Only four weeks and three days until I am done with this quarter. Did you know that it gets warmer later on in the year? Did you know that being in a house with no air conditioning or swamp cooler sucks pretty hard? Because the answer to both of those questions is a resounding "It does". It may be 'cooler' here than in Tucson, but when you factor in humidity and lack of AC, it hardly feels it. I've spent the past week or so fondly remembering watching the mercury rise outside while the temperature inside remained, wait for it, comfortable. Thank God for giant fans and having windows on both sides of rooms.
Classes proceed much as they have: blaahh.
Does anyone remember...and the name escapes me as I write this...the movie with Sara Jessica Parker and Bette Midler and that other woman who play witches, and it has a talking cat, and some kid who moves into town and his sister gets kidnapped by the witches...? Anyway, I have a sudden urge to watch it. Netflix needs to provide instantaneous service. Instantaneous mind-reading service.
Needless to say, it's terribly exciting up here. I'd go out and about, taking pictures and such, but like I said: hot, humid.
Friday, May 19, 2006
Thursday, May 04, 2006
birds over the sea
Biology was, blessedly, cancelled today. I'm sitting in the library wondering whether or not I should go to Poetry. It's been one of those days already. Anyway, this is a story I wrote for my Fiction class last quarter, I've been meaning to post it for a while.
It was a Sunday, a day for writing letters instead of receiving them, a day that swept itself underneath Adrian’s door and fogged his apartment with wasted possibility. His sister was telling him about her house in California, how very much the water looked like a painting --so blue! from her window and how long it took Harry to carry all of the boxes into the living room. Adrian pressed his finger to the dirty glass in his kitchenette and slowly wiped away a month of dust into smooth tendrils of nonsense patterns that curled and connected like thoughts running through his head.
“What’s your address?” Adrian asked because they had run out of things to talk about and the conversation lagged, tumbled and lay gasping for breath in a ditch. “I’ll send you a letter.”
“I don’t know yet; they haven’t put the street sign up,” she sighed, and he could hear her breath echoing in a glass like they were talking in a cave. “I hate that there’s gonna be a house across the street soon. It’ll block the ocean and I’ll forget what it looks like.”
“You should take a picture,” he said. Once he said it, he regretted it, the words reminded him of school yard taunts.
It’ll last longer.
“Maybe I’ll just burn it down.” Her voice boomed into the telephone, he was at the bottom of a well and she was leaning over the edge, bouncing the words down; somewhere he could hear the seagulls calling to each other; Go, go, they urged as they circled around the water that sang on its own. “And dance around the fire.” He stared through the lines he had made to the highway that curled around his building; endless hissing cars sped by. “When are you going to visit us, Adrian? You should come visit soon.”
In the evening there was just him and the quiet gurgle of a coffee pot; the secret mumbling of it and the creaking wheeze of the building that crept around his apartment. They were all waiting for Rosemary, who worked in a law office downtown, and came home smelling like old coffee and toner; the smell followed her dog-like, it ran around, nipping at his nose. She came through the door and laid on the couch like someone had thrown her there; one leg over the back, another over the rough arm of it, and arms sprawled behind her head. He watched her when she did this, her quick pantomime motions like she was constantly trying something out in front of a mirror; even when she raised her head and looked over at the coffee pot it looked like a reflection of what she saw once.
“Let’s go out tonight.” He said it as if no one had ever gone out before and the weight of it pressed down on her, pinning her to the couch.
“I’m tired.”
I know you are, but what am I?
“Alright,” he tried to sound casual but suspicion pushed at him and he was certain that it had been in his mouth and she could see it if she looked; maybe she didn’t care. “I don’t know where we’d go anyway.”
She kicked off her shoes and stretched, her toes quivered like ten little birds ready to fly away. He had seen that anxiousness before. It was there while she dressed and how she dried her hair and in the time between sleep and waking up. More and more often Adrian saw it.
They went out to dinner a week later. It was Italian, because Rosemary liked Italian, the sauce and the wine of it; they had met at an Italian restaurant where he worked forever ago. She came in often enough that he knew her name, knew where she liked to sit, and that she was single. The night he asked her out, he got a haircut and stood in front of the mirror in his bathroom saying “Hi” or “Hello” or “Hey.” He was convinced it was the opening that was important. In the end he made a gurgling noise when they were walking to their cars.
“Did you see the plane crash in the paper today?” A plane had lost control in a storm and plowed through a highway in Rome, the fire and smoke pillaring into the black sky. There were pictures on television with somber news anchors who spoke like they knew this would make or break their career, and bleary-eyed mothers who screamed and wept and clutched their rosaries. “It looked pretty bad,” she finished, the furrow in her brow nestled between her eyes for a moment, and took a breadstick.
