Category Archives: Writing Exercise

What Happened Next

Recently I’ve been reminded how much I want to tell stories. It’s not just something I want to do, it’s something that I yearn for. It seeps from my fingers and re-focuses how I view the streets I walk upon. I wish I had the focus and intensity to do this as often as I should.

I think of the artists, the storytellers, the people who do it so well. Flannery O’Connor and her stories of the grotesque. Bono and his snapshots of redemption, grace, and the fall. Anne Lamott and her real honesty. They inspire me. I know I’m miles from them, but they act like the muse, beckoning me on, and sometimes you have to give in and let it flow, let the words come and worry later about what it will be, what it will say, how bad it really is.

Taste is the enemy of art. As soon as you start tiptoeing around something you’re doing it wrong. So you just bore into it and do what you can, say what you can, and redo it later.

What happens next is something along this vein. It isn’t a story, it’s a character sketch. It’s a glimpse of two people coming together and apart. It probably drips with my vision and my truth, my condescending tone. That’s why it’s only a sketch. Merely practice. A bit racy too, considering my audience, so put the kids to bed.

What Happened Next

He turned away and blew the smoke slowly across his lips. Aleah looked down and tried to hold her breath. She counted: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, breathe. Andy looked off in a daze.

Then, snapping back to the moment, he turned to Aleah and a slow smile appeared. She looked up to catch his gaze and blushed, her eyes falling and then rising again. Andy ground his half-finished cigarette into his shoe and flicked the butt in the air.

What happened next is nothing new. They’d been building up to it all month, eyeing each other as they stocked the shelves at the grocery store. At first Andy seemed aloof and crass, but now he was just crass and there was something about him Aleah felt drawn to. In the beginning Aleah seemed like any other girl, but she hung around when others would have walked away. She sat on the bench during breaks, feeling the summer night around them, watching the solitary cars drive by and the empty parking lot.

Then there was that night. Andy had parked his crumpled Grand Am next to Aleah’s cute little Dodge. Andy swore when the driver’s door wouldn’t open, and he came around to the other side right when Aleah was coming out to her car. He stood there for a moment watching her, and she watched him. They had awkward conversation, but there was something in the air. It was electricity or nerves or hormones or something.

Finally Andy cracked a joke that made Aleah laugh and the air seemed lighter. Their hands touched for a moment and their eyes met and Andy felt a ball in his throat and a flashback from TV dramas and he wanted to get out of there. Aleah watched him go with interest, and Andy drove home confused and horny, trying to figure out this girl who didn’t seem to care that his jeans sagged and that he always wore a faded Yankees hat.

With Andy’s cigarette snuffed out the air was clear again and they moved closer, two bodies, a mere island in a secluded soccer field in a forgotten park. They sat in the middle of the green grass field, which needed to be mowed. It was surrounded by forest, a field often overlooked and needing attention. In a few moments Aleah was staring up at the blue sky and the cumulus clouds and Andy above her. He’d taken his hat off, a rare and vulnerable act.

She slipped into a daze during what happened next, a sudden flood of tingling emotion that registered so far off the scale she didn’t know what to do. She breathed in deeply and closed her eyes for a moment of blind love.

Unlike Aleah, Andy was all too aware of what was happening. His stomach was in his throat and his eyes kept flirting with the edges of the field. He had to clench every muscle in his hands to keep them from trembling as he unbuttoned her shorts.

Winnie-the-Pooh graced her underwear and he tried not to notice. Her stomach had a slight curve above the thin band of her underwear and her thighs seemed to bulge below her crotch. She was anything but fat, but she wasn’t toned and shaped like the girls in the Sears underwear ads.

The Winnie-the-Pooh’s came off and it was another jarring site, another image that didn’t measure up to his soft-focused expectations. It was too harsh, too real, the grass poking and scratching, the sun beating down, the feeling of a million eyes watching from the nearby trees. His sagging pants sagged a little farther and Aleah murmured. They tried to kiss but it was sloppy and awkward.

In a moment it was over and Andy rolled away. Two kids, lying in an empty green field, giving themselves away. It was so much, but it was not enough.

Andy zipped his pants and reached for a cigarette, leaving Aleah to take care of herself. And she lay there for a moment, wondering what just happened, wondering if anything just happened. The breeze felt cold and she could feel the grass scratching her thighs. She watched Andy take a slow drag and blow the smoke across the sky and she wondered if she’d ever be so close and so far away from anyone.

Sedgewick at the Duck Farm

He saw her from the other side of the creek. She was sitting at a lone bench on the deserted side of the creek at the duck farm. At least that’s what Sedgewick always called the little barn and farm house with the duck pond and creek and the little antique shop that sold old fashioned candy to the sugar-loving little kids in the neighborhood.

