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.

Another:

Ghost Story

The door into summer is laced with growing things, creepers and small roses. Sometimes, you'd swear you could smell jasmine.

The garden stretches out on either side of it, verdant in June, sodden in November. Sheep move on the lawns; in the eaves of distant houses, rooks curl heads beneath wings.

No one admits to having seen the girl, heard the rustle of skirts or the snap of her parasol. There's nothing to admit; she casts no shadow. The dead don't.

Unable to leave, too insubstantial to remember, she sways in the garden doorway like the summer wind passing through.

My doorway drabble:
It may be my clearest memory of college, more so than my few moments of festivity, or insight gained in lectures, or all-nighters with friends. Sitting in the doorway of my instructor’s office because my butt...my chair’s butt was too wide to fit in the tiny offices designed for a student to be the Karen Carpenter of Munchkinland. I was used to feeling obvious, of course, but that felt different. It was private business that brought people to office hours...a misunderstanding, public relations, confessions of slack, and my deep and misguided desire to be the most brilliant student my creative writing teacher ever had.And I was having to bare it all at louder than normal volumes so that my target could hear me... I suppose it was good I never brought in any outrageous lies...just a hyper-persistent skin condition and a domestic life I hoped to upgrade to chaotic, bus drivers that wouldn’t stop for me, and an overeager heart, eager to share my secret identity as a woman with a brain.

Was it too much to ask that I could close one damn door?

Write-ma and knock-em-dead-ma to Allyson.

Meet the deadline-ma, Allyson!