Freewrite Fiction: Stars

In case you’ve been wondering, we have sailed through skin and sky. 

We reach up to where the two meet and cannot feel the difference. 

You hold a star in your hand, fingers cradling dust and light, waiting for me to blow at the universe, waiting for me to create a new milky way against the dark path we have traveled. 

Instead I lift my other hand to meet the first and cup the brilliance in my palms. 

 I don’t want to let go. 

You put your arms around my waist, tell me drop it all. You know it won’t last. Or it will burn through my fingers the older it gets, the longer it sits and invokes what we thought we would never say. There is a silence in the night that we can’t wrap ourselves around and so we walk on, afraid to be still, afraid we will disappear in the nothingness we have sewn from the sky. 

Where else can we go? We ask over and over as we fall down hills and run down valleys. Past the old cabin where you loved me so deeply, rough against pine floors and cobwebs, black widows watching us from clouded windows. 

You held my hand, fingers intertwined, you lifted me up and over the threshold and led me over the beach, mussel shells crushed beneath our feet. 

 It all seemed so easy then. 

You whisper to me: Let go of the stars. Stop reaching so high. 

All that you need is right here around you in perfect constellations for your happiness.

Fiction: Storied rocks

In case you have been wondering, the whistle I carved out of a willow branch has yellowed and dried into a stiff carcass of what was the notion of a tree. I keep it on the mantle next to the heart rocks and autumn leaves and smooth river stones that you I we collected on this journey. 

I am weighed down with the heaviness of hearts broken out of granite and shale. 

You are my heart and I hold your weight in my hand, craggy and cold, warming to my touch. 

If I could skip these stones over water, over the bay where we sat, feet in the sand, faces shining up to the full moon overhead, would the rocks sink to the bottom? 

Would they find a firm place in the muck and seagrass or would they toss along with the broken beer bottles and baby shoes and lost wedding rings? 

Would they become sand? 

The stories they could tell of warm pockets and well lined hands, of being witness to lovemaking in tents under the stars, of hawks screeching overhead and tiny ants crawling over imagined backbones.

All these stories crumbling into fragments, each grain a word, a sigh, the flip of a hand as you walked away. At the bottom of the ocean, all our stories mix and mingle, our worn heart rocks become a shifting solid ground. 

A home for Others in the darkness. 

Finally home.

Freewrite: The Story of We

We wander through the streets of this nothing town and take up residence in broken houses, broken hearts. 

We unwrap furniture as if it were dead bodies, dust settling on our thin wrists and tangled hair. 

We cook food on ancient stoves and pretend the war is over. 

We love deeply on the dirty rugs and cover ourselves with clothes that are wilted and holed. It is not like us to be so daring. But nobody cares (we don't) now that the other side has won. 

We tumble outside into the dying light of spring and throw ourselves into the sparse sheaves of grass emerging from cold earth. The flowers aren’t yet here but it doesn’t matter to us. There are branches overhead and worms underneath to keep us company. 

We bundle in blankets and read to one another under the covers of darkness and light.  

We wriggle and squirm and fight off the loneliness and can’t imagine life before/after/with one another.  

We can’t figure it all out, all these happenings and all this tragedy, but we are not built for such things. 

We can just be here right now and take in the wonder and pain. 

We rip each other to shreds and build one another up to be naked and free. 

We are here for this purpose and I cannot tell you otherwise. I don’t want to lie. 

We won’t be OK but in this moment we are alive.  
 

Fiction: Silent spines in my grounded sole

It is as if you saw me already. You with your faded jeans and blushing cheeks and dirty dusted hoodie. Your eyes covered by the edge of the fabric. I couldn’t understand what you were saying at first. You mumbled and quavered, your toes drawing dreams in the sand. I bent over slowly, as not to scare you back into the rabbit hole of your past, and I whispered a forgotten hello. But you knew exactly what it meant. The blue of your eyes showed no fear, no remembrance of the time before time began for us. It seemed so clear to you that I was to appear, you were to sigh, I was to breathe, you were to ask. 

I take your hand without a word. It lay limply in my own; a captured dove pale and still in my palm. We walk towards the hillside, towards rocks paused in the middle of their tumble down the slope, as if catching their breath before finishing the descent. We walk over clay red and rough beneath our bare feet. You squeak with pain when the cactus spine tears through the tender underbelly of arched bones and thin skin of your earthbound sole. The dove flies free of my grasp and flutters towards your splayed toes. A fuzzy ball of needles clings to the curve of your point. You don’t look up at me as you take knife from back pocket, position the blade between skin and fiber, and fling the source of pain, of gasps, of beauty, of defense back into the dust where we hadn’t looked before. You examine the tiny pinpricks letting the universe in through the bottom of your foot. You smile and brush at the ruby droplets and microscopic spines intermingling.

Knife back in pocket you climb up my body to standing, my gaze distant and startled at the sudden intimacy. Your hand is a sparrow and nestles its way into the nest of my fingers. You pull me along the path as the sun sets over the hill before us. The shadows disappear and we wonder how they (we) (you and I) ever existed.

Fiction: Memories

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You press your memories into my hand, word by word, petal by petal, thistle by thistle. 

I close my fist over the years and hold as tightly as I can. 

Are you giving these memories to me? Am I borrowing them? Are they shared? Like shared custody? Like a dog or child, weekends here at my little shack, memories running over tiled floor as spaghetti boils over on the stove, bubbling frothing blackening the range with unattended flour and salt. 

Or at your place, perfectly moped and dusted, blue green seaglass gleaming in bowls and jelly jars. Light skitters across the pumpkin pine floors and comes to a halt at the edge of the memory’s coat. You pick that one up, cradle the thought of me on Pfeiffer Beach close to your collarbone where the skin is so taut and freckled. You squeeze too tightly and the tiny fading memory slips through your fingers and comes back to me to hold it at a distance, too painful for either of us to cradle.

We will go back and forth for years until the memories’ coats are tattered from delivery, until their shoes are not shoes anymore but mere anklets, soles worn away by trudging through time. We don’t see eye to eye on their keep or care and we argue without speaking until the memories decide to emancipate themselves and be rid of both of our selfish heart homes.

They will pack their satchels of secondary memories (you wore a robin blue scarf that day at the beach) and be on their way into the ether. They will not look back. They will not stop. They may circle around someday and come knocking on our doors when we least expect it, but they will be free to come and go as they please.

But for now, nestled in my palm, they coo and rub and warm themselves in my grasp.

I smile up at you as you fade into the evening.

You are now a memory about passing on memories and my arm reaches out into the dust of your skin.

Fiction: Expanding

She grabbed his hand and led him from room to room, her fingers loosely coupled around his, tension between thumbs and fingertips falling away with each subsequent step.
She wanted him to follow, unled.
He slowed his pace as she raced through the memories of each doorway and plank, every window a story within a story.
She told them all. Like an accordion, the memories expanded in sound and movement. Her voice reverberating and then barely audible down dark hallways and up carpeted stairs. Her free hand fluttered into the past and reimagined the future the house would hold. She touched her belly round and hard. She touched the soft lines around her eye. She stopped and pulled his shoulder towards her chest, kissed his cheek shyly as if his DNA was not swirling within her belly too.
Every day was new with this thing this alien this person forming just inches from her heart. That was why he had to know the history. In case she swelled so large the house didn't recognize her anymore and erased all the memories (of her) in its walls papered with mahogany smoke and gravelly laughter. She had to do it quickly before the inches betrayed them and he too recognized her no longer.
At least he would have the memories of the house to hold him and remind him of the girl he once knew.