Incompleat Iconoclast » Fiction

Exercise #29: How Did We Ever Manage?

Edward F. Gumnick — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 16:48:09 +0000

“How did we ever manage to find each other?” The question wasn’t always rhetorical. In the early years, you’d invite me to reminisce for hours about how we met for the first time at a mutual friend’s party. How you hesitated before giving me your number. How I heard that you were finding your way out of a relationship, so I never summoned the nerve to call. Then we didn’t see one another again for two years. How we used to enjoy retelling each other the story of our chance meeting at the museum, of my clumsy pick-up line that charmed you enough that you caught yourself thinking of me when I called you. We lay in bed for hours marveling at fate or chance or destiny or dumb luck—whatever force we credited in those happy moments for the circumstances that brought us together.

Later on, you’d pose the question in a tone that no longer invited an answer, and I was filled with my own questions. How did our stories grow stale? Did my charm fade, or your curiosity—or both? When did credit turn to blame? There was no sense of wonder in our last chance meeting—another party, at the home of a friend we didn’t know we had in common. How I struggled to think of anything to say. How your face flushed as our hostess made an excuse to whisk me away from you.

How did we ever manage to lose each other?

Note: The prompt was to write something that begins with the lead line, “How did we ever manage to find each other?” Didn’t like this prompt at all, so I’ve wrestled with it for three days.

This post is an exercise that I wrote as part of the Fall 2008 50/50 Workshop, on which I began work in September 2008. (I’m still—again—working on it as of August 2010.) Read a description of the 50/50 workshop, or view all of the Fall 2008 50/50 posts.

Exercise #28: Movie Star

Edward F. Gumnick — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 04:45:54 +0000

Hollywood, CA—Entertainment industry sources are buzzing today with the gossip that the world’s last remaining noncelebrity, Phil Stackfield, a tax accountant from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, is engaged to become the fifth husband of model, country singer, and celebrity cage-fighting phenom Darla Chartreuse. Chartreuse, 27, who began life as Darlene Carter, is the platinum-blonde star attraction of Fox Ultra Reality Channel’s Celebrity Death Match and the singer-songwriter who scored Grammy gold last year with the crossover smash hit, “Baby Ain’t No Use.”

Little is known about Stackfield, 38, a graduate of Linn County Community College, except that the accounting firm in which he’s an associate is a member of the Cedar Rapids Chamber of Commerce, and he professes to like spending time outdoors, playing video games, and hanging out with his friends. His secretive relationship with Darla Chartreuse began three years ago when the country diva’s tour bus experienced transmission failure outside a diner on I-80 where Stackfield was eating creamed chipped beef on toast.

Chartreuse admits to having been charmed by the fact that Stackfield was the only diner patron not live-tweeting his meal or shooting cell-phone video of himself. In a March interview with Ellen Degeneres, she described Stackfield as “quirky and cute in that offbeat way people sometimes get when they spend a lot of time off-camera.”

A spokesperson for Chartreuse said that the singer is writing at her Nashville home and couldn’t be reached for comment.

Note: The prompt was to write about a movie star. I decided to go in another direction. (Do I need to say that this is a work of fiction?)

Exercise #27: Evasion

Edward F. Gumnick — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:21:54 +0000

Jeremy woke up one morning, sat up in bed, looked at Boot—perched on the pile of Newsweeks under the window—and said out loud, “Today is the day.” He swung his legs off the side of the bed, careful to place his feet in the narrow path that led to the bathroom.

He said it again, louder this time: “Today is the day.” At the sound of Jeremy’s voice, Boot sprang from the stack of magazines to the bed. Some papers fluttered to the floor.

He thought about picking them up, but he didn’t want to get distracted by the small task. Today was going to be about big progress.

He followed the path to the bathroom. On his left were columns of newspapers. On the right, pages printed from the Internet, stapled in the upper-left corners, and sorted into dozens of manila folders. A sheaf of recipes caught his eye. Maybe he would cook something later. He carried the folder to the bathroom and placed it on top of the overflowing basket of news magazines between the toilet and the bathtub. He let the tub fill while he brushed his teeth and shaved.

As soon as he was dry and dressed, Jeremy navigated to the front hallway. A good place to start. He surveyed the stacks of boxes lining the walls. A silverfish crawled out from between two cartons, but by the time he’d fetched a tissue from the bathroom, it had disappeared again. He would need to clean and dust as he cleared away some of this mess, so he made his way to the kitchen.

He opened the cabinets under the sink and contemplated the crusty rags and dozens of open bottles of cleaning products. He picked up an empty Windex bottle, then put it back down.

Maybe he should fix himself something to eat. Then he would be ready to work.

Note: The prompt was to write about a character who is evading something.

