Seconds Away

There might have been a moment I could have saved it. A seconds long window where it could have been okay. But I didn't say a word. I let the hands of the clock slip on away around the dial, a whole minute. Still silent. She cried. And then she hung up. And I never made it better.
I saw her again, a few times, but it never was like it was before.

What?

I wish I had heard him more clearly. Maybe I should have asked him to repeat it. It would have been nice to not think he was just going to the store. It would have made it easier to never see him again.

Though I'm not sure how many times you should ask someone to say "I'm leaving you for a stripper."

Coping

We tried to lay there in the grass with our bodies wrapped around each other until the world made a little more sense. It never did, but we felt better about it I guess.

It Worked Out Okay

She cried onto me for an hour. We were wrapped around each other and i held her as close ad I could as she sobbed. Her whole body shook, and mine shook with her. I never asked why but she said it helped a little.
I'm not so sure it did, but maybe.

What I Found In My Pocket

I reached into the pocket of a pair of pants I bought used, and found a not written on a small pink square of paper, folded and a little worse for wear from washing. I could read the words, but i could make out the shape of a heart at the bottom.

I Am Totally In The Wrong Here. I Suck.

So I haven't posted in weeks. If you were with me at the beggining, my apologies for promising things I couldn't deliver.
BUT- I have a backlog of stories to post, so we'll be right on a new schedule that works better with my actual life (and not the life I imagine sometimes in my head, where time and motivation are infinite resources).
I'll be posting three days a week, Tuesday/Thursday/Sunday. The story project of the month will be on Tuesdays, a random short story on Thursdays, and more parts of  "Windows and Doors" on Sundays. Two super shorts will be posted with all of those. I promise. Hit me if I don't. Hard and often.

Which brings me to this weeks game of  super fun group story awesmoness:
A modified game of Exquisite Corpse. Basically, I'll write three lines, someone (the two people that will ever read this blog I assume) will post a continuation of three lines as a comment. I will choose one those three line continuations to be the beggining of a whole new story entirely, and post three more lines the next Tuesday.
Get it? Well it'll make sense as we go, we'll see where we are byy November. Have fun now!

The Story.
I wasn't really entirely sure what happened to the shoes. We looked everywhere for them. They were the only thing that never made it back to the house. The shirts did. Both pairs of paints. Even most of the stolen tire swing did. But we never saw the shoes again.

Leaving

We didn't run that far away when we left. We didn't even stay gone that long.
But it was far enough and long enough that we felt freer than we ever had. I think that I slept the best I ever have in the back seat of that shitty four door sedan in the National Forest.

It Kept Me Up At Night

They found the body of a girl, age eleven, in the creek out behind Martin's house. They searched him up and down, and did all kinds of strange things with test tubes and evidence bags, but all they ever found was a string of not guilties. They don't even know her name.
No one talks about it anymore, but no one goes to the creek behind Martin's house either.
I named her Elliott. And every year in November I bring a white flower back to where she died.

An Update On Tales Told In Public

So I was putting out a new letter this week, and it was the first so far to get a written response!

The letter: "I never meant for you to find out. I didn't want to hurt you. I was lonely and you were far away."

The response: "Shit. Need to get your life fixed."

So not the most intelligent response but hey. Someone read it.

So Hey There

SO you may have noticed that below, I've posted the first chapter in the serialized story. Yay.
I'm lazy today, so the supershorts will start up again tomorrow and hopefully my work ethic will return. Or not.

Windows and Doors (Part 1)

My soul  is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that, and I intend to end up there. -Rumi

He wasn't entirely sure what towns the bus was in between, but he knew they were miles away from anything worth being near.
And he liked it.
He wasn't even sure what town he'd bought the ticket for. But it was far enough away. And every time he woke up, there was new land outside the window, that he'd never seen. Places he hadn't had the time to stain or bruise with things he wouldn't want to remember. So he rode on and on and on. He might just every line he could until he hit the ocean, or maybe dip down into Mexico. The weather would be nice at least.

