Felt

 Haven't written a poem in a loooong time, but this just came blurting out of me.  Still tinkering with it.

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Felt

There is a world where the adults can show a child what her future will be.

They use a felt board; the same kind used to tell Sunday School stories.

A woman with plastic-wrap hair holds shapes with her witch fingers.

She says, “Here is the boy who will break your heart.”

The little figure is tow-headed and dimpled.

“You’ll run in so many circles, it will take you years to untangle all the curves.

But you’ll be grateful for having fallen in love.”

The woman is sitting in a toddler-sized chair.  It scrapes on the linoleum as she scoots forward.

She says, “These two blurry shapes are your parents. 

Gods and demons.

They are warm.  Cold.  Massive.

Someday they will diminish, even as they come into focus.

Their pain will be as clear to you as the red triangle you see here.

They will become so small you could fit them in your pocket.

That’s when you remember to carry them at all times.”

The woman promises you a butterscotch if you remember your lessons.

She scatters flannel confetti all over the blue sky felt board of your life.

“These are the friends you will want because you like the same music.

But these bricks off to the side?  They are the ones who would lend you their bones.”

She shows you oceans and skyscrapers; all of your adventures.

"There is the whale who will fail to swallow you.

There is the Egypt you’ll be too afraid to leave."

You think it’s strange that she knows your favorite trees to look at from a window,

and the paint drip bumps on a school wall that will fascinate your fingers when you do the important thinking.

These lessons are comprehensive.

Five Sentence Fiction Spasm

Last minute 5SF post!  Too late to make it to the links at Lillie McFerrin's lovely site.  But I had an urge to get back in the flash game.  Fiction, that is.  So here's one for the prompt: faces.

If he's smoking while he makes a political point, his lip will curl up the same way it does when he's tearing lettuce leaves. After a long walk, he'll hold your hand lightly in his because he says he can feel the pulse in your fingers. “Still breathing,” he says. Noses never stop growing and his will only get longer. But you'll be under by then; leaving the trace of all these gestures.

Five Sentence Fiction: Candy

Not everything is in ruins.

But most of the good stuff is gone.

One morning I crank up my scrapped together go-kart and motor up the coast to a block of boutiques and cafes in a tourist town where even the always red horizon seems a bit dimmer.

I stop into a sweet shop and and there isn't much left, but I do find a Fun Dip under the cashier's drawer (which is still full of useless money).

I lick the marshmallow flavored stick all covered with cherry sugar from its little paper packet, and damn if the last sweet thing on earth doesn't taste just like it did when I was a girl, legs dangling in the water at the Yosemite Avenue Rec Center on a July afternoon in 1987, my eyes still burning from chlorine as “Like a Virgin” played on somebody's radio and was carried away on a hot breeze.

Once Upon a Time Writing Contest Submission!

     What More Is You Lookin’ For?

     A limo pulls up in front of the new aquarium.

     In the backseat, Nick’s mother straightens out her cocktail dress.  Nick’s earbuds are blasting some thudding trash.   She leans over to straighten his tie.  He slaps her hands away, flipping her off as he crawls out the door. 

     He shoves his way past old rich hags in diamonds and elbows a photographer in the stomach.

     His dad is CEO of Bex Oil.   Nick doesn’t know what CEO stands for.  He does know something about the beach.  His dad is killing the beach, destroying the earth, collapsing the universe.  Or whatever.  His biology teacher gave him nervous looks when they did papers on environmental issues.  Every kid in class talked about Nick’s father.  But Nick knows his dad is an asshole.  He heard the aquarium is some bone to throw at green people. 

     He snags booze and sniffs out an intern with shaggy hair who’s most likely holding.

     On a catwalk over a massive tank, Nick is stoned right into the floor and guzzling Dom Perignon.  The intern is babbling about selling out, Greenpeace, college girls...  Nick lies on his stomach and leans over the water.  There are tiger sharks in there, and manta rays, and other freaky creatures.  There are also stone statue things covered with barnacles and shells.  Nick blinks into the depths.  He can’t even see the bottom. There’s something in the corner of his eye…

     He squints.  Can’t see it straight on.  Something out of sight…  Boobs? 

