Fucking Blocked
I want to write, but I have absolutely nothing to say.
I could talk about American Idol and it's place as one of the 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse, but it just seems pointless now.
I could talk about work...and risk getting fired.
I could talk about sex...and how much I'm not having anymore.
Fucking shit.
The well is dry.
Fuck it.
Here's a short story I wrote last year participating in Chuck Palahniuk writing workshop. It's a reworking from a story I wrote in college.
The Grass and the River (For Want of Rain)
Her face crumpled in despair-my own heart a jackhammer in my chest. You think of all the times when you joke with your friends “Dude, this is so surreal.”
Standing on the bank of the river that runs between our two houses in the waist high grass with the girl you grew up with. The girl next door. The girl whose existence establishes absolute certainty that Loving her is easy cuz she’s beautiful...doo doo doo doo... The girl who’s fixin’ to blow her face off with her dad’s old 45. Surreal? It don’t get much more Magritte than that.
The gun was comically large in her petite hand. My body heavy in this brackish swamp drowning in all the things I shouldn’t do. -images of her brain splattered on the grass-shuddering.
“Fuck, Lucy, c’mon” The sun was so hot.
“No! Don’t…” She’d become feral. Panicked. It was as if she could smell my next move and the wrong one would end this scene.
A man was traveling the jungles of India with a guide. From the east he could hear something heavily crashing its way through the trees. The guide looked…concerned.
“We should hurry.” He warned.
“Why? What is that?” the man asked.
“Lone Elephant.” The guide was moving faster now,
“What’s wrong with a lone Elephant?” the man laughed.
“You know, Elephants move in herds, yes?” hacking with the machete.
“Yeah, come to think of it, why would an Elephant be alone?” swatting at branches in his way.
“Because he wants to be.”
Lucy moved on her own. While the rest of us ran around like a pack of dogs, there was Lucy. Alone. Angry. At first, it wasn’t that people didn’t want to include her in their reindeer games. She let you know she didn’t WANT to play. That made her strange.
Lucy disappeared. A lot. She was nine when she found her dad hanging from a rafter in their barn. For two days her frantic mother haunted our mother’s kitchens-“could she use your phone? Ours is…well…” calling the police, calling the undertaker, calling her mother. “Y’all got anything to drink around here? My nerves are just shot.” My dad found her. Curled up in the back of an old Plymouth her dad had been tinkering with. And then she was just one of those kids who ran wild in the absence of anyone to tell her different. She played by her own rules. I did my damndest to keep up. She was never happy. She rarely smiled.
Lucy never said anything much, but when she did, it was always something you heard. She was reading the philosophers these days, smoking grass…because she said, “well, shit, you can’t philosophize as a teenager unless you’re pulling tubes, smoking cigarettes and GESTURING with those cigarettes.” She’d laugh, but then the sadness.
“There’s beauty in this world, Stevie. I see it all the time. I just don’t feel it.”
And when she spoke- a mellow earthy tone. It broke your heart. Her soul was anguish and to look into her eyes was a kick to my chest, knocking the wind out of me.
I tried to kiss her. Once. She decked me one in the jaw. She called me a charlatan.
I didn’t see her again for a week. My shame was acute. She called me friend for my lack of any agenda. Kissing her changed all that. It was a betrayal. Suddenly I was a predator. But I loved that girl.
The river was a brook for lack of rain. We stood charging the air with a thousand things to say.
And the gun.
I looked up and noticed the clouds inching across a too-blue sky. My skin tightening with inevitable sunburn. I could smell her brown hair. And suddenly my ears were ringing and she was on the ground and my legs melted under me and I landed in the grass hard. My head dropped into my hands as I let go of the sobs wracking my body.
I could talk about American Idol and it's place as one of the 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse, but it just seems pointless now.
I could talk about work...and risk getting fired.
I could talk about sex...and how much I'm not having anymore.
Fucking shit.
The well is dry.
Fuck it.
Here's a short story I wrote last year participating in Chuck Palahniuk writing workshop. It's a reworking from a story I wrote in college.
The Grass and the River (For Want of Rain)
Her face crumpled in despair-my own heart a jackhammer in my chest. You think of all the times when you joke with your friends “Dude, this is so surreal.”
Standing on the bank of the river that runs between our two houses in the waist high grass with the girl you grew up with. The girl next door. The girl whose existence establishes absolute certainty that Loving her is easy cuz she’s beautiful...doo doo doo doo... The girl who’s fixin’ to blow her face off with her dad’s old 45. Surreal? It don’t get much more Magritte than that.
The gun was comically large in her petite hand. My body heavy in this brackish swamp drowning in all the things I shouldn’t do. -images of her brain splattered on the grass-shuddering.
“Fuck, Lucy, c’mon” The sun was so hot.
“No! Don’t…” She’d become feral. Panicked. It was as if she could smell my next move and the wrong one would end this scene.
A man was traveling the jungles of India with a guide. From the east he could hear something heavily crashing its way through the trees. The guide looked…concerned.
“We should hurry.” He warned.
“Why? What is that?” the man asked.
“Lone Elephant.” The guide was moving faster now,
“What’s wrong with a lone Elephant?” the man laughed.
“You know, Elephants move in herds, yes?” hacking with the machete.
“Yeah, come to think of it, why would an Elephant be alone?” swatting at branches in his way.
“Because he wants to be.”
Lucy moved on her own. While the rest of us ran around like a pack of dogs, there was Lucy. Alone. Angry. At first, it wasn’t that people didn’t want to include her in their reindeer games. She let you know she didn’t WANT to play. That made her strange.
Lucy disappeared. A lot. She was nine when she found her dad hanging from a rafter in their barn. For two days her frantic mother haunted our mother’s kitchens-“could she use your phone? Ours is…well…” calling the police, calling the undertaker, calling her mother. “Y’all got anything to drink around here? My nerves are just shot.” My dad found her. Curled up in the back of an old Plymouth her dad had been tinkering with. And then she was just one of those kids who ran wild in the absence of anyone to tell her different. She played by her own rules. I did my damndest to keep up. She was never happy. She rarely smiled.
Lucy never said anything much, but when she did, it was always something you heard. She was reading the philosophers these days, smoking grass…because she said, “well, shit, you can’t philosophize as a teenager unless you’re pulling tubes, smoking cigarettes and GESTURING with those cigarettes.” She’d laugh, but then the sadness.
“There’s beauty in this world, Stevie. I see it all the time. I just don’t feel it.”
And when she spoke- a mellow earthy tone. It broke your heart. Her soul was anguish and to look into her eyes was a kick to my chest, knocking the wind out of me.
I tried to kiss her. Once. She decked me one in the jaw. She called me a charlatan.
I didn’t see her again for a week. My shame was acute. She called me friend for my lack of any agenda. Kissing her changed all that. It was a betrayal. Suddenly I was a predator. But I loved that girl.
The river was a brook for lack of rain. We stood charging the air with a thousand things to say.
And the gun.
I looked up and noticed the clouds inching across a too-blue sky. My skin tightening with inevitable sunburn. I could smell her brown hair. And suddenly my ears were ringing and she was on the ground and my legs melted under me and I landed in the grass hard. My head dropped into my hands as I let go of the sobs wracking my body.
posted by LC Greenwood at 12:06 PM
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