He turned his phone on for the first time since leaving in a tiny bullshit town somewhere in the middle of Texas. Twenty seven missed calls. Eighteen new voicemails.

He stomped the battery into peices, threw the phone in the bus station trash can, and kept riding.

People started to look a little different out here. Skin tones deepened, clothing changed. The accents started getting a little more unfamiliar. He felt displaced, and happy to be drifting.

He stopped riding buses somewhere in Arizona. He started riding trains again, like he did when he was younger and running away from home. There was probably something in that for a psychiatrist to parse out and explain away. Something about fear, and something about sex.

The trains ran out in California, and there was water stretching out under gray sky. And there was a feeling in the air, that felt like somehting good.

He wondered about traveling, and about running, as he looked out on waves and waves and waves. He thought about the beats, and how they spent their time running around the country. That the word beat came from beatitude. He wondered if the distance behind him brought him any closer to heaven. He threw his driver's license and his passport into the ocean.

Something That Is Cool That We Should Do Together

I hope you enjoy those stories below.
But there is something better than reading stories.
Helping make new ones.

Like I said before, Wednesdays on this blog will be a time to start and update a monthly project in storytelling and September's is (drum roll):

THE INTERCEPTED LETTERS PROJECT

Over the course of this month, I'll be leaving snippets of imaginary correspondence around town and campus, and giving you guys (the three of you reading) a weekly peak into what I'm leaving and what the reactions have been, if any.
Now your part.
Leave your own notes around, and see what happens. Post them in the comments to this post and tell me and everyone what's been happening.
And here's the first letter I'm leaving:

I saw you last night. And I saw him. I would have hit him if I didn't think I might have missed and punched you. And that didn't seem like a good way to convince you I was better than him. But I still wanted to.

An Email I Found Saved To Drafts The Morning After That I Don't Remember Writing

There is a thing you should knl;ow.
(I meantui ekverythingf I saiigd.n I just say I don'tm becausrte I'm afraid.
I loveni you.
Kind of.

Coffee

  The woman with the green eyes and the dark brown hair comes in every morning, around six unless she's running late, and orders one cup of coffee black. Sometimes she orders something to eat along with it. Has she missed breakfast those days? Or just wants something sweet. There are other customers, that smile more, that talk more. But I don't pay as much attention. I open the store, I sell a few cups to people that keep hellish early morning hours and I wait for the woman with the green eyes to tell me something I know by heart already.

The Girl From Boston Rides Again

   She hasn't told anyone her name since she was seventeen and riding a bus for hours to run from a home she hated, and then hitching rides on trains with kids not much older than her all the way North to a place that felt a little more like home than home ever did.

  They all call her by different names. Some call her Red, for her hair, or Freckles. One or two assholes call her Fire-Crotch for the same reason, but always quiet and behind her back since the last one to say it in ear shot hasn't ever smiled the same again. One friend calls her the Girl From Boston (she hasn't ever told him she's from West Virginia, and she won't ever. He has to know though, just listening to her voice.)

  She's not sure why she stopped using her name, maybe just because no good ever came from it. Sometimes she gives fakes, but usually she lets other peoplen make up their own for her. That started on the first train she hopped.

  There was a ratty looking kid in a black shirt, eyeing her, not in thhat hungry-creepy way that people on buses do, or the way some men do to every woman they ever meet. There was a curiosity there. She asked him what in the hell he was looking at, not knowing why exactly she was so angry someone wanted to meet her.

"Hey there. I'm Sammy. Who're you?"
"Me."
"I meant what's your name."
Silence. Shifting of weight. "I don't have one."

No one speaks again. Sammy didn't understand why, thought she was threatened by him. But she wasn't. She was just tired of being what she was. Tired of being anything in particular. So after that she wasn't.

