Even if I wasn’t his Favorite, He Loved Me All the Same
We'd spend time together, me coming up to sweep the sawdust from his feet. The closest thing I had to a father figure. This old man, this 83-year-old man would be fixated on the self-built wooden table before him, sawing something, tossing the safety off like it was an option. I know it. I reminded him so often.
And then, after I swept the sawdust from the floor and he picked his feet up so as to let me do the job I had designated myself. I asked him. "Pop, what might you be doing up there anyway?"
"Well, come 'ere and listen and I'll show you."
And my plump little face with my ugly thick girls tied behind my head in that suffocatingly tight ponytail would come up beside his right, then yank to his left so I might not obstruct his arm.
"You see this?"
I stared at it, my eyes turning up to him and nodding.
"You know what this is?"
"No sir."
"This is a carpenter's square."
"A carpenter's square?"
And he nodded to me, pulling a piece of wood up to himself, the smell of sawdust hitting my nose, making it wrinkle as my brown eyes stared down at the wood he was scratching with his knife-sharpened pencil. "You find the spot you want to measure," he grumbled, my ears listening hard to his low voice, so much that I only made out a few slivers of his words. "And then you make you cut. You measure twice."
"Twice?"
"Twice."
And I sat out there with him in the heat, in the house built on the sloped hill that could have caved in at any point and taken us all with it, the sandy slope, and the smell of sawdust rubbing off his thinning skin onto my fresh skin.
And we would stand there together, me watching him silently, as he spoke and talked and showed me how he learned to be a carpenter.
Rest in Peace, Pop. I loved you in life as I loved you in death. <3
Tough Shit
Let me preface this. I was that girl in school, the easy pickins, the one guys would try to make bets on to get her to go out with them because I wouldn't go out with anybody. My first motto was no and my second was 'how bad do you want your ass kicked?' before smiling at them and letting them discern if I was joking or not.
I purposefully spent a majority of my time around men. I never fit in with the girls.
I just silently sat around the girls at school, looking rather dumb with my thumb up my ass because I couldn't share their interests and I think they sensed it and I was cast out further from their cliques till I disappeared into the fray of sweaty teenage bodies.
Now... I'm not saying, smack a guy in the face, but you're going to have learn the tango. The lingo, the dance of how to get em' by the gonads and really serve up a taste of their own medicine.
I've had a classmate - unfortunately to my knowledge doing drugs - attempt to pop up from the desk I flipped him off of, it was my desk and I asked nicely twice, and he rolled his eyes at me and ignored me before taking the guerilla stance like he might sock me in the face. I was always ready for the hits, but they never came. Fat bluffs on meaty arms and even meatier heads.
I met guys the size of The Mountain with softer hearts that flowers in sunlit fields.
I met girls who chased into the fray, who liked to break their hearts on guys who were just looking for a notch in their bed and then I'd shake my head. My dignity was always number one and if I left no openings on my body, then it was all verbal sparring that I had to concern myself with.
So here, you can see how - clipped of the true vulgarity I could have and probably would have seen - I might handle it as I am now a little more articulate than I did then. I just wasn't a word smith and it's hard to jab back at an idiotic remark that's probably more composed around 'that's what she said' and 'dumb bitch' which is so often quipped. I think my favorite is just playing the edge of the paper till the other person can't mentally spar because their eyes are filled with rage and their cheeks full of the yell threatening to burst through. The end of the argument.
My advice, keep everything playful. Just above flirting as a harsh reminder that if he wants to get at you or even have an interest in your persona, he might need to up his A game a little and stop being vulgar enough to get you to spar with him a little more in a fun manner. In a friendly one. That may not happen, but for men... Let's keep this between you and me... From someone who hangs out with a lot of them. They're big ol' sacks of emotion, they just put better masks up because society likes men to be tough, so when you got him good. You'll know.
Do your best, kiddo. You got this. <3
___________________________________________________________________
I looked him up and down, a sly smirk on my youthful face. "What, you lookin' at me?"
