Pomodoro: Vignette Who lives there

Tanner sat back on the bank of the river and stared at the abandoned fisherman's cabin, "Do you think someone lived there or just hung out there when they fished?"

Tom skipped a rock half-way across the river in the direction of the cabin before answering. "They probably lived there. Why would you build a fishing shack this close to town? You could just walk up the hill and be home. It's not that far."

"Yeah, but when it flooded, and it wouldn't even need to be that big of a flood, you'd be wet, like really wet. I bet it floods every spring."

"It can't or it wouldn't still be there. I don't think it floods that often. It's higher over there than here. It'd flood this way first."

Tanner pushed himself to his feet and dusted the grass off his pants. "Let's go look at it."

"And we'll get there how? The river's low, but it's not that low."

"We'll walk across the dam."

"First there are signs saying not to do that and second there's a fence between us and the dam."

"Well if we don't read the signs they don't apply to us. We'll just say that we didn't see them."

"But I did see them. I just told you about them," Tom said.

"I didn't hear you. I was listening to my iPhone."

"And the fence?"

"Well, that we're going to have to climb over."

"And then we'll get onto the dam by way of..."

"We'll go through the power station part of the dam there's a door right there." Tanner pointed at the locked and rusty door, "Then out the other side, onto the part where the gates are mounted, they're rusted open so it's not like they're going to move, and then it's just a short jump down to the concrete dam wall and we're there."

"How do you propose we get back?"

"Or... if you'd let me finish, we could walk up there to the bridge, cross it, and walk down the deer trail to the river."

"Thank God. I thought you'd lost your mind."

"If we had a crowbar we could maybe get that door open but not without one."

Behind them a voice said, "Or a key. That works."

"Jesus!" Tanner and Tom, both high-school Sophomores, spun and saw a man in a city water department work shirt.

"So, about those signs," he started.

"Never saw them." Tanner interrupted.

"That's what I hear. It was a fishing cabin."

"What?" Tom asked.

"That was a fishing cabin. My grandpa built it before world war two but he only used it the one time before he was sent off to Germany. He didn't come back and Gramma wouldn't sell so there it sits. On private property, with a locked door." He stared at Tanner as he said the last part.

"Well we weren't going in. We just wanted to look at it."

"I'll go with you. I've got a key and can let you in and keep an eye on you to make sure the window that it still has stays in one piece."

"Cool!" Tanner started toward the bridge with Tom following.

Tom said, "I'm Tom, that's Tanner."

"You can call me Al."

"Is that your name?"

"No, it's a line from a song."

"Never heard it. Is it new?" Tanner asked.

"Not really, no. Yes. It's my name. What're you boys doing down by the dam?" Al gestured to where he'd found them talking about breaking into the abandoned hydro-electric dam from the beginning of the bridge across the river.

"Nothing." Tom said.

"Then I came just in time," Al said.

They walked in silence until they got to the top of the trail that lead from the road down to the river's edge. It wasn't a groomed trail and was more of an animal path than a trail. Branches and bushes infringed from both sides making it hard to see where they were going as they descended the steep hill. "You a pervert?" Tanner asked as he stutter stepped down the last few yards of the hill to the flat along side the river. Tom followed right behind and stopped just past Tanner.

"You should've asked that before you went down into the weeds with me," Al said as he walk-ran down the steep embankment, stopping before he got to where the boys stood looking at him. "And no. I'm a Libra."

"Well that's okay then," Tom said, because you know. That's science and there's never been a mass murderer that was a Libra before." His voiced dripped with sarcasm.

"Oh. You didn't ask if I was a mass murderer. He asked if I was a pervert." Al said pushing past them to move towards the cabin.

"So, are you a mass murderer?"

"Well, I don't know. I haven't murdered a helluva lot of people but I suppose there was a point in time when Saddam Hussein hadn't murdered a lot of people or Hitler hadn't either but they are mass murderers aren't they?"

"You really need to work on your putting people at ease skills," Tanner said, looking back at Tom and letting Al get slightly further ahead of them.

Vignette: Writing exercise: Pomodoro 20 minutes

John turned into the coffee shop parking lot and sighed, "There are never any spots near the door."

