Category: Chris’ Writing

The Mighty Shake

When he stands, it is as a mighty lion stands – a deliberate struggle of a beast battered by carnivorous dreams. Restless and cold, he shifts through the monochrome darkness of night. With each step his paw lands with the thrust of an uncalibrated pile driver trying to beat down the house in which he lives. His good master does not wake; not so for the neighbor girl tumbling beyond the pale green drywall.

He reaches his mirage and begins his inarticulate laps from the cool stainless steel bowl. Water splashes on the wall and the floor and his crusty black nose. When the struggle is over, strands of sinewy slobber drape his mug. The “mighty shake” is coming. The walls recoil in terror. The picture frames fall flat. The clean – the spotless – the untouched – they all post their guard – ready and waiting. His great brute box head turns violently and sets in motion a furious chain reaction of jowl to drool to mid-air acrobats of gelatin-like mouth droppings seeking out the clean – the spotless – the untouched.

Written from 11:05 pm to 11:25 pm on Wednesday, November 10, 2010 at home in Traverse City, Michigan.

OneWord: Fangs, Stage, Elixir, Feud, Kit

OneWord.com gives you a random word and 60 seconds to write. Following are my submissions for the past week.

Fangs: The husky’s fangs were exposed as it panted cool grey breath into the mid-fall air. They looked sharp and hungry, as if she were in her element and ready to hunt. Then she sat next to me, and put her paw up to be scratched.

Stage: She set the stage with her wonderful grin. I saw it from the back of the natural theater in which we were set free to roam, discover and explore the magnificent wilderness.

Elixir: The elixir of life – the body – fully woven, yet muted beneath the dark suppression of my chores, responsibilities, and commitments – struggles to burn through the layers and succeed a short success. Let me be.

Feud: We rarely feud, and when we do, we feud a little then make some breakfast or go for a walk or laugh it off. There’s never much to our feuds and, so far as I can tall, they’ve never grown into fights.

Kit: The tool kit in the corner of my work shed is old. The blue-coated metal is rusting and creaks when the lid is opened. The wooden-handled tools are cracked and dry and, the metal there, rusty, too.

Remembering Summer

Gaze about from where you stand. Spin in circles ’til you’re dizzy as a child exiting the best merry-go-round ride she’s ever had. Look up at the humongous sky above and wonder aloud what’s beyond the antique clouds and shimmering stars. Watch the yellow leaves fall and remember it was a hot and dry and brilliant summer that left us with more than a handful of memories. And then, in good time, when the wind blows hard down the paths that we happen upon and the warmth has dissipated, take another moment to wrap the textures of life all around you like a hundred blankets quilted from everything that’s so much bigger than any single one of us could ever imagine. Remember summer. Enjoy fall. And look forward to all that is to come.

Three Lovely Heads

Three lovely heads turned left, looking, not where they must, but where they may. Two of three capped with color. The third: just light brown hair, up and off to reveal a flushed cold ear. The snow on the path whence they came is trampled flat from sporty snowshoes and tender paws.

Maybe, if I were to jump inside a lovely head… maybe each one is looking back at their tracks being eroded by the hill-top wind and wishing they, too, could go on such a wonderful ride through the crisp country air. Up and away, just as a snowflake, as high as the birds until the furiously white sun in the expansive blue sky melted each one back down among naked poplars, oaks full of curled brown leaves, and evergreens with their thin needles wiggling in the wind. They would set down on the diamond snow, yet the only depressions around would be the dimples in six smiling cheeks concealed by three lovely heads turned left, looking, not where they must, but where they may.

Written, for the most part, from 11:05 pm to 11:30 pm on Sunday, December 13th, 2009 in my childhood bedroom in Traverse City, Michigan.

