem like someone’s been setting the clocks forward? Wasn’t it just July? What are we doing going to college tomorrow? I certainly don’t know what I want to do with my life yet. I’m not ready, I mean, are you guys ready?” And I can hear the desperation in my own voice as the words spill out like salt when someone’s tampered with the lid of the salt shaker.

Paul puts down the pipe, frowning. My boyfriend, Paul, gives me a peculiar look, the kind where his eyes look worried; it makes me think I’ve said something that makes him think of something he doesn’t want to think about, and I’m sure he’s thinking the same thing I am: Summer’s almost over.

No one speaks, and I hear a moth tapping on the pane of the window behind my seat, attracted to the light and blind to the world and the now solemn-faced youths gathered beneath him. I think about him, and I understand his plight, although he probably doesn’t himself—the staid reality that is his vain pursuit: he will probably die in this window, reaching for the light and never knowing the feeling of achievement. I feel helpless suddenly, like a moth in a window pane, constantly running into the glass and never understanding why I can’t have what I want. I look up pleadingly to my comrades, and though I feel that I should be ashamed to say it, I let myself be honest for the first time since I made the decision to spend four more years in school; since I took out the loan to pay the tuition my struggling family couldn’t afford; since my mother convinced me that the only way to better myself was to go to college and get a good job and a house so that I could one day get married and have a family and put down roots and get old and wise; I know they’ll disagree, because the college experience is what everyone wants, but I love these boys, and so I tell them,

“You guys, I really don’t think this is what I want.”

(Source: storiesandsuchthings)

May 10, 2012

Trouble

Mandee Price

There was something about her as a child, something bright and airy, like the salt in ocean air, just full enough to find its way into your memory for the dusk of ages. She wasn’t without troubles, as no children are, but it didn’t trouble her as it did so many. It had always seemed to her that troubles would come with or without a person’s permission, so one ought to go on being happy without the permission of Trouble himself. Cold night air tickled her fancy, and she loved the green in the trees and the grass and the other things that grew. Even more, she loved to hear the words that told her why the grass was green and the sky was blue and the clouds dropped the rain wheresoever they pleased, and why the stars were so bright beyond the atmosphere, as if they were embers floating upward from a bonfire, finding their way into the night. Oh, she loved the words.

As the seasons changed impatiently, so did the child she had been, until one day her blossoming uncovered a new kind of twinkle in Trouble’s eye. It was beautiful, poetic really, how quickly he became an expert botanist in order to investigate her lovely blooms. As it were, these childhood friends had been forever interlocked and most amicably connected, but as the girl began to flower, Trouble could do nothing but fawn over her. The moon kept her busy, though, with her tantalizing frown and her silent cries, and the sun caressed her young shoulders with his fiery embrace. With these and other lovers afoot, the poor girl had no time for Trouble’s romance; and it is true, perhaps, that she noted not his change of heart, going on about the business of growing up without much more than the casual smile she had allowed for him all their long lives.

There is no stranger to the ache of a love unrequited, and many a broken hearted soul could intimate to anyone the demise begotten them as their darling relentlessly paid them no more mind than a mitten without a match. Trouble’s heart grew colder with Sun’s every endearing stroke, and his mind began to slip a little more each time Moon sang his love to sleep. His affectionate gaze became beams of adoring desperation, shot from eyes greener with envy than any blade of grass the girl had ever seen. He fantasized, he stradegized, he planned, and he plotted, and then finally, one day, Trouble raised his head to the sky, leering at Sun and Moon with disdain and cackling in elated victory. He would court her with everything inside him, he would not rest until he could lay her down at night beside him, reaching places within her that not even the stars had shed their light upon.

Trouble was inexplicably charming, you know, and it wasn’t long at all before he could almost taste the salty air she breathed, she was so close to being his. He took her sailing in late August, the bay aglitter, to promise Sun he could play coy no longer. They dined by candle light on the French Riviera, sipping glasses of wine older than dirt and sweeter than honeysuckle, to swear to Moon she could no longer steal her with lullabies. The girl grew to know his love for her, and something inside her thrived on it from time to time, but they were so often embarking on his grand adventures that she rarely found time to sit alone on the shoreline of the Atlantic, book in hand, toes tracing careful outlines of dream clouds in the think, wet sand. The salty air of the ocean began to forget their home in the gentle tissues of her lungs, and the summer wind drew away from her as an old grey mare pulls a cart to market, plodding away with such dreadful sluggishness, she hadn’t the slightest inclination to notice its leave until its absence was no longer fresh and could not be rectified with anything of which she then knew.

It was then, one day, that Trouble stopped loving her. He had conquered his foes, captured his princess, but what treasure was she now? What could he adore in her, now that the salt and the wind and the light were gone from her like memories of a relative whose funeral was already planned? Trouble could see that he had taken these things from her, had robbed her of the child she had been, and late one night he packed his things and departed, leaving only a simple note in his wake:

My darling angel, I have stolen the very air from your lungs, and without air one cannot live. You have died with me, and we shall rest in peace like two stars, shooting into oblivion, momentarily engraved in the infinity of the skyline. Let her go, my love, and begin to live. Then I will return to you, and we shall learn to die again.

And this way they lived, Trouble and his lover, for the rest of their days. He never gave up on her, and though she flourished in his absence, she could never seem to leave him behind permanently. But as many times as they were resurected, she never lost her way so far as being departed from the salt and the wind without reunion. So take heart, young lovers. Trouble may haunt your bed, but the ocean will always take you back.

