Here you go....

Challenge #89 (ice) is now closed.

Challenge #90, in the spirit of the season (well, the spirit of this specific post-December 25 season), is returns.

Thanks, Deb!

I hadn't realized how long it had been since I'd written a drabble! I checked my lj and it was two months. Geez, when I get distracted, I get distracted.

This actually happened last night. Poor Nic said I was screaming, and put his bad shoulder out trying to wake me all the way up.

Nightmares About Lovers With the Same Name

Wow.

I had a recurring nightmare - the first N, leaving - but it's been awhile. Last night's was a whole new level of hell. Dante would've creamed.

Last night, it was both N's, leaving me together. How's that for abandonment? Not only were they agreeing to abandon me together, the first love's wife was waiting in the car for them.

I woke screaming, and the second love woke mostly up and held on to me, crooning while I babbled, don't go don't go I'm sorry.

See, that's the thing about these nightmares: my darlings go, but they never return.

Drabble For My Dad

I keep coming back to the last time we went to the movies. That sounds so final, but six years, and we haven’t gone together since, so I guess it really was the last time. If I had known that, maybe I wouldn’t have picked something with Adam Sandler at his most juvenile, but I thought that it would either be amusing or I’d get another chance to redeem myself. You did eventually stop holding the X-Files movie against me(the show wasn’t very much like that, though. Honest.) You always think you’ll get another chance, and we had been to hundreds of movies together.I thought it was our thing, something we would do when I had a house, kids, and a publicist.

I don’t know why I keep coming back to that, like we would have stayed close if we would’ve gone to...Citizen Kane at the Valley Art or something, not that I ever would’ve wanted to see rat-faced little Renee holding her mom Meryl’s hand as she expired from...whatever chick-flick moms expire from, even before I knew that real moms could get tumors.I thought I would make you smile...but maybe chick flicks were like your secret kink. You never told me, just like with a whole bunch of other stuff. I wish you had. But having our last time be “Big Daddy” feels like what I imagine dying with porno on feels like...I wish it was, at least, “The Wedding Singer”. At least I could hold my head up.
Of course, we could’ve gone to the greatest show in the world and gotten into a stupid hassle in the car, as fifty DC commuters could testify, but I never thought that would be the last time either. It would have been different...if I had known. I’m not sure if I would have held my tongue or gotten a thrill of rage and said “fucking skinflint asshole” in front of half of Metro Parkway, because, as you may have guessed, Making A Scene was your worry, not mine. Give me a million scenes over the silent treatment. But life sort of got in the way there, and you disappeared without telling me that was It, except for being the boniest Santa ever at Christmas. Why did you do that? It can’t really be because I laughed at a pee joke, can it? Because I watch foreign films now, and everything. I keep coming back to make it my fault, so it makes sense, and because I can’t yell at Adam Sandler.

Shit, erika.

Sucks when stuff isn't fixable, even when they're still alive, when it's people, not circs.

Yeah, definitely.

I Do Not Mean What I Think They Mean

The example uses a wheatfield harvest: it's called "diminishing returns."

One person can't do it; the wheat rots in the fields. Two workers, things pick up, you rotate time and labour. After that? It gets dodgy; the benefits of having three don't outweigh the drawbacks.

So.

You, her, me: that's three. Five years of both of us loving you, mutual loathing, no cooperation.

I bled, and she probably never noticed. I quit the harvest when the wheat buried me. I knew I was needed. I quit anyway.

And you died, wheat and chaff, heart and bone, barren field.

Diminishing returns.

My newest column is up at GotPoetry.com: Your Mediocre Political Poem Is Hurting America.

Usual Victor grumpiness.

The holidays, and being off work, have totally thrown off my sense of what day it is. Hence, I'm a day late again. My New Year's Resolution: be on time with the weekly drabble topics!

Challenge #90 (returns) is now closed.

Challenge #91 is standing in a doorway.

(You're all very lucky, BTW, because I *almost* made the topic "FLOAM," because the commercial for it is on TV as I type, and it's so....grotesquely appealing that I almost used it. Plus, it's fun to say. Try it -- FLOAM!)

yay FLOAM!

Doorways

The taxi left her and her suitcase on the sidewalk, interrupting the solid line of rain on pavement. The building seemed taller, dingier somehow. Stacks of boxy shapes, too much like little prison cells.

She went through this door long ago. Striking out across country, she looked for fame, fortune, a shred of recognition. And she struck out, again and again. Beaten back, beaten down, her last hundred carried her back to a nameless town. She slogged up the front walk, stabbed the peeling button.

“Hello?”

One door closing, one door closed. Breathe in, breathe out.

“Hi Mom… it’s me.”