Week in Seven Words #418

despondent
An aquarium has been installed at the ferry terminal, and its fish, which are frontosa, wear the most melancholy expression.

details
During the walk, I find many stories on the ground. Next to a pothole in a parking lot are a pair of sparkling sneakers and a small backpack. By the curb several blocks away, there's a guest book from a first birthday party, fallen from a purse or bag or out of a car. On another street, an upright piano lies on its back with a can of beer cradled against its chest.

droid
One of the dentist's instruments sounds like R2-D2, so even though I'm getting a cavity filled, I'm trying hard not to laugh.

intricacies
The elevated sidewalk, narrow as a wick, bears us down a block of 19th and early 20th century houses with conical towers, decorative trim, wraparound porches, and other features that delight the eye and tickle the imagination.

lapping
A quiet beach, the sea in gentle argument with the sand. A gull is seated on the water, as on a blanket of blue tourmaline.

spread
A broad blue cloth of sky and water with an uneven row of buildings stitched to the horizon.

stoical
She's lean, spare, and self-contained, sufficient unto herself.

Week in Seven Words #408

booty
Their yard sale is set up on a street corner, and it looks like they've unloaded a pirate ship. There are chests of different sizes, exotic rugs, a sword, grimacing sculptures that look like idols swiped from a jungle altar. (The sword is fake, as it turns out.)

breakable
There's little space in the sculpture shop, and I'm afraid to move. The sculptures are thin and fragile, with wavy contours and ornaments made to snap off at the errant touch of a shoulder.

determined
He sets the toddler loose, and she aims unerringly for the puddle. He picks her up just as the tips of her feet touch the edge and sets her down several feet away. Immediately she swerves and heads for the puddle again.

downtime
The low seat by the window on the second floor of the bookstore: a place for people to pause and take stock of their day (or life), or burrow into a book for a while. Today a nanny is there, leaning her forehead against the window while the baby lies across her lap, asleep.

imbibed
During Trivial Pursuit, he keeps hoping I'll trip up on Sports & Leisure. After several questions about athletes I'd never heard of competing at sports I rarely watch, I get a question about a mixed drink I enjoyed the week before. That's more like it.

misread
Halfway through reviewing the text, I realize that I've been reading 'garish' as 'garnish.' That makes a difference. Also, I'm probably hungry.

uncovering
A rare moment when we're alone, and I discover that without the constraints of other people, we're able to speak freely and find common interests we didn't know we shared.

Week in Seven Words #283

disengage
She walks ahead of the rest of us, and I understand the mood she's in - restless, unwilling to talk, needing to feel like she's floating free.

dump
Between the chainlink fence and the water is a zone of discarded objects: a pink Disney princess balloon, a bike wheel, green bottles and a soccer ball.

lava
Volcanic colors of sunset over small gray buildings.

lurch
An email I expected arrives. Even though I sensed that something like it was coming, it's no less disappointing.

scalpels
Skyscrapers like silver blades cutting into the night.

squandering
Half an hour gets sucked away on a TV show where people make petty, poorly thought out decisions and end their night drunk and brawling.

watercraft
We walk past the yachts in the marina and marvel at their features, like the hot tubs and lounge chairs. "Which one is yours?" she asks, grinning. I tell her that mine isn't a yacht. It's a leaky rowboat. The amenities include a bucket to bail out water.

Week in Seven Words #258

application
Tentative fingers and solemn attention as she plays a two-handed piece on the keyboard.

finds
Blue shells, brown leaves and a star-shaped badge with a rusted pin.

observance
A hardheaded waitress serves clam chowder to one, fried chicken and a heap of pasta to another. Raises her eyebrow as she hands me my meal, an iced tea.

shifts
His car smells like cake air freshener and newsprint. Magazines slide around under my feet as he drives.

showered
A hole has torn open in the clouds. Light soft as talc sifts down to a bare tree by the water.

trimmed
They can take ten photos of a scene I'm in, and I won't appear in a single one.

variegated
Colonies of salty pools among yellow weeds and striated rock.

