Tag: creative writing
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The You Not Looking
Something’s been holding back the words. It might be the version of me that’ll read these lines one day. Winding me down back roads toward a painted horizon, as fabricated as one on the set of an old western. Pulling my eyes from the one I’m driving towards. Still, something’s been holding back the words.…
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Perpetual Discovery
Seize each breath with the satisfaction of knowing that newness is around each and every bend in the day. Pull the air in deeply. Expel it in due rhythm. Attune yourself to the lyrics of the song you’ve never listened to close enough to realize how precisely they describe your current situation. Imprint to your…
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Knee-high by the Fourth of July
On the opposite side of the road passed the third pickup he’d seen that afternoon donning an oversized American flag waving in the blackened air behind the cab’s smokestack exhaust pipes. Patriotism, he thought as stomach acid warmed his chest, muddied and misled. The giant flag, strung from a 4’’X4’’ wooden post, flapped in animated…
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Attic
All day I have been hearing jazz faintly playing in my room. It does not seep through the wall nor does it rise from the chambers below. The riffs are generated within my mind. My ears glimpse phantom sound waves—unseen, invisible. Their nonexistence will startle me any longer. For I am a music box of…
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Observing a Sneeze
Leaving the country for the summer can be kind of a big deal for 15-year-old girls. While it is not always the case, a venture like this can be a game-changer, moreover, a life-changer; going to Rome for three weeks of the three months of freedom between academic years did more than alter her worldly…
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Penned Out
Ideas, once inked in permanence, are now buried beneath an ever-growing, pixelated timeline. (Is it so much different than having them closed between bound pages and set up on rarely visited bookshelf, the stacks in the library surrounded by thin carpet tread upon no longer?) They are suffering silent agony in the bottom of a…
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Street Parking Woes
Angelica hadn’t worked there but three weeks before she realized something was amiss. On Friday, she walked to her car during her sacred lunch break to find the all too recognizable florescent orange of a parking ticket envelope glaring from under the passenger side wiper blade. It was the fourth time the parking authority had…
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Here Has Been Us
At the end of the driveway, out of reach from the parental sensor light, the car off save for its accessorized music maker, two adolescents conversed. “Maybe I wasn’t driving at all. Maybe the roads were actually operating as treadmills and they moved under us. We remained stationary. We didn’t really just drive there, the…
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Snow Dances
Dusty waves of snow lap the pavement in curved sheets, rounded like a preschool teacher’s sample shapes. A lesson in scissor dexterity. Wind propels the white mass against my shoes, breaking formation like a group of synchronized swimmers, dancing in spirals around my calculated steps and meeting again on the other side. Floating in fluid…
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Depressive Tempests
“The madness of depression is, generally speaking, the antithesis of violence. It is a storm indeed, but a storm of murk.” – William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness It is never so simple to say, “listen here, this is an exact depiction of mental illness,” as is it not simply the case in…
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Fourth to Last Train Home
The hour was not incredibly late, but both parties were quite weary from their respective days’ toil. It had been a long, dog day of midsummer. They each carried aches in their bodies, but the weariness stemmed from elsewhere. There was a mental exhaustion at play, a soft drone humming on the part of the…
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Spoon Licks
Bits of ground coffee lodged themselves in between what teeth were still sticking in his beet-red gums. The tip of a rollie hung gently from the top of his lip while he humbled, that is hummed and mumbled, some conjured-up words to nestle between the clankity clanking tings he made while the spoons hit themselves,…
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Flies Dance in the Floodlights
It had now become a ritual that after every break-up he would go for a walk in search of a baseball diamond. If there were bleachers there, he would sit and wait for a pickup softball game to begin and he’d watch it to completion. There were seldom others spectating at these low-stakes games, and…
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Chlorine and Sea Spray
A four-star hotel had its foundation near where the Pacific laps the mainland with a ravenous host of frothy tongues. Two skinny hoods skated past on splintered boards with rusted bearings that squealed, hungry for replacement or grease whatever remedy would silence their pangs. Their hunger was osmosed through the feet of their riders. The…
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Outside the Ellison Duplex
The young men wore smirks of a mutual malice. Their expressions were either meant to ward off or attract simple-minded questions, depending on who may happen to be doing the asking. Questions like the kind that Hopscotch Joey had trotted up and asked last week as the little band of twenty-something tough guys stood outside…
Sophisticating the Rudimentary 