Week in Seven Words #301

inventiveness
Trying to figure out how to play with her collection of Shopkins, we come up with a game. I'll pretend I can take only one Shopkins figurine with me on a vacation. One by one, she'll pretend to be the figurines pleading their case. She'll have each one present reasons for why it's the best choice and will address my questions and concerns. ("As ice cream, I'll keep you cool and give you something to eat if all the restaurants serve gross food.") She comes up with creative, funny ideas and also makes some of the figurines self-sabotaging.

luring
Late afternoon shadows make the woods even more inviting. I'm tempted to stay until night, when I'd have a much harder time finding my way out.

restocking
More lungfuls of clean air to take with me to the city.

searching
The tree seeks itself in the leaf-choked stream.

stridulous
During the hike, I hear a faint roar. It's sports commentary, seeping from his headphones.

susceptibilities
Suddenly, we're at the lake. Silky water ringed with colorful trees. It's a view that breaches the hardened places in my mind.

unremarked
After the hours she spends finding and implementing a solution for their Internet outage, they largely ignore her.

Week in Seven Words #282

bibliotheca
She pushes a stroller heaped with picture books. There's a child in there too, somewhere.

cramping
At some point, he started to sound like a 1950s TV dad. Though in some ways he has matured, his thoughts have also hardened and narrowed.

mindset
I leave the room in anger. Outside, a few things calm me: The air, the trees and the soft afternoon light. The self-possession I feel, when I finally realize that the greatest part of my anger comes from things I'm insecure about or afraid of in myself.

rafters
The music surrounds us, forms a roof over our head with the clouds and stars beyond it.

recollecting
I'm told she was a quiet, self-conscious child who sometimes had problems at school. Her own stories of her childhood are different - that she was confident, tough, never afraid.

slacken
The cough that latched onto my windpipe for weeks is finally relaxing its grip.

surmount
The bottom half of the beech tree is a mess of scars and initials. Farther up, the trunk smooths out, rising past all the parts that are defaced.

Week in Seven Words #220 & 221

220

asthmatic
Buses wheezing in the heat, looking battered and ill.

bitterness
They dwell on other people's failures, because they want to justify the lack of risk-taking in their own lives and distract themselves from their profound regrets.

briny
Broken, brown ground and a river that smells like an ocean.

brittle
Judging, measuring, comparing. Never just listening. Never accepting.

emerald
It's a precious green lawn in a neighborhood full of industrial lots, billboards and old apartment houses. Bright flowers have sprung up on it, and people hover around, starved for the simple beauty.

off-putting
"Nobody jumping out of it today," he says in an odd, cheerful voice after staring for a few minutes at the Freedom Tower.

self-defeating
She walks with the group because she wants to improve her fitness, but she gets winded too easily and has trouble keeping up. Discouraged, she settles on a bench and smokes a cigarette.

An Unexpected Descent

Bartleby Snopes recently published a short story I wrote called "An Unexpected Descent."

You can read it here.

Enjoy! (Though be forewarned, it's a grim tale…)

Week in Seven Words #138

felicitous
Meeting kind people in stairwells.

fervent
He holds the last shofar note for an eternity. In that note is every hope, appeal, and wordless scream.

impeded
The men behind me in line at the post office act as if they're in purgatory: they lament the delay, dissect the reasons for the delay, wonder aloud how long they must wait until they can hand their letters or parcels over for deliverance.

indifferent
He's become accustomed to speaking about people as if they're abstractions. He prides himself on talking about heinous crimes with little feeling or outrage and providing "logical" explanations of crime and justice that sound tidy on paper but fall apart when applied to the messy reality of human life. I think he derives superiority from feeling that he's "above it all" when for the most part he's confusing callousness with rationality. But his comments do highlight how any system of justice on Earth will always have shortcomings of one kind or another, though some of course are much worse than others.

nectar
The sign that the High Holidays have commenced: a dish of honey on the table, for dipping challah and apple slices.

unburdening
Casting my sins into a soft swollen gray river.

unmasked
At first she seems sullen and withdrawn. But just give her the chance to speak, without getting impatient or trying to win her over with fake smiles, and a more interesting picture emerges.

