Hemmingway Mock story

A short story I wrote for my Hemingway class.


A Strong Summer Wind

With patient hands he nailed the two pages of loose-leaf paper onto his wall. He stepped back and watched the loose ends of the pages flutter. The bottoms of them looked like struggling bird wings. He went to his desk in the right corner of the room and moved his chair to the middle of the room. When he sat, the back of the chair creaked underneath his weight. He looked up at the letters on his wall. For three years she had written him once a week. The letters were always two pages long. The two pages weighed about 1.5 ounces, just enough to be covered by a 60-cent international stamp. One hundred and fifty-six weeks later, his walls were filled. The first of the letters was hung in the top left corner of the wall adjacent to his door. He stood up, carrying the chair with him, and crossed the room. He placed the chair underneath the first letters. He walked back across the room to his desk, where he kept his glass and a bottle of whisky. He poured some into the glass and walked back to his chair. When he sat down the legs of the chair shifted. He made a mental note to tighten them later that evening. He studied her faded handwriting against the aged ivory page.

Peter,
It’s odd not speaking to you, but you’ve left me here without many options. Couldn’t you have chosen somewhere closer? Rinaldi and Nick claim that Wyomingt is just as much of a wilderness as your African plains.
My father always told me to make the most of what I have.
At least this is an opportunity to practice my penmanship.
Today I must go to the market and pick up some things. I’ll either go directly after sealing this or later in the evening. I dread the grocery when it’s busy on Sundays, so I’ll probably go later. Until then, I’ll settle for The Times’ crossword.
My apologies if this letter is atrociously boring.
I suppose I’ll get better with practice, as with everything.
Be patient with me Peter, you’ve left me with a rather large adjustment.
Yours,
Norma
He laughed and took a drink. He stood to pour another, pausing to read the letter above the desk. There was a small pink note that stood out from the rest. It was the only letter in two years that was shorter than two pages.
Peter,
New York is really very glorious in the summer. You’re a fool for leaving it behind. Yours, Norma
His calloused hand reached into his linen shirt pocket. He pulled out a cigarette and lit it with his Zippo. She had sent it to him for Christmas the year prior. The engraving on the side said “Don’t keep me waiting forever Peter.”
He put down his drink on the desk and went outside. The fall wind pulsed on his face and he walked into it gladly. It was hotter inside his shack than it was under the sun. Peter liked the yellow grass of the Serengeti. In two weeks he would be back in New York with her. He continued to walk. He had come here to study the wild-life, the Patas Monkeys, Common Genets, and the big five. To hunt, gather, and study the way man should live. Peter noticed that where he was walking the ground was trampled. The foliage around him was eaten down to the branches. Impalas had been nearby, a good-sized herd of them. He kept walking, following their tracks.
A bush moved in the distance and a male impala exited from the shrubbery. He was lean and wise. His flank muscles tensed under his auburn coat, ready to bolt in an instant. Peter loved to watch impalas run. Once he had startled a herd of females, and they had pranced like hundreds of rubber-balls bouncing on the pavement. He wished Norma could have seen that. Maybe then she would understand why he had chosen to come here.
Peter held eye contact with the male Impala. It stood as still as it would have stuffed in a museum. The male was herding the women to keep them in his territory. It was almost May. Mating season was coming soon. This impala would have beautiful offspring.
Peter stared into its marble-black eyes and leaned his right-foot forward. A twig cracked under his hunting boot. The sound was the trigger the impala was waiting for. It bounded off into the Serengeti Plain and left Peter standing. The wind picked up, there would be a storm. It was time to go back.
He thought about Norma. He thought about the way her auburn hair shined in the New York summer sun. He thought about her lipstick on her martini glass. He thought about the way her lips braced her cigarettes. The wind was picking up. Peter could see the on-coming storm in the distance. He picked up his pace. He could never go fast enough.
By the time he reached his house it had already begun raining. He opened his door. The letters were strewn across the floor. He took off his shoes that were now dark brown from the rain, and crossed the room to pick up his desk chair. His curtain waved like a handkerchief in a gloved hand out of a train window. He picked up a letter from the floor and sat down in the chair. His head was very heavy in his hands.

