Author: Sally

fiction

The Phone Call

Sally10 Comments

The phone was ringing inside the phone box as Lisa walked past.

Nine months had passed since her mother died. Walking had become her way to cope.

The first months were the worst. Her very soul shivered. With grief, regret, sadness and with the damp cold of winter.

She bundled in layers and walked the country roads for hours.

At first she focused on her feet, watching them move forward as if they belonged to someone else while her mind replayed that last conversation.

Her mom had called that morning, “I’m not feeling well. Could you stop over?”

“Is it urgent?” Lisa had asked. “I’ve got a lot happening today. Could I come tomorrow?”

Her mother had yielded. She never wanted anyone to fuss over her.

She never wanted anyone to fuss over her. Lisa repeated those words in her mind. That’s why I should have listened. That’s why I should have gone.

But she hadn’t.

Instead she had found her mother the next day, dead.

So she started walking. For hours upon hours.

She thought knew these roads, but she had never noticed the phone box.

Now it was ringing. She pushed the door open and lifted the receiver.

“Hello,” she said.

“Lisa? Is that you?” It was her mother’s voice. “I didn’t get a chance to tell you that I loved you.”

“Mom? Mom?!” Lisa shouted into the receiver. “I love you, too.”

With a click the line went dead.

Lisa stood, staring and wondering at the receiver.

My Unicorn Challenge submission for this week.

This is 250 words, the limit for the challenge. It also has to be based on the photo.

I had to edit out SO MUCH to make the word count and I didn’t even finish the story in my head. I hope it makes sense.

poetry

Autumn/Winter

Sally14 Comments

Some may think it strange —
This is my favorite time
I sit quietly
Watching leaves waft their way down
Or swirling as if unsure
Where to fall. It’s fall —
Leaves falling, falling, falling
Left behind ’til spring
Or raked into piles and hauled
To the compost where they rot
“It’s so cold today!”
People say, pulling on coats
Wild geese preen feathers
Preparing for fall; they fly
In formation; I stay home

Truly my favorite time of year.

W3 prompt for today:

  • Compose a series of three tanka;
    • Following are three “turn lines” or “pivots” (third lines) for each of three tanka, and you must construct the rest:
      1. Turn / Pivot for tanka #1: “I sit quietly”
      2. Turn / Pivot for tanka #2: “Left behind till spring”
      3. Turn / Pivot for tanka #3: “Wild geese preen feathers”
    • These tanka are to be autumn/winter-themed;
    • You may write each of your tanka in a single unbroken line of thirty-one syllables, or you may use the five-line 5/7/5/7/7 approach.
fiction

Crowded

Sally11 Comments

She sat at a table with a tall iced lemonade. Waiting. Waiting.

He said he would meet her here.

“Don’t be late,” he had said. “I’ve got a surprise for you.”

She waited and sipped.

Not far away, he waited, watching for her.

Where was she? he wondered.

He felt his anger rising.

He had told her not to be late and that he had a surprise.

Surprises always intrigued her. She was like a fish chasing a shiny lure. Dangle some bauble and she’ll follow it anywhere. He scoffed aloud as he thought of her stupidity.

The outdoor seating was crowded. She leaned against the tree and wondered if she was in the wrong spot. She sipped the last of her lemonade and decided to stroll to the other side and see if he was there.

At about the same moment, he rose and walked to see if he could find her.

“Damn tourists,” he muttered as he picked his way around the busy tables.

There was no sign of her. He clenched and unclenched his fists angrily. He shoved his hands into his pockets and fingered the packet of cyanide salts he had hoped to slip into her drink.

“Damn,” he said aloud and stalked off.

She, too, scanned the crowded tables — no sign of him.

She sighed a deep sigh, thinking about the container of arsenic in her purse. It would have to wait for another time.

This is my response to this week’s Unicorn Challenge. The Unicorn Challenge is simple — 250 words based on the photo prompt.

Clearly I watch way too many crime shows.

Plus, my dramaturg daughter is probably rolling her eyes at my choice of poisons. I don’t know about poisons — and I was afraid to search on my computer for the best poison to slip into a drink. Again — too many crime shows.

family · Life

Life Choices

Sally11 Comments

“There’s an awful lot of sighing going on over there,” said my pew-mate at church yesterday.

She was right.

I carry my cares in my shoulders and my breathing. Multiple times during the worship service I had realized my shoulders were tight and that I was holding my breath. I would force my shoulders down in faux-relaxation and exhale slowly. Apparently it didn’t go unnoticed.

We talked for a few minutes afterwards and her words were so helpful. To have the right person with the right words show up at the right moment is truly a gift.

Then I made a great life choice — carve pumpkins with my granddaughter.

Sometimes a life choice is something big — where to go to college, who to spend my life with, where to settle down and live.

More often it’s something small — what do I do this month, this week, this day, this moment.

