Since y'all twisted my arm to go on another three-way with Failure and Rejection, I thought I'd share what I've written so far
Saturday Morning Cut By Erika Jahneke Cheryl’s life only makes sense when she cuts hair. Something doesn’t fit or is uneven, she can train it back or trim it, squirt it with water or product, something. You can’t exactly pull life back with a banana clip. Even the smell, which every associate stylist she’s ever had complains about, is one of her favorite things.Burned hair, perm solution, color with its sinus-opening ammonia...if she could snort it she would, because when she’s here, she makes things happen. She knows exactly how long a dye job lasts. Not like, say, a marriage. She picked up Pete’s wandering eye before he could admit to it himself...they’ve always been in a weird kind of synch. She thought it would save them, back when she was still scarred from watching her own parents flick mashed potatoes at each other in a fit of rage-beyond-words, but it’s hard to read your own husband’s mind and not find yourself. She has trouble adjusting to change. It takes her half a television season to identify the models-cum-district-attorneys on Law and Order, after all, and by the time she does, Jack McCoy has moved on. Maybe they’re all the same.

It’s not hard to get stuck in the past in this salon...salon being a gross overstatement. This is an old-school beauty shop, not one of those sybaritic temples to Paul Mitchell promising coconut-scented hairgasms. This place is still half Cheryl’s mom’s fifties modish pink Formica. Cheryl swore she’d never work in here, but she forgot to tell herself what she would do instead, so here she is, gamely attempting to resurrect the beehive for what one of her few college classes would’ve called her aging “client base.” Sigh.She can see it over her head in a balloon like in her kids’ comic books. She could do a lot of things; she goes to conventions, tries to keep up, admires short spiky styles, new colors. It’s all wasted. Her clients want the hair from when their mental clocks stopped, the last time they felt they understood, which around here taps out at about 1964 or something....the Goldwater years.
”Like, wow, what a bummer, man. A total bad scene.” she says and laughs at herself.
When she first started here, she used to do her own hair, sometimes a platinum that made her feel famous, but lately anything new she brings home makes Pete say “Why do you have to act like some fucking *kid,* Cheryl?” Because I’m not fucking dead, Pete. “I thought you’d like it.” Given that that girl you stare at is only about nineteen. She’s not that pretty, though. Her pores are huge and her makeup is too dark for her complexion. But she is a lot younger, probably doesn’t squint when she reads, if she reads.Cheryl wonders if she should refit the place, make it more modern, or if she did the wrong thing in fighting the city when they wanted to run the freeway through here. Mid afternoon is slow on weekends...the older ladies get started early and frantic moms looking to get kids haircuts prefer not to go downtown for them, in favor of a chain salon with a million chairs and toys in the waiting area. So she is surprised to find a woman she’s never seen before, leaning on crutches and looking in her window.” Hi,” Cheryl says, trying to look and not look both. “ I thought you were closed.” “Well, you know, it’s...practically.” She couldn’t defend this place to this woman.

So far, the only thing that rubbed me was the L&O reference. You can't assume your readers watch the show - besides, it isn't needed in there.

That line about reading her husband's mind and not finding herself there just about broke me in half. Damn it.

Thanks.

I love the opening imagery in the piece, erika. I didn't mind the Law & Order reference -- I never watch the show, but it made sense in context. The "flicking mashed potatoes," though, did bother me a bit. I can see seriously angry adults throwing lamps, pots of coffee, paperback novels, houseplants or dirty diapers, but food fights to me are kidn of a frat boy, juvenile thing. Which may be what you want.

Well, I want them to be having a dumb argument and doing something physically stupid, but maybe that isn't the right kind of stupid.

I think what it is for me is, I can't imagine throwing mashed potatoes without laughing. And I can't laugh and fight at the same time. You could establish that her parents were deadly serious about it, but that would take a longer flashback for me.

Physically stupid, hmmm. I'll have to think on that.

A lot of times, the first image isn't quite right... Maybe somebody can lock themselves in the bathroom or throw dishes.

Punching walls is pretty stupid (voice of experience). But it's much more strongly destructive, and the violence isn't directed at the other person physically. So, not sure if that's the sort of thing you're after.

I remember Nic slowly losing his temper with his insane ex Annie, as she picked and picked and picked, and watching him suddenly turn and slam a half-formed patty of ground beef into the wall. Not at her, or near her; it was pure frustration.

Trust me, it was not remotely comical.

For new challenge:

Glastonbury

My first sense of this place is its size: it feels simply enormous.

I expected that, of course; from the outside, the Abbey Barn is imposing. But the soaring heights of the ceiling, the terrifying solidity of the oak-crucked supports, the endless sense that something is moving just beyond the edges of waking vision, leave me wanting to stand very still, so as not to disturn what might wait in those blurred corners.

Glastonbury Abbey is haunted ground. I wonder if this place is haunted, as well, and so a book is seeded, and left fallow, to grow over time.

Another...

Erica Road

I'm helped out of the van and, enraged, I propel the wheelchair up the steep path to the side door, through an evening fragrant with night-blooming plants and eucalyptus. It's an assault on the senses: stars pock the great overhead and spill down onto my broken legs.

I peer through the sliding doors into a filthy kitchen. He's curled up, drunk. Inside, where I'm going, are his wife and her lover and the lover's dog. They're about to feel my wrath.

It's my first time here, my first sight of this house from hell, and I never want to leave.