Maggot

The first time I saw her she was screaming.

I'd heard of her before that day, a friend-of-friend situation. I think it was Bridgett who first brought her up, referring to her as "that skinny bitch that Tom hangs around...you know, that wispy little blonde that never shuts up?" I had no idea who Bridgett might be referring to.

No One Watching, 3

The third chapter of the novel I started writing 2 years ago. This chapter ends very abruptly. I'm not sure why I did it that way. I remember I was really weird about writing this and didn't want to tell anyone that I was writing it until it was finished. That was my master plan. I was going to write this whole novel and end it with THE END and print it up and dedicate it to this person who inspired it by not being in my life and then I was going to send it to this person and never ever think about him/her again because I would have already written THE END, our story would be over and there'd be nothing left to say. Needless to say, things did not go as planned. 

On January 4^th, the quote of the day was from Doris Lessing. Frankie had never heard of Doris Lessing, but she found the quote to be insightful: “All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under the flesh.” She was lying in bed contemplating sanity and flesh and what things she found to be delightful when Tim entered her room.

“Oh, come on. You’re not out of bed yet? The bros are coming over today,” Tim whined at his apathetic roommate.

“The ‘bros’? Since when do you have ‘bros’?”

Man and Wife

Here is the crappy AIS story I wrote like 3 years ago. Basically, I've been through my computer and deleting things, and I keep finding things that I forgot I wrote. Someday I will maybe rewrite this, though this is the second version of it. Originally, they were ice skaters. I probably have that one somewhere, too. I think this was when I wanted everything I did to be plot driven and not character driven, and I don't really know.

           “Adam Birch?  I ain’t seen you since you were in the ninth grade!  You must be graduated by now.  That right?” Mrs. Jameson asked, walking up to the glass counter of the butcher’s shop.

           “Good afternoon, Mrs. Jameson.  Yeah, two years ago.”  Adam added quietly, “First in my class.”

           “I always knew you’d do well!  You got a good head on your shoulders.  You goin’ to school?  A smart boy like you oughta get himself a college education.”

           “No, ma’am.   Can I help you pick anything out today?  We got a real nice special on this smoked turkey and we—“

           “Last I remember, you had a pretty little girlfriend.  What was her name?” She struggled to remember, Adam offering no help.  Finally, it came to her, “Eva Jane! Eva Jane Wilson.  That was it.  Whatever happened to little Eva Jane?  You were absolutely head over heels for her.”

           “I never knew a girl named Eva Jane, ma’am,” Adam replied coolly as he bent down to reposition a large ham in the display. 

No One Watching, 2

The second chapter of the novel I started 2 years ago to fill in the space of someone I missed (still miss?). 

As Frankie made her way to her car, she realized that a black t-shirt had been a poor choice. It was a typical summer day in New Orleans, replete with stifling humidity. Getting inside her decrepit Honda, Frankie scorched her hand on her seatbelt. It seemed to be at least twenty degrees hotter inside the car, despite the fact that neither of the windows in the backseat rolled up all of the way. On a good day, Frankie could beat her dashboard until the air conditioning kicked on, but on this day, she was not so lucky. After eight minutes of banging her fists against the dash with all of the ferocity a skeleton could possibly muster, Frankie gave up and cranked the windows down as far as they’d go.

Twisting the volume knob on her car’s stereo, she found that Garbage’s “I Would Die for You” was skipping in her CD player. She instantly recognized the CD as one of Luly’s mixes and remembered how long it had been since she’d driven her car. Her mind flashed to a memory of roughly ten weeks ago when she’d spent three hours sobbing hysterically in her car and mouthing the words to the songs on Luly’s mix. Tim had been forced to remove Frankie from the car forcefully when a woman from their apartment building became irritated with Frankie’s refusal to quiet down and threatened to call the cops.

An observation on the theory of survival of the fittest, as applied to airplane attendants

The man in the orange baseball cap leaned back in his chair.  He casually glanced around the terminal for any sign of an attractive woman, but there were none in sight.  Even the nearby stewardesses left much to be desired.  There had been a time when it was a requirement for all stewardesses to be attractive, but that time had come to a screeching halt after a wave of equal opportunity law suits were decided in favor of the ugly people of America. 

“The world is going to shit,” thought the man.  “Far too much equality for the world to function the way nature intended it.”  

