Monthly Archives: January 2013

Noticing

carrotwood tree

Unless she had camped there, climbed a certain tree, waited for Independence Day and known that being brutally honest with herself was the only viable direction, she would not have noticed any of it; couldn’t have discovered a single marvelous feature of their new home.

The day they chopped down the Carrotwood tree because it was cracking the decking around the pool, the sky was a cloudless blue and as the last few branches hit the ground she cried out from her perch in the upper bedroom where she had been watching the workers chip-chopping away, “The ocean – we have an ocean view!”

So it went, her fascination with living near the sea as she had always wanted to; the only possible thing missing being a passionate relationship (her marriage had lost that years before), the kind that makes you want to linger in bed, the kind that makes you forget about eating and sleeping and drinking, drunk and full and sated as you are with your, erm, activities.

July 4th found her lazy and blue; feeling as if she should want to go somewhere and watch the fireworks, should want to be festive and lively, but it wasn’t until the doorbell rang, the neighbors standing there with chairs asking if she minded them watching fireworks in her front yard, that she realized the excitement had unfathomably come to her.

She grew to love her home, despite the fact that she had hung nothing on the walls in two years, as if it were a temporary abode; nevertheless enjoying the regular sound of the train – another inadvertent discovery, in the distance and finally the day that, many days after asking her husband to leave, she discovered the church bells ringing in the distance, the glorious music of her new life ringing with them.

This week’s word: ringing

Lillie McFerrin Writes

The Ledge

By the time I reached her side she was standing on a ledge so narrow that I could hardly believe she had not already plunged, due to her very large feet, into the mad Monday morning melee of cars hurtling their passengers to work, to the gym, or to their clandestine lovers.

The call had come less than five minutes before, and I had sprinted from the coffee shop where I had been enjoying a quiet morning of endless caffeine while writing, or at least pretending to write, the next chapter in my frustrating but insistent novel, to the eight-story building where she teetered on her last nerve. It took every ounce of courage I possessed, despite my love for her, to crawl through the uppermost window and stand, sweat pouring from every conceivable gland, next to her and begin the speech I wished I had practiced during my desperate lung-bursting run to save my best friend.

I went for the kind of straight talk I thought might work: “I know things have been tough lately, but geez Carmen, this is extreme even for you.”

Carmen suddenly moved from her unstable perch, causing my heart to lurch so powerfully that I nearly lost my balance and only managed to re-gain my footing a moment before she leapt through the next window with a maniacal laugh and the fading words, “NOW did I inspire you to finally write your next chapter?”

Lillie McFerrin provides weekly prompts for her “Five Sentence Fiction” challenge. This week’s word: inspire

Lillie McFerrin Writes