writing @ rustyspork [dot] net

Short Shorts: Flight, Early Morning

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

These two are old, but I haven't written anything in weeks and this page needs some love.

Flight

He took off with a roaring. The prop blurred and he left the ground not through speed or wind or lift, but through pure magic. The taxi pulled away as his lights rose through the sky, and I slid across the seats to the left window to watch him bank, then turn south, and I watched as the flickering strobes took him farther into the inky sky, watched as the trees flying past hid him, watched long after his twinkling had become indistinguishable from the stars.

Early Morning

It's cold outside and I've lost my gloves, walking through the early-morning frost with my hands deep in my pockets and still freezing, trying to get home to you (curled up under the blankets, the warmth of your nude skin feeding their warmth, a cocoon of comfort made up of you and my down comforter), hurrying to slip into bed beside you, to wake you with my frigid hands on your warm back.

Sheri wrote at 10:15 PM

Work in Progress: Collector

Sunday, December 30, 2007

Sorry it's been a while, I haven't written much.

Collector

I keep a collection of hearts in my living room. In the farthest corner of the room, away from the couch and the TV, there's a huge wooden cabinet, and I keep them in there, carefully labeled and ordered by date. They thump dully behind the doors, the heaviest wood I could find, a constant drone of life, quietly monotonous and easily drowned out by turning the TV up a little too high, which I always do. The inane chatter of mediocre sitcoms and hushed tones of crime dramas fill the house at all hours, the rumble of a thousand drumbeats quietly thundering beneath.

Nobody comes to visit anymore. My friends were confused by the cloudless skies, waiting for the storm. They are convinced my house is haunted.

The hearts are all unique. Some are huge and kind, others tiny and black like charcoal. Many are broken. They sit in neat rows, thumping away behind a small label that bears a date, name, location and description. Some nights I stand before the open cabinet and read the labels, the names. The descriptions are varied, but they each end in a similar way: given, stolen, forgotten. On nights when the beat is too loud, too strong in my own chest, I go to the cabinet and take down a heart, cup it gently like water in my palms, remember how it got here. August 30; John; Giordano's Restaurant; Dated for 8 months, made love for the first time during a snowstorm, given. It thumps weakly in my hand. Replace it and take another, March 3; ???; airport; stolen. I hadn't even known I had it until security stopped me and opened my luggage and there it was, laying on top of my underwear and thudding away. The security woman told me I should get an organ cooler or it would die. I nodded politely and told her I wasn't worried.

I tried getting rid of them. I found the first one in my purse after I lost my virginity, June 26; Kent; hotel room; forgotten. I screamed and vomited and tried to throw it away, but I woke up the next morning with it on my pillow. I sold them, I buried them, I mailed them to Timbuktu, but they always came back and they kept on beating, so I built the cabinet.

A man is coming over. I met him in a bar; he doesn't know me. I believe this is for the best. I put out an ad. SWF seeks SM; only requirement is a firm hold on his heart. He shows up in a car too rich for my neighborhood. He is kind, and polite, and when we make love in my bedroom with the door closed on the cabinet, he is gentle. He spends the night and cooks breakfast. As we sit eating it on the couch, watching Sunday morning cartoons like a pair of children, he looks at the cabinet.

"There's a noise coming from in there."

I nod slowly, my mouth full of scrambled eggs.

He walks over to the doors and I cannot stop him, cannot explain a cabinet full of catalogued beating hearts in my living room. He stares inside the doors and I stop chewing.

Minutes later he is gone and for the first time, I am the one left crying. I curl on the couch as Bugs Bunny fights a losing battle against the drone in the cabinet. A heart appears on my pillow, but it is not his.

Sheri wrote at 11:13 PM

Work in Progress: The Aftermath of Lightning

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

I'd like some responses to this, please.

The Aftermath of Lightning

The strike left a tree on his back. It stretched with gnarly, knotted branches across his skin, hanging like old scrawny arms onto his shoulder and around his waist like an aged lover. The muscles were scarred deep, rivers of puckered flesh etched into his tanned hide. The tree arched from one hip, up his back and over the opposite shoulder, cauterized white bark, dead or dying branches with no leaves imprinted like a brand on his skin. It burned in the sun, eternally tender skin, like an infant's under the beating rays. He straightened with a groan too old for his age, sweat beading on his forehead and his chest. They sat in tiny domes and refused to move in the still, stifling air. He wiped his hands on jeans too soiled to care, smearing oil across years of dirt and paint and shit. Tossing the rag into the bed of the truck, rusted a deep orange over the original red, he looked out over the rows of corn, straight military lines, obediently still in the brutal heat. Miles away, looming heavily over the land, a storm was moving in. It hulked its way across the sky, a huge glutenous cloud that reached off into oblivion on either side. An uncomfortable breeze swayed the stalks of corn. It was coming, and he was going to be inside when it arrived.