Exercise #26: Not Wearing It

Edward F. Gumnick — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 04:43:54 +0000

Dr. Schollman says it doesn’t matter if I wear my hat or not, and that the important thing is that I take the pills, take all the pills, take the pills every day, the blue pills that the pharmacist counts with big steel tweezers on a white tray into the bottle one two three four five and so on until there is one for every day of the month and then I am supposed to come back for more, But it’s very important, Billy, says the pharmacist—this is the pharmacist talking to me now, not Dr. S—It’s very important, Billy, that you take your pill every day.

But I know that the pills are like the hat in the way Dr. S and the pharmacist see the world, the pills are like my hat for not having to see the men without eyes who sit on benches, the men with glasses but no eyes who ride the subway, standing just behind someone, standing out of sight when I look again to see if what I saw the first time was right, that there is a man without eyes who follows me onto the subway, who sits in the park, who sits by the carousel like he is waiting for someone, but I know that it is me that he is waiting for.

Dr. S says, In any case, if these men are real, which I do not concede that they are, mind you, but if these men are real, Billy, do you see any reason to believe that they mean you any harm? And I think I am being very clever when I say that what I see isn’t as important as what they see, since they are the men with no eyes, and when I leave his office, there is one of them using the ATM across the street, I can see the bare smooth eyeless skin of his face reflected in the stainless steel panel above the machine, and I know that he is watching me, though he doesn’t know I know.

I know because I am not wearing my hat. I always see better when I am not wearing it.

Note: The prompt was to write about a piece of clothing that your character refused to wear. Sometimes I like an opportunity to go to a crazy place. Makes me appreciate my sanity, such as it is.

Exercise #25: The Halfway Mark

Edward F. Gumnick — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 13:59:55 +0000

In Half

Andrea told people later that she was driven by rage, but the truth was that too little sleep and too much late-night TV put the idea in her head.

James had called as she was washing the dinner dishes to say that he wanted to come by in the morning to get his half of the stuff they’d bought together. When he had said he was ready to move on with his life, she had known that was code for “ready to start the parade of women” through his crappy apartment. Three years earlier, Andrea had brought up the rear of his last such parade.

The commercial was one she’d seen dozens of times without paying much attention. An idiot in a lime-green polo shirt stood between two stacks of mattresses, waving a chain saw. Cheesy graphics that were supposed to represent “slashed prices” materialized in the air around him and flew toward the viewer and off the edges of the TV screen. The 60-second spot whizzed by at double-fast-forward speed, but Andrea clicked the remote to stop it, then rolled back far enough to watch the end of the commercial, where Mattress Melvin or Krazy Karl (or whatever his name was) plunged the blade of the saw into the mattress at the top of one of the stacks. Shreds of ticking and batting sprayed from the deep gash. Andrea hit the “pause” button and stared at the scene.

Fifteen minutes later, she stood at the foot of the bed—a California king with a cherry frame. She remembered how expensive the red satin sheets were, and for a moment, she contemplated taking them off. But she decided that such a compromise would violate the spirit of the gesture. So she pumped the primer and pulled the cord to start the engine. She thought about the expression on James’s face the day he brought the saw home from the store, and how she’d held back an urge to mock his affected ruggedness. The red flannel shirt still hung in closet, worn only that one time.

Andrea squeezed the saw’s throttle and went to work on the bed.

Note: The prompt was to write about an event that was a “halfway mark.” This exercise was the halfway point in the 50/50 workshop. I’m just 326 days behind schedule!

Exercise #24: Busted!

Edward F. Gumnick — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 15:48:56 +0000

Super

Apartment 1A has never given me so much as a McDonald’s gift certificate at Christmas time, even though she has thousands of dollars under her mattress.

1B is a filthy pig. Clean your bathroom, man!

I once showed up to replace the window unit in 1C and found Mrs. S. still in her nightie at 4:30 in the afternoon. I thought I heard a noise from the hall closet. At 5:30, Mr. S. said hello to me while I was washing the sidewalk. He looked like he was on his way home from work.

2A owns a surprising number of toys for a man without children.

Apartment 2B always smells like a skunk that someone has tried to dress up with Old Spice. But he pays his rent on time, and once he helped me clean out the apartment after a long-time tenant passed away. (We found her after a couple of days.)

I have never seen so many dirty magazines in my life as the day that a pipe broke under the sink in 2C. He wouldn’t make eye contact with me, but then he grinned like a maniac when I caught him staring at my ass. Creepy.

Mr. J. in 3A is carrying on with the girl in 4A. They think nobody knows, but the only person in the building who’s in the dark is Mrs. J., who also suffers from the misguided belief that I don’t know she got a dog.

