Birthday Party

Written for Tipsy Lit Prompted: describe a family tradition that has changed over time. Mother bakes a cake and the children play games in the great outdoors. Maybe they sing, maybe they have candles, maybe they don't. Gifts are bestowed upon little dimpled Johnny, the birthday boy, gifts that are handmade with care. A bear knit by grandma. A pretty picture by sister. A picture book by best friend. Flowers from mother's garden. A car built by father out of wood. A car built by brother out of sticks and sweets. This was a good old-fashioned birthday party.

Johnny is now Grandpa John. Allison, his granddaughter, also has her birthday parties at home. Her mother hires a professional party decorator to impress the adults and her father pays a magician to mystify the children. Because children need to be entertained. They suck on lollipops and juice boxes and when her mother brings out the buttercream cupcakes nearly the size of Allison's head, cacophony breaks loose. Every classmate and old friend and cousin within reasonable driving distance runs at top speed in a different direction. But the parents are on their seventh bottle of champagne by then, so they giggle and chatter on.

It's a party for everyone! Everyone but Grandpa John who sits in the corner with his hearing aid turned down, observing the madness with amused, grateful eyes. When Allison finally sits before the piles of shiny gifts, she is so high and happy that she barely stops to look at each present she opens. Her friends, on the other hand, don't hesitate to put the gifts to good use.

When the last one has been opened, the exodus begins. Hugs and high fives and coats and extra cupcakes shoved out the door. Wrapping paper litters the floor like a rainbow-colored blizzard. Little Allison falls asleep upon the snowflakes, lips and cheeks red as cherries.

Follow Me

There is no time, shouted the wrinkled man with a folded spine, wildebeests running across his eyeballs. He wished he were one of them. Getting the hell out of there. If she gathered everything she wanted from her cabin, they would be sacrificed to the sea. Anna took a long gaze at her jewelry box and gilded picture frames from the doorway. The old man hissed at her as he hobbled towards the exit. Really, her hesitation lasted the smallest of moments, but a split second becomes eternity when you can hear the ocean gushing towards you, when you're already in the belly of the ship, below water, practically daring the ocean to swallow you whole.

He wasn't ready to go home to the angels. Though he'd lived a long and full life, he couldn't ignore the feeling that he had many more good years on the planet. He had great grandkids with full heads of red hair and the most achingly beautiful granddaughters an old man could imagine. He had no wife, he hadn't had one for a while, but he had children and true friends and a house down the street from a deep blue lake where he fished every day from May through September.

The girl stepped back into the room. She was drawn to her things like Sleeping Beauty to the spindle. She had gold in her eyes and the devil on her shoulder. The man yelled from his belly, stop! You're going to drown! But the sound came only from his throat. Spindly and quiet. He'd run out of that kind of power decades ago.

He hated her. She didn't deserve to live if she believed pretty things to be bigger than a life. What did she think would happen if the ship went down? Did she fancy herself a mermaid? Did she think she could outrun the ship, the weight of the ocean, the force of God? He staggered towards her, purple fingers stretching for her ivory neck.

Follow me now, or you will die. 

And then he turned and fled. He wanted to look back but he feared this would kill him. He did not see his life flash, rather the faces of his children hurtled through his mind at an alarming speed. With each face, he climbed another rung of the ladder. He was the last person saved from the ship.

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Rainbows

In response to this week's Tipsy Lit prompt: write about an adult topic seen through a child’s eyes.

When the sun beamed its mustard face through the window, Tanner could squint his eyes and see a rainbow swaying in his Mommy’s mirror, smiling at him like the man in the sweet shop. His neighbor lady, Dawn, said good things always followed a rainbow. She wore messy rainbows on her clothes every day. She made them herself, and she made one for Tanner, too. 

“Ugh. Do you have to wear that shirt? It’s so hippie-dippy,” said his Mommy, her voice scrunched. Mommy hated Dawn, but she still let Tanner fall asleep on Dawn’s couch every night, scratchy and moldy, cartoons fading into dreams. 

Tanner’s Mommy didn’t work all day like other mommies. She smoked her special sticks and painted her toe nails pretty and yelled at Ricki Lake and made snickerdoodle cookies. Her friends came over sometimes and they drank from tall brown bottles in between kissing on the mouth. They kissed like their tongues tasted of custard, or something else you couldn't stop tasting. Tanner felt funny on the underside of his tummy when they panted and licked like the stray puppies who rolled around the neighborhood. Sometimes his Mommy gave him a lollipop and changed the TV to cartoons and took her friend by the fingers.

“Now be a good boy while Mommy has grown up time, okay?”

“What’s grown up time, Mommy?” 

“It’s when we talk about grown up things.”

“What are grown up things?”

“I’ll tell you when you’re older.”

The men smiled big yucky smiles, their teeth sharp as the big bad wolf, while she ruffled his hair and winked one eye. He listened for the click, the signal she’d pushed in the lock, and then he pressed his ear against the door and listened for grown up things. But they didn’t talk. They jumped on the bed and Mommy made sounds like she was eating a box of chocolates or slipping into a bubbly bath.

Sometimes Tanner tip toed back to the TV like a good boy and sometimes he walked down the street slow as a tortoise, hunting for friends that didn’t want to be caught. He offered a freckled girl on a strawberry bicycle a lick of his lollipop one day.

"It's strawberry! You'll love it!"

"Gross!” she screamed, pedaling away, calling for her daddy. Tanner wished he could call for his daddy, but he already knew that no one would come.

