Write-On Prompt: Don't Touch That Key

 

Note: Last night was prompt night at Write On. The items above were presented as prompts for a story of our choosing. Here’s what I came up with.

 A square nail, the kind pulled from some old barn with a million years of rust on it and the jagged crooks and bends of a witch’s back, was driven into the side of door frame, very near the top. A silver ring circled where the nail met the pine board stained dark when the house was built in the early 1900s and now almost black a hundred years later as the original varnish aged. From the ring dangled a single silver key and next to it a white plastic square with some sort of green sticker on it.

 Mary Beth squinted to make out more, maybe there were words on the sticker and maybe even numbers on the plastic square, but she couldn’t read them. If Mama were gone, she would drag a chair over to look closer, but Mama was at the oven, striking a match and lighting a candle that smelled like cinnamon rolls.

 “Your face will stick like that,” Charlotte said from the table. Charlotte was two years older and two years wiser, as she liked to say. As if being ten was a rite of passage where little girls cease to be silly and become great sages of the world.

 “I hope it sticks like this,” Mary Beth answered, directing her tongue at her sister.

 “Girls, stop it,” Mama said, flicking her wrist at them like they were pesky flies. She was always doing that these days, as if the girls were nothing more than annoying pulses of light at the edge her vision. Charlotte pretended not to notice, saying that Mama had always been like this, and that Mary Beth just had to accept it and grow up. But Mary Beth knew the truth. Mama changed the same time that Daddy changed, and both of them changed the same night that Daddy drove that nail into the door frame and put that key on it.

 “Don’t either of you ever touch that key,” Daddy had said, his face red like he’d just ran up the hill to the barn a dozen times rather than drive one nail into a board. “You touch it, and I”ll know it, and believe me, you won’t be able to sit for a month.”

 Mama fluttered from the room, arms jerking about like a marionette and Mary Beth settled into the chair next to Charlotte.

 “What’s it for?” Mary Beth asked.

 Charlotte rolled her eyes, grabbed a tube of lip gloss and spread it on her lips, pursing them like she was some harlot in the movies. Mary Beth wanted to grab the brown tube, throw it across the room, and remind her oh-so-wise older sister that it wasn’t lipstick she was smearing on her lips. Charlotte could have greased a turkey through a pinhole with the amount of times she grabbed the lip gloss and pouted her lips in an hour.

 “You gotta be wondering,” Mary Beth said.

 “I”ll have you know, I’m not.” Charlotte flipped a page in her chapter book that she carried everywhere. Another illusion. The girl thought she could convince everyone that she was some Brainiac by carrying the book around, but Mary Beth was pretty sure her sister had never read more than two pages in a sitting in her life.

“You’re a liar.”

 “Am not. I’m not curious because I know what it does.”

 “Oh yeah, smarty pants, tell me.”

 “It opens a lock.”

 “Well, duh, I know that, but what lock?”

“The one on the door at the back of the shed.”

 Mary Beth thought a minute. She avoided the shed because it had a putrid musty smell, and if she looked hard enough, she could make out the skeletal remains of critters in the dirt floor. The shed was old, just as old as the house if not older, and, at first, she couldn’t remember there being a door in the shed. Then she remembered, it was a giant oak door with hundreds of engravings on the back wall. A door that was entirely too nice to be hanging in a derelict shed. It had been buried behind decades of rubble when their family moved into the place three years earlier. Her daddy had started cleaning in that shed in October, hauling old lumber and tools and bags of garbage out for days. At some point, he must have cleared a path all the way to the door.

 “What’s that door need a lock for?” Mary Beth finally asked.

 “Because there’s something behind that door,” Charlotte said, “And Mama and Papa don’t want us to see it.”

 “Wha…”

 A chill air blew into the house as daddy rushed in from doing chores. His face was long and his eyes drooped. He was only thirty-five, but he looked like he was in his sixties. When did daddy start looking so old and tired?

 “Susan, isn’t it time for these girls to get to bed?” he called, stomping to the fridge, opening it, and pulling from it a red beer can. He barreled from the kitchen without even acknowledging the two girls.

 Mary Beth wanted to protest. It wasn’t even seven thirty. Their bed time wasn’t until eight, sometimes they could even stay up to eight-thirty, but Charlotte elbowed her in the ribs.