3B tells me everything. He thinks if he keeps me in the loop, I won’t tell anyone else what he went to prison for.

Note: The prompt was to write something about any sense of the word “busted.”

Exercise #23: Too Much

Edward F. Gumnick — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 04:25:14 +0000

Outgoing

Today is the day. I’m going to leave here. I’m going to make a couple of sandwiches, wrap them in waxed paper, put them in one of the brown paper bags that I asked Morena to buy when she brought me groceries last week, and I’ll add a bag of baked potato chips and a can of Coke. Then I’ll put my lunch in the new backpack that I bought online from Timberland, along with a couple of magazines. I will walk out the front door, I will lock it behind me, and I will take the three flights of stairs to the ground floor. I’ll walk out of the building and turn right on the sidewalk. Then I’ll go four blocks north and two blocks east to Riverview Park. I’ve seen it on a Google map. It looks lovely and green in the satellite image. I can also see it from a couple of online traffic cams that look south along Lincoln Parkway. I know from the police reports I read that the neighborhood policing program has reduced crime in the area, and that Riverview Park is patrolled at all times of day and night.

So today might be the day. I’ve spent a lot of time building up to this moment. I haven’t been outside in four and a half years. Not just outside the building, but outside the door into the hallway of my apartment building. I wasn’t always like this. There was a time when I walked the streets without a care like so many people do. But that was before I realized how dangerous it is out there. Still, some of the friends I’ve met online tell me that I should be strong, that I should not be afraid, that I’m missing too much by spending my life in this small apartment. On an intellectual level, I hear what they’re saying. But there’s a voice inside me that won’t let me forget how easy it is to lose everything in a matter of moments. And so I take precautions, I guard my safety, my privacy.

Maybe today will be the day, though. I’ll load up my backpack so I’m ready for whatever I might encounter out there. The food, of course, and bottles of water, filtered twice through the charcoal filters I ordered. Maybe a flashlight. The keys for all my door locks, except for the one to the deadbolt, which I’ll leave under the loose edge of the carpet in the hall outside my door. You can’t be too careful. And something to read, not so much for the entertainment as for a buffer against the possibility that people will want to talk to me. If I look like I’m reading, people will leave me alone. And my surgical mask, too, will discourage casual conversation, though I understand that it’s not serious protection against any of the more virulent antigens out there. I will have to take my chances.

I don’t know if today will be the day. There is still too much to be done at home, too much to think about.

Note: The assignment was to write about “something you have too much of.” I wrestled with this prompt for a couple of days, but I was getting nowhere. Perhaps I spent too much time thinking about it, or let it become a mental block with too much power over me. I decided to write from the perspective of a character who finds the whole world to be too much for him.

Exercise #22: Lead Line: “I was so tired that night, I fell asleep with my clothes on…”

Edward F. Gumnick — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 01:15:48 +0000

Contrary to every science fiction or horror movie stereotype, they came at about 11:30 in the morning, not in the dead of night. I guess, strictly speaking, it was the dead of night somewhere, because they touched down simultaneously in at least three dozen places around the globe. But it was 11:30 a.m. here, and the last thought I remember having before I heard the shriek of something very large braking in the atmosphere was, “I should think about lunch.”

And then, like everyone else, I raced out of the building to find out what was making that awful noise, and I saw a huge gray cylinder streak across the sky pushing a wave of white heat ahead of it, trailing a stream of white vapor. It slowed noticeably as I watched. The sound of its passage diminished until all that was left was the whoosh of its maneuvering jets as it came to hover over somewhere just west of downtown, then settled toward the ground, where I lost sight of it behind the treeline.

Then silence for a moment, and then a lot more noise of a more chaotic variety—many smaller engines as the tactical craft spewed out of ports on the top of the mother ship. I only know some of these details because Dennis was close enough to see it, and he told me about it later when I met him scavenging in the ruins of a shopping center near my house. I only heard the noise, the rising and falling whines of the small scout ships and fighters whizzing in all directions, criss-crossing the sky and taking out the utility and communications systems with their strange weapons. I hadn’t had a clear moment to try my cell phone, and now that I thought to do so, it showed “No signal.” I thought of Jana, somewhere on the far side of where the big ship had landed, out of contact and alone with the baby.

The nimble flying machines raced back and forth in no discernible pattern, firing staccato pulses of a pale golden light in all directions. Occasionally, a larger craft would emit a pulse that rattled the windows of my office building. I ran back inside. The receptionist had abandoned her desk like everyone else. I picked up the handset of her phone, but the line was dead. The power was out. Even the second hand of the battery-operated clock on the wall behind her desk was stopped. I raced back to my own office and grabbed my car keys, then ran back out to where my car was parked by the curb. I hopped in, shoved the key in the ignition, and turned it, but as I feared, nothing happened.