Carving pumpkins, eating roasted pumpkins — sometimes that is the very best life choice.

Blather · poetry

The Broon Coo (and other cow blather)

Sally8 Comments

Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt: “oo.” Find a word with “oo” in it or just use “oo” because why not?

When my granddaughter was littler (she’s now a big 4 years old), I wasn’t working full-time and would go babysit once a week. So. Much. Fun.

Anyhoo — she was just a wee little thing, and I would put on music to play in the background while we played. I had a whole playlist for her.

I pulled it up the other day because I (obviously) hadn’t played it in a long time. It was a lot of Scottish songs. My granddaughter loved Ally Bally Bee and “danced” to it — which involved running around the couch.

I loved The Broon Coo, a song about a mischievous cow that breaks oot and eats all the hay and neaps (turnips) and chases the ducks.

Cows are near and dear to my heart. The cow population is our area has significantly declined over the 50+ years since my parents bought the house I am now living in. When we first moved here, though, there was a working dairy farm next door.

I wrote a poem about it some years ago and thought that I had posted it. Maybe I had and then took it down. Who knows? It happened to be in my overfull WordPress draft folder and I’ll put it at the bottom of this post. It’s not really stream-of-consciousness, you know.

If you’ve ever experienced feeding a cow something from your hand, you’ll know that it’s an unforgettable thing. The smoothness of their nose. The tongue pulling whatever it is off your hand. The slow patient chewing that ensues.

So many people are just in a hurry when they eat. They could learn a lesson from cows.

A horse’s muzzle is dry and it will use its lips to take whatever you’re holding. A cow’s nose is slimy — but in the best of ways, if there can be a best of ways for slime.

I used to walk down the road and play music for the cows. They would walk alongside me on their side of the fence.

Then there was the year the cows stampeded up our road when the guy was trying to load them in a truck. He eventually rounded them all up, save one — and there were feral cow sightings over the winter that year as it wandered the back hills. I don’t know whatever happened to it.

But the Broon Coo song is about a cow that breaks out and gets into trouble — which is what my poem is also about (kind of) except our cow was a black-and-white Holstein.

So I’ll leave you here with a few cow pictures and a poem. 🙂

When my parents bought the farm
(literally)
Pa Jackson was over the hill
(euphemistically and literally)

He milked the cows by hand
While the barn cats tumbled in the hay
(euphemistically and literally)
I watched with wide eyes
(the milking, not the euphemistic tumbling)

The Jacksons had a bull
To do the job of the artificial inseminator
And when our pet heifer,
Sock-it-to-me-Sunshine,
Wandered over
To visit the Jacksons’ cows
The bull also got to know her
(euphemistically)

Then, our heifer
Was in the family way
(euphemistically)
She was loaded on a truck
And sent to a home
For unwed cows

The next summer
The Jackson’s cows
Were also loaded onto trucks
And sent to auction
Because Pa Jackson was
Extremely
Over the hill
(euphemistically)

A few years later
We read in the newspaper
That he had bought the farm.
(euphemistically)

fiction

The Heart Scan

Sally25 Comments

“This is very strange,” said the cardiologist. “I have never seen anything like it.”

“What is it, doctor?” she asked.

The monitor was facing away from her. The doctor stared, furrowing his brow and shaking his head. Finally, he stepped away and came around to sit beside her.

“Tell me again what you’ve been experiencing,” he asked.

“My heart starts racing. I get short-of-breath,” she said.

“Are you exercising when this happens?”

“No! I’m just sitting at my desk,” she said.

“It just starts randomly?” he asked.

Her face flushed. “Kind of,” she said.

“Is there something you’re not telling me?” he asked.

“N-n-n0,” she said.

He paused and moved on to explain what she was about to see. “We have new technology,” he said, “that takes information from many different studies and layers them to form an image of your heart. We took the images from your electrocardiogram, echocardiogram, MRI, and CT scan, and combined them. Then we took the electroencephalogram, the study of your brain waves, and layered that too. The result is an image that should show what is happening with your heart.”

She nodded, showing that she understood.

He stood up and turned the monitor to face her.

She looked at the image showing dry ground and a box marked, “Fragile.”

Just then her cellphone buzzed. She look at her phone, at the photo of the man calling her. Her face flushed; her breath caught; she put her hand over her heart to hold it in.

This week’s Unicorn Challenge. Rules are to use the image as a prompt and write a maximum of 250 words.

poetry

Liturgy

Sally15 Comments

Lean
Into
The pained words
Uttered by men,
Repeated to the
God who already knows:
I believe in one God … I
Confess my faults; Have mercy, please,
According to all Your promises —
“Lean into the pained words uttered by men”

This is my response to the W3 prompt this week —

  • Share an emotion of yours in a “Dectina Refrain” poem.
  • Ten lines;
  • Syllabic: 1/2/3/4/5/6/7/8/9/10;
  • The tenth line is comprised of the first four lines all together, as one stand alone line in quotation marks. (apparently the quotation marks are optional.)
  • This wasn’t a requirement — but mine is an acrostic as well.