No One Watching, 1

Once upon a time (2 years ago), I missed someone very much and began writing this novel in attempt to get my mind off that person:   

            The quote of the day was a bible verse from Corinthians. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast. It is not proud. Frankie was not a religious person. She did not necessarily believe in God, but she did not think about those things enough to consider herself an atheist. Theistic beliefs aside, Frankie liked to consider herself a fairly spiritual person. Lately, however, she was feeling very unspiritual. In many ways, Frankie felt sanctified when she created art. Unfortunately, it had been days since she had felt inspired enough to get out of bed, let alone pick up a paintbrush.

As a result of Frankie’s lack of inspiration, all that she had created in two and a half months was a page of worthless doodles of her cat, Jean Beignet Ramsey. This is not to say that Jean Beignet Ramsey was not a worthy object of Frankie’s doodling. Beignet was the cutest ball of orange fluff that anyone had ever seen, and Frankie loved her more than she loved most humans. Frankie’s cat had even been the source of inspiration for one of her best paintings: the cat once spent hours playing in a cardboard box, which caused Frankie to do a painting of herself in a box. Her art professor interpreted the painting as “a feminist commentary on the modern day sexualized female.” He put it in a big art show. It won some award that Frankie had never heard of, and Frankie got her picture in The Times Picayune.

The Ballad of the Busboy

If only I had the same

pomegranate palms

tangerine phalanges

fizzypop fingernails

that the shortskirt sugarplum fairies

carry on the ends of their arms

when they dance in the dreams of

every boy who ever lived

For now I can barely talk

them into dining from my finest

china let alone eating out of

my perpetually sweatsoaked sootstained

soft as hardwood hands

Butter or Jelly?

Every day when you wake up

you’re hungry to get me hot

and stick things in my slots,

but where’s my thanks?

And whose gonna clean up

the mess you left inside me

once you take out what popped up

and head to work?

You’ll leave me in the kitchen,

until you return home

for your lunch break,

during which you never

take me out even once.

Wish

This was the first flash fiction I ever attempted (I think it's from 2009): 

“What are you doing?” Cassie barked through a mouthful of minty foam.

With my face still pressed against the bathroom window, I decided it was safe to leak my secret plan to my big sister.  I told her, “I’m gonna find the biggest, brightest star and wish Dad home to make pancakes for me tomorrow.”

Symbiosis

I tell Lacey I'm thinking about cutting my hair. Charley's girlfriend Mina says when I wear my hair long, she forgets I'm not a girl. She gets confused when I go into the men's room. Charley says that Mina doesn't know what she's talking about.
Lacey says she thinks I look good, even if I do look like a girl; she kisses me, hoping to distract me but failing to do so.
Charley pipes in, "Don't worry about. It increases your options, if nothing else." When me and Charley go out, I'm sometimes I'm mistaken for his little brother, sometimes his girlfriend. I guess, honestly, my role in his life is somewhere in between the two. Or maybe that's not right. Maybe it's something totally different, like something other people don't get because they haven't experienced it.

Prove me wrong

Well, brother, I have my reservations about you.

You seem like the type to tell me that pain in the shape of a heart is unnatural.

Unnatural is a natural born killer.

He took the lives of eight adolescents just last week, but no one has the balls to put unnatural on trial.

No one has the guts to stand up and say GUILTY!GUILTY!GUILTY!.

We are victims of hatred, murders, suicides, sins.

We have not been granted immunity, and we've all helped hide a body or two.

We are too small to peer into the mirror, unafraid that unnatural will stare back.

We are all too small to stab the sharks in business suits, too small to string unnatural up but his $400 cufflinks and leave him to rot.

We are too small to shatter our bathroom mirrors and cut unnatural out of our faces, out of our chests, with shards of glass.

We are too small.

And also with you

After you die, Mag told me, you're reduced to a cold mess of body parts. You stop being a person. You're just a cluster of cells. Inanimate, your body is something separate from what it was when you were alive. You're an empty shell, and just like that, the shell has nothing to do with the creature it once contained. And that was the real kicker, she said, that even if she put all his pieces back together, her dad wasn't in there anymore. Gluing together a shattered jar won't bring back the bit of life that once lived there.
His body was on the floor, still dressed in his Easter clothes. His hand was limp, but his finger was still looped around the trigger. There was a lot of blood, bits of brain and bone, Mag said. The same things that make up my head, or yours, or anyone's. The same things that were working in me so I could process the scene, so I could scream and scream and cry and call out, "DADDYDADDYDADDY, I LOVE YOU, DADDY NO, PLEASEPLEASEPLEASE,"—my parts that made me scream for God to help me, my parts that are the only reason that I can conceive of a God, were firing faster than I can understand, while his were spilling out onto the rug, soaking into the floorboards. A mess of parts, disassembled and broken. And they'd been in tact just minutes before, keeping him in there. He'd been in there, and these parts, his shell, his jar, had been able to pour my cereal, to drive me to Church, to sing the hymns with me, to put both hands together and pray, to say "Amen," to take his neighbor's hand, to say "Peace be with you."