 “They go out there after we go to sleep,” Charlotte said. “I’m going to follow them tonight.”

 Mary Beth eyed the key again at the top of the door frame. This mystery that had nagged for a better part of a month, and the answer as simple as a lock out in the shed. She wondered how long that Charlotte knew. Probably only a day or two, but Charlotte probably would claim she’d known all along. Well, she wasn’t going to pull anything over on Mary Beth here. She might be eight, but she was plenty smart, too.

 “I’m coming with you,” Mary Beth said, thinking she could bring her little blue flashlight to guide the way.

Write-On Prompt: WD 2 - Calling Captain Crapper

 

Note: This is the second prompt in a series of  five prompts we are working through at Write On. The first story is linked here: What Lies Ahead: Write-On Prompt: WD 1 - Rob Calls It Quits (whatliesaheadblog.blogspot.com)

Nobody ever thought about Wendall unless the crapper backed up, an unusually common malfunction in the men’s room at Castella Services. Only seventeen males worked at Castella, well sixteen since Rob’s outburst about an hour earlier, and Wendall had his suspicions on which one of those seventeen couldn’t clean their rears without using half a roll of TP and clogging the old pipes of this aging building. Wendall was twenty-nine, and he’d already spent more time on his knees in front of a dirty stool with a plunger in one hand and a clothespin over his nostrils than most people would spend in three lifetimes.

 Not only didn’t they think of him, but they also didn’t know his real name. “Captain Crapper,” that’s what most of the khaki-wearing bastards called him.

 “Captain Crapper” they called when the toilet clogged, “Report to the deck for another voyage on the brown sea.”

 Wendall had thought about quitting, just like Rob had, a thousand times. But what would happen then? He lived with his mother, who retired early from a career in doing nothing to spend her golden years doing less, and his grandmother, who was ninety-six and still walked three miles a day, but who hadn’t held a job since Jimmy Carter was in office. Both were dependent on his meager salary.

 Wendall played the scene of Rob quitting over and over in his mind. The suddenness of it, the brisk way he waltzed from the office, shoulders back, head held high. He was cool, just like a rockstar.

 The tickets, the thought of them rang like a tornado warning in his head. Seven hundred bucks down the drain.

 Clearly, Rob had forgot that Wendall had a surprise waiting for him. Wendall had only mentioned it to Rob three times that day. Of course, Rob had barely acknowledged it.

 “Hmmmm,” Rob mumbled, while the two smoked during a break that morning. Rob lived in his own head sometimes. That’s one of the things Wendall liked about him. The guy could exist without talking and that calmed Wendall.

 Wendall had wanted to wait until the end of the day to spring the tickets on Rob, that way maybe they could go down to Bump’s Tap and split a pitcher of beer talking about it. Metallica. Third Row, center. Rob would have probably high-fived him or something because Rob loved music, and for whatever reason, Wendall just wanted to do nice things for Rob. He wasn’t like the rest of the assholes at this hellhole. He was a daydreamer, sure, but he wasn’t arrogant. Hanging out with a janitor wasn’t below him, and he didn’t call Wendall “Captain Crapper.” Just Wendall. Sometimes, he’d even say, “Hey Buddy.” Can you believe that? Buddy. Wendall hadn’t had a buddy or a friend or a pal since grammar school. The tickets were an impulse buy, he didn’t even have Rob’s phone number, but they were buddies, pals, friends, right? Buddies, pals, friends, go to concerts together.

 Now Rob was gone for good.

 “Ahoy!” Cal Pickens called. “There’s a storm on the brown sea! Calling Captain Crapper!”

 There was a chuckle around the cubicles. The cubicle where Rob sat was quiet, this time because Wendall’s friend was gone and not because Rob found the nickname stupid and thought Wendall was a good guy.

 Wendall grabbed the plunger and sighed.

From the Beat: Unique Features

 

Note: I covered a high school baseball game on Saturday for Sauk Valley Media. Below is a bit on how doing so can translate to writing fiction. A link to my game story is also below.

Saturday’s Sectional Championship baseball game between Newman and Dakota provided enough dramatics that I didn’t have space to discuss one of the unique aspects of the host site in Pearl City. The baseball diamond at Pearl City sits in the corner of the football field, which itself sits in an earthen bowl.

