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.”

Odd that the topic made me think of being conscious of breathing, too. Or maybe not so odd. Can one stand in a doorway and not be introspective? Anyway,


Drabble: standing in a doorway

Am I really going to do this?

The ground is ten thousand feet beneath my toes, brown and yellow and green and gray, fields and trees and pavement.

Why am I jumping out of a perfectly good airplane?

Breathe.

Again.

Wow, that's a long way down.

Got to remember to breathe.

My mouth is dry. My heart is racing--I can't hear it over the roar of the engines, but I can feel it. The blast of the airflow past the doorway plucks at my coveralls, urging me to
bend the elbows,
bend the knees,
stop thinking
and just


GO!

I couldn't do that unless I was pushed.

And then I'd drag the pusher down with me. Gah. Stuff of nightmares.

Good drabble, though.

I'd followed the conversation for months, trying to catch up. Glittering motes in an online dance, conversational improv bright as diamonds, deep as caverns, themes old as bedrock and ephemeral as this year's fashions. After the great migration some of the impetus was lost; one day I was caught up and the subject was one I'm passionate about. My fingers flew. I clicked "next", and there was nothing next. This time, instead of delete, I hit "post."

I was welcomed, I stayed, and felt at home. There was an eventual opportunity to meet. A knock, and I ran to open. Hello--