Variety

My first three creative writing assignments.  I’ve borrowed liberally from here…because I could.  These are limited by class length restrictions, and I imagine they’ll be revised, before all is said and done.

#3  Cloak (A Summer Night)

            I often think of myself as an old cloak. Once solid white wool, it frayed, accrued holes, gained a unique character to its own detriment. I patch each hole patiently, keeping the whole of it intact. I make sure it remains functional and in its original form. One day, in the process of repairing this mangled, ancient garment, I paused with needle in hand. I realized—none of the white remained. Just patches sewn to patches, thread-lines zigzagging pell-mell every which way. Oil, food, booze, and sex had stained it permanently. In the darkness, I cast the same silhouette—however, when that light flickers tentatively on, it’s a completely different coat. Mottled and frayed, each day does a little more to puncture the makeshift clothes I wear to protect me from the elements.
 
We’d left the carnival in full-swing, firmly certain that to waste such a summer night on the bright lights and haughty, unwashed hawkers constituted a crime. My grandpa’s woods stretched on endlessly in the descending night. It beckoned, and willingly we came to it.
I took out the blanket I’d carried from the truck, spreading its weathered plaid pattern across the untrimmed heather. We laid flat-backed on the felt, side-by-side, and I taught her the stars. Steadfast Perseus stalked Draco, always walking towards Polaris but never quite reaching it. Cepheus and Cassiopeia reigned over the northern heavens jointly, also side-by-side. The susurrus oak savannah sighed heavily in the breeze.
I’d wanted her so bad for so very long now, and now, finally, she’s free. Single. Ready and waiting. She shone with unearthly light beneath the waning gibbous moon, and her smile radiated a stifling heat still completely indescribable. I started to turn towards her, but froze. I knew it. Oh, God, I knew it. This is the definition of crashing the boards, of taking someone on the rebound. It would’ve been a band-aid pittance for a real, suppurating wound. I could’ve. I know I could’ve. It would’ve been alright, but not all right, and I think I remember that night better for the innocence I chose to give it.
 
My fists hit the wall repeatedly without cessation, and I quickly realized that it did more to hurt my hand than to actually transfer my frustration. “Don’t you get it?” I’d screamed at him, “we’re not all saints, true. But it’s because we chose not to be. And I don’t want to be the fucking martyr. Fuck being the hero. I don’t want that kind of responsibility, and in the end, the only real result of martyrdom is a dead martyr.”
            I was closed for remodeling, I thought, as my cloak threatened to smother me.
 
I don’t know what brought me outside, but it’s where I found him. I didn’t know who he was, but he’d propped himself up against a concealed buttress of the pier, well out of sight from the back porch of the house party. There he sat, eyes shut tight, legs churning the sand, racking sobs aborting breaths from within their pulmonary womb. A half-empty beer bottle barely grasped threatened to fall into the sable lakeside sand.
            He sensed my presence. “…I…I just…” he could barely squeeze any syllables between the tears. “…Just need a few minutes…” A gull cried overhead, harmonizing with the man seemingly melting from solid sand into so much glass on the beach. “…to figure it out…”
            Concerned, I gently asked, “Figure what out?”
            “This.” He managed a long whistling breath while gesturing indiscriminately, indicating everything. The crying resumed. “All of…of…it. It doesn’t make any sense. I…I…don’t…why?”
            I slowly sidled up next to him, only allowing myself one quick glance at his face. Although dusk concealed his features somewhat, a rather young, Irish countenance concealed by freckles and a newborn beard seemed to be collapsing in upon itself. I looked away. 
A Persian cat stared at us curiously from the end of the pier, its attention stolen from the school of slender fish swarming around the end pilings. Crickets sang their nightly sonata, their chirping chorus nearly enough to drown out the cacophony of the party. Dim glowing lights from the high-priced homes encircling us softly lit the surface of the water. I sighed. I didn’t really know what to say, but I spoke anyways.
            “It doesn’t really make any sense, I know.” I thought of her, spread out on a blanket, willing.  “God, I know it, man. I know.” He stopped crying for a moment, briefly joining his gaze with mine on the far side of the lake. “It can be pretty goddamned beautiful, though.” Silence settled upon us, and time became indeterminate.
            He smiled through his tears, the expression absolutely beautiful. “Yeah,” he whispered, “it really can be.”
 
            I shed my cloak.

#2 A Supposition

Mitchell Olson, Eng 274, In Brief #2, A Supposition
I’ve never known such unshackled rage. It came readily and without end, a deep pool of inexhaustible emotional exhaustion. We’d stood on the far side of the middle school embankment, around the corner, and behind the cinderblock wall that stopped both the earth and sun from tumbling over. We traded insult for insult, and I could readily see that while my cool was quickly dissolving in the early June heat, his was not.
“You catch more flies with honey than vinegar,” he’d said, his pristine white teeth reflecting the midsummer sun from within his sneer. Oh, that was it. I’d had quite enough of my smug torturer. The condescension, the cloak-and-dagger intrigue bullshit, and now the implicit denial of guilt within that last statement: something broke. Too many years of his piling burdens, both mental and physical, and this camel’s back finally shattered into fragments of a formerly unshakable sanity. My knuckles itched as if some vengeful demon tickled them with a raven’s feather. The hellish creature whispered in my ear furtively, the words sliding through his lipless grin as if breathed from the mouth of a venomous snake. Do it! End it now! He deserves it! Mete out justice…become justice! Don’t think about it! Do it, do it, do it, do it! What if…?
 