To meet the required dimensions for postseason play, the outfield fence extending from left field to center was placed atop the bowl, meaning the last 10 feet or so of the outfield grass was a steep gradient, almost like a wall before the fence. Once upon a time, I probably would have added a column or side story about the challenges of this setting feature. Alas, space and publishing realties don’t allow for that sort of expansion of coverage at SVM.

If this was a fictional story, it would have been a focus of the setting with the point being that the story would hinge on this unusual trait. It’s easy to get caught up when building a fictional world, that we forget the point. You put characters in a place for a reason, and you give that place characteristics, and when you marry the two together in the plot, that’s when there is magic. A huge ice wall in Game of Thrones was unique and served a purpose, and if the books progress like the TV show, a big point in the story will be how the bad guys (the White Walkers) overcome the wall. Maybe a more accessible setting feature is the yellow brick road. That’s a unique thing about Oz, and following it becomes the driver of the plot.

Anyways, just a thought on settings from my observations from my latest excursion to my old beat.

Story link:Baseball: Tunink’s homers power Newman into 1A supersectional – Shaw Local

Write-On Prompt: WD 1 - Rob Calls It Quits

 Note: Write-On was cancelled on Tuesday night, but I had a prompt from my latest edition of Writer's Digest that I liked, so I held a private session at home. The prompt is actually a series of five prompts that would help create a series of interconnected flash fiction stories. I wrote on the first prompt last night, and I hope to do all five and share them here with you. I will admit I went over 500 words here. 

Here is the prompt: 

The drive to work: twenty-four minutes or somewhere between four and seven standard songs shuffled on Rob’s MP3 player. Today the ride started halfway through Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain.” An anthem from a band filled with romantic drama that made millions crafting songs about those romantic problems. Rob hummed along, wondering if he could function in a band with an ex-girlfriend. The song ended but his fantasy didn’t, so he missed the next two songs to the point if a madman pointed a gun at him later that day he couldn’t have named them with his life very much depending on it.

In his fantasy, his female bandmate had a voice like Stevie Nicks but looked more like a 1990s version of Gwen Stefani. He liked his girls punkier rather than mystical. They met at a club when both were seventeen, sneaking in with fake IDs and bonding over a shared freak out after each unwittingly took pills that they found out later were ecstasy. Once the throbbing lights and spinning subsided, they shared their mutual admiration of late sixties jam bands and items from the dollar the menus at fast food chains.

Rob lost his train of thought as John Fogerty’s voice filled his Grand Am with “Run Through the Jungle.” Creedence Clearwater Revival - another band with problems, but between Fogerty and the rest, including his own brother. Rob rolled through a stop sign at the intersection of one rural road with another, realizing he was ten minutes from work. No bandmates there. Just co-workers at Castella Services, a subsidiary of Something-Or-Other Incorporated, a brand of some Chinese firm. He operated a computer there, checking emails, transferring requests to the office in Houston and verifying customer reviews of Castella’s multiple but often vague services. He talked to three people there on a regular basis. Norman, his middle-aged, angry boss, Wendall, the janitor who smoked two packs a day near the picnic table at the back of the building, and Myra, a foul-mouthed grandmother who shared a cubicle with Rob.

After Fogerty, Blink-182 sped through a catchy tune followed by Sublime and T-Rex. Rob decided the female would sing, he’d play lead guitar, and the band’s first album would go double-platinum on the back of a trilogy of singles Rob wrote about a traveling gunfighter in an apocalyptic version of the old west. Shortly after Rob would propose to his lady frontwoman only to find out she’d been stepping out with the bass player.

 “Bummer,” Rob actually said parking in front of the faux-brick façade of his workplace.

 “How’s it fucking going, Rob?” Myra greeted him at their cubicle, the beep of his computer powering on punctuating her sentence.

 “Shitty,” Rob said. “She’s screwing the bass player.”

 “What?”

 The conversation ended there, the only sound being the sporadic tapping of their fingers on their keyboards. Rob couldn’t get over his imaginary band’s breakup in a torrent of bitter feelings and backstabbing. He remembered he had to stop for milk after work and that he wanted to start binging Game of Thrones that night for the fourth time. He hadn’t been on a date in eighteen months. Rob wanted to be in a band with messy romantic entanglements, at least it was something.