     He sees boobs.  Almost.   But he can’t quite look at them.  Weird?  Boy, is he high.

     He hears a whisper and since he feels like he’s floating anyway, he pushes himself off the cat walk and into the blue as the whisper becomes a water logged scream.

     It’s three o’clock in the morning and their impossible, no doubt rehab-bound son is vamoose.  The mother growls obscenities and frowns into the manta ray tank, thinking that an ugly as hell little stone formation shouldn’t be blocking the pretty coral.  What dumbass put that there?

5 Sentence Fiction!: Tears

Tears
Private Radeena Spal has no qualms about the memory wipe, she’s just nervous about the possibility of it hurting as she clenches and unclenches her fists in Dr. Green’s waiting room.
She hasn’t slept properly in weeks.
Memories of those grey scaly humanoids exploding into bits, and of women and children who stared up at her with pleading yellow eyes keep her up at night in her quarters, hunched and sweating in the dark corner of her bunk, unable to put out of her thoughts how the shriek of the land fire sounded so much like a melancholy violin.
Dr. Green calls for her and she all but leaps to her feet, smiling tightly.
Thirty years later, she sits next to her second husband in a velveteen box seat at a performance of an interplanetary orchestra and as the gamey tentacle of a talented Vuol brings his bow down over the strings, Radeena feels an inexplicable sorrow so deep and aching that she must be escorted out of the theater because her weeping causes a disturbance.

5 Sentence Fiction: Scorching (Part 2 of 2)

Part 1 of this 5SF "two parter" is below, might want to read that one first.  But it's not like it's Breaking Bad or something, so whatevs.

Scorching

The fourth grade girls play Chinese jump rope and the thin soles of bright white Keds meeting that September-hot blacktop pavement right in the middle of Los Angeles make them jump high and quick like popcorn.

Bridget Cassidy curls her toes at the heat but remains still as a sentry as the band of elastic makes a thin indentation on the backs of her sweaty knees.

“You’re a slut and your mom’s a slut,” Katie Norris hisses  in her ear, appearing from nowhere and making Bridget jerk her head, startled.

Earlier that day, a strange woman pulled their teacher aside and said she needed to talk to Katie and two other girls in class–all of them are kids that Bridget also goes to church with and she thought it must have something to do with church, so why didn’t they want to talk to her?

There’s some connection here between the mysterious lady talking to Katie and the other weird stuff going on like how Bridget was suddenly not allowed to go to Katie’s slumber party (she cried for an hour) and her mom having a screaming fight with two people from church in the middle of the grocery store while Bridget watched, baffled and clutching a Betty’s Diary comic, and she wonders now as Katie stares at her with pink cheeked rage, why the girl is so angry when Bridget is always the one who’s left out.

5 Sentence Fiction (Part 1 of a 2 Parter): Wicked

-Catching up on the ole Five Sentence Fiction.  This prompt is a few weeks old.  Bit...heavy. I dunno, I'm tryin' somethin'.  Also, maybe not so much strictly inspired by the word 'wicked' which connotes a bit of playfulness. Ah well.  This goes with my next 5 Sentence Fiction for the prompt 'scorching' which I'll put up next.

Wicked

On a Monday afternoon in 1985, Lydia Cassidy calls Barbara Norris and makes her fears known: That new man at church is obviously trouble and shouldn’t be babysitting children, and did she know that  Barabara's daughter burst into tears at Vacation Bible School and pounded her group leader with tiny fists when the older girl tried to escort her to the bathroom? 

Barbara’s hands shake as the adrenaline flows and she says, “You must have a really dirty mind, Mrs.Cassidy, and I think you have mental problems.”

She tries to slam the phone down but she is shuddering with such violence that she misses the receiver.

She stands from the dining room table, grimacing at a nick in the otherwise flawless walnut and plans the rest of her day, shoving the phone call to the back of her mind as it will be dealt with later (“Lydia Cassidy screamed horrible things at me over the phone!”).

Barbara catches a reflection of her own stubborn beauty in the glass of the china cabinet and glances away, thinking that Lydia Cassidy has always been so dramatic, and these things are quite common.