There was a long hallway and someone screaming. 
And lots of other things that I can’t say right because, even if it made sense then, it doesn’t now. 
It was just a dream. 
And I have to get to work.
Tag Archives: writing process
Twirling Her Hair
Her forefinger and index entwine up the black strands, climbing toward her head, pulling it sideways and down. 
The thumb is the anchor, spooling around in loop after loop, but forgetting the ends, letting them go, until her head pulls back and they have to start at the bottom, pulling up again. It is absent-minded, desperate, alternately slow, almost still, then frenetic. 
It goes on, delicate, mindless, ecstatic and determined, the sunlight warm and orange, a spider spinning a beautiful erotic web.
And then she turns her head, and as attractive as she is, full-lipped and confident, her look subtracts from the motion, for she is calculated in her look, and cannot understand the elegance of her own hand.
Ice Friday: Non-Dialogue
“He was small.” D couldn’t remember exactly where she was and had to review the room, her hands, the view from the window to get herself back. “And he talked a lot. Incessant, that’s what my mother called him.”
“This guy just left me seven texts.” E selected ‘all’ and punched delete. 
“He couldn’t drive, didn’t have his driver’s license. We were driving up to Lake George, and I left him in my car, in front of a liquor store. I was gone for less than two minutes. When I came out, there’s a cop writing a ticket, and this guy is just sitting in the car, pretending he doesn’t see anything.”
“Seven messages. Who does that?”
“He could have said something to the cop. Right?”
“Just leave one message. One.”
The sun was low across the water, making the world look like it had drowned. 
“I asked him to talk to someone for me, to introduce me to a client. He wouldn’t do it.”
“I am so done with crap like this.”
“And then he got into Jesus.”
“Is that why you dumped him?”
“We never went out.”
“Un-friended him then.”
She wanted to get up but couldn’t work up the desire.
Taking the W Train on Canadian Thanksgiving
I was late. 
I had been drinking. 
And so I took the W. ![20150727_090635[1]](https://i0.wp.com/mcphedranbadside.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/20150727_0906351.jpg?ssl=1)
It was the wrong train. 
I knew that. 
I was scared. 
I was alone. 
But I got home in the end.
Isolates
We had the dream when we were young. We believed that there might be something in our future. There really would be. It wasn’t just this lonely room, this place of now, more than a lifelong drift toward an abyss, the same from which we had emerged. 
We moved and did, sat and listened, and then hunched, thin, dreams not what they had been, instead looking into a screen, our hope now in that, the expectation, then knowing how we made our-self something we had dreaded, a dream made memory. 
But there is no such thing as regret. Or just a bit.
“Try to Stay Positive!”
I trailed after my wife, navigating around a cluster of pink bedecked girls dancing to electro-pop beats during “ Open Studio Weekend; the place looked like a Hollywood set.
“Even the graffiti looks fake.”
A scruffy juggler in white tights called over, “Try to stay positive!”
I glared back. “Stay focused on yourself.”
“It’s okay, man.” He dropped his pins. “It’s all good.”
Ice Friday: Qasiagssaq, The Great Liar
Qasiagssaq, men say, was a great liar. One day, when he had been in his kayak, without even a sight of a seal. He noticed a man from his village towing in a big black seal. Qasiagssaq rowed behind the man and stole the seal.
“Qasiagssaq, you have made a catch,” cried his fellow villagers. “Where did you get that tow line?”
“I have had it a long time,” he answered, “but have never used it before today.”
The other man from the village returned. “I got a big black seal today, but it was taken with my tow line.”
The next day he was out again in his kayak and said to himself, “What is the use of my being out here, I who never catch anything?” He went to shore and lay his knees across a stone and used another stone to hammer his knee caps.
When he returned to the village, he told the villagers, “An iceberg calved right on top of me so that I barely escaped alive.”
Some time later, Qasiagssaq heard that a couple in another village had lost their child and went to visit. “Today my little daughter, Nipisartangivaq, is doubtless crying at her mother’s side as usual.”
The mourners looked up eagerly. “Ah, how grateful we are to you! Now your little daughter can have all her things.” And they gave him a cooking pot, beads and a great quantity of food. When he returned home, the other villagers asked where he got so many things.
“An umiak started out on a journey, and the people in it were hurried and forgetful.”
Towards evening, a number of kayaks arrived; the people from the other village had brought meat for Qasiagssaq’s daughter. When they learned that Qasiagssaq did not have a daughter, they asked for their cooking pot to be returned.
The next evening he returned home and told the villagers he had found a dead whale. They rowed out for it and asked Qasiagssaq where the whale was.
“Over there, beyond that little ness,” he replied.
They rowed there and found nothing and asked again.
“Over there, beyond that little ness,” Qasiagssaq replied.
This happened again and again until the others finally said, ‘Qasiagssaq is only a trouble to us all. Let us kill him.”
And at last they did as they had said, and killed Qasiagssaq.*
*Greenlandic Folk Tale, as collected by Knud Rasmussen
In Preparation
The church is shrouded in darkness.
Shadows chase up the pillars, like passing trees, and it suddenly seems as if there might an imperative here. ![20150916_205757[1]](https://i0.wp.com/mcphedranbadside.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/20150916_2057571.jpg?ssl=1)
It accelerates, chasing after itself, until it is utterly still. 
And then it is only about maintaining, keeping everything as it is. 
Or getting it higher, harder, dreaming that it really could be something more, furious in its fading.![20150122_162243[1]](https://i0.wp.com/mcphedranbadside.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/20150122_1622431.jpg?ssl=1)
Until it’s perverse and sad, a carnival and nothing more.![20140321_223751[1]](https://i0.wp.com/mcphedranbadside.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/20140321_2237511.jpg?ssl=1)
And we watch it slip and fall. 
As an idiot records every moment.
Ice Friday: John Williams’ “Augustus”
Attributed to Horace from Maecenas in John Williams’ Augustus:Â
I decide to make a poem when I am compelled by some strong feeling to do so–but I wait until the feeling hardens into a resolve; then I conceive an end, as simple as I can make it, toward which that feeling might progress, though often I cannot see how it will do so. 
And then I compose my poem, using whatever means are at my command. I borrow from others if I have to–no matter. I invent if I have to–no matter. I use the language that I know, and I work within its limits. But the point is this: the end that I discover at last is not the end that I conceived at first. 
For every solution entails new choices, and every choice made poses new problems to which new solutions must be found, and so on and on. Deep in his heart, the poet is always surprised at where his poem has gone.
Not the Hot Dog
I was in a questionable position, knowing I was doing the wrong thing, hoping no one would notice. Something came past me, right at my ear. I looked on the ground. It looked like feces.
The room space was long and narrow, leading into an ocean, the water warm.
She was young and beautiful, her tight shirt knotted at the back. I wanted to know more and tried to ask her.
“You really want to know?” She kept going.
I persisted, but my time was up. And then there was a group of detectives, all of them filling in time cards. And I saw my bill for $750 and was alone with the paper and she was locked in a room. 
One of the detectives came out, doing up his pants. “I like it like a hot dog, know what I mean?”
I didn’t.