Story Slam #5 (3/25/10)

No poet this time.

Words: kneecap, pretty, ridicule
Her kneecap was pretty bony, which led to playground ridicule when they hung their legs down through the skeletal metal dome and kicked at the kids fighting inside, beyond the thunderdome. Her kneecap was bony, but pretty, and he tried to bump into it as often as possible when weaving out of range of Frankie's fists.

Theme: letters to Mom
(I was eating a burger, so I didn't write in response to this one)

Line: something very long about Benjamin realizing only after 1000 feet that he had stopped worrying what the neighbors thought. Also shouted out: "Nobody believes in dragons anymore."
I responded to this, but didn't read it aloud, so I was able to wrap it into a later piece.

Words: email, wrangle, waterlogged
Twenty years before email we wrangled, wrassled, grappled on the truck tire inner tube. The lake was sunlight sparkled, the water undulating away from the tube in fast rolls getting slower, farther, the lake a tub shaken, water slopping side to side, his wiry arms clenching, grabbing biceps, ankles, trying to shake my grip. Our waterlogged shorts wrapped around skinny thighs like plastic bags draped and dripping across fallen trees. We wrestled, wrangled, shorts low on our waists, legs about to give out, feet ready to slip. And then the splash, sinking down through the water weeds, streaks of sunlight, blowing water out hard through my nose, arms and legs finally limp. I lay back, looked up at sky wavered by water, looked at his bright white legs dangling down below him as he held the tube. Let myself stop, float, let him win.

Poker round. Words: hallucinate, chew, moist
Nobody believes in dragons anymore, Benjamin thought, but we do believe in drugs, specifically acid. We do believe in 700 strangers signing our Tao of Pooh t-shirt, the Sharpie pushing through the cloth to crawling skin, marking him so that when he took the shirt off in the tent later he could see black dots all over his pale chest.

He was working on a pretty good farmer tan, farmer burn, probably, which is why people kept offering him sunscreen, spraying him with cool mist from water bottles. Finally, mid-afternoon and the dry straw grass was rising and sinking below him, affecting his footing, and an earth-mother type with silver rings in her dreads squirted some sunscreen from a bottle she kept in her backpack's side pocket and just slathered it onto his arm, slipping her fingers down, massage artist.

Benjamin had stopped worrying what the neighbors would think a long time ago, when he chewed the moist paper tab, wondering if you were supposed to chew it, really, or just swallow it whole.

The tent, later, pink cloth moist but not dripping. His teeth were starting to feel metallic, edged, clenched. He looked at the tent ceiling, filmstrip burning in an ashtray, everything falling down. Moira there, wrapping him tight in his sleeping bag.

"Your safety song is 'Sex You Up', by Color Me Badd," she said, and started humming, hugging the down of the sleeping bag around him, bodies conforming.

William Tell

My story "William Tell" is in the new issue of Painted Bride Quarterly:

http://www.pbq.drexel.edu/issue81/fiction/thorpe-elizabeth_william-tell.php

Story Slam #4 (2/25/10)

Poet: Genevieve Betts

Line: "The first time I saw it, I squinted"
(this was the third round, but I didn't read in the first two, so I folded details into this one)
The first time I saw it, I squinted. I was lying next to Kevin in the back of a pickup truck that wasn't his and wasn't mine. I saw the empty bottle and squinted in the early light, looked for other, fuller bottles nearby. I remembered the night before, shot after shot, power hour after power hour in the apartment above the bar, the apartment that also wasn't Kevin's or mine. The apartment where mice had shat on the kitchen counter, next to a knife that gleamed dull but still menacing. I remember how the fluorescent light in the kitchen got brighter and brighter and the music got louder until someone said the cops were there. We went down the fire escape, Kevin and me, we hid behind the dumpsters in the odd glow of the bar's bug light, and then when everything was quiet again, we got into the back of this uncapped pickup truck and I kept drinking from the bottle of vodka I'd taken off the dirty counter and stuck in my backpack. I drank from the bottle because I had to, but I tried to measure shots anyway. I like to keep track.