"Nah, I don't like dumb bitches."
"Eeee- scathing," I retorted, rolling my eyes at him as if that was the worst I heard. "I'm sure if we checked our grades, we'd see who the real jackass is, but I'm sure it'll have to be something. Something to save your fragile ego."
And I know he might turn red in the face, might pop up from his seat to thwack me in the head. I expected it and if he did, I'd be smiling at him even after it was all said and done.
"You're a real-"
"Oh, before you speak."
"AH!" he screeches at me. "Can't h-"
"AH!" I screech back at him, devolving into a fit of laughter. "Fucking Christ, my ears are bleeding."
"Crazy bitch."
"Mm, maybe, but not for you. If I did, I think I'd have to dig my eyes out of my head first and blot out the scent of Axe. It's Axe, right? God. Pathetic." And so I might turn, and he might tug at my thick hair - thank God I straightened it to perturb some of the more curious hands that liked to wrap their fingers in it and yank - and my hands would be swatting at him. I'd be glaring, grinning sinisterly and ready to pounce on him in a knock-out drag out fight.
"I wouldn't." I warn.
"What are you going to do?"
"What are you going to do? Hit a girl? I'm sure that'll be a good image for you. Keep trying."
"Mm, I'm good. I think I'd rather-"
"Oo, 'fraid not. I've seen better. Again. That Axe, my good bud. It's a menace to the room. It assaults my nose." And he might start yammering on, my hand echoing in a sort of funny pantomime, fingers to thumb, fingers to thumb in a rigid and comical motion as the other hand might prop my cheek up and my face tilt into my hand, my eyes close till he gives up. "That's what I thought, prick." And we'd dance again tomorrow or the day after, till he either gave up or I decided to find something better to tune him out with. It really never changes and I know this, but I know one thing... I'm ready to scrap. I'm the scrappy kind of girl, the one that boys all 'oooh' and 'aaah' at when you clack one of their 'buddies' just right in the face or serve them up with some quip good enough to make him shrivel up in that awkwardly short school chair. Would the office write me up? Eh, maybe... But I chat with them often. We talk. I talk. The faculty know me. Would I lie? Never. Not in a day. I am just that kind of girl. I am just that. I am very fine with it.
“You write? Describe it to me.”
Oh, just amateur.
It sounded an awful lot like “tell me about your day”⸺the person who asks it knows just as well as the person who’s being asked that nobody actually cares.
I felt a strong desire to brush off his request, even when the tiny flame sitting between us stuck its head out from above the rim to judge me.
But then I saw the glint in his eyes and I just couldn’t bring myself to snuff it out.
So toasty and warm.
“It’s clingy, like a flame. Kinda like how this tiny little flame keeps clinging onto the wick even though it knows it’s gonna go out in a bit"
I must’ve been feeling petty that day. Petty enough to get back at a flame for judging me.
"I write my words to be sharp and clingy like a hook. I’ll do anything to hold on to eyes and ears, anything to crawl my words into minds so that I can be heard. I’m usually too tired to do it out loud, so I let my hands weave my words, haha”
Somehow I found myself getting excited about this question, this question I never would have bothered to answer before. Somehow I felt like he was soaking in my words the way the cinnamon candle scent was soaking into my clothes. Somehow his presence had waxed my words so well they slipped out easier than butter.
And when I saw the flame dancing in his smiling eyes, I knew my words had reached him.