A stranger speaking in tongues

Your lips: not thick, not supple, soft,
your slick tongue strong as a slug,
too much gum for some people
but I appreciate all that pink.
Each of your teeth like a baby pearl
sharpened into something squarish,
and each not quite but almost white,
so perfectly spaced that I find myself
sinking into each sliver of a gap
every time you slip on that sly smile,
parting your lips just to purse them again
and parting once more to please me,
but tonight I'll only see your sick grin
in memories meant strictly to tease me.

Worth

I can't believe I found this! I thought it was gone forever. It's not very good, but I wrote it a long time ago for someone . Ah, nostalgia. This is my first Dez and Lia story. Dez (sometimes called Carmilla or Carmella) and Lia (sometimes called Kit) are reoccurring characters in my writing. 

Once upon a time there was a very pretty girl whose hair was made of gold.  Though she was more beautiful than any queen, the girl came from the poorest family in San Quirico, a tiny town outside of Florence. Signora Guinizelli, knowing that she would eventually be forced to give up her youngest daughter, named her child Desideria.

Something Like Belonging

The doctor exhaled deeply as he leaned back into his seat. “I’m in a field of petunias.  I’m fishing at Lake Tahoe.  I’m at home in my Sleep Number Bed.  I am relaxed,” he thought.  Really he was hundreds of miles off the ground in an unsettlingly uncrowded plane, and this fact made it impossible for the doctor to relax.  He discretely reached into the pocket of his khakis, wrapping his fingers around a little plastic bottle of Xanax.  He looked around the cabin to make sure that no one was looking at him, but just as the doctor was about to twist the lid off of the bottle, he noticed a woman staring at him from a few seats over. 

The woman had tiny black eyes hidden beneath enormous puffs of wrinkled skin.  At first, the doctor was unsure if the woman was really looking his way or if the shadows cast by the bags around her eyes simply made it look as though she was staring, but the mere thought of someone watching him was enough to make him withdraw his hand from his pocket.  The doctor picked up one of the ancient magazines from the back of the seat in front of him, flipped it open, and pretended to read an article about poverty in Burundi.

The woman had been staring and continued to stare as the boney, graying doctor feigned interest in a magazine article in order to distract from his obvious discomfort.  The doctor reminded the woman of her second husband, who had spent most of his life worrying about money.  “Hilda, I just don’t know if we have the money to be buying the deli cheese,” he would say to her, as if the seventy-eight cent difference in price could be the difference between a comfortable retirement and sleeping in an alleyway for the rest of his life.  He had been a dentist, and he had died of a heart attack at age forty-one, never reaching the cushy retirement that he had worried over for most of his life and without ever truly being able to enjoy a slice of deli cheese.  Hilda had always felt sorry for her second husband.  She felt sorry for the doctor, as well.  She had a thought that she would go up and sit next to him.  She would put her arms around him.  She would say, “hush,” and everything would be better.  Hilda decided to remain in her seat. 

The doctor looked back at the woman, hoping that she had finally turned away or fallen asleep.  She had not, but when the doctor looked back at her, she caught the nervous desperation in his glance and turned to look at someone else, hoping to put him at ease. 

There was a girl in a wheelchair toward the back of the cabin.  Her legs were long and spindly.  She had all the appeal of a spider dying a slow death due to malnourishment.  The girl in the wheel chair looked bored, as teenagers often do.  She would have liked to listen to her headphones, but she had forgotten to pack them.  Had Hilda known, she would have offered up her headphones, but of course, there was no way for her to know this.  Hilda continued to stare.  A thin middle-aged man in a royal blue tracksuit, perhaps the father of the girl in the wheelchair, sat next to her. The father sat rigidly in his seat, a brutal hunger forcing his face into a scowl.  Hilda thought of putting her arms around the father and telling him “hush,” the way she’d imagined comforting the doctor, but the “hush” was not quite enough.  Hilda would have to kiss his forehead; she would have to say, “Regardless of what you think, you are loved.”  She thought that if she did this, he would turn into a teddy bear, something soft, something less angry.  As Hilda tried to imagine what the father would look like as a teddy bear, he turned to her and glared fiercely.  Caught by surprise, Hilda felt a tickle when the glare hit her.  She made a sound—a half giggle, half gasp.  It went like this: Gah-aah!


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To read the rest of the story, visit https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/175850 or look up Calla Lilies by Holly Combs on Amazon.com and download the e-Book.