Prose Snapshots

He sat on the patched-up couch reading the Chinese newspaper with his large, gold-rimmed spectacles framing his kind eyes. The TV was on in front of him but he seemed not to notice, lost in reading about the world. But I was watching the girl in the TV. She talked back to her grandpa in disrespect and threw the allowance money he’d given her at his feet. I turned off the TV in defiance and marched over to my grandpa, thin on the over-sized couch that was falling apart, to give him a hug. And he folded his newspaper and hugged me back, unaware of the scene that had just passed.

Sometimes, at night, when the whole family was present, we would gather around the board-game Scrabble and put words together for points. My dad was the most serious about this, using his letters carefully, reading up on the rules and restrictions. But even so, he could never beat my mom, who assembled words in excitement, making the most interesting combinations, paying no heed to any such point system. She would get up to make some noodles as my dad took his time on his turn, and finish eating before he could tally up the score. And she’d smile playfully and wink at me, as it was always in her favor.

My sister was like a personal pest who would never stop following me around and copied everything I did. So I took her around sometimes. I did, because if I didn’t, she would start to cry. And because she was always there, she was witness to my acts of creativity, my imaginative genius. I created about ten million games for us to play. Four or five stuck. We played stuffed animals sometimes but I didn’t like the term “stuffed” because they were filled with something real, too, so I called them “little animals” and we referred to them as our “L.A.”s. She always wanted to be the bunnies so I let her be the bunnies and she wanted the cats so I let her have those, too. So I took on the personas of octopuses and armadillos, and when she saw that they were more interesting, we switched. And switched again.

Rough rough draft of long piece

I scanned the entire volleyball court for her, only to find her sitting on the sidelines. Her eyes were closed. Movement danced around me on all sides, but my eyes were locked on her motionless figure. What’s wrong? I asked. In her right hand was a container of Advil, in her left, a bottle of water. Mom never takes pain relievers. What’s wrong?

I don’t want to start here, but I must adhere to the truth. For the truth is, this is where it begins. I don’t want to begin here because I don’t want her death to be the trigger for my memory of her life. But I’ve slowly come to realize that only in death does life have any real meaning anyway. It is the fact that there is a definite end that makes each standing moment stand. Moments are remembered. Death first, then immortality.

She was brilliant, he says. He shakes his head. Head of the class. My dad wraps his large hands around his mug of tea and drinks. He sets the mug gently on the table and, with his hands still wrapped around its circumference, looks down into it. I remember, he begins. He is now reading the tea leaves, but these are tales of the past…

She used to wear her hair in two braids and never paid me much attention. I was from the country, you see. A country boy. Your mom, she was a city girl. But not like the other city girls, you see. None of that haughty pretention, that strutting around the streets as if a foot above everyone else, looking down. No, she was grounded.

Let me tell you something about stories. It’s something I learned, telling them. Words are magical. They make things…last. Moments exist in eternity, eternally – over and over they unfold and refold. And people never die, in stories. They just keep on living.

I took the Advil out of her hand and she opened her eyes at me. A headache, she said, and smiled. She set the bottle of water down and cradled her head with both hands. Her eyes were shut again. Just a bit of a headache. And despite the smile that rested lightly on her lips, I caught a leak of pain in her expression.

She never paid me much attention because no one paid me much attention. He laughs, takes another draught of tea. You could say she was the first, in fact, to even chance me a glance. And, just like that, he is lost in his sanctuary of memory.

She said she would be O.K., but Dad and I knew something was off kilter, decidedly amiss, somehow not quite right. It was a topos of the world turned upside down. It’s a feeling you get when you know someone well. Well enough to know that she never gets headaches. Well enough to know that she never takes pills. That she never sits on the sidelines.

We put her in the car and drove her to the hospital. Before we arrived, she fell unconscious in the backseat. When we got to the emergency room, they had to put her on a stretcher.

The doctors here decided that my mom needed to get to the neurological center downtown. We’re putting her on a helicopter, they said. Wheels aren’t fast enough. Just before they wheeled her onto the helicopter, they asked me if I had anything I wanted to say to her. I just stared. If you have anything you to say, she might still be able to hear you. I had nothing, so they strapped her into the helicopter.

We were in the same class and we were paired up because she was the best and I had the most dire need for improvement. My dad chuckles. I remember, once. We were getting onto a bus. Or she was getting onto a bus, rather, and I was curiously following her. Accompanying her, if you will.

When Dad and I arrived at the neurological center, people were already expecting us. We made a move to sit in the waiting room, but they steered us to another space – our own waiting area, separate from everyone else. We were told to wait there, shut off. Distanced. I seated myself in a chair and tried not to think much.

It was pouring rain that day and I didn’t have an umbrella, otherwise I would’ve given it to her. We were standing in the middle of the bus, holding onto what we could, when she turns to me and says she’s had enough. I’ve had enough of you following me around! she says. Off you get! There is not enough room on this bus.

