writing

Velvet, Blood, and Resolve

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Photo by Omer Salom on Unsplash

The dress was slinky first and foremost.  The dress of a siren.  An enchantress.  Only a woman of great confidence would attempt such a dress.  And it was white.  As white as the breasts Solomon sang about.  Her dark hair tumbled down her back in soft curls to her waist.  The only things soft about this woman were those curls and that velvet.  Rich and thick. 

But there at her breast, one might have taken it for an oversized brooch of office or such, was her heart like a wet, red stain on otherwise perfection.

She wore her heart on her sleeve?  No.  On her breast. Beating and bleeding one drop at a time like a metronome keeping beat to the insistent memories of those she had let harm her.

Let.

No more.  Her beating heart was now a warning.  It said, “I have been used. I have been a victim.  No more. Be wary of what you do. I will not be trifled with.”

And you could see her resolve in the set of her jaw.  Her smooth brow.  Her wide eyes.  Oh yes.  Eyes wide open she was walking into the arena of life, herself blameless other than for the crime of accommodation.  No more.  She was to be earned.

Her blood dripped one drop at a time down her breast, her skirt, a single rivulet.  Not much.  Not enough to harm her.  Just enough to remind those who saw that she had once bled sorrow.  Bled angst.  Bled despair.  But no more.

Oh no.  No more. It was a whispered warning and a banshee’s battle cry.  She was now a legend. Something to be desired.  Something to be feared. 

Someone to be valued.

A Fierce Habit

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I’ve taken my typewriter to the hospital with me for kidney infections. I have taken it on camping trips, and the sand has gotten in the keys. It is just like the most fierce habit you can imagine. It is there, and it stares at you like a conscience.

Erma Bombeck

And I take my computer but unlike a typewriter, it needs a power source.  So, not camping.  But then I haven’t been camping.  I haven’t been anywhere the computer can’t go.  In fact,  I have a computer dedicated solely to travel.  If if gets lost, stolen, or damaged, it.’s no big deal.  It’s old and it’s cantankerous but this is, as Bombeck says, a fierce habit. You do what you have to do.

I write daily.  Sometimes several times daily. 

On the rare days when I must miss my 7 am writing group, I am at loose ends and discombobulated.  I am not myself and there’s nothing for it, but to write.

I am not writing important treatises or compelling prose.  No heart rending poetry.  I am just babbling in my own little way.  Bombeck turned her unique writing into a multimillion dollar enterprise.  

I have no illusions.  I am no Erma Bombeck, but she is my heroine and I use the feminine because she started her career when women were housewives.. She wrote about her little Dayton Ohio life and family and made a career of it0.  I can, at the very least, make a habit of it.  And I have.

I average 800 word a day.  Stephen King does 2000.  I am no Stephen King.  Plus I have a full time job that is not writing.

It is the most fierce habit.  I am in a really bad place when I can’t or don’t write.

I write essays, I write slice-of-life, anecdotes, snippets of short stories, character descriptions, rants, prayers.  Promises.

I write a little bit of everything and while I am not successful, I am happy.

I will continue to carry my travel computer around.

Brian

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Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash

Donna unplugged the modem, counted to 60 AGAIN, plugged it back in and watched the light.  Blue, blue, red, blue.

“Damn it.”  She looked at the clock.  17 minutes.  They had 17 minutes to get her internet up and running.  She’d called the company three times already.  It was out statewide.  She was just a cog in the wheel. 

She opened the laptop’s camera and checked her makeup again.  The lighting in the family room was not optimal, but that’s where the laptop lived and besides the background was more interesting than any other spot in her house.

There had been a hundred messages back and forth.  Five phone calls.  Now they had graduated to Zoom.  Brian wanted to meet in person, but Donna was cautious.  Overly so her friends said.  She had no reason to think he was anything other than what he said, but she’d heard too many horror stories to relax.  But oh did he feel perfect. 

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Isobel

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Isobel scrubbed out what was left of her third cigarette of the morning and drained the dregs of her second mug of coffee.  Black of course.  No sugar.  Of course.

She’d been chain-smoking Marlboros and shotgunning coffee since she joined the Academy at 14.  It was the only way to keep her profile long and lean.

Sacramento portrait photographer Mayumi Acosta aims to share the many facets of the women she photographs. https://lnkd.in/gsamcc7r

Isobel was famous for the lines she could make of her body.  She preferred modern dance in nothing but a leotard the exact shade of her skin, but when you are called to dance, you go where your talent takes you. 

And so she was the prima for the New York Ballet – a position envied by many.

Today they had her costumed in swirls and twirls of scarlet silk and chiffon. Madame signaled that it was time to begin.  She walked in her toe shoes, that distinctive walk that only ballet dancers with years of experience can duplicate, to the center of the backdrop.  Simple black. The scarlet of her costume, the pale peach of her skin, with her dark hair — oh the photos would be extraordinary if the photographer had even a drop of skill.  En pointe, she lengthened her neck, pulled her arms into position, and rotated.  She heard the photographer gasp before she heard the camera shutter start its incessant chatter.  She always strained for that sound. When her audience gasped, she knew her body was telling her true.  She had arranged the lines perfectly. The veins and arteries of her neck reaching upward as did her arms and fingers – balanced perfectly on her toes and the wooden blocks inside her shoes.

Would Claude be in the audience tonight?  She wondered as she pirouetted and her skirts billowed to the background rhythm of the shutter clicking.  Claude was pursuing her with diligence and finesse. She had learned he was a podiatrist early on.  She was dubious that she could allow herself to be at ease with him.  Surely, such a doctor would want beautiful feet.

What most didn’t know was that professional ballerinas had the world’s most god-awful feet.  Isobel was vain.  She did not see her ugly feet as the vehicle for her talent.  She saw them as grotesque appendages never to be exposed to a curious world.  She never wore sandals and only went to the beach with water shoes. She could not fathom exposing her naked feet to a connoisseur. 

Claude’s interest was likely to be rebuffed.  Again.