Quills and Frills-8/23/2014 Aleathia Drehmer, Short Fiction

Aleathia says:

I putting a story up that I wrote in 2011.  I'm not sure anyone has ever seen it really.  It has flaws, I'm sure.

My Heart Keeps Remembering

Tosha leaned forward in the darkness of her room.  Her emptiness hung there like a butchered duck in the window of the shop in Chinatown where she and Bruce had stopped to gawk at its ugliness.  He picked San Francisco for their honeymoon.  She thought it simple and too close to home, but he had dazzled her with hidden sweetness and a gentle understanding to the things that made her purr.  Why was Tosha thinking of that duck in the dirty window and the sounds of languages she would never understand? She could not fathom why, not at this moment.

Now, she was in Oregon, alone, submerged in Portland with its lushness, green haze and one way streets that drove her crazy before Bruce showed her how to navigate her frustration.  The city opened up to her then with Bruce by her side dressed in a smile that was never less than genuine.  Tosha considered herself to be mostly unlucky in this world until he found her that day on the walking bridge in the Japanese Gardens.

It was spring and Bruce saw her under the blossoms of the cherry tree, chestnut hair framing a solemn mouth, imagining what it would be like listening to her heart beneath his ear.  Her eyes were down cast, she was watching the koi do their intimate dance beneath lotus pads.  Bruce walked slowly, quietly and came onto the bridge.  Tosha hadn’t heard his shoes scuffle the wood mesmerized by the world inside the world she was living.  Bruce stood next to her with his pinky touching hers.

Tosha felt a sudden warmth and looked at this man’s hand sharing a space that was reserved for lovers.  He was a stranger and yet, she had no objection in the silence between them.  She couldn’t bring herself to behold him gazing back to the water, but the koi disbanded, forcing her to lift her eyes to his.  He stared at her with such conviction. She knew there would always be something between them.

Alone in this night, with Bruce underground only three days, Tosha couldn’t find reality to be any sort of comfort.  She slid from the bed looking out the window.  The moon was a wafer shy of full and mocking her.  Tosha found her arms sliding into her coat, her feet into the loafers she wore for gardening and her keys in her hand.  The doorknob felt cold in her palm as she turned it.  She drove her old Volvo through town and when she finally stopped the engine quiet, she was in front of the Japanese Gardens.

She stood at the gates that were closed like her newly damaged heart.  Tosha shook their solidity until the bars rattled like a ghost story.  She remembered they had found a hole in the fence a long time ago and had snuck in to make love on the sumptuous grass.  Tosha ran with arms pumping and legs burning against the chill of the moon-filled night.  She prayed it was still there, that one flaw in the park, that one chance to get him back.

Breathless, Tosha stopped at the torn seam in the fence.  She removed her coat to fit through but the years found her less agile than she once was as her skin scraped raw across the rough edges of the chain link.  She didn’t care about anything right now except the bridge where she first understood the meaning of existence.  Her legs carried her in the sparse light of the moon until she saw it in the distance.  Her breathing heavy still; her heart bursting through her ribs with expectation.

She removed her shoes feeling the faded, worn wood beneath her feet.  It was strangely powerful as one foot fell in front of the other until reaching the apex of the bridge underneath the cherry tree.  Tosha couldn’t see the koi in the dark, but she stared into the water regardless.  A gale swept across the gardens livening her skin with goose bumps and an overwhelming feeling that Bruce was here with her.

Tosha felt that warmth again and she couldn’t look for fear that she were dreaming.  She couldn’t risk the disappointment in discovering her insanity, because she felt that warmth like an undeniable truth. Her head turned without opening her eyes at first.  She coaxed them slowly and beside her was the pale, translucent outline of her dear Bruce just as young as the day she had met him—so handsome, his smile a thing to start a war over.  Tosha leaned into this light, putting her lips to his, legs trembling beneath her and the world dropping from her vision.  She still loved him.  She still wanted him always beside her in silent confidence as the keeper of her sweet tenderness which no one else could see.