At some point, a doctor walked into the room.

Perhaps this is how life goes. We think, sometimes, that life can fix itself. This can’t be happening to me because it can’t be happening to me. We rely on the doctors of our lives to take care of things that go wrong, that are beyond our control – our capability, or knowledge. Monthly physical: all systems in full health. But what if we get a bad report? What if the doctor delivers only bad news? What if there is nothing we can do to make him tell us something else?

The doctor walked into the room and strode purposefully toward the chair in which I sat. His manner was cool, steely. Braced, is the word. His eyes fixed steadily on me as he advanced, and mine likewise followed him in his approach. When he reached my chair, he placed one hand on the armrest and knelt down so that he was perfectly eye-level with me. And when he spoke, it seemed I was listening to a news anchor, looking into a T.V. screen, through the lens of a camera.

Brain aneurysm, he reports. Less than 1% chance of survival.

Everything is going well in life, and then, at some point, a doctor walks into the room.

And he asks me: Do you believe in miracles?

I was shocked, of course. Enough so to obey. So the bus stopped, I got off, it closed its doors behind me and continued on. And suddenly I found myself standing in the rain! I was just standing in the rain.

That’s what stories do. They keep people alive. But words can never become the person, can never recreate every aspect of his multi-faceted character. But what else do we have? Words can last even after the memory fades. So, slowly, the person becomes the stories, because the stories are all that are left. It’s imperfect immortality, but it’s the closest we can get.

My dad has finished his tea so that all that is left now are the tea leaves. He is smiling down at them as he recalls…But she came back. I must have been standing there a quarter hour at that stop, so wet my bones felt wet. But there she was, stepping off the return bus, carrying the umbrella I’d given her so that she wouldn’t get rained on.

My dad is quiet for a minute. He looks up. I reach over for the kettle of hot water, and refill his mug of tea.

100 words (/223 words): smoke

My grandma is an eighty-year-old Chinese woman. Petite. Small feet. She stands at 5’0’’. Her hair, which is pure white, is cut short (because it is more practical that way). And she mends my socks in her spare time.

On this particular day, she is over at our apartment, mending my socks at the kitchen table. I am reading quietly beside her, and the balcony door is open, letting in summer air.

In the midst of my meditations, I become aware of an increasingly noticeable smell of cigarette smoke. My grandma looks up from her sewing as it seeps into the apartment through the screen door.

Two cigarette butts fall from the above balcony onto ours.

“Goddamn black people,” my grandma says loudly. She wets a thread and continues to sew.

What? I stare at her. What did you say, grandma?

“They must be black,” she says matter-of-factly. And in my shock, and abhorrence at her ignorance, I lash out. I fold my book and march to my room, shut my door, unwilling to have anything further to do with her.

But she made moon-cakes, that night, to make up for it. It was the wrong time of year to be eating moon-cakes, but she hand-made them and delivered them to my room where I was shut up, busy being ashamed of her.

100 words: public bus

I was three quarters short, and everyone averted his eyes. I stood at the head of the bus, prodding, shaking my coin purse as if I’d missed something, fully aware I hadn’t, fully aware I was holding everyone up just by standing there, prodding, shaking my coin purse. People have meetings to get to, I told myself. I flipped over a nickel. Work, jobs, obligations. I turned a dime and shook my head. We are on a schedule here.

One quarter would be different. One quarter and someone would get up, say “Here, miss,” sit down. I snapped the clasp of my coin purse shut – smiled politely. “I think I need to make a trip to the bank”– looked around at the people looking out of windows, checking watches, feigning sleep. I smiled at them, politely, and stepped off the bus.

250-word sketch: Catching Dragonflies

Tall grasses, ones that can only be found near marsh land and still water. A child plodding through them, hands first, pulling the grasses apart as if opening drapery. Her grandpa beside her, she marches through the green world, batting cattails out of her way, sending droplets of dew into the still air.

She is the bringer of color this morning. The vibrancy of a green just waking flows to those tall grasses through her fingertips. She looks up and the sky is opening its blue eyes. A trail of color, blazed through a marsh coming out of slumber.

But she forgets, in her moment, that hers is not the only trail forged this morning, for her grandpa walks beside her, stretching his limbs in accord with the distant trees. He marches beside her, no less ready, no less eager – a youth again in his old age.

Nearer the water, they choose a place to stop. This place will do, he thinks. I will stop here, she decides.

They wait for things to settle. They wait because they have stirred things up.
They wait.
They are here to catch dragonflies.

The first to come are the electric-blue ones, the ones that land at the tip of each grass and bend the delicate stalk with delicate weight. There are opaque-winged ones and ones with dots on them. Some have curled tails. Some have big eyes. Her favorite are the ones with big eyes. But I can never catch them, she thinks, because they always see me coming.

Somewhere to her right, her grandpa is pointing. Look at that dragonfly, he is saying. She opens her hand, but the dragonfly, as if fully aware of her intentions, takes momentary flight and lands elsewhere.