"Oh, so you're going to have to walk an extra twenty steps for your cup of coffee?" Mark asked reaching to pull his backpack from the floorboard between his feet.

"Well, I don't like not being able to see my car. What if something happens to it?"

"Like what? Someone going to wash it?"

"It could happen. Maybe a car washing flash mob is going around town perpetrating cleanliness on other people's cars. Some of this dirt has been with me for months. The layers of gravel road grime are all that's keeping the bumper on over on your side," John said as he pulled the Mercury Sable into a parking spot closer to the bank than the coffee shop. In the evening's deep yellow-orange light of the magic hour the baby blue paint was a matte haze of dust and dirt evenly covering the car in a patina of road grime.

"You  might get better gas mileage if they chiseled off the top layer or two. They might be deep enough to even be called strata. Have you looked for fossils in it?"

"Why would there be a watch in my car?" The car groaned as it rocked back on shocks that had quit working the way they were supposed to months ago. The car rocked to a stop as the two college students opened the doors and climbed out.

As Mark slammed his door a puff of dust could be seen in the slanting rays of the sun, "Let's go wash it after this."

"Nah. It's cool. We're going to eat after this. Soon as they close we have to go meet the girls at the new bar-b-que place in the mall parking lot."

"She might ride with you if you washed it."

They crossed the parking lot, watching a black Prius pull into the drive through lane and stop at the window as they crossed in front of it, "Yeah, and then you'd have to sit in back."

"Keep the dirt then. There are actual glass pop bottles in your back seat it's been so long since you cleaned it out. I'm pretty sure evolution is happening back there. Yesterday on the way to class I heard a rustling and when I got out of the car I think a small herd of goblins scampered out of the back seat and went under the car."

"You can't say scampered," John said as he opened the door and went in.

"I think I can. I just did. I'm sure I just did. My mouth remembers saying it."

"No, I mean nobody says that. It's part of people's reading vocabulary but not part of anybody's speaking vocabulary. No more scampered."

"What should I say instead? Scuttled? Dashed? Skittered?" Mark waved at the woman behind the counter who had looked up at them as they entered and smiled as she pulled a shot from the machine.

The jet engine scream of the milk frothing soon filled the room as they stood staring at the hand written menu board. "Ran. You should say ran."

"But that's not the same thing, it doesn't convey..."

"Nope, can't say 'convey' either."

"When did you become Mister Vocabulary?"

"I'm taking a creative writing class and we've been talking about language choices in dialogue and how to make it realistic."

"But this is dialogue, like in real life. We're real people having a real conversation and those are good words so if I use them then they're the right words."

"Nope. See, that's where you're wrong. You read too much. You think real life is like a book and you talk like someone in a book."

Mark pulled his coffee punch card from his wallet as he stepped to the counter to order, "You're saying I read too much but you're the one taking the writing course?"

"I have to. It's an easy elective."

"You think writing is easy?"

"Well, I did until I started taking this course. I figured it was creative, what's she going to do say she didn't like it? Can you believe she does exactly that? I thought writing was like art and you could do whatever you wanted and say it was art so they couldn't criticise it. They do it with paintings. Look at this stuff on the walls. Seriously? I've done better than that in the margins of my Poli-Sci notes."

"You failed Political Science," Mark said.

"But my doodles were really good," John said. "Can I get a large vanilla latte in a small cup with no foam?"

"Whole milk right?"

"The wholer the better. That cow worked for that stuff, no sense skimming some off and throwing it away. It seems disrespectful."

"I just want a tea with honey and lemon."

"Seriously? You come to a coffee shop and get tea?" John asked handing the barista a five, "Keep it."

"Well, we don't have a tea shop," Mark said as he handed her his punch card and a five.

"We got a new jasmine tea in do you want to try it?"

"Please. No jasmine. He'll smell flowery and I'm trying to break him of that."

Mark bowed dramatically, "Jasmine would be wonderful thank you. Ignore him. He's feeling grumpy because he's afraid someone will wash his car since he can't see it and stop them from doing it."

"What if they planted corn on the roof instead?"

"It just washes off in the rain. I tried to cover the roof in chia seeds to see if they'd grow but it's not deep enough. That would have been so sweet."