He drank his wine and poured another glass, “What are you going to have?” He didn’t want to talk about the crash. He wanted to forget everything that was beyond the table like forgetting a dream, letting it fade into vague, disjointed bits of nothing shapes. “I was thinking about the tortellini.”
Their food came slowly on the arms of a sullen waitress, who held their food --tortellini for him, and a mass of cheese and pasta, the name of which Adrian had forgotten, for her-- alternately as if it were garbage and as if it were a fierce living thing that would leap from the plates and attack her. But away from her stained shirt. Always away.
Outside, it had begun to rain, and the rain came down the windows like a frayed curtain, blurring everything. He saw an ambulance race by in a red and blue smear of purpose. It was doing something, helping people. Whenever someone asked Adrian what he did for a living, which was rarely, he would tell them that he was a writer; sometimes, when he was drunk, he would say that he was published too. After all, there had been a small amount of local enthusiasm when he sent off his manuscript --Swing Sets--, and he figured, in a stumble and a haze, that that was worth something. But what little enthusiasm there was seemed to have dragged itself outside of city limits with a broken wing and died there, cawing weakly to the end.
“I wonder what it would feel like to have your life end just like that,” Rosemary said. Adrian chewed a tortellini and watched her fine gold necklace dance against her skin while she spoke. He’d finish the bottle soon.
Would they have to talk about the crash? The lives lost and ruined? He didn’t want to think about any kind of great change, much less something on that scale, it seemed like the end of the world. There were great masses of fuselage wedged into the ground; smoking craters like footsteps. “You probably wouldn’t know what had happened,” he mumbled to get her to drop the subject and to move onto something else.
“But,” she paused and looked purposefully out the window to the wet streets gleaming eerily in the lights. “What’s it feel like to be dead, you know?”
“Probably something like this.”
There had been phone calls when someone’s breathing answered his Hello, and then the sick flat dial tone that resounded in his ear; short messages on the answering machine with nothing but silence.
She looked into his face. His lips were numb and wavered a little.
I’m rubber, you’re glue...
He was more than a little drunk and its blanket clung to him, making him feel more paranoid, more angry, more secure in speaking, perhaps, than he should have felt. “Who’s the guy who keeps calling?” There was a sensation in his stomach that had nothing to do with the pasta, nothing to do with the wine, and everything to do with how he could tell that everything was going to come out of his mouth: tumbling and awkward, covering the table with half-words and spilling onto the floor with no way for someone to come and mop it up. “What’s his name?”
There was a squawking retort, a clattering, swearing mess of sound outside his door. When he woke up, she was gone. There wasn’t a note, she had taken most of her clothes, most of her things, pictures from the refrigerator lay on the floor, little lifeboats on the great tile sea.
He sent letters the next day. Two envelopes: one with his sister’s name on it and LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA underneath, like he was sending it to some misnamed and misplaced Santa Claus, and the other with his name and his address underneath. He also sent a postcard with the Seattle skyline looking how tourists must imagine it: sparkling, with the sun high in the frame, bloated cartoon letters in the lower right corner. That one went to Rosemary’s old house, in case the people there were in the habit of forwarding mail.
It was a Sunday, a day for writing letters instead of receiving them, a day that swept itself underneath Adrian’s door and fogged his apartment with wasted possibility. His sister was telling him about her house in California, how very much the water looked like a painting --so blue! from her window and how long it took Harry to carry all of the boxes into the living room. Adrian pressed his finger to the dirty glass in his kitchenette and slowly wiped away a month of dust into smooth tendrils of nonsense patterns that curled and connected like thoughts running through his head.
“What’s your address?” Adrian asked because they had run out of things to talk about and the conversation lagged, tumbled and lay gasping for breath in a ditch. “I’ll send you a letter.”
“I don’t know yet; they haven’t put the street sign up,” she sighed, and he could hear her breath echoing in a glass like they were talking in a cave. “I hate that there’s gonna be a house across the street soon. It’ll block the ocean and I’ll forget what it looks like.”
“You should take a picture,” he said. Once he said it, he regretted it, the words reminded him of school yard taunts.
It’ll last longer.
“Maybe I’ll just burn it down.” Her voice boomed into the telephone, he was at the bottom of a well and she was leaning over the edge, bouncing the words down; somewhere he could hear the seagulls calling to each other; Go, go, they urged as they circled around the water that sang on its own. “And dance around the fire.” He stared through the lines he had made to the highway that curled around his building; endless hissing cars sped by. “When are you going to visit us, Adrian? You should come visit soon.”
In the evening there was just him and the quiet gurgle of a coffee pot; the secret mumbling of it and the creaking wheeze of the building that crept around his apartment. They were all waiting for Rosemary, who worked in a law office downtown, and came home smelling like old coffee and toner; the smell followed her dog-like, it ran around, nipping at his nose. She came through the door and laid on the couch like someone had thrown her there; one leg over the back, another over the rough arm of it, and arms sprawled behind her head. He watched her when she did this, her quick pantomime motions like she was constantly trying something out in front of a mirror; even when she raised her head and looked over at the coffee pot it looked like a reflection of what she saw once.