Week in Seven Words #129

aftermath
There was a crowd of geese here the week before along with pigeons and turtles all fighting over chunks of bread tossed by a wiry old lady who loves to see her animals fed. Now the rocky ledge that slopes down to the lake has only a few pigeons standing on it, at rest among their droppings.

cache
Oddments found at the back of a nightstand, behind the drawers: a baby photo and a budget written up in Hebrew.

cavort
During the third movement of Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto they get up and dance on the baseball diamond.

gloaming
Twilight picnics among evergreen trees.

peeping
High up from the ground, three raccoons poke their heads out of a hole in a tree like cuckoo clock figurines.

virtually
Competing at archery without a bow and arrow, and bowling without a ball.

wending
I've been through this place a number of times but I keep finding new paths. This one overlooks a stream bed where a thread of dark water unspools over tumbling rocks.

Week in Seven Words #128

antsy
People shuffle between the express and local sides of the platform as the announcer makes a calm droning promise that a train is just one stop away.

confer
The little office where we work, with the utilitarian furniture and the crushed earwig on the wall, feels like a battle command room.

coverlet
All eyes on the little one as he tumbles among the blankets.

glimpsing
I like when older people suddenly become very young; the moment he stops watering the grass and springs after the soccer ball, I can see him as he was forty or fifty years ago.

miscellany
Shells and feathers, old birds' nests and flowers on a white wood shelf.

self-made
He's a self-proclaimed superhero and has made a little kit for himself complete with a badge and a book illustrating his many battles against monsters, robots, and supervillains. Most impressive to me is the way he carefully writes in the book, slowly spelling out words while sounding them out to himself. I'm so proud of him.

three-pointer
The hoop in the basketball court is way too high for him but he keeps aiming for it anyway. Not caring for once about the score, he has fun trying to steal the ball from me and laughs at how I bob around, shoes squeaking and arms waving wildly, as I mount an exaggerated but incompetent defense.

Good Short Fiction: 3 tales from The Oxford Book of English Short Stories

Collection: The Oxford Book of English Short Stories
Editor: A.S. Byatt

Title: The Destructors
Author: Graham Greene
In London several boys have formed a gang. They content themselves with playing games and committing petty infractions, until a new member makes a more radical suggestion: to destroy the one house in the neighborhood that wasn't bombed during the Blitz. The man who lives there knows some of the boys, and they have nothing against him personally. But the thought of tearing down the home and everything in it - every possession, every piece of furniture, every plank and pipe and wall panel - is irresistible. They wait for the man to leave his house on a brief holiday, and they begin their work.

As I read this I thought of William Golding's Lord of the Flies and found Greene's story to be more chilling in some ways. The destruction here takes place in the heart of civilization, and it isn't driven by anything like revenge, anger, bloodlust or other out-of-control emotions. The boys don't steal anything, and they even admit that they don't hate the homeowner. In systematically destroying the house from the inside, while leaving the outer walls to collapse last, they work like single-minded termites. It's a kind of pure impersonal evil, not fueled by any emotion or ideology, except perhaps for the excitement of destruction and some deep-seated antipathy towards anything beautiful and worthwhile; maybe this uncompromising need to destroy lies at the core of every evil act. They spare nothing in the house, and wipe out every vestige of the man's identity within it. That this happens in a neighborhood already scarred by the Second World War makes it even more disturbing. The house survived the bombings only to succumb to a different manifestation of evil that seems inescapable; it's a part of day-to-day life, in wartime and peacetime, and exists even in the hearts of children.

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Title: Solid Objects
Author: Virginia Woolf
The story begins with two men arguing politics as they walk along a beach. We don't hear the substance of their argument, and soon they give it up in favor of resting on the sand for a while. One of them throws pieces of slate out onto the ocean, letting them skim over the waves; the other man, whose name is John, wriggles his fingers into the sand - a childlike gesture - and finds a piece of green glass resembling a gemstone.

From then on he becomes obsessed with finding broken discarded objects that have an interesting appearance, such as fantastically shaped pieces of pottery and china, smooth lumps of iron and chunks of rock.

Anything so long as it was an object of some kind, more or less round, perhaps with a dying flame deep sunk in its mass, anything—china, glass, amber, rock, marble—even the smooth oval egg of a prehistoric bird would do.

