Chalk

The bucket lay opened in the stretch of concrete that passed for a patio in then back of the very suburban apartment. A primary-colors slide-cube-fort occupied most it, leaving the red haired boy hunting for room to crawl on. His mother watched from inside, alternating between the book (library owned) and quick glances to the patio.

The bucket had ended up hastely in the red wagon that shuffled boys and groceries from store to house–a last minute decision, maybe a chance to buy some needed study time. And just as hastely it had been presented as a last minute surprise to the boy. His grey overall shorts hugged his soft, silky baby fat and the heat of late spring was quickly curling his long locks into tight spirals that went from straw to auburn when little beads of sweat gathered at the roots. 

The boy smiled at the opened bucket. The huge cylinders of color offered new choices–olive and fuschia and gold and melon. He wrapped a small hand around them and tried to lick them. “No, no!”  Mama quickly stopped him. “On the ground!”

Mama showed him the magic of the color spilled on the gray canvas, quickly sketching a frog, with big eye lashes and a heart for lips. The boy would learn later that mama’s frog was the boa constrictor of her life and that, like Saint-Exupery, she had never learned to quickly draw anything else. 

For now, the frog was magical and mama stepped back in, letting the boy savor the color all by himself.

The color left the sticks so easily.  The boy discovered shades and textures and places to leave their dusty marks.  The sticks rolled on the ground under his bare knees and got stuck inside the overalls and in the corners of the small yellow slide. Some of them broke in half, letting the boy double the color greatness of the gift. Soon, some shattered, and dust of mahogany and gold fell in chaotic configurations on and around the boy. 

When mama came out again, her boy was covered in streaks of brilliant hues, stripes across the nose and left cheek and small splotches of golden dust in the right side of the face. His grey overalls had hand prints of green and lime and browns and a holiday of rainbows lay around his knees and bare feet.  Even his hair was tinted.  And through the wide grin, mama could see the buddah, giggling at the offering of color and late spring joy this world sometime has to offer. 

The run

Something twitched in the web of bare white branches.

Lisa upped the volume on her headphones hoping that the throbbing percussion of the latest  Vampire Weekend would shut down the rapidly encroaching sense of doom.

“One two three four five six seven eight and one two–”

Sometimes sheer counting had made the aches disappear. Not this time. Why had she stopped for a long run?

The trail head had looked inviting enough. Lovely wintry crisp weather, small gravel on the path covered with the squishy quilt of rotting leaves. On one side the river slowly ate away the frozen edges of the last snow storm. The canal on the other side was not so lucky and, even in the warming temperatures, hung on stubbornly to a layer of greenish ice, now in total disarray displaying through its encrusted translucency  the remnants of the many freezes and thaws of the winter season.

She hadn’t hesitated. She had jumped into the idyllic path, gone over the quaint red bridge and began to pound the soft ground.

A few miles in she had began to notice the solitude–the disturbing echoes of nothingness. Bare bones nature–chaotic and random and rarely encountered in her native New York City overpowered her natural sense of indestructibility. She ran with music in most trails. Not here. Strange thoughts began to creep in. What if someone lurked in the path. Did you forget about wild animals. She hadn’t told anyone she was running.

For a moment she stopped, paralyzed. In the distance she could hear a rumbling getting louder and louder. Panic set in. It sounded like a mountain sized vacuum approaching. No. It was a train in the distance.  Her hearing became painfully acute. She turned around and ran back.

As her speed increased, she saw other women from long long ago also running this very same path. They were finding their way to a village, carrying food, some were fleeing for their lives. May were very afraid. They ran fast and it hurt them. She was running for them, she was running with them. The women who had to run alone because they needed to escape, to go somewhere, who hadn’t had cars, or cities or desk jobs. Who had to live and run. In the open, in the rain, in the dark. She heard everything. The crack of the wind against a frozen edge, the echoes of the men running after them, a couple of deer running from them. She realized she was (they were) both prey and predator.

Then the mind went blank.

By the time she saw the car at the trail head, the sun had began to color the trees in its evening honey tones. She touched the car. She clicked it open. She took some pictures. She drank some water. She posted to some media. She got in the car. She drove away.

Less than five minutes later, she completely forgot that for a moment she had actually been alive.

Anna

(Raw snippet from a larger work)

The subway rolled in. Anna moved into one of the trains, noticing once again the slight stoop of her shoulders. It still bothered her. In the dim, unflattering fluorescent light, she brushed off once again the gnawing of dissatisfaction. It had gotten better in the latter years or she had gotten better at pushing the feeling to the periphery of her consciousness.

Her life so far had been a step too late. Fairly recently, she had finally realized that she had been one of the golden children, the chosen ones–intelligent, ambitious, driven. She had actually been the people she admired but had not known it at the time. So her promise had not panned out and she had slipped into an uneasy mediocrity as time went on. By the time she had noticed, it had been too late–an entire life lived in the pluperfect.

In some ways, it didn’t matter. Anna had gotten very good at lying, and the past that she could have had but didn’t, she simply had invented.  And she was good at invention.  Her golden child sense of entitlement left her with no scruples in doing this. The way she figured, it was her birthright. The only reason her life had not gone the chosen way was a misstep, a simple miscalculation–on the whole dismisable.

WordStreak – The Scar

(A  small raw snippet from a much larger work.  This is part of my #WordStreak commitment–300 words daily at least.  I will publish some material–although it may not be what I actually wrote that day–just to keep me on my toes)

“Well, I’ll tell you the story  but I don’t know if it is true or false I have rearranged the dusty corners of this infernal mind of mine so many times.”

A pub in Bournemouth—not even a pub, it might have been a diner, greasy fries and chips and coke.  I didn’t drink then—refused to.  My body was still sacred—I wanted my body to be sacred, not knowing that I was my body.”

“But I also wanted the boys.  Oh, how I wanted the boys.  There was a German one, thin in the face with long, delicate fingers and sweet freckles, who had caught my eye.  I didn’t speak German so hormones were talking.  And I was so small and awkward and young and eager.”

“Two of the boys at our table smoked.  Hell, everyone but me smoked at that time.  I began to clown around putting the straw from the coke suggestively to my lips.”

“In. Breathe. Out. Puff.  Giggle. Sometimes the clear cheap plastic stuck briefly on my lower lip–progressively drier from wanting to kiss.  Then I saw the lighter.”

“The tip of the clear straw touched the flame.  The plastic melted rapidly into one single teardrop that hang there precariously until the molecular structure began to weaken and stretch, polymers still clinging to each other as a blob of melted plastic fell on my left hand in the valley between the knuckles of the middle and index fingers forming a perfect dome of translucent pain and quickly burning through my skin—forever a testament to my teen lust.