Some old flash fictions I feel I should share

A Deep Breath


Death smelled wet and panicked. It made slapping sounds on the linoleum floor of my kitchen—the echoes of millions of knuckles cracking in simultaneous tension and release. The glass remnants of a fish bowl created a mosaic around McGee, my Chinese fighting goldfish. I dove and cupped him in my hands. His small vertebrae twisted in panic. I sprinted into the kitchen, crying, whispering Hail Mary’s.
My hands felt dry against McGee’s amber scales. I could see his pulse threading, losing momentum. The air I breathed was choking him. His mouth gaped, but there were no words. We looked at each other. The golden rims around his pupils burned urgent in the morning light. His eyes shifted focus.
I fumbled with the kitchen cabinet to get to a bowl. He slapped his fins against my palm. I maneuvered the cabinet door open with my elbow. His gills opened and closed like a waning heart valve.
His eyes were fixing on the ceiling. The cabinet opened, a flood of Tupperware drowned my feet. With my pinky and ring fingers contorted like scissors I grabbed a Pyrex measuring cup. McGee remained cupped in my hands like a prayer. He gasped less and less. At the sink, the morning light reflected on his scales in an orange the shade of warning. The water from my faucet wouldn’t run fast enough. McGee tumbled into the water, weaving through it like a feather falling. Spinning with the current he rose slowly, his body arched and he surfaced, limp at the top of the bowl.



- .- .-.. -.- .. -. --. / .. -. / -.-. --- -.. .
(Talking in Code)



Two summers ago my boyfriend taught me how to play cribbage. We sat adjacent to one another in cracked plastic lawn chairs, his grandmother’s old wooden board between us. We would have been out at the bars like any other normal twenty-something’s, but we were both unemployed and broke that summer, we lived like grannies. He taught me how to play using rhyme schemes: Fifteen-two the rest won’t do, fifteen-four, there ain’t no more, fifteen-two I guess I’m screwed, fifteensix the rest is nixed, and so on. He told me that it was mathematically impossible to get a hand that had nineteen points. One time my hand didn’t have any points so I told him it had nineteen. Nineteen became code for zero. We spoke in code a lot of the time. He told me he loved me when he bought me my own toothbrush for his house. That night I told him I loved him by tapping it in Morse code between his shoulder blades when he was sleeping. .. / .-.. --- ...- . / -.-- --- ..-. My Uncle is the fastest living Morse Code typist in the world. He can type seventy words in a minute. The fastest anyone has ever typed in Morse Code is 75.2 words per minute, and that record was set in 1939. I guess people’s fingers just can’t move that fast anymore. Later that summer I drove south to Charlotte to visit my family. Mom was pleased that I had learned to play cribbage. Your grandmother taught me how to count by playing cribbage, she told me. We went to Hobby Lobby and walked through the aisles of silk peonies, scrap-book stickers, and grandma-scented potpourri towards the game section of the store. We found a board of our own and purchased it for less than five dollars. Playing with Mom wasn’t as fun because she didn’t know the rhymes and was much better than me. She had strategy. By the time that I got back to his apartment in Greensboro a week later I was much improved. I also had tons of new rhymes. Mom’s first language was French, and it’s a lot easier to rhyme in French than English because of the way verbs are conjugated. Anyway, he freaked out a little the next time we played and I said things like fifteen-two-et le repos est pour vous, or fifteen-two-ne peut pas croire vos yeux, or fifteen four-blesse mon couer. He wouldn’t say that he was mad, but I knew he was because of the way his mouth dissipated to a squiggly line and the way he cracked his knuckles every few minutes. The next day he came home from his summer class with a French-to-English dictionary from the library. By the end of the summer he was almost as good at French as me, and we would practice speaking it during our evening walks. Sometimes walking down the empty sidewalks and speaking French was more intimate than being naked together in his bedroom. We would cross Aberdeen Terrace hand-in-hand, without looking both ways. Sometimes we would dance in the middle of the street and sing Edith Piaf songs to each other with great vibrato just because we could.

430 in the morning

I'm about to go to work.
Thank you to everyone who came to our last show, it was really appreciated and we hope that we made it worth your while.





And so went the coolest thing I've ever done in my life.

six word life

My friend Sarah sent me this article the other day, and then read some stuff out loud to the Writer's Community.
So these are my attempts at a six word life:

Wandering around, eventually I'll find my way

Talking and Walking around in circles it seems

Dad humor: my love of puns

Still looking for my chinese family

I take my fortune cookies seriously

My horoscope said today was a seven

It's not you, its the mustache

Razzle Dazzle Rose

Sitting in Newg's apartment, with some strawberry bruscetta and bitch beers (smirnoff?) in my stomach, and I am glad.
First of all, sitting next to me is my newly purchased first edition of "For Whom the Bell Tolls." Engraved on top of the brown canvas cover is Ernest Hemingway's signature. Published by Scribner's in 1940...it cost me seven dollars and fifty cents.
seven dollars
fifty cents.
That's a lot to be excited for.
I also bot "La Peste" by Camus, which cost me less than a dollar and is completely in french. I figure I'll use it to brush up on my foreign language skills and then send it to Tony.
Reading about the plague is always inspiring, right? That will really motivate me to go to Europe.
...
Speaking of! I'm getting my ticket for Paris. I leave on May 27th, and then return on June 30th.
another thing to be glad for.
that and life is good.


I hope that this post gives you all plenty of cavities, as it is so nauseatingly sweet.