Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Words I Made Up While Doing Schoolwork in a Hurry #20

Here's a good one. What is "wisdome?"

Sunday, March 29, 2009

Alternate ending

On Saturday I took a great class on microfiction. One of our assignments was to write a new "tail for a tale" in 300 words or fewer, making up new endings for popular films, books or reality. The choices included new endings for any presidential election, World War II, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest without the lobotomy, any of the Star Wars films, or what might have happened if Jack lived instead of Rose in Titanic. That's the one I chose. Here it is:



Sometimes, after he settled into his spot on the beach and began drawing the tourists, he would see her walking by – always the young Rose. She never aged in his mind. Once a girl stopped and handed him twenty dollars and when he looked up it was her. Except then he saw that the girl had black hair and not auburn, and she wore one of those flimsy knit tank tops instead of lace. They only ever saw him as an old man. For the longest time he couldn’t go near the water, the waves. Now he couldn’t stay away. He felt the sea pull like he’d felt her pull at his wrist before the deep cold claimed her. They were looking again, for that damned necklace – as if it was the most valuable thing at the bottom of the sea.

He had tried to die that night. He tried to roll himself into the abyss but found he had no strength, or was frozen tight to the wood that bouyed him. The otherworld where she had gone was close enough to touch. He refused to call out when the boats drifted by but they found him anyway. In the daylight on the Carpathia he had seen Hockley searching for her and that was the only thing that kept Jack from jumping up and throttling him on the deck, surrounded by shivering masses in wool blankets – Hockley would never have her. Hockley would live with that as long as he lived, until he offed himself over something ephemeral and meaningless. Jack had much more. He’d had to live with much more.

Friday, March 27, 2009

Portent

Here's a little piece for a belated Three Word Wednesday. The words are earnest, layer and reactive.



Four dead cows.

It’s what I see when I drive by the farm, a flash of death just past the earnest farmhouse with its windows shuttered by tradition and Christian judgment. Everything else is a gray area.

Layers of dried mud crack on their flanks. They didn’t die where they stood, they were dragged there in those neat rows, their stiff legs all sticking out in the same direction, pointing toward nowhere. Before I congratulate myself on the 'CSI: Farm' deduction I chill because of what’s not apparent. Illness? Poison? Something reactive in their sixteen collective stomachs? Four times the chance something could go wrong, could morph through their odd, grass-processing bodies.

Was this the end or the beginning?

Thursday, March 26, 2009

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Words I Made Up While Doing Schoolwork in a Hurry #19

Someone give me a definition for "nerfous."

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Strange interlude IV














The chicken puppet and the anchovy puppet decide to form a book club.

Saturday, March 14, 2009

Tell-Tale Book

Would anyone else be weirded out if you were reading an Edgar Allan Poe collection late at night on Friday the 13th when everyone else was asleep and you discovered the book had exactly 666 pages?

Monday, March 9, 2009

Hot air

Thursday, March 5, 2009

It's not purple...

...but you gotta give it up for electric salmon.














P.S. It's for sale!

Sunday, March 1, 2009