“Let’s go out tonight.” He said it as if no one had ever gone out before and the weight of it pressed down on her, pinning her to the couch.
“I’m tired.”
I know you are, but what am I?
“Alright,” he tried to sound casual but suspicion pushed at him and he was certain that it had been in his mouth and she could see it if she looked; maybe she didn’t care. “I don’t know where we’d go anyway.”
She kicked off her shoes and stretched, her toes quivered like ten little birds ready to fly away. He had seen that anxiousness before. It was there while she dressed and how she dried her hair and in the time between sleep and waking up. More and more often Adrian saw it.
They went out to dinner a week later. It was Italian, because Rosemary liked Italian, the sauce and the wine of it; they had met at an Italian restaurant where he worked forever ago. She came in often enough that he knew her name, knew where she liked to sit, and that she was single. The night he asked her out, he got a haircut and stood in front of the mirror in his bathroom saying “Hi” or “Hello” or “Hey.” He was convinced it was the opening that was important. In the end he made a gurgling noise when they were walking to their cars.
“Did you see the plane crash in the paper today?” A plane had lost control in a storm and plowed through a highway in Rome, the fire and smoke pillaring into the black sky. There were pictures on television with somber news anchors who spoke like they knew this would make or break their career, and bleary-eyed mothers who screamed and wept and clutched their rosaries. “It looked pretty bad,” she finished, the furrow in her brow nestled between her eyes for a moment, and took a breadstick.
He drank his wine and poured another glass, “What are you going to have?” He didn’t want to talk about the crash. He wanted to forget everything that was beyond the table like forgetting a dream, letting it fade into vague, disjointed bits of nothing shapes. “I was thinking about the tortellini.”
Their food came slowly on the arms of a sullen waitress, who held their food --tortellini for him, and a mass of cheese and pasta, the name of which Adrian had forgotten, for her-- alternately as if it were garbage and as if it were a fierce living thing that would leap from the plates and attack her. But away from her stained shirt. Always away.
Outside, it had begun to rain, and the rain came down the windows like a frayed curtain, blurring everything. He saw an ambulance race by in a red and blue smear of purpose. It was doing something, helping people. Whenever someone asked Adrian what he did for a living, which was rarely, he would tell them that he was a writer; sometimes, when he was drunk, he would say that he was published too. After all, there had been a small amount of local enthusiasm when he sent off his manuscript --Swing Sets--, and he figured, in a stumble and a haze, that that was worth something. But what little enthusiasm there was seemed to have dragged itself outside of city limits with a broken wing and died there, cawing weakly to the end.
“I wonder what it would feel like to have your life end just like that,” Rosemary said. Adrian chewed a tortellini and watched her fine gold necklace dance against her skin while she spoke. He’d finish the bottle soon.
Would they have to talk about the crash? The lives lost and ruined? He didn’t want to think about any kind of great change, much less something on that scale, it seemed like the end of the world. There were great masses of fuselage wedged into the ground; smoking craters like footsteps. “You probably wouldn’t know what had happened,” he mumbled to get her to drop the subject and to move onto something else.
“But,” she paused and looked purposefully out the window to the wet streets gleaming eerily in the lights. “What’s it feel like to be dead, you know?”
“Probably something like this.”
There had been phone calls when someone’s breathing answered his Hello, and then the sick flat dial tone that resounded in his ear; short messages on the answering machine with nothing but silence.
She looked into his face. His lips were numb and wavered a little.
I’m rubber, you’re glue...
He was more than a little drunk and its blanket clung to him, making him feel more paranoid, more angry, more secure in speaking, perhaps, than he should have felt. “Who’s the guy who keeps calling?” There was a sensation in his stomach that had nothing to do with the pasta, nothing to do with the wine, and everything to do with how he could tell that everything was going to come out of his mouth: tumbling and awkward, covering the table with half-words and spilling onto the floor with no way for someone to come and mop it up. “What’s his name?”
There was a squawking retort, a clattering, swearing mess of sound outside his door. When he woke up, she was gone. There wasn’t a note, she had taken most of her clothes, most of her things, pictures from the refrigerator lay on the floor, little lifeboats on the great tile sea.
He sent letters the next day. Two envelopes: one with his sister’s name on it and LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA underneath, like he was sending it to some misnamed and misplaced Santa Claus, and the other with his name and his address underneath. He also sent a postcard with the Seattle skyline looking how tourists must imagine it: sparkling, with the sun high in the frame, bloated cartoon letters in the lower right corner. That one went to Rosemary’s old house, in case the people there were in the habit of forwarding mail.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)