Youthful Smiling Faces

Last weekend I stood among one dozen youthful and smiling faces. Beyond was Lake Michigan, its muted blue and green water as stormy as the sky. Waves with whitecaps crashed on the sandy shore far below our perch, but made no sound. There was a cold wind that swept up and over the face of the dune and carried with it sand and snow that felt like a billion little supermen punching my radish cheeks.

I sat on the hard yellow sand and closed my watery eyes for a moment to imagine the warm summer day when I ran down the steep dune path (dimpled from climbers). The water was still and transparent then, which allowed me to see rocks near the shore and splotches of seaweed further out. I want to say I could feel the warmth of that summer day sun as I sat there with my eyes closed, but there’s no way. The wind whipping over the precipice of the dune carried away not only sand and snow, but also the remainder of my summer memory. As quickly as I had displaced my presence, I was brought back to the present by a chill that rattled my vertebrae.

Above me, dogs wove in and out of multicolored snow-pant pillars, playing and flirting with each other in a manner of which the rest of us could only dream.

When we lined up for a group picture, backs to the beauty, our smiles ran left-and-right and up-and-down. Big goofy sand-filled grins, all seeming to say, ‘I’m having fun if you are!’ And in that precise moment I realized that we were (and are) fractions of each other’s happiness. Without any number of us there, the wind would carry a sharper bite, the gray sky would be less magnificent, and our pictures – memories – and lives would be less brilliant.

Home Sweet Home

The young boy stood on the dirt shoulder of a rutted country road as an automobile sputtered past leaving behind a cloud of dust. The sun was white and hot, bleaching everything beneath and creating a raw vacancy in the already desolate terrain. The grain of the land stood up to him as he knelt down to it and when he reached his hand down to the dirt, he thought of home and of mama and of the small dog they found one day and kept forever.

The dehydrated crops stretched to the horizon and turned back his eyes and thoughts from any plan he’d ever had to get away from the abandoned details. ‘Look around,’ mama would say, ‘And you’ll see how lucky you are.’ He squinted through the dust sifting down at a another car coming along the right fork in the road. His hand, stuffed in the pocket of his ripped jean shorts, clenched around the natural wood and polished brass caps of his carving knife. He withdrew the knife, pinched open its large blade, and ran the dry skin of his thumb perpendicular to the sharp edge. It scraped his dry skin audibly. Maybe like the tear of paper. Or a mason jar full of mama’s homemade blackberry jam being dragged across their counter top.

Written from 10:00 pm to 10:25pm on Sunday, December 6th, 2009 in my childhood bedroom in Traverse City, Michigan.

Everyday Everything

She was his everyday everything, and he realized he would never replace – or fill – the part of his heart that he had devoted to her. It’s not that it was off limits, for he had tried to reach it every day since he last called her his love. Instead, the void was simply too enormously significant to fill with any other memory.

He had loved since, but it was never the same. Everything felt like some crude high school mock-up, not a Broadway set. The pinnacle of his recent loves was, to be austere, the destruction of the set pieces and, equally, the black absence of the negative space when it was over. In that space, he could see through to what was left of his shattered and failing memories.

Loop and again, he couldn’t get her out of his mind. But the sad thing was, his memories were fading – not much faster than the basal sliding of a ten-thousand year glacier – but fading nonetheless. Stored sensations that he once carried in and around him now seemed as far away as the migrating sea gulls circling above the summer bay. He devoted hours of his days to trying to remember the details that mattered most – the ones he now missed the most. God, damn it. The beginning wasn’t right and there was no end.

It wasn’t much of a leap to presume that in spite of the bad and the worse, the fighting and the distance, the intrusions by others and the exclusions by one another he could have had her for the rest of his life. They could have persevered.

Love is perseverance he would say aloud when there was nothing else he could do to calm his hands which shook from anger. He would fold them together and say aloud that love is perseverance. That sturdy set around him both walling him in and walling him out.

Written from 11:45pm to 12:15am on Sunday, November 8 and Monday, November 9 of 2009 in my childhood bedroom in Traverse City, Michigan.