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--

Fossilised

Our front door covered all bases - it faced northeast/southwest.

Standing with my back to the piano, I looked out at forever: the back of the mountain, the road down the hill to Tam Valley, Richardson Bay, San Francisco, the ocean, possibility, infinity.

If I turned my back to the world, staring inside, I saw everything I ever wanted: the cats, the hammock, the air we breathed together.

I chose the world, the wrong choice. Now my heart is fossilised, crucified in that doorway, trying to look in both directions at once, desperate for just one more glimpse of you.