You are in a bookstore in another city:
~ You see something you can’t live without, but you don’t have enough money to pay for it. What do you do?
~ You see a neighbor, alone, weeping. What do you do?
~ You see an acquaintance shoplift. What do you do?
~ You see two married acquaintances, without their spouses, heads and bodies close together, in a suggestive position. What do you do?
~ You are a young child and smile up at the grown-up whose hand you are holding but you don’t recognize the grown-up. What do you do?
Pick one and write for 20 minutes.
Note from Marlene: You can tweak prompts however you want. For example, with this prompt, the setting could be a deserted walkway near water, in a park, at a crowded Saturday market. You choose the setting and Just Write!
Photo by Sasha Oaks Photo by Jim C. March Photo by Kent Sorensen
Ke11y
Oh dear, Marlene: I confess to cheating on my time limit! I just got to thinking, that regardless of wealth we cannot buy imagination…nor can we buy those things we love most in this world.
The Fog Child: Lori
We live here, high up on the bluff, my wife and I, secreting ourselves behind those wrought iron gates. The truth is, I’m free to do absolutely nothing, enjoy my days, my wife, and my existence without ever having have to do a really disagreeable thing. It’s true, I suppose, financial security has brought my family a degree of comfort and luxury; no longer fearing what the right hand column on a menu says, while at the bookstore I will buy three copies of a book; one hardback, to keep by my bed, and two paperback copies; one I keep by the bathtub, and one to keep in the car. Economists and philosophers argue, with some merit, that the sum total of a person’s possessions is an incomplete measure of wealth. True wealth, I’ve heard it said, encompasses someone’s God-given talents and the breadth of his horizons. So I sit here on my rickety old bench, my early morning cup of tea in hand, behind those wrought iron gates, and wonder what a God given talent is?
This hemisphere’s first radiance lights up the belly of a sea fog as the waves come ashore soft and shallow, bringing everything it seems but answers. A low, mournful hum, an ancient fugue composed for a hobo sailor, emanates from Point Cabrillo and spreads beyond the shore’s craggy coastline. I’m thankful for my jacket this early morn, its bolstered warmth, and my hands squeezed around the mug. What is it, exactly, that makes the waves turn and begin all over?
“Mr. Frank…help me, will you?” It’s a voice I have long recognized.
I set my mug down and walk toward the gate. “You’re up early this morning, Lori.”
Her wild-strawberry hair, the crinkle ‘neath her eyes, her young breath that would have azaleas awake from a cold snap, and her gentleness on any given day touches my very soul. How I always welcome her friendship.
“Hold my hand, will you, Mr. Frank…” Such a thing, I wonder. To hold a child’s hand.
Standing there, reaching, she looks momentarily alone. Not complete.
“Your hand is so warm, Mr. Frank.” I apply a small amount of pressure, tightening that warmth.
Be on the lookout for the strength in people, their gentleness and how they smile – on any given day or throughout a lifetime, be on the lookout. Complete them.
As we walk over to the bench I cannot but wonder where she lays her head? What brings her to the edge of the ocean; to this universe I call imagination.
“What are you thinking about today, Mr. Frank?” She asks, skipping into my lap, looking into my eyes as though she were adult.
“Friendship…gratitude…love and other grown up things.” I respond, covering her hands gently around the mug of tea.
“That sounds big!”
“I suppose it is,” I respond, pulling a woolly scarf from my jacket pocket and looping it around her neck, twice.
Life is full of contradiction. Marriage has rendered this man unique, virtuous and wise – so would thirty years living in a monastery. If I have regrets or feel inadequate, it comes from quarrels of my own making. It is easy enough to see the truth of beach trash; a rubber sandal, kelp aplenty, cans, plastic containers, but with imagination and belief, with someone’s spoken friendship and gratitude, then these, too, carry every kind of treasure to its edge. Such gifts from those we know, love, or befriend, allow me to trade back the worst parts of myself.
“I’m your friend, Mr. Frank.”