The two of them went and sat in overstuffed chairs to wait for their drinks to be brought to them. Mark pulled his books out and started studying. John took out his phone and started making faces into the camera. "You know you're not supposed to text and drive. I wonder if that includes snapchat?"

"Yes."

"Snapchat hadn't even been invented when they passed that law. How can it include something that didn't even exist yet?"

"It does."

"I don't think it does."

"You're wrong."

"You're drinking jasmine tea and I'm the one that's wrong?"

"With honey and lemon."

"Yeah... I'm pretty sure it's not me that's wrong."

"Wrong about that too."

Can't you pretend to be normal? (Me & Writing 3 of 3)

Rich sat on the front steps of the white ranch style house and stared out into the pecan orchard. Tables were set up in front of him as almost a dozen of his extended family milled around making sure all the food was put out right and there were serving utensils. He looked right, towards the blacktop and saw, in the stretch of grass between the house and the road that a football game had started. He couldn't see his cousin Dean anywhere. As Granny walked towards the steps holding a pitcher that once held iced tea he stood and opened the door for her, ten-year olds knew to open doors for ladies in the South in the seventies. He would be ten in a few months. "Do you know where Dean went?"

"I think he went inside," she said as she climbed the three concrete steps slowly and held the door as she entered the house with Rich right behind her. He stopped at the cookie jar in the kitchen and pulled a peppermint out before walking down the hall that went the length of the house towards the guest room he slept in when he stayed here a week or two each summer. The door to his room was shut and he pushed it open after popping the starlight peppermint into his mouth and using his tongue to flip it into his cheek.

"There you are." Dean sat on the bed holding a purse and his eyes were red. He'd been crying... again. "Why don't  you come out and play with us? We're going to play tag until it gets dark and then hide and seek."

Dean wiped his nose with the back of his pale thin arm and looked up at Rich out from under impossibly curly hair that was almost an afro it was so long and the curls so tight. "They were making fun of me again."

"Who was?" Rich asked sitting on the bed next to Dean and dangling his dirty feet over the edge.

"Steve and them."

"Because of the purse?"

"Yes."

"So leave it inside."

"But I like it. I want to play with it. I can still run and play tag. How's a purse stop me from running?"

"I mean when there's all these people here. They..." Rich was thinking they didn't know Dean played with a purse, but everybody knew he did. Everybody knew he acted like a girl all the time and everybody talked about it. But he'd always done that. He was eight and as long as Rich could remember Dean had acted like a girl. Not a tom-boy girl either, a girly girl, girlier than any girl Rich knew. "They just... Can't you just leave it alone? One family reunion a year is all we have. Can't you pretend to be a boy for one day? Pretend to be normal? People wouldn't be so mean then."

"But I'm not. Nobody else has to pretend to be somebody. Just me. I don't want to." Dean was crying again. If Rich had been older he'd have recognized them as mad tears. But at nine and a half tears were tears.

"But I want you to come play with us and it'll be more fun if you do. Most of the other kids here don't know all the good hiding places you do. You live here. You'll be better at it than them. They can't make fun of you then, not if you win." Rich knew Dean wouldn't win. He never won. He screamed, no, squealed as he ran and ran like a girl. Anybody could catch him. But he did want him to come play. His older cousin was playing football. The one he usually played with and Rich didn't know most of his other cousins out there. Some company, even Dean, would be better than none. "Please."

"But they don't like me. None of them do." Dean said softly.

"They barely know you. They're just mean." Rich said.

"Why are they always mean to me though?" Dean asked.

"Because you're different. Just don't be different and they won't be mean." As Rich said it he felt like he was onto something big that he was just starting to figure out for himself. "Just pretend to be like everybody else. Just act like everybody else. Act like a boy."

"I hate being a boy." Dean hissed. "I'm just a boy here." He grabbed at his crotch.

"Well that's how you tell who's a boy and who's a girl. It's the difference."

"Not for me." Dean said.

"For everybody. You don't have to mean it. You can just fake it. Like acting. Like when we play scenes from the Carol Burnett Show." Probably not the best thing to mention since Rich played Tim Conway and Dean always played Mrs. ah-Whiggens or Charo.