The wind came again, harder this time, shaking the cherry tree with unmitigated violence, its bare branches like nails against a chalkboard, and he was gone.  Tosha froze in her disbelief, in her unwillingness to let go, in her cold and selfish grief, remembering how a smile changed everything that ever was or will be.

Aleathia Drehmer 2011

Quills and Frills-6/7/2014

Aleathia says:

One from the vault.  The Honey Pit, by me.

The Honey Pit

Darla lay on the old quilt in the field.  The summer flowers bobbed in a light breeze that didn’t seem to make the air any less thick around her.  She reached her hand out and snapped a daisy from its stem.  Its yellow center stared at her like a glowing eye.  She tried to count all the flowers within the flower, but the sun washed out her eyes.  Darla played “he loves me, he loves me not” in silence wondering if Marcus had fallen into the river.

“I feel like being submerged in honey,” she said to no one in particular, “I think it would feel nice like a liquid second skin.”

“It would be hard to breathe oxygen that way,” Marcus said from a distance.

Darla hadn’t thought he heard her.  She had hoped, but wasn’t counting on it.  He could be aloof sometimes and she never knew when that would be.

“Well, I won’t put my head under.  I will just go in up to my neck.”

“Ok,” he said as he walked closer, ”I’ll look out for sharks.”

“Are you a shark?” she questioned.

“No, but I’ll stand here ready to hit them with an oar if they come after you.  I’ll just stand here outside the honey pit while you bath.” He remarked with a small smile perching on the ends of his lips as if he were imagining her in the thick, amber liquid sticking to herself.

She liked that smile on his face.  She felt connected to it. Connected with everything around her and she didn’t know why.  Maybe that was the most amazing part about the smile.  It transcended everything she couldn’t name.

Darla closed her eyes and swam in that honey pit, arms moving in slow motion and legs scissoring, but not cutting anything but time.  Her naked flesh invited the honey to live on her.   She opened her mouth and tasted it.  It was so sweet and natural that it choked her.  Darla thought it was so opposite with the rest of the world that she knew day to day.  Everything sour and plastic and impossibly manmade.  There was nothing she could attach herself to that didn’t hurt or leave an aftertaste in her mouth.

She heard Marcus’ feet shift stance in the grass.  He always wore inappropriate shoes.  He liked to feel like every step reminded him to be alive.  Sometimes suffering made him feel alive.  She couldn’t understand this fully, but accepted it was part of what she loved about him.

“You will have to hose me off when I am done in the honey.”

“My pleasure.”

Dar stood up from the blanket slowly like she were rising from the pit and dripping the culmination of a bee’s life.  She was right about it feeling like a second skin.  It pulled at her flesh as it slid onto the grass leaving her feet in pools of gold.  Darla imagined she had been touched by Midas and felt precious for just a second.  She stood there with her arms out in an airplane and blindly smiled into the sun.

“You look like you have had a rebirth,” he said softly.

“This is a sweeter life,” Dar said.

I will be sweet by osmosis, she thought, and I will smell like candy and glow like summer peaches on the bough and be filled with nectar.  With her eyes closed and arms still out at her sides, she felt Marcus come closer.  Darla could feel him in her space.  She could feel the heat of his dark colors, of his sadness reach out like fingers.

She put her arms down but didn’t open her eyes.  She wanted to stay in this place where he would venture to get this close.  “I would lie in the grass under the sun and sleep by the river; I would listen to the frogs singing and hum along.  The crickets would hop from blade to blade above my head and in my dream would move like the undulation of water.”

“Perfect,” Marcus whispered only inches from her mouth.  He wanted to kiss those lips.  He wanted to taste that dream Darla was weaving, but he didn’t know how.

“Maybe you would leave your shark hunting post long enough to come and sit by the river with me and watch lesser fish.”  She reached out and put her fingers on his mouth smearing honey across it.

“All fish are great.”

Aleathia Drehmer

Quills and Frills-5/24/2014 Writing Prompt

Savory
by Ally Malinenko

Wet cardboard. Warm wet cardboard.

Think of wet cardboard – where it’s pulpy on top, a mushy consistency but the bottom is still firm and then leave the whole thing in the sun so that it’s baked warm to the touch.