Line: As the other two Chrises lay dying (there were three Chrises at the slam that night)
As the other two Chrises lay dying on the couch, or claiming they were dying, anyway, from the soup at the Indian buffet that had given them food poisoning three days ago, plenty of time for them to get over it by now, if they weren't so concerned about getting girls (other girls, outside girls, not me) to take care of them by getting them Bud Light from the refrigerator, Bud Light being the brand they'd both just switched to from Coors because they had fallen for the Here We Go slogan in the new Bud Light Superbowl commercials, because they liked to walk out of convenience stores with two thirty packs and Chris One's brand new license that proved he was finally 21, and hold the beer up as they came to the car with the windows open, me inside, and say Here We Go, and then get inside and encourage me to peel out like they imagine Danica Patrick might if they were cool enough to hang out with her. The two other Chrises lay dying, or claiming they were dying, but I wasn't falling for it, and neither would Danica Patrick if they were cool enough to hang out with her.

Words: beer, drive, transcendent
The Chrises lay dying on the couch, or claiming they were dying, even though the food poisoning at the Indian buffet happened three days ago. A girl with the lowest of low cut shirts and slutty high heels with no socks even though it was winter and the snow fell slowly outside, falling and melting instantly on the warm wet streets, snow like I'd see someday in the Alps on Easter when I went with an Australian and a French girl to a church service in German where I would understand the music but could only mouth the words in English and not sing them in German, on the trip that was so far in my future I couldn't even imagine it could happen, the snow was falling and melting like it would on the wet winding streets in the Alps someday and the girl was sitting on the arm of the couch near Chris Two, not too close in case he was going to puke but close enough, the beer was running low and I needed to get out of that hot, close apartment, I had to drive somewhere tonight, so I went up to Chris One, sat next to him on his couch arm like the girl with the slutty shoes sat on the other and said to Chris One, "beer run. Let's go. Transcend."

Theme: Faking it
In eighth grade band we were told by the blond band leader to fake it if we didn't know how to play our instruments right. I sat next to Shannon, my steady best friend, and next to her Orion wouldn't quit hooking his clarinet screws on Casey's dangly earrings, threatening to pull them out, and that was enough to convince me never to wear dangly earrings. We moved our fingers over the holes in our clarinets, finger-synching with everyone else in our section, but we didn't blow.

Theme: Drinking before noon, Words: fantastic, hopped, ?
It was fantastic, drinking before noon, before nine, before seven, on a Cinco de Mayo that didn't in any way resemble a long afternoon in Mexico where the guy trying to sell us a marble chess set for eleven dollars handed my camera to my mom and stood next to me, subtly pinching my ass while the camera clicked.

It was a snowy Cinco de Mayo on a thin small-town street, a Mexican restaurant across from the Rite-Aid (closed) and a jewelry store (closed). We stood around the early morning Cinco de Mayo bar at the Mexican restaurant, wearing straw sombreros with the Mexican restaurant's corporate logo stamped in black ink on the fronts, we stood around the bar with Erika, who got me a blender for my birthday so she could stop by and borrow it every single Thursday night and return it crusted red with dried daiquiri every Sunday afternoon.

We stood there on Cinco de Mayo, early light greying the snow outside the crepe-papered windows, and I was already kind of over it. One day I would be nostalgic for this, the tight muscles of the hockey player I'd invited into my bed and then rejected the night before, the dried out limes in the white bucket on the edge of the bar, even the heavy-hopped microbrews at the pub around the corner. It was fantastic, drinking before noon, or later I'd remember it that way, but I was done.

For My Brother, on his 30th Birthday

Your knees were always scabby, band-aids falling off, your skin sunburned or grayed-dry, scratched from raspberry or blackberry brambles. You were the first, the only, to get stitches, break an arm, break teeth.

You lost things; winter coats, a tent in a concert parking lot, half an apartment full of furniture put out by your landlord with the trash.

Your college books were plastered with yellow used stickers and warped with seawater from driving your open Jeep into the water on the Rhode Island beach.

You passed out too close to campfires, woke up damp in the early grey light, fumbling for the pack of cigarettes you’d crushed in your pocket. You ditched finals and drove to Boston with a girl who made the Jeep stink with cheap perfume, you bought her a rose at a service station, then gave it, frozen to wilting, to our mother when she came to spring the car from the impound lot.

You ran across six lanes of traffic to the Arc de Triomphe instead of using the underground tunnel. You did backflips at parties when you were too drunk to stand. The wheel of your fifty-dollar car fell off on the way home from the prom.

You are in danger every minute of every day. But you’ve made it this far.

***

Note: This isn't done -- I can't seem to make it come out right. But it is my brother's birthday, and my thoughts have been with him today, so I wanted to at least post what I had.