As I’d been watching the arrival of the invaders and the first wave of their assault, I’d been dimly aware of activity all around me. The other inhabitants of the office suite I shared had been running back and forth in a noisy panic, in and out of the building, back and forth to their cars. I hadn’t been paying much attention to the screams and shouts, but now I suddenly noticed the silence as the assault force moved off in another direction. I was surprised to find I was alone on the street. I suppose that most of my co-workers had gone to find hiding places, or run off to look for help.

I thought for a moment. I went back into the building. Under the sink in the kitchen, there were some empty plastic gallon jugs. I was glad to see that there was still enough water pressure to fill them; with the electricity out, that wouldn’t last for long. I filled all five, but could only reasonably plan to carry two. I left the other three on the counter next to the sink.

To be continued….

Note: Today’s assignment was to use the line “I was so tired that night, I fell asleep with my clothes on….” This story is headed toward a place where that line would fit, but it didn’t make it there before my allotted time for the assignment ran out.

Exercise #16: Annus Mirabilis

Edward F. Gumnick — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 05:58:40 +0000

I always said I would make the perfect lottery winner. I would not be one of those assholes who win $37 million and manage to blow through it in two years, then end up on food stamps or something. No, I had a plan. If I ever won the lottery, I would invest the money. I would put some into mutual funds and some into safe stocks, and a little bit into the stocks that are too risky for my retirement fund, but that I’ve always thought about gambling on. And I would set some goals for growth and income. Whatever I managed to earn on my investments, some percentage of it would be reinvested, and I would only draw on the excess income for spending money. And if that meant I had to keep working, I would keep working, but at least I wouldn’t end up broke, and I’d have plenty to live on in my retirement.

There was something else I’d read about lottery winners, too, that used to run through my head when I stood in line at the convenience store to buy my tickets every Friday. Somebody did a study that showed that lottery winners aren’t any happier, on average, than anyone else as soon as six months after they win the jackpot. In fact, they even compared lottery winners to people who’d been in terrible accidents and were left partially paralyzed, and lottery winners weren’t any happier than those poor suckers. I guess the more striking fact there is that the paraplegics aren’t any less happy than the general public by the time six months have gone by. People can get used to anything. They can get used to having nothing, and they can get used to having everything. And I guess you’re as happy as you decide to make yourself.

So I always said that if I won the lottery, I would find a way to make myself happy, and I would find a way to keep myself happy. And I started thinking about something else I’d read: that happy and successful people tend to surround themselves with other happy and successful people. And I used to interpret that as meaning that if you’re not lucky enough to be surrounded by happy and successful people, you’re pretty much screwed. But I think there’s another way to look at it. Maybe it means that what you’re supposed to do is whatever you can to make the people around you happy and successful. If you can make some kind of difference in their lives, then they’ll have something extra to give when it comes time to make a difference in your life. I don’t know. I’m not an expert on this kind of thing.

And so I also tried to take that idea into consideration when I waited for the balls to pop up out of the machine and tell me that I’d become a millionaire. I decided I would take some of that money I make on my very sensible and well-planned investment strategy, and I would use it to help the people around me. I would pay the credit card that’s the only thing standing in the way of someone’s going back to school, and I’d also pay her tuition, at least until she’s had enough time to figure out if that’s what she wants to do. I’d pay off a couple of mortgages for people. I’d send one very exhausted guy on a vacation. I would help someone start a business.

Well, my plan didn’t count on how far the stock market could fall in six months, and I guess I figured on having more patience than I actually do have. So I had to start drawing on my principal if I wanted to make some people happy and successful. And then I got laid off from my job, so the next thing I knew, I was having to take living expenses out of that fund, too. I figured as long as I was out of work anyway, if I was going to send my friend on vacation, he might as well have company. Man, did we have a good time.

Note: The assignment was to write about an annus mirabilis—Latin for “wonderful year.”

Exercise #13: Waiting for Morning

Edward F. Gumnick — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 05:39:26 +0000

It was nothing. I told you it was nothing, and I wish that you had believed me, but you suspected it was something. And so, even though it was nothing, when it turned into what looked like something, there you were to catch me in the act, so there was no denying that it did, indeed, look like something. But even then, it was still nothing. Well, nothing to me. Obviously, something to you. And you were ready to confront me, and then you looked at me and you thought it was something, but it was still nothing, but there was nothing I could have said to persuade you of that, and so with a blank stare, you stormed off into the darkness. And then I heard you drive away, and I thought, “There will be hell to pay in the morning.”

Note: The assignment was to write about “waiting for morning to arrive.”