Housewarming
The mattress was lumpy under her cheek. It smelled vaguely like vomit and urine, although she'd washed it when she'd moved into the room. Her first piece of furniture.
She kept her face pressed resolutely into the futon. The hiss of a zipper presaged the clank of a belt buckle. Then, a rustle as a t-shirt was donned. The door opened and closed.
Tears trickled over her nose as she reached down to the cookie jar to feel the bills she'd placed there earlier. She'd made more in half an hour than a whole day panhandling at the parking garage.
Sail, your cookie jar is frigging amazing! God, I love this.
I'm having a great time writing these, but it's getting difficult to keep track of my timeline. I think I'm going to have to print them all out so I can arrange them and have them at hand to figure out where each new one fits.
You're going to wind up with a novel!
I can't seem to do anything but totally frivolous or over the top dark:
Never lonely
I miss him every way there is to miss somebody, smell, taste, caress, breath and heart. I remember all the reasons he was dear to me, and all the reasons he was unbearable. I remember the drinking and the dark sarcasm that flowed from him in an endless stream when he was drunk. I remember the day his angry words turned into angry actions, and I stopped his blows with a fish knife.
Nobody thinks it anything but self-defense - not even me. But I loved and killed him; in the dark I'll never be alone, never free of him.
Those are both so intense, Typo and Sail!
The light snaps off and here we are, the chill night no match for the hard knot of ice in my stomach.
It went wrong somewhere along the line and I don’t know when or where, but all my confusion and sadness has coalesced and compacted to a grapefruit-sized lump of anger so hot it freezes me.
I can feel you shift on the mattress. I close my eyes. We will not talk because we don’t know what to say. To speak is an ending; I am afraid that my ice will erupt forth and shatter you.
It’s dark here.
That's very powerful, MM.
If I might? I'd drop "forth" after erupt. Erupt is such a strong image in itself that "forth" robs it of power. If you want to use "forth," I would use a softer verb.
Otherwise, that paragraph is just gutting.
What Bev said, MM. Excellent work.
My goodness, we're drawing out some good stuff with this topic. Not that we don't always, but this one really seems to have sparked a flame.