I snarl, my nostrils flare, and I hiss, “But you catch even more with bullshit.” I throw a punch, a right hook, determined to hit him like a falling piano, wanting to leave bloody ivory scattered across the street.
A punch is usually like any other misdeed; it comes back in kind. He doesn’t see it coming, however, and I whoop in glee as his front teeth break on my knuckles. Through the crimson haze descending over my vision, I think I see a glimmer of a formerly perfect tooth drool lazily out of his mouth as he stumbles backwards. So primal. Like a summer squall I fall upon him, alternating hands and cusses and laughter and crying like zephyrs and screaming winds and susurrus tree-falls and briny rain. I land punch after punch until neither of us could see. So fruitless. Just firecracker explosions of fist crunching against skull, against broken eye sockets, against a now-mutilated nose leaking blood like he couldn’t ever run out. Numb fingers become a numb arm become a numb heart, but I keep at it. So justified. Splitting wood, kneading dough, throwing punches. A steady rhythm: left, right, left, right. Remember to breathe occasionally. So wrong.
Aren’t I a good man what have I done to deserve this I try to be nice but it won’t work you won’t let it work just a snap judgment and summary social execution while consider this a lesson if you manage to survive it on my sufferance with my mercy you owe me your life your respect and your immortal fear…
 
“You catch more flies with honey than vinegar,” he’d said, his pristine white teeth reflecting the midsummer sun from within his sneer. He must’ve seen how I shook violently with countless emotions. Anger, resentment, fear, and sadness all frolicked naked across my playground face. I took an ocean-deep breath and looked him full in the eye, half-heartedly considering what I wouldn’t ever convince myself to do. The only way it would definitely end.
Why did I take such offense to this middling boy of little consequence? What did his opinion matter to me? I knew it wasn’t because I respected his opinion. What was it? I opened my mouth to angrily retort, and then brought myself up short. I realized. It’s because I believed him.
I spoke softly. “What on Earth would I do with flies?” and I turned and walked away. 

#1 An Encounter

Sometimes you need to take a chance. When you forego opportunity, when you sacrifice the potential possibilities of tomorrow on the altar of nefarious, detestable routine, you miss what makes getting up worth it. It’s life in neutral; pushes, prods, familiar people, and just enough movement to displace inertia. I needed to take a chance.
She was beautiful; I know of no other apt way to describe her.  Where we met, marble statues exultantly crowed old superstitions that long ago had lost their meaning for me.  They seemed to say, chiseled full lips slightly agape, "This is kismet.  This is cosmic.  This is entirely correct."  When I’d met her, I hadn’t slept less than nine hours a night since I turned fourteen.  Afterwards…afterwards, I slept increments at a time, and all these seconds of slumber stolen from the tail-end of the day taunted me with visions of her.  I was haunted by a strange and lovely spirit, and awakening always filled me with a peculiar and ineffable disappointment.  I could theorize no way in which I could reconcile the roiling discontented longing and thrumming appreciation grappling disconsolately somewhere inside of my ribcage.
She stood on the weathered concrete stoop, mittened hand resting lightly upon the rusted latticed handrail.  Her scarf, softly blue and made of crinoline, whipped wildly in the nascent winter’s gales.  The snow, which had only just begun to conceal the agrarian landscape in gauzy veils, clung desperately to her tapered eyelashes.  She’d looked at me, her expression sweetly serious.  "What time is it," she’d asked, a puff of smoke escaping her thin lips.
<div style=”MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; TEXT-INDENT: 0.5in; LINE-HEIGHT: 200%”>"You’re too late," I’d replied jokingly, "I’m taken." She’d laughed, a peal of silvery notes from a choir of church bells. Silence reigned briefly, and the rule of such an uncertain master compelled me to voice something, if just anything. I remembered a quatrain I’d written earlier in the day during a general education class, bored and drooping head braced by my hand. I spoke tremulously, the words barely reaching her ruddy ears before the oblivion of the swirling torrent of snow smothered them entirely. “I had been meant for this place./The silence now above our hearts/Unbends to me winter’s embrace,/Dressed in silent love and snowy lace.”
Sometimes moments have this incredible way of breaking down exactly as you thought they would. Minutes can turn to seconds which disseminate themselves in frozen images taken from a single instant of time. Sometimes, when a moment truly matters, the meaningful minutes that define us shed the context of being an indivisible experience. What follows next I don’t remember as a minute, or hour, or a day in my life, but instead as a breathtaking slideshow. It’s like a photo-album in my mind.
She smiled shyly. Long chocolate hair hanging in slow curls cascaded casually from beneath her matching blue hat; her briny eyes, glistening beneath the buzzing streetlight’s incandescence, burned green in the newborn evening.  They were feminine eyes, surely, and seemed tempered by a distinct element of immeasurable strength. The chill that infused the air had imbued within her cheeks a wintry rouge, one of the finest gifts of the coldest season.
We talked for hours after walking inside. Depending upon the subject of our conversation, our voices would rise to a fiery vehemence or fall to a solacing whisper. She loved the snow but hated being cold. She enjoyed Christmas but detested shopping. She went to church for people, not God. The musicality of Poe lulled her to sleep when the day had grown too long, and the crooning sentimentality of Elizabeth Barrett Browning soothed her when she felt lonely. Iron & Wine played every other song on her Ipod, even while she recognized the power of the latent emotion in the straining vocals of Mineral. 
Long after when the conversation had run its natural course, we talked on, and on, and on. We knew silence meant a return to our solitary beds, and such a cold end seemed irreconcilably unfitting to the undeniable warmth of the evening. It happened eventually, though, and when I shut the door to my dorm room, my mind raced ahead of rationality with gusto.
I couldn’t get to sleep that night. Nineteen years had passed me by before that night, many of them stuck in a pernicious neutral, and sleeping, in the words of Arcade Fire, seemed like “giving in.” Despite the bone-deep weariness that plagued me for the next few months, however, I knew not all kinds of insomnia are the same. The nightly contagion that had befallen me tasted all too sweet.