Mommy’s friends always left before dinner. She cut hot dogs into octopuses and baked chicken into dinosaurs. He drank big boy milk and she gulped purple mommy juice and they smashed their glasses together and said “cheers!” After dinner, she packed up her big black bag with underwear and sparkly shoes and a funny wig. He liked the long yellow one best because it turned Mommy into Rapunzel. Mommy loved to be beautiful, she said it felt like she’d captured the stars in her pocket.

At work, she twirled on a stage, and she did it so nicely, like a fairy princess, that people gave her money. Whenever Tanner asked her to dance for him, she grabbed his hands and they spun around the living room until they fell to the ground in a happy pile.

He tried to wait up for her always, but his eyelids grew heavy as rain clouds. Always. When the stage set her free, she carried him from Dawn’s couch to his bed so that he awoke in a different place than he’d fallen asleep. He loved waking up in his own little bed, counting the cars on his bed sheets.  

But one morning, he woke up on Dawn’s couch and it felt like the world had cracked open for a one-eyed hairy monster to crawl out. It chewed up his brains and left him dead but alive and itchy. Dawn’s face, round as the full moon, appeared before his nose, asking him if he wanted rainbow loops or frosted flakes for breakfast.

“I want Mommy.”

“Well I'm not sure where she’s at, little guy.”

image credit: themusicreunion.com

Prank Caller

For this week’s prompt at Tipsy Lit, we are to write about insanity. What would push your character over the edge? How would they snap? Is it a one time, violent snap and then return to sanity or do they cross over forever? What does that look like? Do they know they’re crazy? I’ve learned to adapt to my mother’s quirks. She doesn’t attend parent-teacher conferences without Jasper the guinea pig peaking out of her carpet bag. My teachers look at me a bit differently after they've met my mother. She dyes her hair a different color on the first of every month, hues of copper and sunshine and mahogany, because she believes it keeps others from recognizing her. Never mind that she has worn the same obtrusive floppy hat and cat-eye sunglasses and shade of Revlon lipstick (burnt sienna) for longer than it takes to turn over every cell in the body.

She lists her occupation as “Mother” although I fit the role better than she does. I cook the spaghetti and clean behind my own ears and forge her signature to pay the bills and intercept the phone calls. After she got arrested last year for too many prank calls to the 911 operator, I started locking up the telephone. She hurled a crystal vase against the wall the first time I did it, but I scurried out the front door by the time it shattered like an airplane crashing. She never mentioned the phone again.

I wish I could say that something happened to make her this way, and I suppose it had to be a lost chapter of her childhood, something she will never admit. Because her photo albums tell a different story. She led a privileged life, a girlhood of equestrian endeavors and private schools and holidays in the Mediterranean. She achieved her first expulsion at my age (thirteen and a half) when she walked through the halls of her prep school naked as a newborn.

These days, from what I can tell, she devotes her life to stretching. She calls the yoga mat her sacred space. She can twist her limbs into a pretzel and she can sit cross-legged all day long. I bet she was sitting cross-legged, looking zen as a Buddhist priest, when she made those phone calls.

Sometimes I hate her. When I tell her so, she threatens to jump off of the Aurora bridge. I know she would do it. It's too easy to close my eyes and see her broken body flattened in a parking lot, human flesh turned to red paint. She says I’m her only reason for living. And so I have learned to swallow my hatred when I feel it, blistering my heart instead of my mother's. I can’t help but love her. It’s like an addiction.

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She Loved Colors

In response to this week's Tipsy Lit prompt: let’s see what kinds of locations/professions we can imagine ourselves (or our characters) in. Write a scene that describes the location in a way that also gives us a sense of the person who works there. There was no way out. She had to force the door open upon arrival, pushing clothing and spike heels and sundry items out of the way of the viridescent particle board on hinges. Even so, every time she wanted to leave, her belongings had managed to sneak their way back against the door as if plotting their escape, peeking under the crack for fresh air. The only window was old and painted shut, but at least it was single pane.

She lived in a one-room apartment with a closet-sized bathroom and no closet at all. In one corner, a sink and an electric range comprised her kitchen. The countertop was the color of the ripe flesh of a mango, and the fridge was child-sized. If she bought a six-pack of Corona, she had to drink four bottles in one night because there was only ever room for two. Warm beer rotted her insides. She’d wanted a microwave since she moved in but she could never save enough. Every bit of her monthly allowance went to rent, food, drink, pot and paints.

She had a knack for running out of food and money simultaneously. After starving for a day or two, assuming she wasn’t in the middle of a masterpiece, she would show up on a friend’s doorstep, bringing a painting she’d discarded before finishing, claiming that it came to her in a vision after their previous visit, and they would be so flattered that they inevitably offered her a drink or a snack or a whole meal. She never invited them to her place. Most of them didn’t know where she lived. But no one ever stopped opening their doors. Someday those paintings would be worth something.

She painted in front of the bay window. Beyond all of the buildings and smog and cement, she could see a sliver of ocean. Always waiting for her, no matter the blackness of night or the numbing of her mind.

She sold a few paintings at a farmer’s market, standing like a pathetic hippie in her long skirts and gladiator shoes and John Lennon sunglasses and vermillion lipstick and homemade earrings, praying to Jesus that the people of Los Angeles would see beyond her youth and recognize her for who she was.

The sales were demeaning and the tent cumbersome and the afternoons stifling. She quit selling at the market as soon as she’d earned enough for a queen mattress. A real bed helped her to dream. She had no other furniture. No dresser or shelves or couch, nothing but an easel and paintings and books stacked everywhere like the buildings around her, and piles of clothing and jewelry hanging from thumbtacks on the walls that were splattered in paint. Not in any particular pattern because she hated patterns, but she loved colors.

Photo credit: JennyMaldonado via Compfight cc

I am a writer. And so are you.

I am a writer. And so are you.