As he combs through alleys, shrubs, and train tracks, his political career quietly implodes. Human affairs seem like background noise or faded wallpaper in comparison to the vivid objects that John finds; the objects endure as John's life slips by in his constant search for more of them. Each new find has to be more interesting than the last one. John's ambitions have been diverted into strange channels; the story never touches on what his political positions were, or what he had hoped to get out of life before discovering that first piece of green glass on the beach. None of it seems to matter.

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Title: The Toys of Peace
Author: Saki (Hector Hugh Munro)

Harvey Bope has been asked by his sister to buy some peaceful toys for her sons, Bertie and Eric, when he next visits. The National Peace Council has recommended that boys be given toys that have nothing to do with war, so as to foster more peaceful impulses in them. Harvey is skeptical that "peace toys" will have any impact on his nephews' inclinations, but he decides to try the experiment. He brings them something altogether different from "the 'Siege of Adrianople' toy" they received from their Aunt Susan:

"It's a fort!" exclaimed Bertie.

"It isn't, it's the palace of the Mpret of Albania," said Eric, immensely proud of his knowledge of the exotic title; "it's got no windows, you see, so that passers-by can't fire in at the Royal Family."

"It's a municipal dust-bin," said Harvey hurriedly; "you see all the refuse and litter of a town is collected there, instead of lying about and injuring the health of the citizens."

In addition to the municipal dust-bin he's brought other civic buildings (including a municipal wash-house), along with figurines of civilian leaders. The kinds of toys, and the boys' reaction to them, are hilarious. The boys' resourcefulness is also a delight, as they turn the peaceful figurines and buildings into war toys:

Peeping in through the doorway Harvey observed that the municipal dustbin had been pierced with holes to accommodate the muzzles of imaginary cannon...

Clever and funny as the story is, it also has an underlying sadness. When Harvey observes at the end that he and his sister "have begun too late" in their peace toy experiment, you sense that he's not just talking about how old the boys are but about humanity as a whole.

Bertie and Eric, inspired by the riveting accounts of past battles they've read about, play at war with swashbuckling dialogue and cheerful slaughter. There's still an innocence to their play, because they don't know what it's like to be in real battle. In their lifetime there will be two world wars. H.H. Munro himself didn't survive WWI; when the war began he voluntarily fought as a soldier and was killed in France in 1916. The collection in which this story first appeared, The Toys of Peace, and Other Papers, was published posthumously in 1919.

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Other recommended stories in this collection include At Hiruharama (by Penelope Fitzgerald) and Nuns at Luncheon (by Aldous Huxley).

Week in Seven Words #80

all-purpose
When in doubt, buy them a gift card for a book store.

assurance
I half-expect an angry email. Instead I get concern, what sounds like a willingness to understand. I'm surprised. Years ago it would have been different. I wish I had possessed the confidence and faith to speak sooner.

clunky
Sitting on the floor gives me a strange perspective of the table and its unsteady piles of intermingled books, papers, notebooks, and journals. A water bottle looks like an alien totem, and the lamp towers solemnly over the laptop. Everything seems large and somewhat foolish, like children's toys meant to be tossed around and banged up.

curdled
No matter how many papers I go through, by the end of the day I'm no closer to having it figured out.

dovelike
The reading of the Book of Lamentations starts unexpectedly from a soft-spoken man at the back of the shul.

forbearing
About an hour before the fast ends, I start getting distracted with thoughts of food. My stomach isn't rumbling, but there's an odd clench to it, as if it's disgruntled but too polite to whine.

maquis
I feel like I should have learned about Nancy Wake prior to her death at age 98. She hasn't passed unnoticed, but she and others like her ought to be better known.

No longer inanimate

An apple spontaneously collapsing into three parts. A red pen sliding free from its cap. Is this what our desk clutter does when we're nose-deep in a book and not looking?

DanseDance from Julien Vallée on Vimeo.

Just going to add some lovely words from the makers of this video:

We want to imagine a place where objects could live and move, harmoniously, and of their own accord. Without interfering with each other these objects would bounce, roll, turn and cross each other’s paths.