This whole “share an emotion” business is for the birds in my life right now.

I told my counselor that this week. Not a fan of emotions. At all. Not even a little. Please make them go away.

But I’ve been trying to pray again. Trying is the operative word here.

This is why liturgy is so important. When words fail, we still have words — old words that have been spoken for centuries.

I’m not alone.

fiction

Clean Your Room

Sally8 Comments

“Is that my shirt?” Deena asked.

“What are you talking about?” her sister Sadie replied. “I bought this shirt a year ago.”

Deena shook her head. “No, in the photo.”

“What?! That’s a soap dispenser!” Sadie said. “I balanced it on the post and liked the shadows it made, so I snapped a photo of it.”

“Well, that’s my shirt,” Deena said, pointing to a faint bit of plaid visible through the doorway.

“Oh, yeah, oops,” Sadie said sheepishly. “I suppose you want it back?”

“Nah, you can have it.”

“Come here, Deena, and tell me what you see,” Sadie said, looking out the front window.

“I see Mrs. Smith weeding her flowers,” she answered, pointing off to the side. “Why?”

“Because I see your bike left on the lawn,” said Sadie.

“How about here?” she asked, pulling Deena into the kitchen.

“I see a sink full of dishes,” Deena said.

“And I see the fruit bowl on the counter!”

They both laughed and ran into the living room.

“Guess what I see here,” Deena asked.

Sadie looked off to the side, and saw the unfolded blanket on a chair. She pointed at it and Deena nodded.

“But what do I see?” Sadie asked.

Deena furrowed her brow and studied the center of the room. “The pile of books?”

“Yes!” Sadie squealed.

“Guess what I see,” said a stern voice behind them.

The girls turned.

“I see two girls with Saturday chores to do,” said their mother. “Start cleaning.”

This is my response to this week’s Unicorn Challenge:

Using the photo prompt, write a story of 250 words or less.

Then go clean your room.

Blather

Saturday Blather that dips into controversy

Sally12 Comments

In case anyone wonders, I took down the Dormasha I had written for the W3 prompt. Even though it was based on a front desk conversation, it was too dark. I often process hard things through writing, but I’m learning that I don’t necessarily need to share them here 🙂

The truth is that most of the material I get for any of my writing is from front desk conversations. I have met some of the most interesting people just through the slow building of relationship by daily greeting people and asking how they’re doing.

Yesterday, a young man who comes to swim, and who has been telling me bits of tidbits about his family and job, leaned on the counter and asked me if I had read the news about where he works. I had not. So he told me why his place of employment had made the front pages.

I told him that I often avoid the news. “Depending on what news source I go to, I feel like I’m in two totally different countries,” I said.

“It’s the politics of teams,” he replied. “Politicians used to be the people who could work out compromises, but now it’s sport. It’s the Yankees vs the Red Sox.”

He couldn’t have picked a better rivalry. The Yankees and Red Sox have spent the better part of a century vilifying each other.

“We don’t look for common ground anymore,” he continued. “Take gun control…” and my mind immediately wandered off to Wyoming.

Honestly, I don’t remember what he said next. I had lived for a time in Wyoming, though, and people there take their gun rights pretty seriously.

I thought about them. I thought about the time we house-sat for a guy who had a ranch, and he had told us about the gun in the hall closet, in case … I don’t remember … coyotes? He failed to tell us, however, about the arsenal in the spare room, or the loaded handgun in the nightstand of the room we had put our young son to sleep in — thank God, I checked that drawer!

In upstate New York, the gun owners that I know are responsible and safe. Primarily, they hunt deer.

I don’t personally own a gun or want to own a gun — and I actually don’t want to enter the whole debate.

After talking with the guy who brought it up — and he had headed off for the pool — one of the custodial staff walked by. I knew he was really big into gun rights with tattoos that bear witness to his strong beliefs.

“How do you feel about background checks?” I asked him, and was surprised to hear that he really wasn’t that far off from the other man. And he was very knowledgeable and well-spoken on the topic.

Can I just stop here and say — this is why stream-of-consciousness writing produces blather in me. I write myself into a hole. I wanted to tell you that I get my material for posts from conversations I have — and now I’ve just stepped into controversy — but I’m going to leave it here because Stream of Consciousness.

Here’s some safer blather — three times a week, this little guy comes in wearing a backpack that’s bigger than his torso. He was chattering up a storm yesterday about school.

“How old is he?” I asked the mom.

“He’ll be three in a few weeks,” she said. “He’s very excited about school because he watches his brother get on the bus every day.”

It made me smile.

I think I’ll just leave you with that.