(Source: storiesandsuchthings)

May 8, 2012

The Cast-Iron Garden Bench

Shago Elizondo

I think about the cast-iron garden bench
that used to sit patiently
among the flowering quinces and bird baths
in the backyard of my grandparents’
South Pasadena home—
and strange, the likeness of color
between it and the surrounding greenery,
almost as if it adopted that color
just to fit in.

How it waited for anyone
to offer it attention—even if just
to sit on it for a moment to enjoy
the sound of light traffic on Indiana Drive,
the bitter smell that the myrica bush
gave off when it was growing,
or the view of the wrought-iron
spiral staircase that led to absolutely nowhere
(I like to think that Grandpa
had a good laugh when he put that in,
right next to the tree
which I always thought reached into Heaven).

Now I imagine that the bench
would try to seduce any wanderer
who happened to walk past it—
maybe letting out a whistle,
or reciting La Belle Dame Sans Merci
to someone nearby.

How it would flaunt its blemishes—
the missing nub on its back right leg,
which was replaced by a small piece of
2X4—the harsh indention on its back
from when Uncle Julian slammed it
with a metal baseball bat.
Any other bench would demand repairs or replacements.

Visitors would just stand in front of it,
remarking at how wonderful
the primroses were coming in,
or how tall the sunflowers had become.

I’m sure that my grandparents
pictured sitting in that bench at the conclusion
of every day, enjoying their café
and watching over Pasadena and Alhambra
as the two cities readied themselves for bed.
But they never did that. Not once.
And no guests were ever seduced
into sitting on it—not when the bar was
fifty feet away on the terrace.

I didn’t even sit on it.

Now, in my old age,
I wish I would have sat with it—
maybe I could’ve brought out the turntable
and contemplated some Oscar Pettiford Quintet
with it, talking about how Coleman Hawkins’
solo in All the Things You Are
sounds like a woman saying Yes.

But there was just something uninviting
about the guaranteed coldness of its touch,
the stubborn hardness of its stance,
the antique floral pattern that it wore all the time.
Even the infinite green spots
that were helplessly bespeckled all over it
were enough to evoke images
of a pubescent teen with acne.

It had dreams of grandeur
on its little spot in the garden,
but the poor fool never had the sense enough
to unbolt itself from its concrete base
and walk directly into traffic,
where maybe then it could’ve been noticed

(Source: storiesandsuchthings)

May 6, 2012

How to Break Up With Somebody

Luke Sineath

We were at a coffeeshop eating breakfast, and she told me that when she was in graduate school she tried to put on a feminist fashion show, but it never materialised. I questioned the concept of a feminist fashion show—I said something like how fashion is about the clothes, not the person, & models try to get thin to disappear, to not exist, the woman is nothing but a hanger—something along those lines—& then she said that there was too much to respond to & she had to go—then, while we were walking home I could tell she was brooding. I asked her what was wrong.

“You’re so dismissive. You read one book on fashion and now you think you’re an expert.”

“Expert? I never said I was an expert. I never made that claim.”

“No, you didn’t use that word—it was the way you were talking, the way you were picking apart every little thing I said.”

“What do you mean? I can’t have an opinion on anything? I’m just expressing an opinion. I happen to believe things about the world, you know.”

She groaned.

“Fine!” I said. “You know what? Fine! I won’t talk to you about fashion until I’ve read ten books!

“Oh my god,” she cut in. “That would be even worse!”

“What? Are you serious?”

“Yes! I haven’t even read ten fashion books! I don’t have time to read ten fashion books! I’m at work all the time!”

“Oh, come on. You’ve read ten fashion books—”

“Only parts of them.”

“What about graduate school? You read a bunch then.”

We were just about home by now.

“But that was a long time ago.” She was still shouting.

I waited for a burgundy red car to pass and crossed the street, she crossed further on. After we went inside I did dishes while she packed up her things. When she had everything but her cat I sat down in the living room.

“Did you take my key off your key-chain?” I asked.

She glared at me. “Yes.”

And then she was gone.

I found my key later, on the table by the bed, next to my copy of Atonement, which she’d asked to borrow last time but never actually read, other than the sex scene which she dug around for, because I told her it was hot.

(Source: storiesandsuchthings)

May 3, 2012

These Pockets

Elaine Hsiang

recently
i’ve had a thing for big pockets
i can
hold so much:
bottles, phones, wallets, keys,
our hands we can hold
hands in these pockets

recently
i’ve had a thing for big pockets
i can
hide so much:
candy, loose change, journals, chapstick,
our love we can hide
love in these pockets

lately
it’s been kind of chilly, i’ve been wearing
coats with big pockets
let’s hold and hide our
lovehands in them, hold,

where only we can
feel the warmth

(Source: storiesandsuchthings)

May 3, 2012

Musing

Paul Hovey

what makes Us what We are?
are We Reflections of Reflections
of Events of the Past?
are We predictions of the Future
that the Lord made to last?

what is it that We’re made of?
are we Elements and Water
fixed by Chance and Fate?
or a hapless Orphan’s Daydream
that starts too Early and ends too Late?

what binds our Moral values?
what tells us Wrong from Right?
does the justice Court define Us?
or do the Heaven’s supply the Light?

(Source: storiesandsuchthings)

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Biutiful (2010)

This movie was phenomenal. Javier Bardem is an inspiration.

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