Three out of four ain't bad: a triptych

While it rained, he stood at the window of his apartment playing a scratched violin. With only three strings, he had to adapt his musical arrangements. He was grateful once more that the E — the high string — was the missing string, and not any of the others. Those high notes scraped the inside of his brain anyway.

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The little girls are dressed in their best clothes. Their grandmother starched and pressed the little dresses until they could have stood on their own. Their curled, brown hair is pinned away from their cheeks by matching yellow bird barrettes. Grandmother made them matching sweater-coats, smart little wool jackets to keep their blue dresses tidy and keep out the autumn chill. The polished shoes are buckled now, but the soccer ball abandoned under the practice goal will be irresistible soon. The tiny scuff marks will be scolded and then buffed away.

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Two men play accordion inside the little Bavarian restaurant. The building was made of several rooms that had been added on and patched together over the past 100 years. In the nineties, the owner tried to make the place brighter by putting thick white stucco on all the inside and outside walls. Chalkboards display the hearty offerings of the day: two meals, two appetizers, two kinds of beer, and two accordion players. 

10 Things: Witch

It’s Writer Wednesday (#WW) over in Twitterdom, so let’s do 10 Things to get our writer cells working. I say a thing. You say 10 Things that pop into your head or out the end of your pen. Ready? Set?

WITCH

Go!

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These are my 10 Things. Your mileage may vary.

1. Wicked Witch. For L. Frank Baum, she was a cackling, green-skinned thing, out for vengeance for her sister against Dorothy and for power against the Wizard of Oz. Gregory Maguire complicates her, building a biology and psychology for her in which wickedness is only one interpretation. Rhetorical and political only.

2. Amy is the name of the witch that haunts my stories, but I don’t really know who she is or what makes her unique. Should I make her a knitter? Or perhaps more like Nancy Drew, sleuthing and meddling?

3. Witchy Woman. Is that The Eagles? What is that song even about? Does the point of view LIKE her witchiness? Fear it? Hang on, I have to go listen. 

4. Hermione Granger. My favorite witch. Bookish, awkward, brilliant. The most loyal friend. And aside from one jealous meltdown, she does not crumble from her responsibilities even when upset. 

5. Which witch? A grammatical conundrum. A question in which we wonder what the correct use of the word is in a particular written context.

6. Witchy Poo. She was a costumed cartoon of a witch who looked just like the cartoon Helga. Orange hair, striped socks and vultures. Oh, and warts. What did she even want from Pufenstuf? I don’t know, except that he was afraid of her and I want some socks like hers. 

7. Bewitched. The domestic witch who used her powers not for the improvement of society but for domestic bliss, against the wishes of her wilder and more sexual mother. Conservative shift? Then her daughter is wilder as well?

8. Sabrina the teenage witch. Which I never watched. Not once. But somehow my brain knows the actress’s name is Melissa Joan Hart. Why do I know that?

9. Willow. Nerdy to evil. Hetero to lesbian. Shy to invidious. My other favorite witch. Both she and Hermione relied heavily on books for their power and craft.

10. A Discovery of Witches was the last witch book I read.

And now, you see, I’ve come to the end of my 10 Things and only talked about pop culture witches. What about historical witches? Religious witches? Multi-cultural witches?  

It's in the shoes

My favorite style weighs seven grams. I have nine pairs of those. I keep them in baggies in the closet with silica gel packets and athlete’s foot powder. Because you just can’t find them anymore. I got most of them on eBay from different resellers. They’re worth a chunk of change, but they shave off enough mass to hold off the fatigue at the end of a long race.

Sure. I noticed a huge difference when I switched from the nine gram to the eight gram shoes and stopped wearing socks. They get an unholy smell after a couple of runs but they’re worth it for that forty-two seconds I save. 

They wear microfiber shirts, long-sleeved and white. Mesh sun caps. Expensive wrap-around sunglasses. Complicated wrist-watches or smart phones on a bicep band with one ear hook. They stand in arrogant postures holding silver, bullet-shaped water bottles with the logos of running brands. They suck the last drop of goo from little foil energy packets.

The race winner walks by. He’s a college kid. Along the race route people called and cheered him by name. He halved their times in broken-in, stock, Nikes and a tank top. He’s eating a banana and drinking the free water provided by the race organizers. He waves at them. They smile and call his name, eager to ask him questions. He shrugs, slowing his pace only for a moment. He drops the banana peel into the trash can and jogs to his car.

10 Things: Mac

A stuffy head and creaky fingers are making my words flow like molasses today. What I need is a little writing EXERCISE. Join me? Let’s do 10 Things. I say a thing and you share the first 10 Things you think of when you think of that thing. It’s easy. Find my things after a polite pixel partition. Anyone can play!

10 Things: MAC.

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My MAC things? Certainly.

1. Hi. I’m a Mac and I’m a PC. Actually I’m a Mac. Or rather, THIS is a Mac.

2. Two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun. Big Mac. Why do they call it that?

3. Mac. A nickname for my step-father. A frequent nickname for people with a “Mc” or “Mac” surname or more generally for anyone of Irish or Scottish descent.

4. A generic epithet, like ‘buddy.’ Hey mac, can you spare a dime?

5. Mac, a Scottish Terrier from a Disney movie. Which one though? Lady and the Tramp? Can anyone confirm or deny this correlation?

6. Mac… Mack… macintosh rain coat. Splish splash.

7. Mac. Macadam. McAdam, the person credited with the use of macadame, a type of paving that I associate with black top parking lots. I learned this word from Janet Evanovich. True story.

8. macmacmaccamcamcam A backwards camera? Yes, reaching now. Can. I. Pull. Out. Ten???

9. Mac. Macademia nuts! From Hawaii. My grandma Flora brought these to me sometimes when she came to visit. I thought she had such weird snacks. I realize now that she was excited to share exotic foods with me. 

10. macmacmacmac HEYYY Macarena! Sonar X6 can dance the Macarena (though he knows it as the calendar song from school. Try it. Sing the months of the year—in English or Spanish—to the Macrena tune. I’ll wait.). But he doens’t know how to Hustle. A parenting lapse. I’ll fix that this weekend. 

Etude: a Fairy Tale

The blood rushes to my head when I think of the ground. It’s a long way down. On one side of me a window shows the sun setting over the giant boulders at the edge of the lake. I used to swim there and spread my hair across the boulders to dry in the sun. My mother’s cameo ring always got tangled in my hair when I tried to reset the braid. On the other side of me, a doorway shows Benito’s face, twenty feet tall, in black and white spray paint on the alley wall. So he’s always watching the door. 

He used to bring me flowers according to the season. Strange flowers from all over the world. Birds of Paradise to remind me of the heat of the jungle. Brown-orange mums (my favorite—so crisp) to remind me of football games and apple cider. (Why didn’t he bring apple cider?) He could be persuaded, sometimes, into trust and security. Into something like happiness. He could be persuaded to rebraid my hair with the blood-red poppies (to forget me of everything). 

I stand on the bed, waiting. Will the magic ever expire? 

I liked him so much more when he was flesh and blood and six feet tall. Now he’s paint and pigment. Never changing. Only watching my door. Never bringing me flowers. Clutching in his fist, the key to the door.