Find the Word
I was tagged by @fictionshewrote for this! Thank you so much <3 Basic concept: find a quote that contains the following words “breath, open, deep, gently.” Every post gets different words, so if I tagged you, your words are at the bottom of this post!
I’m gonna have to dig around through various drafts, since all I’ve been writing are short stories. But all of these short stories will be part of the same collection! I’ll post the associated titles along with the excerpts. Breath
This is from my story “Until it Hits Something Solid” about two guys in Oakhurst sorting out their friendship.
All his adult life, Wilder has felt he hasn’t quite understood things. The lectures at his community college, how to talk to women, why Corey always looks like he’s ready to fight. Now, with Corey’s sad, self-assured face staring at him, and the creeping suspicion that he’s in the wrong, he takes one, slow breath. “Then fucking enlighten me,” he says.
“No,” Corey says. Then, quieter, “What do you think is going to happen to Tracy’s daughter?”
“I don’t get it.”
“Every asshole here has an opinion. How do you think this works out for her?”
“I don’t know,” Wilder says. His neck hurts, tense with the promise of a headache. He isn’t sure if he wants Tracy’s daughter—or the idea of her—to have a kid or not. He wants her to make her own decision. He doesn’t want to have to think about what that decision means. Whenever things like this came up in his house growing up, they were pushed aside. They didn’t involve him. There was the obvious answer of choice, the answer that he felt was best because he didn’t have to have an opinion about it. Now, the more he thought about Tracy’s daughter, and having to carry a baby with Oakhurst watching, or without a place to sleep, the more he was certain he couldn’t know the answer. “There’s no good option,” he says.
“There it is,” Corey says. “For once you figured something out yourself.” He sinks back into the seat, body hanging slack. “There’s no version of this where she doesn’t do exactly what she needs to survive,” he says. “Same as any of us.” Open
This is from a short story with the working title “Collection,” about a young girl trying to find control and power in her life in self-destructive ways. She tosses more crackers whenever the ducks grow disinterested, keeps them waiting around for more. They quack and squabble and snap flat bills her way, wide open and demanding. The youngest ones are the loudest, still shedding their grey fluff for full grown feathers. The babies leave clumps of themselves floating on the water in a way she finds careless, stuck to each other, snagged on twigs or scum. But, whenever they draw close to land, the parents crowd around their children, shrill and over protective against the girl’s interest. Her dad always pulls her back from the edge when they walk the paths around the lake. Concerned is the word he uses for how tightly he holds onto her. “Your mother and I are concerned,” or, “You can’t wander off” or, “I love you—stay close.” He never lets her leave the paved path to feed the ducks or climb trees, always keeps her where he wants her. She suspects that her parents know more than she does about where danger lurks, or if, more likely, they are just scared of the possibilities that lie outside closed doors.
Feet crunch in the dirt behind her and when she turns it is as she suspected: Reid is watching her. He smiles at her as if she has said a funny joke or invited him to stay, and she does not smile back. She knows he will come closer whether she smiles or not, because it is hot and her tree has shade. Because they are the only two looking out at the lake. Because he has followed her here from Mrs. Herschel’s house. She had wanted him to show up, but now that he is here a part of her misses her closet and the dark and the ants.
Deep
I cheated slightly and went for “deeper” instead of “deep.” This comes out of a story titled “Beyond the Storm, the Night is Peaceful.” It’s about a young girl and her father trying to communicate, and trying to learn to trust each other to care.
“Tomorrow we’ll go into town and thank Bill right. Pay him for the gas he used on you,” her dad says.
Calliope sits across from him, the pint of pistachio ice cream between them. It’s half soup, no point freezing it again. Once solid, it’ll taste like freezer burn. She digs her spoon into the island of ice cream floating in the middle, pins it against the side to get a scoop out. Melt drips onto her shirt. Wiping it rubs it deeper into the fabric. Her dad looks tired, shoulders slack, eyes red. They sit like that, her eating and him quiet, until he picks up his spoon. The pint goes back and forth after that. A few bites, then pass it along until it’s gone.
“I was going to Fresno,” Calliope says.
“Don’t start like that,” her dad says. He sets the empty pint down between them, spreads his hands, palms against the table.
“How else is there?” she says. Her backpack lays open next to her father’s chair.
He reaches into the backpack, pulls out a wad of bills. “You took three hundred dollars.” He tosses it next to the empty ice cream.
“Two thirty-five.”
He pounds the table, palm flat, hard enough to jump the empty pint. Then again, just as loud, but the weight behind the blow is gone. He looks at her without moving his head, up through his lashes. His eyes look large and wet and too young for his face. Like a child who has found his parents out in a lie for the first time, all that trust broken open into tears. “What’d you expect to do?” he says. “Fresno, sure. At night when everything’s closed. And alone—I didn’t raise you to be this fucking stupid.” When he looks at her this time there’s a weakness, a pain in the trembled set of his mouth that sends discomfort down Calliope’s spine. “I went to your school to find you,” he says.
“Didn’t have to,” she says.
Gently
This comes out of a story called “There Is No Fire Here.” It’s about a young person trying to grapple with their sister’s abuse, and the ways they’re implicated by not stopping that abuse.
The first time I set a fire, I was fifteen. In the fading evening light, I had bundled dry twigs and some brush in the dirt behind our trailer. Used some matches I found in a drawer to start the burn. It had smoked up so bad I’d almost passed out. Dad watched Survivor religiously. One season, a contestant passed out from smoke inhalation and fell into the fire. The pain was what woke him up. I only heard him screaming from the TV, turned in time to see him wading into a lake, skin and blood dripping from his hands. The flare of light and that image kept me steady. All of me clenched so tight that I saw spots, eyes aching against the severity. It was like staring into my own, hand-crafted Sun. I had made a star. A single point of light in the dark and the cold.
Inside, I could hear the belt. I could hear Tati. But the fire—the light—was alive. It burned so hot I felt the skin on my cheeks dry and gently blister. I watched until it had burned itself to ashes, until all that was left behind was blackened earth. Until the evening was quiet. Until I was quiet. Still me. The offering.
This was a lot of fun! Thank you so much for tagging me <3
I’m gonna tag @bealicey @ritedudehere and @wulphi but if anyone else would like to do it, please do so and remember to tag me so I can see the post. (Also, I’d say, if you can’t find something with that word, I challenge you to write a paragraph or some such using it.)
Your words are: Scrubbed, another, tangle, and everywhere.