Good Short Fiction: "Puss-Cat" and "The White Cat"

Collection: Tails of Wonder and Imagination: Cat Stories
Editor: Ellen Datlow

Title: Puss-Cat
Author: Reggie Oliver
Godfrey is a washed up theater actor who used to perform in supporting roles alongside the late Sir Roderick Bentley, a legendary thespian. In the story Godfrey is sitting around talking about Roderick ("Roddy") over drinks, and even though Godfrey is an interesting man in his own right - world-weary and full of forced cheer, his tongue loosened by drink - you sense that his life has revolved and will always revolve around Roddy. "Puss-cat" is the term of endearment that Roddy, an insatiable womanizer, used for all of his girlfriends and mistresses, and Godfrey spends the most time talking about one of them: Yolande, an ingenue who caught Roderick's attention after she berated him for hurting a stray cat that hung around the theater where they were rehearsing. As Godfrey puts it:

Yolande, you see, was one of those people who is instantly drawn to anything even more defenceless than herself.

There's so much deliciousness in this story, the way it's crafted in a loose narrative where each detail slips in at just the right moment. In Godfrey's reminiscences the characters come alive: Roddy, grand and careless, the charismatic egotist par excellence, and Yolande, who is way in over her head when it comes to love and life and the often sordid business of theater. And Godfrey himself, with his witty asides and drink-deadened heart, what little surprises he has in store for us. I love how the humor in the story can suddenly give way to a deep bruising darkness.

I also love the detail about each theater having its own cat, a stray who saunters around and owns the place (and keeps mice from chewing on wires and cables). Isn't it curious that Roddy, a man of the theater who calls all his girlfriends "puss-cat," really hates cats? Theater cats are a critical part of this tale.

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Title: The White Cat
Author: Joyce Carol Oates

There was a gentleman of independent means who, at about the age of fifty-six, conceived of a passionate hatred for his much-younger wife's white Persian cat.

Julius Muir is in his fifties; Alissa, his wife, is in her thirties. It's her second marriage, and his first. She's pursuing an acting career in the city and spends a lot of time with her circle of theater friends, including men her own age. Julius meantime hangs around his large estate outside the city collecting valuables and wondering why he still feels lonely.

Into this picture of marital health steps Miranda, the cat. Miranda seems to show affection to everyone but Julius, and it drives him up the wall. He bought her, didn't he? Out of his loving, considerate heart he gave her as a gift to his wife, to cuddle and dote on. He sustains her, provides her with a home. Why won't she let him touch her? Why won't she love him? If someone were to ask him, "Julius, dear boy, is it really the cat that's bothering you or is it your wife?" he would say that of course it's not his wife. He loves his wife; it's just her cat he can't stand. Her beautiful ungrateful cat.

So he starts plotting how to kill the cat and make it look like an accident. It's a sad spectacle for the most part. Creepy and pitiable. He married a woman who is unsuited to him and to his ideal of marriage, and he thinks offing her cat will change things? But he's not really thinking, is he; he's going off the deep end.

Sometimes a story has a dominant color, and for this one it's a pale icy blue. Husband and wife may be cordial to one another but there's a chill on the marriage. Even Julius Muir's passions give off little heat. I see him bluish and oxygen-starved, with little to nourish him from within or from without.

Love can't be bought or demanded. And revenge doesn't always go as planned. It's painful to watch Julius square off against a house cat, and feel the futility of everything he does. Tormented by the thought that maybe a man like him can't inspire love.

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Other stories from this collection: Coyote Peyote (by Carole Nelson Douglas), Every Angel is Terrifying (by John Kessel), Tiger in the Snow (by Daniel Wynn Barber), Gordon the Self-Made Cat by Peter S. Beagle, and Guardians by George R. R. Martin.

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This post has been linked to at Short Stories on Wednesday #23 at the Breadcrumb Reads blog.