Sedgewick was going for a walk that Saturday morning, and he just happened to head towards the secluded little duck farm. He liked to watch the ducks cavorting around the little converted chicken coup and then waddle down to the creek and paddle around the lazily swirling water. He especially liked to see the fuzzy little baby ducks, and even more than that he liked to watch the excited mothers and their even more excited little daughters as they cooed and fussed over the baby ducks.

But it was still fairly early for a Saturday morning and the subdued crowds the duck farm usually saw on June Saturdays hadn’t shown up yet. So Sedgewick had the farm to himself. Except for the young girl sitting by herself on the lone bench on the far side of the creek.

Her deep brown eyes were watching the dark creek water swirl around rocks and debris, carrying honking little ducks further downstream. Her face was contorted, her eyebrows scrunched together, giving herself a uni-brow. She didn’t smile when the ducks pecked at each other or climbed out of the creek and shook themselves like river-soaked dogs.

Her brown hair was pulled back in two, tight ponytails, the kind of hairdo a giddy teenager would wear to school on a lark. Sedgewick had a feeling it was left over from yesterday and she hadn’t bothered to do something different this morning.

Sedgewick watched the ducks a while longer, but his eyes kept returning to the lone girl. After several minutes of this he couldn’t stand it any more, and wandered over to the rickety bridge. He crossed slowly, pausing in the middle to watch a duck swim under the bridge and take another glance at the girl. He had been fiddling with a weed he’d picked up somewhere along the way and finally tossed it to the wind and watched it fall into the creek and then turn over in the water and twirl around a rock and disappear under the dark, clear water of the creek.

He stepped over to the other side and stopped a short ten feet from the lone bench. The other side of the creek was secluded and quiet. There was a small patch of mowed grass and the lone bench and that was it. An old chain-link fence swallowed up by brush and vines and bushes edged the small mowed area, and beyond the fence was a swath forest that looked dark and dreary but sheltered the duck farm from the noisy traffic and congestion.

Sedgwick watched the girl for a few moments, than took another few steps forward. She didn’t notice his presence, but kept her eyes locked on a dark swirling pool of water. Sedgewick paused again, feeling very self conscious about approaching someone he didn’t know, especially a young teenage girl.

He didn’t exactly know what he was going to do or what he was going to say, and now the terror of not knowing started to build in the back of his throat. She looked so lonely, so scared, so full of hurt and something that pulled at her stomach like a cramp. Sedgewick could almost read the pain in her face, in that furled brow, and he knew he had to do something, to say something. He didn’t know what was wrong, what had caused a young girl to come to the lonely side of the creek and sit by herself so early on a Saturday morning without doing her hair or even bothering with anything like that.

Sedgewick realized she not only hadn’t done her hair, it was still wispy and crumpled from sleeping, but she was also wearing her pajamas. She wore a pair of scrub pants like doctors wear and an old faded T-shirt that was yellowing from age. There was a pair of worn, crusted sandals on the ground next to her, and her bare feet were digging in the soft mud, turning her pasty white toes black. Her face was red and blotchy, she had a few undisguised zits, and her eyes were red and puffy. She’d been crying.

Sedgewick noticed all of this and wanted to offer this hurting girl what he could. He stepped forward again, this time slower than he had before. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and tried the best he could.

“Hi,” he said, hesitation filling his voice. A tear streamed down the girl’s face as she broke her gaze and looked over towards the voice. She saw an older guy standing there, probably the same age as some of the seniors she knew at school. His hands were shoved deep in the pockets of his baggy, faded, and torn jeans, his scrubby tennis shoe was pawing at the ground. His face was soft and gentle, sort of friendly but in a mysterious way. Yesterday’s five o’clock shadowed disguised his baby face. His eyes were deep and he was chewing on his lip. It wasn’t exactly the kind of face her and her friends swooned over. It wasn’t the kind of face she used to cut out of magazines and plaster to her bedroom wall. But there was a smile of sorts in that face, and eyes that looked deep into hers, eyes that looked into her heart and somehow could see the pain that was swallowing her whole. She didn’t say anything, but tried to blink away the tears.

“I-I was watching the ducks,” Sedgewick started, gesturing to the other side of the creek. “And I saw you sitting over here… by yourself. I thought maybe you needed something.” It was a lot for Sedgewick to get out. He finished as quickly as he could and bit his lip, waiting for her response.