The storm roared through within an hour. It was loud, bombarding the house with rain in huge clumps, fastballs of water pitched by an angry god. Thunder rumbled constantly like far-off timpani, cymbal crashes punctuating the suddenly-dark evening.

He hunched in a corner, eyes staring gapingly at the hardwood floor as it flickered like Christmas lights from the lightning outside. Electricity hung in the air. He imagined he could feel it, tingling along the gouges and puckered skin of his back, could smell the sweet acridity of charring flesh. Now, as then, he could feel his stomach turn. He vomited on the floor. The storm raged on outside as he buried his head against his knees and thought of winter.

Sheri wrote at 10:53 PM

Writing Exercise: Crash

Sunday, December 09, 2007

Sorry it's been a while. Pretty sure no one noticed. This page seems to average 3 hits a day.

Nov. 28: Crash

There were moments before and after. Before, there was a car, hulking in the dark garage like an obese lion stalking prey. There was a long stretch of highway, dwindling off into the night, an elementary art student's sketch of perspective, center line whizzing by, dash-dash-dash, like Morse code, an unheard SOS. There was a late-night radio announcer who cursed in between songs, because no one listened this late, anyway. The road barreled through the flat land of Florida, all straight lines and right angles, looking like a huge Etch-a-Sketch from the air. There was a support beam beside a lamppost, inviting in its stern presence, concrete resolution to, no matter what may come across it, remain there.

After, there was shattered glass on the asphalt, glittering under the streetlight, a million jagged stars against the black tar of the sky. There was the backseat, dirty leather and soda cans, and it all upside down, with the road above and the sky below. There was the whine of sirens, beautiful in their song, luring men off to their deaths in red and white painted vans. There was the pillar, as unperturbed as before, as it had been for years, perhaps since the beginning of time.

Sheri wrote at 10:57 PM

Writing Exercise: Fire Eater

Monday, December 03, 2007

Fire Eater

There is a difference between a fire breather and a fire eater. A fire breather is a coward, a fraud, like a summer action flick that blinds the audience with big explosions that ricochet but do not echo. A fire eater may also breathe fire, but he is an artist, and he suffers for his art. The audience is subdued' he is a suspenseful noir.

The fire eater would swallow anything. His penchant for downing daggers and riding crops and even a man's waking cane earned him the title of The Masochist. But his favorite was always fire. The way it lit the faces of the people in the first row, licked at the wooden rod, ached for more to devour, it thrilled him. And unlike the swords and assorted household implements, it left something inside him. He would open his jaw wide, like a python, and the fire would melt down his throat, warm as chicken soup. And when he pulled out the charred baton, the fire was gone. It stayed there inside him, heating the molten core of himself.

Sheri wrote at 9:25 PM

Writing Exercise: Secondary

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Nov. 20: Secondary

Anne had always been second to her sister. She was older, so it was strange, but the day her sister had been born, pink and already breathing and after only two hours of labor, with a head covered in fine platinum hair, she felt herself move in her parents' hearts. Her birth had been messy, like most, taking sixteen hours to finally arrive in the world, her mother screaming and then herself screaming when the doctor slapped her, feeling for the first time the powerful rush of oxygen in and out of her lungs, filling herself full to bursting, and she so fascinated by it that she continued to scream for days. She had been ugly and bloody, with the cheeks of a teenager on a newborn's face, bald as her father. Her mother had called her their little alien. And then her sister was born, perfect and silent and not at all impressed with the act of breathing. Her parents counted her sister's fingers and toes, ten of each, as they had done with her - but with more urgency, she was convinced, more attention to each little knuckle and toenail.

Sheri wrote at 10:41 PM

Writing Exercise: Minus

Sunday, November 25, 2007

Nov. 15 (again): Minus

Her mother had always told her that when you slept with a man, you gave a piece of yourself away. When she lost her virginity, awkwardly, on her tiny twin-sized bed that was too small for her alone, in her room still pink from girlish childhood, nothing fell off. He rolled off of her, sweaty and weak-kneed and her unfulfilled, and she was still whole, a puzzle with all of its pieces. While he lay there panting, his hairless chest heaving, she went to the kitchen for her mother's butcher's knife. He looked at her in confusion when she returned, then with terror; his penis had already shriveled, but it nearly cowered into his body. She put her foot up on the edge of the bed and cut off the little toe of her left foot. The bloody nub rolled across the sheets, leaving a wet trail. She picked it up in two fingers and held it out to him. He threw up all over her flowery sheets, pink rosebuds stained with mostly-digested carrots and potatoes, the aftermath of cafeteria food.

Sheri wrote at 11:05 PM