That will give you some idea of what this is like when I actually put a slice of pizza in my mouth. The bigger problem is that it still smells just like pizza. Mouth-watering cheesy delicious pizza.

This is life without the sense of taste – the life I now live.

In the beginning I thought it was a just a cold.

I woke one day and the pancakes on my plate at the diner tasted – well... puffy. Only puffy. Like biting into a mouse-sized mattress. It was spongy and soft. Springy even. But there was no taste.

I put the fork down.

“What?” my girlfriend asked. She sat across from me both eating and thumbing through her phone.

“These don’t taste like anything.”

She rolled her eyes, speared a piece of pancake from my plate with her fork and popped it into her mouth. I watched the muscles of her jaw work.

“They taste like pancakes,” she said swallowing. “You’re probably getting a cold. Don’t be sick for Sunday’s thing. I know you don’t want to go but I promised Denise.”

I nodded, dipping a finger into the pool of syrup on the plate. I licked only cold mucus. Slime trailed down my throat.

Next was pasta. Noodles were worms. Spaghetti sauce has the same consistency as Elmer’s glue. Onion were slugs – hard on the outside and then a pop of warm mush inside. I gagged on those.

She ordered Chinese food. I got nothing from it but the slick acrid oil from the fry cooker. Vegetables gave me only something elemental – dirt and root, the birthing bed of life.

Every beverage was water. Coffee was hot water. Wine was cursed by some hypocritical bastard deity. Scotch on rocks was the first thing that gave me something – but that something was only the bitter tart left over of rubbing alcohol.

At first I panicked. I took swigs of hot sauce. My throat raged in fire but otherwise nothing. My tongue lay inside my mouth – a dead useless thing.

For the first few months I took over cooking. I over-salted, over-spiced everything. My girlfriend burst into tears at the dinner table while I raged in the kitchen.

When we made love, the sweet tang of her skin – the taste of her - was lost to me. I mourned that one most of all.

Eventually I stopped eating. Food had no meaning without taste. My weight dropped severely. My once toned body withered.

The doctor told me not to worry. He gave me brochures that told me taste usually returns. It would all be over in a year or two at the latest. A year or two? My stomach roiled. Was I supposed to live two years like this?
"Is it ever permanent?" I asked.
In answer, he pressed his pillowy lips together until they were nothing more than a white line.

Time passed. In small doses I sometimes found something. One time ginger popped in my mouth, barking attention from listless taste buds. I nearly died that day. It wasn’t much but it was something. Every forkful was another shot fired in this war. When I got something from food, it was a gift. I cursed myself for not appreciating it before.

“I think I got this,” my girlfriend said when I opened the door to our apartment. She stood over the range, enveloped in the aromatic wafting scent of something Indian. She looked stunning, her dark hair, her large eyes. I dropped my bag to the floor and wrapped my arms around her, nuzzling the nape of her neck. I pressed my lips to her skin and inhaled the scent of her. I wanted to tell her I loved her. To thank her for trying. To apologize for what our life had become but she’s too busy detailing the ingredients in the pan before her. I let my tongue just graze her skin. Give me something, please. Just the salt of her, I’ll take that even.  I close my eyes.

“I checked with the Doctor. He agreed that it was worth a shot. We’re going to wake that tongue of yours up, baby,” she said, adding another large dollop of yogurt sauce and curry to the mixture. “Don’t you worry about a thing.”

Nothing. Not even the salty flavor of her sweat. Her flesh was no different than the chicken she pushed around that pan. I tell her I won’t worry. I turn towards the spice rack and open the hot sauce. I shake some onto my tongue. I let it sit there like a pill I can’t swallow. And I pray to a god I’m starting to hate.


Untitled
by Joseph Bouthiette Jr.

This is how I learned to fall.

Maybe I’m losing weight, maybe I’m stumbling in a loss of my sense of weight. Or maybe I’m losing my sense of the ground. The ground, our perpendicular lover, but I’m growing more acquainted with her with every fall. Through her, the continents rumble and through me, the outpour of freshly opened scrapes. With each step I risk embracing her once more, my inner ears spinning like clouds in the wind. I close my eyes in that moment of uncertainty.