Dean fiddled with the purse some more, snapping it open and shut. Open and shut. Open and shut. It was wicker and the handles dark brown leather. The brass catch on it was clicking loudly every time Dean slid it shut. He put the purse on the bed beside him and stood up. "Only one time, and you have to play with me tomorrow instead of Harvey." Harvey was his older brother, the cousin Rich most liked playing with, the one he looked up to and admired.

"OK. I promise." Rich picked the purse up off the bed and tossed it towards a chair that had clothes on it. He didn't want anybody to come in and see it on his bed and think it was his. Dean's eyes tracked it across the room as it flew.

He hugged Rich quickly and Rich hugged him back, uncomfortably, unsure if what he'd just done was a good thing or not. He knew for himself getting along by acting like everybody else was looking like a good idea but it didn't seem like Dean was going to be able to. He didn't know if he should have told him to. Even now, thirty years later he still wasn't sure if what he'd done was good or not. Dean wasn't Dean any more. He went, she went, by Melissa now, whereas Rich was still Rich and most people he met couldn't tell he was gay until someone told them... and someone always told.

Vignette (Writing & Me Part 2 of 3)

 It was morning. He could see the light through his eyelids. The sheets, cool against his skin felt good. The day would be a hot one, and humid too but that wasn't anything new to him. He had grown up in Southern Alabama and August heat was the kind of heat that was almost smothering. Days like this were made for playing slow games in the shade. If it was anything like yesterday, what day was yesterday? Summer vacations were an endless parade of Saturdays and the only way to tell when the real Saturday had arrived was the arrival of Saturday morning cartoons, but there wouldn't be any of those here. They, he and his two sisters, never watched cartoons at his grandmother's house. He called her Granny and he could smell, as he woke up further, he could smell coffee coming through the crack between the door and the hardwood floors that reached the length of the long ranch house she'd called home as long as he could remember.

He yawned hugely, thin tanned arms reaching out of the sheets and stretching into the air conditioned air. He could hear his sisters were already up and talking in the room next door. He turned and climbed out of bed and pulled on shorts and padded down the hall that ran the length of the house and stopped at the bathroom before going to the kitchen. He should have washed his hands, but he was ten and attention to that detail would come later.

Granny sat in a lounge chair in the living room reading her Bible, a thick book, thicker than his blue leatherette bound Bible given to him by his church when he was eight. He sat on the couch near her and leaned on the arm of the couch. It was broad and it felt like plastic but was probably vinyl or something other than plastic. What it was for sure was green. "What're you reading?" He asked, although he could tell by looking.

"The story of Abraham and his son," she replied putting the Bible in her lap and looking up at him. "Do you want some coffee?" Granny let him have coffee and while it was more milk and sugar than coffee it made him feel grown up. And there was always the syrupy sugar in the bottom of the cup when he was done that he could stick his fingers into and eat. There was no way all the sugar he put in his coffee would stay dissolved.

"Yes, please." He said. He liked his time alone with Granny. When his sisters got up and came out of the room things got complicated, busy, and he wasn't the center of attention anymore. There were three of them total and ideally they would all get along, but practically it would probably be the kind of day where two of them would play together and the third would feel left out. He wanted to play with his older cousin like he had yesterday, and the day before that. Then the girls could entertain themselves doing whatever it is girls did. His other cousin, the same age as his sister, the middle, and he would years later realize how much she hated being the middle sister, neither the oldest nor the youngest, but some numinous middle, would probably play with them. He was the closest thing to a girl for miles around here where yards were made of pecan orchards and houses were far enough apart that almost nobody walked from house to house.

He drank his coffee at the bar that bridged the kitchen and living room, cut right through the wall! He wasn't allowed to take the cup away from the table in case he spilled.

"Why Abraham? You've read that before." He was familiar with the story of Abraham and his son and the mountain and the sacrifice and God, at the last minute not making the dad kill his son. He'd never liked the story.

"It's a beautiful story of faith and trusting God. The worst thing in the world for a parent is to lose their child and Abraham trusted God wouldn't do that to him so he went up the mountain knowing God wouldn't make him suffer that way. So he went up with his son and trusted God to not be cruel."