Multimedia Narrative

http://www.archive.org/details/Shira

(just copy&paste the address; I can’t get it to work as a link)

a brief meeting

I felt a heavy coat being draped about my shoulders and two strong hands turning me around.
“You’re lost,” he said, and in the drafty back-alley by a sliver of moon I made out his confident figure.
The night was open and the stars were close. Closer than home, as a fact, where the flat plains of the Mid-west couldn’t take me up to the elevation of this capital, Lhasa.
I was standing on the roof of the world.
He took me then, and looked at me for awhile. I saw a smile cross his lips just before he turned on his heel and strode cooly down the narrow alley by the way he came.
I took a step forward then, to follow him, but continued only with my gaze. A smile rose to my lips as I silently turned in place and began walking lightly in the opposite direction — the direction I had come, waiting for him to realize and come chasing after me.

5 5-min narratives

 1) place
The woods. Early winter. Just when the lakes glaze over with a thin layer of ice. After the first snowfall, maybe. I am sitting on the fallen tree again, the one that makes a bridge from bank to bank over the still flowing river. My legs swing as freely as pendulums, boots brushing the surface of the water. My hands are freezing, I remember. So I get up to go home, but slip on a delicate patch of icy frost and remember the water being cold.

2) person 
I met myself, once. Shira. My alter-ego, my alias, the name I chose for myself when playing those mindless childhood games. Her name was Shira — her real name. My jaw dropped when she said it. I met her in a coffee shop and learned that she’d traveled the world. She’d trekked across countries, roamed entire continents. We exchanged numbers when we parted, but who knows where she is now.

3) a time, alone
I stood on the top of a mountain, as tip-top as I could get. It took me awhile, as I shifted myself about for those last five or so feet, carefully calculating which slightly more elevated patch of land would merit being called the tip. I stood there, hands on hips, looking around. I stood there, quite alone, one girl atop a mountain amidst the mighty Himalayas.

4) understanding the world
When he told me he loved me, I began to reassess my priorities. He gazed confidently into my eyes and I suddenly understood love songs. I suddenly had true empathy for the voices behind all those songs, all those tens of thousands of songs. He broke down a wall and a whole world of undiscovered meaning came pouring in.

5) friends
It was Brittany’s turn, so Louise and I tried to be inconspicuous as we quietly stood watch. The target: a large red bowl of dark chocolate truffles. It was Saturday, so the samples were particularly good today. Ten minutes ago, the bowl looked invitingly full. As I pretended to read the ingredients on a cereal box, I heard, for the fifth time in ten minutes, the small “Aha!” that Brittany let out as if she’d just spotted the chocolates for the very first time, and was presently relishing in her new discovery.

Letter to the Class

I’ve realized it even more, lately. It’s not that it only recently began, but I’ve only recently began to acknowledge it.

I hide behind my writing.

I noticed it first in a fiction writing class I took at my high school – the first creative writing course I’ve ever taken. In that class, I found solace and release. I poured emotion into the stories that I wrote – emotion that I never showed otherwise, and created characters and situations with what you might call reckless abandon. I had absolute power to create and to manipulate. And every time my story came up in the rotation for in-class discussion, I fed off of other students’ reactions, watched their faces when they hit paragraph five, listened with utmost urgency at their critiques. Perhaps you wonder why I say that I hide, when I’ve openly put my writing out there for my peers to assess. The thing is: it wasn’t open. In fact, this course had a certain aspect that I found very appealing at the time. Everything was conducted in anonymity.

I remember my first journal. I called it a journal then, as I do now, but there was a period in between when I played with the idea of calling it a diary. I was ten, and it was the first journal that came my way. My grandma sent it to me all the way from China, thinking I would like it because it was green, my favorite color, and because it had English text running in the shape of a heart on the front cover. I read the English text and it turned out not to be English at all. The unintelligible words were simply blocks of letters arranged in a way that, I presume, the Chinese must have thought resembled English. The first thing I did was print my name neatly and perfectly on the inside cover. Then I began to write…in pencil, the thought of which now makes me cringe.

I’ve kept a journal for nine years now. And I’ve expressed myself largely through written, but unspoken, words.

It’s hard to be real. But in writing, no one’s watching. If no one reads, no one can judge.

On the other hand, if no one reads, no one will ever know. And by sharing, we can learn so much. I’ve always felt uncomfortably exposed when I volunteer my writing for others to read. I saw it as a sort of violation…into something so personal, so raw, so unready. But I am beginning to understand that exposure is necessary sometimes. We are taught to push limits, stretch boundaries, but we also need to let our own be poked and prodded, uncomfortable as it may be.

That said, I’m holding onto the edge of my seat in a mixture of nervous excitement, fear, and curiosity for what the semester may bring. Hopefully, somewhere along the way, I’ll push myself far enough to finally let go.

Wishing all of you all the best,
Simone