“Yes, Lori. No matter what chilly wind blows, I’ll always be safe from storms with you by my side.”
You have to get up early, almost anywhere along the California coastline to find the best shells.
Another friend told me: To know love and beauty, a man must first reside in its midst. Words that bring me back, accountable, and refreshed. This is new again, I like it.
“I better be going now, Mr. Frank.” She says, removing the scarf and wrapping it around my neck, twice, before slipping from my lap.
“Where will you go today, Lori?” I ask, as if afraid for her.
“Beyond the trees, following the foghorn’s blow. I have to know what kind of world lies ahead for those still sailing the seas; those who have all but forgotten my name.”
Together we pull open the gate wide.
“Someone…but someone called you Lori?” I venture, watching her slowly disappear from my conscious thought.
“Why, Mr. Frank, you did! Love, Ocean, Radiance and Imagination” She answers, not turning.
In the overtones of her voice I hear a startling maturity and, for a moment, I see a vision of an older Lori; older than teenager, walking away, her presence more indestructible than love.
Has she invented me, I wonder, just to be unbearably full; euphoric, and miraculously hers?
mcullen Post author
More lovely writing, Kelly. Your writing is rich with visual description that I can see and feel this scene. Glorious writing: “an ancient fugue composed for a hobo sailor” and “my hands squeezed around the mug” and “her young breath that would have azaleas awake from a cold snap.” I’m so grateful to have writing like yours in the world — makes this a wonderful place to be.
Ke11y
Tears…thank you
Ke11y
Looking out from the window I can see the shoreline, see the birds spiraling, darting, squabbling, and the waves coming ashore, shallow, shouldered with linen. I might turn away, pay attention to the kettle’s whistle, were it not for the child. I watch him dance, jump, unable to take my eyes off his joy. I feel a strong urge to go join him, this child dancing alone, enjoying my beach. The steaming kettle continues to demand attention but I resist, transfixed by this boy who dances at the edge of the ocean, running wildly along its ragged waves. I remember how much I loved the sea when so young, its aloneness, wildness, hugeness, its mystery, and how one day I’d never leave its shores.
Think earlier, what about earlier? Think…God…think…born…living, people going away, a child, unnamed, running across the shore, being picked up by the tides and weather; weather so sweet it turns me sad because I know that one day it will all go away. Think. Living, lives, a mother, a father, a tinker’s caravan set up camp by the sea, and this boy who comes running by the tide alone, perhaps in need of company, or strangers. Hair blown wild, blue of eye, needing a holocaust of attention. He might have been born on this very day, he looks so new and fresh, dancing and laughing to the sounds of the mandolin, a boy, a beach and the universe and the rarest wind I ever heard. I quiet the kettle, pull on my oldest and most loved sweater, the one with holes in the elbow, mended, and holed again.
I walk toward the boy and the first thing he says to me is laughter. He’s glad to be alive and announces this by the very sounds he makes. I laugh in turn, for his spirit is catching. He shoves at me his salty-wet, sandy, hand. I hesitate. He gestures impatiently to take hold of it. ‘Com’on, there isn’t much time.’ Such a boy, I think, I would have liked as a son.
We are running hand-in-hand, headlong to where? When he finally stops my heart is beating up the inside of my chest. I gasp my question. ‘Why is there so little time?’ He doesn’t answer, just runs off hell for leather along the shore. When I catch him we tumble into the sand, boy and man, playing. I pin him down. He gasps and as he does so I leap back and shake my head. The boy is me! I feel as though I’ve been punched in the face by a friend, or had my wet hands plunged into an electrical socket.
‘What do they call you, boy?’ I ask, still out of breath and wild.
‘Daniel, sir, Daniel Shaw.’
‘Okay, Daniel Shaw, let’s do a bit of walking, I’m an old man, my legs won’t carry me so far with you.’
I cannot tell him he is me all those years ago, or that I am him all these years later. Am I being shown my life, or is this boy playing with his destiny?