Moss Gathers

  All that there was was the sound of the wind and the tickle f the grass against one side of my face. And then there was a light in the sky, brighter than anything I had ever seen. Then the falling, then the waking with a shudder.

  I make coffee and light the day's first cigarette, trying not to go back to bed every way I know how. I don't know that many ways, so I find myself laying back on the mattress, and wrapping myself back up in the covers that haven't even gotten the chance to get cold yet. I get up an hour later, feed that cats that are mewling on my chest and leave the house so I don't sink back into the cozy trap of home.

  The morning is a tour of things I should have done. I walk through the park where I saw her the first time, and then down the street where we used to live before she said no. Then I'm back, back at home, with the cats and the coffee and shitty little laptop, where the work I'm supposed to do lives. Deadlines, submissions yet to be sent. All the things that pay the bills. Or most of them. Missed the one for the telephone this month. Might  never pay it again. Who uses landlines now anyway?

   Fourteen minutes into what i'm supposed to do, I get restless. Another cup, another cigarette, another walk. This time different route, different memories. Remind me why I didn't move out of this town after? When ever fucking sidewalk brings up memories, and none of them are exactly happy, why do I stay? Probably for the same reason I don't pay the phone bill and I missed the gas and lights last month: laziness, inertia. I am here, and I can live with this, why change it to make myself comfortable and happy? The rent is low. I can eat cheap. I know where things are.

These things don't sound as compelling as they do in my head when I think about moving away.

Third cup, third cigarette. No work done yet. Good morning inertia.

Third walk runs in the track of the first one, and I sit down on the bench where I saw her crying after that asshole left her. Lean against the tree where I kissed her for the first time, drunk and beautiful. I lay down in the  grass where I was for five hours after the end of things, after she flew to Portland. Then I go home, and hope that maybe there's something to watch on t.v. Because it doesn't care if I'm too lazy to move.

The Things That Happen On The Way

   Monday morning is shining in through a window specked with dust from years of running on dirty streets, in little cloud-like patterns. Maybe you could draw in them, leave messages and letters to strangers. But that would be strange. Besides, I'm reading a newspaper. That is who I am on this bus in the morning: the man who reads the paper. You can't just upset that kind of routine to write a love poem in dust to a stranger. Though I want to. So I stare at the window, past the article I'm not reading. I don't stare at the woman who is mumbling to herself and shaking, because that is what she does. That is what she's there for. And I am not the man that stares at crazy people. I read the newspaper. And I don't introduce myself to the girl with the sad face, because I am not the man who comforts sad people. I get off at my stop, and walk down the street. Because I am the man who goes to work.

He Tried

   He tried to write stories about the South. But he couldn't. He didn't feel like it belonged to him, that the places he had lived and the places he had seen were places he had only passed through. He'd spent half his life in the deepest parts of it, in places where the land was all hills and hollers and little creeks woven through, but it felt like only the city was his. And everyone knows even Southern cities aren't the South. So he couldn't, so he didn't and he left for the woods again, to write stories about the city. And they all sounded a little like the way the South was supposed to sound.

So This Is Pretty Much What's Happening.

Hey there,

I'm trying to get stories out to an audience of people that might want to read them. Assuming these people exist, publication would make that happen.

But publication is hard.
Blogs are not.

So here we are. I'll be posting stories here four times a week (unless I feel lazy. Then it will be three.), with three stories a day. The first two will be supershorts, stories less than a page (or five hundred words) in length. Little sketches of scenes and situations. The third will be a longer short story, if about three pages in length, and on Sundays I will be posting serialized pieces of a longer story (excepting this first post. Spending time on the first episode of our gripping narrative).

Also,  stay tuned for the SUPER AWESOME MONTHLY STORYTELLING ADVENTURE!
The installments of the month's adventure in stories in public places will be posted every Wednesday (beginning the first Wednesday in September), and will be mindblowingly cool. I promise.