 Norman peeked his head over the cubicle at 2:30, wondering about a series of emails that Rob hadn’t read yet.

 “I quit, Normy,” Rob said, clicking the power button on his computer monitor.

 “Whew, shit,” Myra said behind him.

Write On Prompt: Reworking a Short Story

 

Note: Last night was prompt night at Write On. There weren’t any prompts this month, so we did some free writing. I had written a story a couple years ago that was a scene contained to a basement where two young teen boys played a baseball card board game and discussed theoretically hiding a dead body. I had liked the characters and the setup, but the story hasn’t gone anywhere, so I thought I’d try reworking the premise into a longer work.  I have dropped the last two paragraphs that I wrote last night because they felt too heavy handed. Not sure if I'd stop the scene where I do here. If you have thoughts, feel free to share. This is an attempt at that. Thanks for reading.

---

Joyce Laudner was no student of history only a connoisseur of retrograde products, and that’s why she eased her Chrysler to the curb on a chilly April morning in front of a house with siding the color of dried cornstalks and shudders the rich tones of communion wine. A blue balloon was tied to the mailbox and next to that a black-and-white sign that the newspaper provided for free for advertising in the classified section alerting all passersby that this was the site of a garage sale.

“Isn’t the sign a misnomer?”  Digital asked from the passenger seat, pointing to the row of tables arranged in the front yard. He couldn’t even see a garage anywhere near this shithole on the west side of the railroad tracks.

“I think the family’s name is Wilmer not Misnomer,” his grandmother, the venerable but often aloof Joyce Laudner, replied.

“I meant…”

“Save it, Junior, we’re missing the deals,” his grandmother flung her door open. She was a slight woman, barely a hundred pounds and so short that she peered between the steering wheel and the dash rather than over it. Her bifocals were spotted, her haired dyed some color that Digital’s friend, Riley, referred to as bloody stool, and a cigarette was tucked behind her ear.

Digital Laudner, her thirteen-year-old grandson, was a student of history. Well, he liked the obvious patterns of history as he recognized them. He saw everything in patterns just like a computer was programed to recognize coded ones and zeroes. His wealth of statistical and mundane knowledge was why his peers at Jordan Junior High nicknamed him Digital, and considering his other choices for names were Aurelius or Junior, he gladly embraced the moniker. His grandmother would never accept it, even though her insistence on calling him Junior made even less sense.

Garage sales were the American contribution to the long-standing human tradition of the trade of goods. Well, the term goods was generous in his mind. While his grandmother saw treasures, he thought most of the stuff piled on tables throughout Jordan and the rest of this star-spangled plot of land was junk. Used and useless junk, and he struggled to understand how this version of the goods trade fit in the grand history that preceded it. Even before the Ancient Greeks and Romans ruled the world, wars were started over goods, be it for precious metals or necessary spices. Heroic spirits set sail into the unknown and unforgiving ocean to find faster paths to Asia. Explorers puttered around artic waters often losing fingers and toes, if not their lives, to frostbite trying to find a northern water route from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Digital even suspected that NASA and all the foreign space programs’ long-term goal was to find someone somewhere to sell them something that would make all their advanced math equations and theoretical physics worth it.

“Are you coming, Junior?” His grandmother was already trudging through the yard, and he knew she wanted him beside her to steady her passage. She was only sixty-three, but she looked twenty years older and the cigarette now dangling from her lips had a lot to do with that. His friend Riley liked to ask what would happen to Digital if his grandmother died, and Digital had run the possible outcomes in his mental mainframe, and the results were bleak if she keeled over before he turned eighteen.

He caught up with her before she reached the tables, her arm instinctively finding his even though she had to lift it up to meet his. Digital was tall, over six feet, and while his personality categorized him as a nerd or dork or dweeb, his looks placed him in an entirely different social stratosphere among his peers. He had wide shoulders, thin hips, and muscled arms, all without trying or participating in sports outside of gym class. Unlike his peers, his face was clear of acne, his chin chiseled, his hair always cut short on the sides and just long enough on the top to lay flat in a neat and attractive manor. If he had been built in a factory as his personality sometimes made people joke then there had been an error when his brain had been placed in this body.

