Just under the wire. At least I thought of something this time, sort of a double drabble:
The First Window
She cooked the dinner, humming a tune. It would be on the table just as her husband crossed the threshold, golden buttery biscuits, pork chops and apples. Their son, beautiful, bright, wriggly boy, waited at the window for a glimpse of Daddy.
A scream, obscene with terror, rolled from the living room and wrapped around her, clutched her belly. She'd never heard the like. She reached him before the spatula hit the floor, but he couldn't speak, just pointed at the window and wailed. She rocked him against her breast and let the dinner burn.
The Second Window
He came into the living room wearing nothing but graying white undershorts loose on his frame, his legs below like pale wormed tree trunks, white belly above, shaggy dark hair at the top. I never saw his eyes. He moaned at the frail old lady half his size, advancing around the worn, delicate furniture like Frankenstein’s monster until she brought up the cattle prod and forced him back into his room. I jumped with every bzzt.
Safe in the car, Mom told a story of demons at windows on foggy nights who eat children’s souls and leave them monsters and I watched his bedroom window curtains, thick and tightly drawn, until the house disappeared around a bend.
Check me out, being all timely!
Challenge #94 (view out your bedroom window) is now closed.
Challenge #95, since we haven't done it in a while, is to write a drabble (or more than one) based on one (or more) of the photos from the Look at Me website. Your choices are below -- when you post your drabble, please include the link to the photo you picked.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four. (The caption alone is worth its own drabble -- and it seems so incongruous with the picture.)
Five.
Six.
Seven.
Eight.
Nine.
Ten.
I know -- it seems like a lot of the choices are dog-centric and/or HoYay-centric. But those are great writing topics....
What's scary is picture number four? Move the Conservatory out of the way behind her, and you can see the back of our house. That's how close to where we live that shot was taken.
Bwah! Number 9 cracks me up. And I love Number 8.
What's scary is picture number four? Move the Conservatory out of the way behind her, and you can see the back of our house. That's how close to where we live that shot was taken.
I figured it was close -- by now, I'm pretty well-educated on where things are in GG Park, and where you are and where Hec & JZ are in relation to things in the park. (Deb = pretty flowers; Hec & JZ = Kezar stadium.)
Or, even simpler: Deb = north. Hec & JZ = south.
But yep - the Conservatory is literally just inside, northeast, of the Arguello gate.
Will look at pictures, and see if any of these speak to me.
Thanks, Deb. I like that one too.
[link]
Picture Two
Mutti bit back a scream and burst into tears when she saw the picture from that Sunday dinner.
"It's Berti!" she cried. "Your brother, Berti!"
"Mutti, don't be silly, it's only a misprint from the photo finishers. There are no such things as ghosts."
She clutched the photograph to her chest, weeping about my little brother and the trolley accident and her lost angel.
Nothing I did afterwards was ever enough to stop her comparisons to dead Berti. She kept the picture in her Bible. When she died, I took the picture out, slipped it into another book, and gave the book to the church charity sale.
Picture six
[link]
We met at a little dive in Honolulu. Another Navy guy, Sam Kelly - we'd both lost brothers at Pearl Harbor when the West Virginia went down under a rain of Japanese bombs.
Local girls lined the street. We ignored them. I had a room, a sanctuary from the navy. It had a table, a chair, a lamp, a hard mattress. We didn't notice how hard the mattress was, that day.
I shipped out next day. Years later, I found Sam's name on the roster of dead for PT 109 - sliced in half by a Japanese destroyer in 1943.