Different Times
Ohhhhhh this challenge hit me....I am just going to say I am praying for you. 11th grade...whew....Your wings and halo are guaranteed! Today, I was covering a class and I told an elementary student to stop drawing and start doing their work....the response was, "Ho, I don't need this BS (the non abbreviated version.) Gasps spread across the classroom....Being on the leadership team in my mind I was thinking - congratulations my darlin', you have just won the rest of the day off. I am going to speak as an exhausted educator...this year has been rough. We live in a world that is just a hot mess...we see that reflection of society in our kids. Kids see, hear and live this...so when they come into the classroom they bring it hard. I told the kids after that student was escorted from the room that we have choices....we don't always make the correct choice but sometimes we learn from our mistakes or our friends poor choices and we do better. I had a student come up to me after class and he made me smile....he hugged me, shook his head and this precious child said, "I just don't understand that kind of behavior." Driving home I was replaying the day and I must admit I was counting up how many days are left....28......I was at a four way stop sign and I just started laughing.....The ride in front of me was a Tahoe....I thought dannnnng I could get vanity plates that say Da-Ho or duh-ho. You have to laugh when you can. Hang in there!
Ghost Critter
I was never fast enough to find out what it was in that secret place we used to sneak off to. Late spring. All during summer. Whenever it wasn’t snowing. What kind of critter was it? Must have been a frog or a turtle. But to this day, it bothers me that I was never fast enough to get a glimpse of it.
Northeastern Indiana wasn’t just full of frogs and turtles, it had a lot of railroad tracks, too. All through its podunk-tiny towns. I was ten. When you walked a couple blocks down the street and stood on the railroad tracks and looked straight down them, the tracks looked like noodley-warped licorice strings, but parallel to each other, just going all over the place together. How the heck could a train ever go on THAT? Fortunately, trains only went by maybe once or twice a year, and super slow even then. We lived in a stagnant backwater of the state. Podunk and stagnant.
But if you followed those screwy tracks way down to the weird side of town where most of the really hardcore hillbilly kids lived—the kids that would all sit in the back of the schoolbus and say “mother-effer” every other word in their sentence—then down there like a mile or so there was this tiny abandoned building about the size of two 1970s telephone booths. The windows were out and the door was gone. I don’t know what this little building was, something to do with the train tracks maybe like a century ago. The floor was missing, and there was a little pond there. A puddle. Like all bodies of water in Indiana, if it ain’t frozen, it’s wet. Never dries out.
Our friend Skeeter showed us this place. He said there was a ghost critter in here, and he wasn’t lying. Even he doesn’t know what it is. The thing is TOO FAST. Every time you poke your head in the little shack, the thing is ALREADY GONE. All you see is the splash in the puddle. What the hell was it?
And I wonder why I didn’t try harder. Because these days, I’m thinking now it’s going to haunt me till my dying day. What the hell was that? What the hell was wrong with me for not getting a NET and going right on straight down there? Even if I’m right and it was just a turtle or a frog—frog, probably—still, it bugs me bad now that I never got to see WHAT KIND. What kind of spots did it have, if it even had any? How exactly big was it? Was it green or brown, or greenish-brown or brownish-green? How big was its mouth? What did its eyes look like? How pointy was the mouth, or was it more round?
I didn’t appreciate Indiana. I had a psychotic mother bad-mouthing it all the time in the background. So there was that. And then we moved away. And I never got to see what kind of critter that was. And I was never diligent enough to bring a net with with me and dredge that sucker out. So uncharacteristic of me. Was I already gone by then?
Thanks, Mom.
That might be in my Top 10 All-Time Things That I Would Do if I Had a Time Machine: Go back there with a fishing net—even a tea strainer!—and find that little guy.
Too into myself
“Well, I’m working on a novel right now.”
“What’s it about?” They inquire.
“Well, it’s a thriller. I’ve been working on it since 2018…I think. But I’m also working on some short stories.” I take a nervous sip of my beer.
They smile and lean in. “Tell me more about your novel.”
Although a bit hesitant, I say, “Well, there’s a protagonist, of course. And an antagonist.”
“Clearly!” They reply.
“Well, the antagonist came about when I woke up shouting his name 10-15 years ago. The name, the clothes, the facial features, the intimidation, the fear, the CHARACTER. Just hit me one night in my sleep.”
They look pensively at me across the table, slightly nodding.
“Well, this character…we’ll call him Bama; is the life of the novel, but the novel is inspired by true events that happened on a road trip I took back in 2003.”