“Look at these doilies,” his grandmother said. “How much does that tag say?”

“Seventy-five cents,” he responded. “You already own forty-seven doilies, you don’t need anymore.”

“Oh, a good garage sale isn’t just about what you need,” a woman who had fat sagging from her arms, stomach and chin appeared. “Am I right?”

The woman, Ms. Wilmer Digital assumed, flashed a smile that included one black tooth before producing a Kleenex from her slack’s pocket and wiping her nose.

“Sure right about that,” His grandmother said, picking two doilies from the stack.

“What is your highest priced item?”

“Junior,” his grandmother gasped even though Digital asked this all the time.

“Well,” the woman put a thumb to her fat chin, “I’m trying to get rid of that old trolling motor for fifty bucks.”

“I see.”

“Kind of a weird question.”

“Don’t get him started,” his grandmother released Digital’s arm, moving toward another table that featured stacks of paperback books, VHS tapes and other miscellaneous items.

“High price items lure people in and that’s your best shot at selling the rest,” Digital said. “Word of mouth can spread about something like that motor. There is an average of two-and-half garage sales in the greater Jordan area every weekend from the end of April to October not counting the townwides the third weekend of June. The average price at a garage sale is seventy-five cents, meaning you need to sell about sixteen items an hour to average twelve dollars, and probably twice that much to actually make a profit.”

“Hunh,” Ms. Wilmer walked away, but Digital followed.

“Did you know there are between 6.5 and 9 million garage sales per year in the United States?”

“Is that so? Oh, clothes are all dollar,” Ms. Wilmer said to another morning shopper.

“Leave that poor woman alone, Junior.” His grandmother had added a ceramic Cardinal, a VHS tape of the Laurence Welk show and a green candy dish to her haul.

Digital made to join his grandmother when something caught his eye. A tattered box with red letters “All Star Baseball Card Game” written upon it. He picked it up, reading the back of the box for the instructions on how baseball cards were used to simulate games.

“Oh, you see something there?” His grandmother asked. “Baseball? You don’t care about baseball.”

“Oh, that damn thing,” the woman chimed in. “My boy tried redoing an entire baseball season using that thing. Had all the lineups and stats scribbled in a notebook.”

“How far did he get?” Digital inquired.

“Not far. My Ralphie always had big ideas, but not much follow through.”

His grandmother was right, Digital didn’t give two shits about baseball, but he had to admit there was something almost poetic about the statistics and the way they fit together to produce results. He wondered if a game that basically used two dice and a batting outcome card would bear the validity of those statistics.

“How much?”

“Tell you what, I’ll give you that and this set of old ball cards for three bucks if you don’t spit any more garage sale facts at me.”

“Deal.” His grandmother said, handing her a twenty for all the items in her hands and the baseball game and cards. “And you say there’s never anything good at these sales.”

“I might stand corrected.” Digital whispered.

Write-On Prompt: Scenes from Fish & Whistle Song

 https://open.spotify.com/track/4qA8M5hJn45rtFyWH5Ixar?si=0a94d8318d774222

Note: Write-On was cancelled last night, but I felt like I’ve been neglecting my writing lately, so I did a prompt night on my own. I found a prompt “Write something inspired by a random song.” Well, it wasn’t random as I put on John Prine’s “Bruised Orange” album on the turntable. The opening song “Fish and Whistle” is upbeat, but the lyrics have the usual Prine hard reality undertones. I latched onto things like the mention of the car wash, hurt ankles, forgiveness, and fishing. I don’t know if this going anywhere, but it’s just a couple scenes about some folks living through hard times.

***

Cars were lined bumper to bumper from the door of the automatic wash at Suds Even for Duds to the car wash’s entrance and into the eastbound lane of Lincolnway. It was early March, the sky was blue, and the air temps unseasonably warm leaving all the car owners of Jordan itching to wash away the layers of dirt and salt collected during the long, cold winter. John watched the procession of cars, most of them white or black, from the swing on his porch across the street.

 His left foot was propped upon a box with an Amazon logo on the side. Ma had ordered something she probably had already forgot about, the delivery guy left it in front of the door the day before just in time to get soaked by a late afternoon shower. Lucky for John, the cardboard held enough integrity to handle his foot and ankle. The later was wrapped tight with brown gauze.