Story Slam #3 (1/28/10)

Poet: Paul Siegell

#1 google, muffin, useless

Some places have good airports, good train stations, some places you just know when you get there. Years before google, years before useless commitments, excuses, the streets warm and smelling of flowers at night when you walk to the beach with the girls you just met, the girls yelling "la playa". You just want to put your hands in the water, fulfill the promise of that airport, that train station, that morning when you walked downstairs to their version of the 7-11, siete diez y ono?, to get a muffin in the morning (and the morning smelled like flowers, too) and you saw the machine for squeezing oranges, fresh, and were you ever glad to be so far from home. And are you ever now, la playa, as you put your hands in a body of water you've never touched.

(didn't read this one aloud)

#2 Baccanalia
Barcelona midnight with these girls I just met. Cartons of sangria from the 7-11, and we watch the street sweeper twist along the sidewalks around the park,
(restart)
Barcelona midnight and it all smells like flowers. I sit on benches with these girls I just met, drinking sangria from the 7-11 next door to our hostel. And the park is dark, the air thick and sweet, but when someone says "la playa", we all get up and go. Winding the streets, windowboxes vined with flowers, flowers dripping almost down to our feet and loose petals underneath.
(restart)

I release you, you want to say. Cold November, your hands are cold but his lips are warm. You didn't expect this. You didn't want this.
(restart)
Take me somewhere beautiful he says, and you don't want it, you don't want any of this. He flew across the country for this. Cold November, and his lips are warm, but warm is all you feel, nothing else. You pull back and you see it in him, how badly he wanted this to be different. How he said, next time I see you, I won't be able not to kiss you. Next time. And all it is is cold and gray, and all you are is tired from work, and he says, if I go...if I go, this is it. He looks at you. You nod.

(didn't read any of this aloud. Wasn't feeling good about the writing yet.)

#3 Dishrag, imbibe, retro
At the bar everything shines, even the dishrag with soap bubbles bursting, shine of pink and blue on each bubble, and the tiny movement when it pops. She looks at the shine on the dishrag and thinks the word imbibe, rounded like bubbles, classy. Classy like this retro bar, red sparkle vinyl on the seats, rounded TV in the corner with a basketball game on, retro, windy March Madness. Imbibe, she thinks, imbibe, and she watches the little bubbles shining and bursting on the dishrag that looks homemade, made by someone's classy grandma, someone who would never have done what she just did in the rock-walled basement, down narrow stairs, below where she sits at the bar, watching the bubbles burst, thinking imbibe. Retro. Class.

#4 Alcoholism
Spin, spin, downward spin, spin the bottle and it always points the same way. You spin it anyway, every time, label up, label down, label soaked off in the rain from the overflow pipe below the market street bridge. On the rocks, on the ice, thin ice, black ice, rocks sharp, poking through, jagged up-and-down rocks. The bottle spins and once it was Coke and once it was a circle of girls, pretty girls, drunk girls, low-lidded girls in low dresses, low blouses, low jeans. Low. Spin low, swing low, sweet chariot, sweet Jesus, Sweet Jane. Spin low, swing low, spin bottle after bottle and it's time to go home.

#5 Refrigerator, tucked, brilliant
The fountain is supposed to be a waterfall, water over the ledge in a clean clear sheet, bright blue that looks almost tropical. But it's cool as a refrigerator back there, me and Evan sitting there cross-legged, looking through the light on the water, something brilliant, grey asphalt all around, cross-legged, wearing shorts, legs bare on the cold concrete, the afternoon long and hot, and we will sit there, knees barely touching, all afternoon.

(rewrite -- done at the Slam)
The fountain is supposed to be a waterfall, water a clean clear plate falling fast over the ledge right in front of us, so close we can feel the cool, smell the chlorine, see the sun through the brilliant blue, so bright it's almost tropical. Cool as a refrigerator back there, cavern cool, basement cool, cool as deep under the pier in Atlantic City, me and Evan cross-legged in shorts, concrete scratchy on our skin. Something brilliant, water plate glass clean, me and Evan, knees barely touching, and I could stay here, legs tucked beneath us, knees almost touching, sun on the water. I think we could stay here, all afternoon.

Story Slam #1

(From one of the early Slams at the Bubble House. See http://twoxpats.blogspot.com/2010/03/story-slam.html for details.)