But she didn’t say anything for a moment. She just looked at him, studying him, trying to keep herself in this moment instead of slipping back into her memories like she’d been doing all morning. This was the very duck farm where she’d been kissed for the first time. Jackson Davis kissed her in the summer after sixth grade on this very bench when the sun was going down and the moon was coming up like a giant melon. She’d thought to herself that any girl would want to kiss a guy named Jackson, but Jackson would only kissed her that summer.

Of course when her and her little pack of friends strolled out of Henry H. Miller Junior High School on the first day of the year she watched Jackson necking with another girl and she cried and dropped her books and ran home to the comfort of her mother.

She came back to this moment in time to feel a tear roll off her cheek and land in the middle of a growing wet spot on her pajamas. Sedgewick saw that tear fall and it triggered a memory back in the depths of his mind, a memory of lone tear falling from his grandmother’s face.

“My grandfather died when I was seven.”

Unlike his previous stuttering speech, Sedgewick managed to say these words with a little more confidence, a little more assurance. The girl noticed it, and looked up to meet his eyes when he began speaking.

“I was raised by my grandma and grandpa, it was just me and them. But one night when I was seven years old I couldn’t sleep and I dragged my blanket into my grandparents’ bedroom and I was going to crawl into bed with them. The moon illuminated their room and I could see my grandfather sitting and rocking in the corner. He couldn’t sleep either and he motioned me over and then pulled me up into his warm, comforting lap. I burrowed my face in his chest. I could smell his Old Spice deodorant. I fell asleep almost immediately and awoke to the warm rays of the morning sun and my grandmother’s face. I remember the look on her face like it was only yesterday. Grief and pain clouded her eyes. But she smiled as my eyes slowly opened, a smile that knew pain and loss and joy and love. She carried me downstairs and we sat down in another chair and rocked and rocked and rocked.”

Sedgewick wasn’t looking at the girl anymore, but was staring at the dark creek water. He had never told anyone this story, and he couldn’t believe it was flowing from his lips like the call and response at church. The girl hadn’t taken her eyes of Sedgewick.

“My grandfather died that night while I slept in his lap.” A single sob rolled through the girl as Sedgewick finished. He stood there silently, still staring at the water, and the girl continued to stare at him.

“I don’t know why you’re sitting here by yourself, staring at the water, but I guess I thought you needed to know that,” Sedgewick said, trying to figure out why he had told this stranger his story. He felt naked and exposed. He pulled his hands from his pockets and crossed his arms, trying to hide his percieved nakedness. He looked away from the water, but still didn’t want to meet her grief-filled eyes.

Instead his eyes fell on a fiery yellow dandelion growing in a tuft of grass on the edge of he creek. The girl noticed it too, and lowered her gaze to the dandelion. Sedgewick slowly stepped forward, and then crouched down, his knees feeling the cold earth through his jeans, and he plucked the dandelion and looked at it.

“You just looked so lonely, and I wanted you to know that you’re not,” Sedgewick said. He didn’t know what else to say, and he had a feeling it wasn’t his place to sit there on the bench with her and be a shoulder to cry on. He had been that shoulder for friends in the past, and needed such a shoulder himself. But a stranger is never the person you turn to for such comfort. And so he knew that he could only impart so much, and what he did impart would serve this girl better if he left it at that.

So he handed her the dandelion, and she gingerly took it, and then watched him walk away, back across the rickety bridge, past the waddling ducks and the farm house, past the barn and back towards the road and back to where ever it was he’d come from.

When he was finally gone she looked down to the fiery yellow dandelion. It was the color of a bright yellow crayon, the kind she used to use to draw pictures of dandelions for her mother. For the first time that morning she smiled. The hole of grief and pain became a little smaller, and she noticed the ducks and the sparkling patch of sun in the creek.

The smile spread as the tears started flowing, warm tears that were full of a deep hurt and a deep love at the same time. That morning her mother had finally succumb to a long battle with cancer and died.

Botched Left Turn

Their eyes met and they were stuck in a moment that yearned to stretch into eternity. The girl was maybe 12 or 13. She was riding shotgun in beat up pickup truck, an older, graying man who must have been her father was driving. He had turned left off a side street, pulling out in front of traffic from both directions, and quickly pulling in line next to the bus Sedgewick was riding.

As soon as the father pulled out he realized he hadn’t looked either way and he hesitated, but then it was too late so he floored it, but then he regained his sense and checked the traffic again, which only allowed him to know just how badly he was cutting someone off. The girl smiled and rolled her eyes in a way only a pre-teen girl could do; a girl who wasn’t yet totally embarrassed at the very thought of her parents, a girl who liked to smile and laugh and go swimming all day long and into the night when the mosquitoes would feed on you every time a square inch of bare skin appeared above the water.