Shall I remain firmly rooted in place? Or shall I fall, a sheep to my gravity’s shepherd? Then I open my eyes, spine clattering against hard earth and eyes full of clouds. Through her, the dirt, I now embrace my true love, her, the sky.

This is how I learned to fly.

[Author's note: this is a remix of sorts of my prose poem "How I Learned to Fly" which can be read in its original form here. Stole a lot of lines from it that I liked for this piece on the loss of the sense of balance. Both are needlessly abstract and silly, but enjoy!]

Trampoline
By Aleathia Drehmer

Bonita was exceptionally clumsy.  Her mother had reminded her of this fact whenever she could and the opportunity arose often.  She used to tell Bonita that grace stopped by while she was sleeping and never bothered coming back.  It was not very surprising when Bonita awoke on the stretcher in the Emergency Room with her face bandaged.

The last thing she remembered was jumping on the trampoline with her friends.  She daringly did a back flip, feeling invincible as she bounced so high, and now she was here.  The ER was noisy—so many bells and whistles, so much chatter between patients and families, and medical banter of doctors.  Bonita looked around the room.  She could barely see over the bulky dressing across her nose.  There was a pain there like insipid fire, yet, she wasn’t really in pain.

Her mother sat there beside the bed with a look on her face that was equal parts irritation, “I hope you’re ok” and “I told you so”.  She said nothing to Bonita, so she said nothing back to her mother.  In their shared silence Bonita noticed she couldn’t smell anything.

It’s just the bandage, she told herself.

Well if it is just the bandage smarty then how come you can’t smell the gauze or the blood? She questioned.

She was very puzzled, but at 14 years old what did she know about noses and a person’s sense of smell?  All she knew was that her nose hurt and her face wasn’t too far behind it the longer she lay there in wonder.    Bonita counted the dots in the ceiling tiles while she waited in the swirl of noise around her. The doctor came into the room and told Bonita’s mother, not Bonita, that her nose was broken and there was nothing they could do about it.  She would have to see the specialist in a week.

Bonita cringed.  Specialist.  That meant a lot of money and she knew that her mother didn’t have the cash to pay for any of this.  She suddenly felt tiny inside as if she were a painfully heavy burden on her mother.  The doctor suddenly looked her in the eyes, standing over her smiling and chuckled.  “And you young lady are going to have a pair of black eyes.  Don’t blow your nose or there will be bleeding.”  Bonita nodded at the doctor and thought it was strange he thought this was all funny.  She did not mention her loss of smell.  She didn’t think it was permanent anyway.

The week passed and Bonita wore the purple badge across her face awkwardly.  Her friends made jokes and Bonita laughed as she always did when she hurt herself being clumsy, but inside she felt a darkness brewing.  Her food was tasteless and bland no matter how much salt or spice she used.  She could not smell the lilacs blooming beneath her bedroom window, or smell the early summer air with its sticky heaviness.  Bonita couldn’t even smell her brother’s horrid gym sneakers that he left closed up in the bathroom.  She was sort of glad of it, but at the same time it was a scent that told the story of her life.

The specialist told her she was fine when she mentioned she couldn’t smell properly.  He told her sometimes that happens with trauma, but he assured her it would come back.  Anosmia he said.  That was the real word for it.  He expected her to look impressed, but she struggled with the concept.  What will I do if I can’t ever smell again? She thought.

Many more weeks passed and Bonita became sullen.  She could smell nothing and the world slipped by her as if she were not even there.  She could not identify with the everyday workings of her own life.  It felt desolate and all her natural joy at being alive drained away into the grass she was standing on but could not smell.  Bonita thought of dying.  She dreamed of smelling the blood and the last threads of air in her lungs as they collapsed on themselves.  It would be so much better than this torture, she thought, seeing the world and not enjoying it.  She stood there in the yard a long time with this final ending.  Bonita smiled and put her arms out as if to be taken up into the heavens.

Bonita!!! God damn it, for the last time, dinner is ready!! Her mother shouted from the window.

Not this time, she thought, not this time.

( These stories were written from a single prompt.  What if you freakishly lost one of your senses, what would your life be like?)