Yeah, sort of like "Slums of Beverly Hills."

Yellow drabble #2:

I hate the way my palms sweat and my stomach jumps. I hate the way my heart pounds as the clickclickclickclick gets louder, the way the air feels colder. I hate the whiteness of my knuckles as I clench the bar and the way the fear builds in the long climb to the track’s zenith. I hate that I won't love every second, that my passion for speed is overthrown by my fear of falling. But, as I have done so many times before, I scrunch my eyes shut and try to remember to breathe.

I hate being yellow more.

"Oh. Look at those."

Or, as Murphy Brown put it: "Why did I stop playing softball at puberty? Because suddenly, sliding into second HURT."

erika, Kristin, those are kickass.

Invisible

They were put up as cheap row houses, a century ago. Typical to San Francisco, they've been lovingly restored with yuppie money and pride of ownership: stone front stairs, corbels and wainscoting, front doors painted in ice cream colours.

Each stairway ends in one of those pretty doors. Above each door is a window, the fanlight showing golden, offering a yellow welcome to, presumably, all comers.

The rain comes down, washing the stairs, the painted doorways, making the fanlights glitter like gold leaf.

The man with the mismatched shoes and the shopping cart passes them, unwelcome, invisible as a ghost.

He pushes it into her hand awkwardly, and she receives it with surprise and as little grace. She's never received a flower before, from anyone. Never even dared buy them for herself, making do with purloining from gardens or liberating them from place settings.

This one is her own, its delicate golden velvet gentle in her palm, the other hand grasping the thorns too tightly.

She looks up at him slowly, thick with confusion, fear hiding her happiness.

"D..." Her mouth opens and closes, her hands relax.

"I shouldn't have," he mutters and grabs it away, charging for the door.

Murphy brown rules! So want to be her, still. Except for the AA. NSM. I stayed home from somewhere to write today, and what I got? Maybe not worth it. I hate having an image of a better book than I can write in my head.

...and then she caught up to him, kravved him to keep him from getting away, and they lived happily ever after, right? RIGHT?

Once he plucked the blossom from that vital orifice.

Luscious drabbles today. Amazing how color can evoke so many different emotions.

My first clip of 2005 is now live, all bylined and pretty and official-looking: [link]

I've found several winceworthy phrasings that I can't believe I didn't catch on multiple editing passes before I submitted it, but that's just life. I'm sure it'll be 100 times worse when I finally publish a 100K-word novel instead of a 1000-word article.