Sedgewick watched the whole botched left turn and then suddenly met the girl’s sparkling eyes as the truck pulled alongside the bus. They looked at each other for a moment, and the moment stretched beyond a casual glance to the point where they both realized the other person was starring. The girl smiled and kept looking at Sedgwick, a head and shoulders slouched in the bus window, just above the TCF Bank banner on the side of the bus.

She seemed to know why Sedgewick was starring–the fact that her father had just made a really dumb driving blunder–and she took this with the same lighthearted joy that she took her father’s poor driving. Sedgewick noticed that a school was on the side street the truck had pulled out from, and he figured her father must have been picking her up from some after school activity, drama or maybe volleyball or something.

She was young, but her black hair framed her freckled fair skin and glowing smile in a way that seemed beautiful and mature. She wore a white shirt, not the cheap undershirt kind, but a dressier one that accentuated her budding breasts.

After their eyes had been together for more than a simple glance, for more than a moment, and on into just plain starring–a time long enough to exchange a volume of information–the girl looked over her shoulder to see for herself just how bad her father had cut off some poor rush hour driver. Her laugh increased when she saw the slowing car and its gesturing driver, and her eyes swept back to the road ahead, taking in the lone bus rider who had locked eyes for a tender moment.

Sedgewick watched her the whole time, his tired face slowly easing into a smile after the truck pulled away.

Unrequited Lust

Being an 18-year-old male had its disadvantages. As Sedgewick walked up to the bus stop, or just about anywhere for that matter, he couldn’t help but notice every semi-attractive female. With one sweep his eyes took in who was at the stop, if he knew them, if he recognized them, if they were new to the stop.

There was the college professor with his handbag. He always came to this stop or the next one, probably walking down to this one if he had the time, too impatient to wait at the farther stop. On the bus he read from a Greek book and got off at the University campus.

There was the big guy with the black gym bag. He always showed up just after the bus pulled up, and joined the tale end of the line of bus riders just as it snaked its way on to the bus. He went all the way downtown.

There were always a few other hangers-on, people who never showed up regularly, who might be there three days in a row and then never again. The semi-attractive women were always in this bunch, as if they changed their routes every day to stop strange men from stalking them. Sedgewick thought that seemed like a decent plan.

There was one girl who had been at the bus stop all week. She walked down 3rd street, just like Sedgewick, although never at the same time. She was always waiting at the bus stop when Sedgewick came strolling up. She got off at the University, a stop before the professor. On Tuesday she was reviewing flash cards, and Sedgewick guessed she was a student taking a summer class.

He noticed that she was something to look at. She wasn’t one of the girls that attracted whistles and long stares, but she was soft on the eyes, with subtle curves hidden under the blouse and pants.

Sedgewick always smiled and nodded to her, just like he did to every other stranger he met. He always felt like people needed to be more friendly, and a smile and nod was about as far as he could go without breaking the social norms that kept him from going up to total strangers and asking for their life story, which was something Sedgewick would love to do.

But when he nodded and smiled at this girl, he meant it. He so wanted to talk to her, find out her name, what class she was taking, where on 3rd street she lived. But he imagined it was a little spooky to be hit on by a total stranger at the bus stop. Sedgewick himself had heard one too many horror stories from scared mothers. He wasn’t about to become one of those stories.

And so his unrequited lust continued.

Two Generations

I saw the contrast of generations in the grocery store tonight.

Subject A: An elderly woman in her seventies or eighties, dressed in a black, mid-ankle skirt, black pumps, a blue blouse and a powder blue dress jacket. Her hair was silver, styled like a typical grandmother and her face was wrinkled and weathered. She had big gaudy rings and earrings.

Subject B: A teenage girl, probably sixteen or seventeen. She wore clean white tennis shoes, the kind with the thick sole, dark blue jeans, and an interesting powder blue shirt–but I’ll get to the shirt in a minute. Her hair was brown, shoulder length and straight. Her shirt must have been the latest rage. It was high cut, so her orange-tanned stomach poked out beneath the skintight shirt. It was open in the back, and tied at the top. The front somehow managed to be high cut on the bottom and low cut on the top. I swear her breasts were trying to jump out to avoid suffocation. And to top it off it was sparkly.

As I paid for my milk I watched Subject A hobbling over to pick up some grocery bags to take home. As Subject A was hobbling, Subject B was finishing packing her groceries and heading towards the door. Subject B paused in Subject A’s path, and looked back to her boyfriend waiting a moment, oblivious to the fact that she was in Subject A’s path. Subject A didn’t notice for a minute, and then looked up to see a suffocating breasts and a really sparkly shirt. Subject A looked flustered and tried to go right. Subject B realized she was in someone’s way and also moved right, and the two did that awkward little social dance.