“Interesting.” They smile. I think to myself, good I haven’t lost them.
“Yeah, so it’s challenging in that my story is based in a pre-tech era. At least the technology we’re used to today. No social media back then really.”
I pause to take another, longer sip of my dos xx, dressed of course. So, I lick the top of the bottle to get a hint of salt and tajin on my tongue. I squint and make a face to get a bit of attention, then proceed.
“I also tend to make a lot of pop culture references in my novel. I’m not sure if that adds to the story and sets the premise or if I’m just trying to hit to 40,000 word minimum for my story to be considered a novel.”
“So why have you not finished it?” They ask.
“Life. I say with a shrug. Honestly, I’m a busy person. I have most free time March through September and do my best writing while on vacation. Really, anywhere other than my home, which holds a myriad of distractions.”
Their eyes are still on me. Slightly nodding.
“You see, when I get bored…or have writer’s block, for lack of a better term, I switch and work on the two short stories I’ve been embarking on. Only a few pages in on both, where my novel is almost at 100.” I smile and lean back in my wooden, reclined chair. Proud of my hobby and the fact that they’re showing interest in me and my work.
“Very cool! So, what about your short stories. Are those thrillers too?”
I lean in again. “No. Surprisingly one is kind of fantasy, and I hate fantasy. It’s set in a past or future dystopian society and the other isn’t a romance story, but a love story. Some sex involved, but more about the peoples’ attractions to each other than the sex. And about their differences, of course.”
“Really!? Do you want to tell me more about those?” they ask.
“I think I need another beer first. The love story is about a couple of lesbians."
They lean back, with another pensive look, but smile. "Wow! You're all over the place."
"Indeed."
the cold keeper (Collab w/ DianaHForst
softly his fingertips glide against my skin
i wish i could say, i knew what it is
being trapped here, doesn't feel alone anymore
i would tell you how long i've been here, but i'm not sure
his skin is ice cold, but i like it that way
every touch says it's gonna be okay
i was scared at first, but now it's real
he's only keeping me here, so he can feel
love or affection, or just a woman's touch
just one cut at a time is enough-
smooth caress, the hopeless fire that dies out before it breathes.
And here I lie, beneath this coverless sky.
Dirt falling upon me, my dead eyes.
We were supposed to be, to be eternal were did I go wrong?
I did not know. But his hands were shaking,
the shovel spade digging into the wet Earth.
Digging it up in a struggle, covering bits of my face and the gaping worries.
The trembling breath. I know he didn't mean it, we were just touching at first.
Playing a dangerous game.
Playing for the passion of a desperate love and so I hope he might come back for me-
to dig me up again. And we might touch again,
the brush skin to feel his lips heavy on mine,
like the cold press of Death's.
Poker Face
His eyes shifted quickly, trying not to draw attention to his underlying intentions. A hand full of spades with more on the table. He was staring at a flush and he felt confident he wasn't going to dig himself into a hole this time. He took a sip of his watered-down whiskey and hoped he hadn't given himself away. He was a man that had been taught composure in the heat of a moment. His roots stretched back to the farm of the strong handed men before him. Hardy and tough. Home-grown. An apple that didn't fall far from the tree of fruit.
It all came down to this moment. Sweat ran across his forehead as the stakes increased. Should he pick up his winnings and call it a night? Or does the seed of the fire inside him burn too deep for quitting? After all he has been burned before.
The other men at the table appear calm and all too comfortable with their hoes sitting close by. Side pieces that accompanied them each Thursday night in the basement of the alley bar. He knew better than engaging in the infidelity game, poker was already challenging his marriage enough. 'Till death do us part.' He reminded himself regularly.
As he threw his last chunk of savings onto the table, he knew he was risking it all. But all he could see was what could be, a moment flowering with attainment. "All in." He said without a quiver in his voice. The river card was next. The fate of his future all in one card of the 52 in a deck.
His eyes widened and he didn't even realize he was holding his breath.
A heart hit the table. And his heart hit the floor.