#1
words: Chaise Longue, Slurping, Tan

I pointed out the mistake in the poem.
"Look," I said to Connie, "She spelled chaise lounge wrong. Twice."
I expected her to laugh, like we always did, at the crazy poet who couldn't spell, even on her final drafts. Sometimes we rejected stories after one or two lines.
"It's so nice," Connie would say, "to work with someone who understands these things."
We worked in her kitchen. I would come in and say hello and go to the hall where the wicker laundry basket was filled with submissions. We went through them together, and I wrote the rejection letters:

"Dear X,
Thank you for thinking of us.
Unfortunately, this doesn't quite suit..."

We were on the same page. But today, she looked at me like I was slurping the bright orange Sunkist I'd made the mistake of bringing in with me. She looked at me, regal and tan from working in her garden.
"It's chaise longue," she said. "It's French."

#2
"So this is it" was the theme or beginning. This one didn't really work, so I kind of folded some of the details into the next one.

#3
First line: "I cleaned my mirror with a sponge"

I cleaned my mirror with a sponge. I cleaned everything, scrubbed the inside of the microwave and polished the faucets, trying to erase all trace of him. Eddie hadn't touched the mirror, but he had looked in it, probably.

He went in the bathroom after, and I lay there and thought about how I had done it, I had crossed a line I'd never meant to cross. Last night, we were in somebody's basement with the white Christmas lights duct-taped to the ceiling and the screen door that almost blew away in Eddie's hand when he opened it to let us out into the stars reflected in the lake.

That was before, and this is forever after. And no matter how many ways I try to clean my after apartment, this is it.

#4
Theme: Duality in a high school cafeteria

Our high school had a dress code, because it was semi-private, but not really. My town paid for it, and all I got for their money was me in khakis or corduroy. I kept my shirt tucked in around teachers -- I didn't want to have to stay there in uncomfortable clothes any longer than I had to, so I was careful to avoid the teachers who were too happy with the detention slips.

The cafeteria was on school grounds, so theoretically school rules applied. But those same teachers with the stacks of slips were the ones whose breath reeked of coffee in the afternoons. They needed their coffee and I needed to feel some air on my skin. So I was two ways. Mr. Button-Down Khaki and Mr. Shirt Untucked, Mr. Making Out in the Janitor Closet with Janie Frederick, who took off her sweater as soon as we got in there and kept it off until the bell.

The dress code was supposed to make us ready to dress in a business-appropriate manner for our future jobs, but all it did was make me narrow my job search to places where I could wear jeans and t-shirts and drink coffee all day.

"If you see my girlfriend, tell her I'm drinking responsibly." A Jersey guy, bright white sneakers, slick black hair, baggy buttondown and jeans, says it to a girl in green scrubs and and a puffy white coat. He's smoking outside Slainte in the rain, his white shirt reflected on the dark wet street.

She steps carefully over water pooling at the corner and laughs as she keeps walking.

"Of all the three million people in Philly to see," he says to his friend, when she's gone.

Creative Writing

He was a hockey player from Montreal. He smoked pot in the woods behind the basketball hoops, just outside the ring of the dorm’s orange light, with my friend Justin, who was a dealer. Once Justin introduced him to me, and he said, yeah, I know Jenny, though I never knew why. The class fulfilled a requirement for him, and most of the time he didn’t speak, just nodded when the professor called his name for attendance. I sat there in the desk behind him, three days a week, looking at the way his dark hair curled down, sometimes wet, sometimes dry and tangled, into the collars of his shirts, hockey hair. Sometimes he wore a bright blue sweater with big uneven stitches that looked homemade, and a collar that kind of rested low so you could see bare skin over the muscles in his neck.

Finally one day he had to read something in class. He looked down at the paper the whole time and read fast about Nintendo games lined up on the wooden shelf above his bed, the faded colors of the labels, how he prized them. The story ended when his basement room flooded and they all got ruined. He didn’t even check if they still worked, just threw them clattering into a big black trash bag and never fished them back out like I would’ve.

Since then I’ve read millions of words on pages, millions of first-draft words, millions of published words, written millions of words of my own. But his line of grey plastic games, the way the light slanted in on them through the basement window in the late afternoons when his friends came over after practice to flop on beanbag chairs on the orange shag rug and make fun of each other and play Contra or Excitebike or Mario, the way the labels curled, peeled, and then rubbed off, ruined, after the flood, his childhood’s end…strange, the things you never forget.