At this point the cashier handed me my receipt and I had to go. I couldn’t watch the generational contrast any longer. As I climbed into my truck and pulled away, I watched Subject A being helped to her car by a much younger woman that must have been her daughter. I noticed Subject B was stalled in front of the pop machine, making out with her boyfriend.

And they all said goodnight.

If I was a rock star when I was 17, if I made the cover of Rollingstone, if I toured the world in a big shiny bus, it’d be a messed up world with flowers in the air and buttons in your hair. I walked down the street today with my hands in my pockets and “It’s a Beautiful Day” streamin’ through my head like cerebral radio. I saw the steeple of Hamline University rising above the old brick apartments on the corner and I wondered if the green copper steeple just floated there northeast of the corner of Minnehaha and Snelling like a wild dream. The sun shone like it hasn’t shone in a season or two and I saw the grass, the pale, dead, yellow grass trying to breathe in the fresh spring air again. I laughed and jaywalked across the street to buy a pop. The lady at the cashier said it’s so nice all the people are out on their bikes and stuff. I said it’s a beautiful day and she didn’t answer and I couldn’t figure out if she was talking to me or the guy next to the ATM who couldn’t seem to remember his PIN number. 5309. That’s what he should have tried.

Poetry is flowing words on a page that you can’t understand no matter how hard you try until suddenly they flow from your fingertips and you think you have a slippery little grasp on the world at hand. That’s why I hate poetry.

So I shoved my hands in my pockets and walked home along the sidewalk, smiling at the gayly painted house for sale, it’s blue-green paint with yellow trim making it look like a candyland home. And I smiled, looked back at the hip coffee shop with the crazy mural wall and the upstairs apartment and I wondered who lives there and if they knew I wanted to capture the world in the lens of camera or the catch of a phrase.

And they all said goodnight.

Mrs. Davis, Second Grade Teacher

My name is Sandy Davis and for forty-three years I’ve taught second graders to subtract 5 from 9 and to shut the hell up when I’m talking. You probably think that’s cruel. Lots of people think that’s cruel nowadays, but that’s just too damn bad. I’ve been doing this for forty-three years and nobody’s gonna tell me I’m doing it wrong.

This morning I called Daniel back to my desk. The lunch monitor informed me he’d been pulling girls’ hair, among other things. The lunch monitors are always telling me things I don’t need to hear. I’m not interested in who Daniel kissed. I’m not interested in who wants Daniel to kiss them. I’m only interested in correcting Daniel when he does something he’s not supposed to. I asked him what happened and I actually had to try to hide my smile when I saw him squirm. He knew he was in trouble, and I let him have it. That’s what teachers do. You don’t do this for forty-three years if you don’t love these kids.

If his mother saw it she’d complain. If the head of the PTA saw it they’d complain. If the principal saw it he’d wish I was more tactful, but he’d be glad he didn’t have to talk to Daniel. Alan

The Grace You Can Get

But the warm rembrances faded and the siblings returned to the dark and stormy night. Blue flashes occasionally lit the kitchen, but otherwise Paul and Jeanie sat in a stunned silence.

“So what are you doing?” Paul ventured.

“What am I doing?” Jeanie repeated, with a hint of annoyance in her voice. She wasn’t sure what Paul meant by the question, but for her there was only one place the question could go.

“I don’t know, Paul. I honestly don’t know. I feel like I’m at the end of my rope, and maybe I am.” Lightning lit up the room again. “You don’t willfully move back into your parents’ house. It’s not something I wanted to do, believe me. But I have no other option.” She finally stopped, feeling like she could ramble on about the inevitable all night, like a dripping faucet that just won’t stop.

Paul merely nodded and sat there in the quiet. What was he supposed to say? Little brothers aren’t supposed to counsel older sisters.

Jeanie sat across the old kitchen table, her face buried in her hands, her heart longing to cry but her mind not allowing it. She wouldn’t stoop to that.

“Sometimes you need a fresh start,” Paul said before he could stop himself. He was the student who was never afraid to speak in class, but usually waited for a worthwhile moment.

“I’m sorry, that sounds kind of trite.” He faltered for a moment. There was something in her face that told him it was his place to be quiet and commiserate. He was also the kind of person who wanted to fix problems, not just listen to them.

“It’s okay. I’m not in a position to reject much of anything.”

The two sat there for a few minutes longer, the thunder echoing and the rain strumming on the window pane.

“I’ll take what grace I can,” Jeanie said.