 “You smokin’ out here?” John’s father crashed through the front door wearing light blue basketball shorts and no shirt. He was fifty-two, the skin of his chest was a permanently red and cracked like old leather. He was missing half his teeth, and the other half were hanging on by threads.

 “Nah, I ain’t smokin?” John said. “Just watching the rich folks awashin’ their cars.”

 John’s father, a man named Ozzie, stretched his lower back and belched. He was fifty-two, but looked twenty years older, worked on the roads, when he worked at all, and smoked three packs a day. Still, he couldn’t forgive John for catching him smoking five years earlier when John was thirteen.

 “That Buick there,” Ozzie said. “And that Escalade there.”

 “Yeah, what about them?”

 “Those two together cost more than this here house,” Ozzie blew air between the two remaining teeth behind his upper lip.

 “Shit, the gas they’re burning idling costs more than this here house.”

 “That’s the way the world goes around.” Ozzie said. “I’m goin’ fishin’. Don’t sit on your ass all day.”

 Across the way, the Escalade honked at a Ford F150 to move ahead. The guy in the Ford lowered his window and stuck his middle finger out. John struggled to his feet, keeping weight off his bad ankle, and lifted the Amazon box and hobbled toward the door.

***

John dangled his swollen ankle in the river, the gauze was stuffed under his buttcheek to keep it from blowing into the water. The cement pad below him was warm from the sun, the shadow from the Route 6 bridge hadn’t reached this far over yet. His father was a hundred feet down yonder, casting just below the dam. A cigarette dangled between his lips and a cooler filled with buds was at his feet.

Ozzie was a slender built man with a paunch protruding noticeably over his belt buckle. John was built the same, he just hadn’t aged and ate enough yet for the paunch. There was no doubt that Ozzie Frey was John’s father. They could have been twin brothers if not for the obvious age difference.

 “Hi ya, John boy.” Deanna Ploge plopped down beside him. She had been a year ahead of John in school before she dropped out at sixteen. Now she was an entrepreneur, selling medicinal and physical recreation activities from the backseat of her Oldsmobile.

 “Hi ya, Deanna.”

 “Heard you busted up your ankle.” She wore a top with a plunging neckline. She’d lost some baby fat since her school days, but she was still on the pudgy side. John supposed guys around here got hard up enough to pay for a go with the likes of her.

 John lifted his foot from the river, the gnarly bruises enhanced by the cold water.

 “Ouch! All that from a hole in the street.”

 “Walking home from Donnie’s last night. Just heard a snap and went down in the middle of the crosswalk there by the laundromat, had to drag myself across the rest of the road.”

 “Cripes, you go to the doctor.”

 “Ma went to a lawyer this morning, he’s going to pay for a doctor supposedly. We’re going to sue the city for everything it’s got.”

 “You mean a Dairy Mart and a three-quarters empty mall?”

 “That’s probably the extents of it.”

 The river rushed by, smelling of dead fish and sewage. John supposed he might have added an infection to the list of his problems by dipping his injured ankle in it. Deanna sat with her legs folded under her. She was probably waiting for the high school to let out in about an hour. The students bought quite a bit of her medicinals.

 “Well, time to do a bit of collectin’.” Deanna stood and walked down the way toward Ozzie.

 “Collectin? What does he owe you for?”

 Deanna didn’t answer, just patted her ass twice and kept walking.

 

Publishing Update: The Gateway Review – Gone

 The Spring 2023 edition of The Gateway Review will feature a flash fiction story of mine entitled “Gone.” You can purchase print copies of the magazine at the link below. The Gateway Review is an annual publication filled with magically weird fiction and poetry. 

“Gone” is a tale that I cooked up during one of our Write On writing group prompt nights. I don’t remember the prompts off the top of my head, but I remember it flying from my brain to my fingertips to the screen in pretty quick order. 

 

The story follows a young woman in a rural setting as all the people she knows and loves suddenly start disappearing. If that sounds like something that might interest you, be sure to order a copy. Literary magazines like this one can use all the help they can get. 

 

Thanks for reading. 

https://www.lulu.com/shop/joe-baumann/the-gateway-review-spring-2023/paperback/product-77vdw4.html?q=the+gateway+review+spring+2023&page=1&pageSize=4