We walk the shore, and that’s all there is: the simplest thing of us upon that shore and the building of castles or climbing the sand dunes to fight our wars amongst the soft mounds, but mostly it is walking, our arms about each other as if we’ll never be cut free by knife or lightning. I sleep beside him and we talk and laugh till the new dawn. As I lay at his side, I wonder if this is in fact his choice; that he is wanting to know his destiny, the kind of man he will become.
Does he know, and perhaps known since that first moment, we are in fact not strangers? He knows very well who I am: his spirit grown older, and how well he is dealing with it. A boy meeting his destiny and playing with it as though his best friend. Has he brought me to him knowing I’m dying? God, I bathe in his laughter as he bathes in mine, and this laughter and friendship and acceptance slaughters the agony of it all.
All day the weather is blue and gold, no clouds, no rain, and a breeze that smells of apples; a boy’s wild breath. Toward evening he sleeps, the sound of the sea in his ears. I wondered how long the flesh might resist its death. Will he like the man he’s grown into? A lifetime later he’ll be standing on this shore looking at himself, will he love the boy, respect the man he is to become? I’ll never ask him, scared of his honesty.
Who will he tell…who can he tell…of this day on a beach shared with his destiny? A boy and a man together, the same heart, the same dreams, together on the shore, walking tangled in each others arms and lives. I know the women he will love, the woman he is walking toward, the woman he will die in front of, the things he will tell her, the things he never did, the anger, the love, the complications, the lies, the laughter. The promises, there’s the rub, the promises in our lives, these are the things, for if I can change one thing for him it will be to make each of them come true. That his life with her is as perfect as the letter ‘O’ and that they’ll live forever and never die and be good friends. Why had I dared to say such a thing when life is sometimes agonized, mad, and crazy wild? Is it the parts left unsaid that make a life so short? Am I being given the magic seven days? Am I drunk? Am I dead? No, I must live and the boy must grow old. I feel foolish. I want to change his destiny. But I’m dying for him, a cruel trick, to be his friend and not have made it better for him; to have loved the people he will love and not been true, ride the machines he will ride, see the things he will see, and when the time is right kill him. I will take him, grudgingly, to that never returning time, through a life of detours; taken just for the hell of it, which is the best reason in the world to do anything when you’re young, and for what, to bring him here, to this point, this shore, to die having lived for what? For love?
And yet he sleeps. Is this it? He’s just a boy on a beach, living the golden peace of innocence. Can’t I make his death more reasonable? Should I end his before other lives, deaths, carve his heart open with their presence and then with their absence? I look at the boy sleeping; his dreams becoming real in his head. Am I supposed to tell him how to handle a life of new starts, every beginning coming to an end? Is ‘hello’ the first word, or just a word we use before ‘goodbye’? Secrets he’ll never be able to let go, even long after midnight, because the sea will not let him; because the boy will be here forever and the man hardly at all. It is good to think of this boy stomping the sand like a raging bull, the taste of salt on his lips, yelling out of sheer joy, and daring the universe to put him down. It is everything to think of a world where a boy can love this hard. I know what the boy is dreaming, I want to tell him his life will go on just as far as the ocean goes, which is very far. But it won’t. One day ahead this boy will be stood at the grave of his loved ones, needing just a little human talk, weeping. The heartache of a man who has not been told he is going to die; just doing it, slamming out his life regardless of consequences, and this boy will be stood there, grown older, muttering his own home made prayer.
‘Get out of that watery grave, son. You can’t see nothing from there.’
They say that everything is better in the morning, tell that to a woman fresh out of love, or a father standing at the grave of a son.
mcullen Post author
Oh, Kelly. The last line. . . “father standing at the grave of a son.” You make me want to be a better writer. You inspire me to not settle for mundane writing. You encourage me to go for the eloquent. . . “needing a holocaust of attention” and “All day the weather is blue and gold, no clouds, no rain, and a breeze that smells of apples; a boy’s wild breath.” and “because the boy will be here forever and the man hardly at all.” Absolutely exquisite writing and joy to read.