"But what about his son? It still seems mean to him." He asked sipping his coffee.

"Not if he trusts that God won't ever ask more of us than we can do. That's the important thing to remember. It's one of my favorite stories. It reminds me that God's looking out for us, and even when he puts things in front of us that look impossible they're not. He'll provide a way if we trust Him."

He finished his coffee and got down from the high chair and put his cup in the sink before giving his Granny a hug and going outside to find his cousin who was the closest house, the only close house, to see if he was up to playing in a fort they'd built in the shade of the azalea bushes. The azaleas were so big once you were in them you could stand up and still be covered by their canopy and his uncombed long blond hair, not curly like it would be once puberty set in, wouldn't touch the branches. As he walked barefoot out the door and onto the dewy grass he heard his sisters getting up. He'd made it out just in time.

Two worlds diverged in a yellow wood...

A common thread through fantasy stories and some science fiction is the idea of a separate universe just the other side of a wardrobe or through an arch (Star Trek: The Original Series) or a vibration away if you rotate a quark sideways from it's normal spin or whatever. That idea that there's something else out there... some other world interesting and tantalizing by it's closeness.
People have worlds in their heads comprised of their world views and their views of the world. Maybe that old guy across the street that sits on the porch sits there because he can't afford to run the air conditioner and the breeze he catches on the porch cools him off. Maybe he sits there because he and his wife Judith used to sit there and watch their kids Michael and Joseph ride their bikes up and down the streets at night, into and out of the pools of light from the street lights and he misses her and his sons never call. Or, maybe he's watching your kids play in the yard, wondering if their breath smells of Rain-Blo bubble-gum and if their skin is as smooth as it looks with that light sheen of summer sweat on it. You don't know... but you make up ideas of what's going on around you and those ideas become the world we live in.
Sometimes our worlds overlap, sometimes they intersect. But they're rarely identical. How could they be? I may not even notice the man sitting on the porch across the street. Instead I notice the car and how the door is unlocked and there is a bag in the back and what could be in the bag? Maybe I don't see the man at all, maybe I just notice that at night the lights are all off by nine and the downstairs windows are open and that while there are blinds they're open so I can see in and I can see the light of a tv sometimes and it's not a big tv, but it's bigger than the one I have and the lights are all off by nine and the windows are open aren't they and everybody has insurance so it's not even really stealing since he'll just get a new one anyway with insurance money and insurance companies screw everybody anyway so why not screw them back just this once.
It's hard to talk to people about a world that doesn't match their world... we don't live in the same world. We live in similar worlds. Worlds drawn with the same outlines but colored with different boxes of colors... soundtracks written by different composers in different times... and here we are trying to all get along together. Meanwhile that man across the street... he still sits there. He never talks to anybody. On Saturdays he mows his lawn on the diagonal and spends as much time sweeping his sidewalk of clippings as he does mowing. His slow shuffling gait and his slow moving arms and his hunched over back betraying a life of what? Hard work? An injury? Or just the effects of age on a human body that's gone on past the "use by" date? He mows. He sweeps. He sits. He watches. His sons don't call. And how did his wife die anyway and where are your kids?
A car drives by, to me it's a piece of crap foreign car that is a symbol of jobs sent over seas. To the driver it's the culmination of months of savings and extra jobs, and it's his freedom, his ability to get away from his parents and their overbearing rules. To someone else it's a too-loud radio on wheels that doesn't stop at stop signs and that drives too fast down a street kids play on. And to someone else it's where they first held hands awkwardly behind the high school, fast shallow breaths, tentative touches, awkward reaches over the center console, a kiss, first tentative, then hard, then panting breaths and fogged up windows. A hand goes over material, over shirt and pants on either side of the console and then a gasp and recoil as someone knocks on the window and stops everything. It's a car but it's not the same car to any of those people.
It's not the same world to any of us... and we all know it. We can feel the edges of the secret world all around us all the time and we wonder sometimes is it just us that feel this way? Is it normal? I don't know... but it's after nine, and the lights across the street are off, your kids are playing hide and seek in the back yard, and that car is still unlocked as the too loud red Suzuki drives past moving from pool of light to pool of light.