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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.”
© 2009 Edward F. Gumnick
Tomorrow the god will show his face in the shadow of the big temple. Then the priests will feed us a meal of corn and beans and give us a drink from a gold cup, wash us, paint our faces with the signs of Kukulkan in red and blue, and dress us in gold and feathers. And then they will lead us to the cenote.
I want to believe I will have the courage walk on my own legs and that they will not have to …more
I’ve decided to return to the online workshop on which I was working when Hurricane Ike arrived last September. Had some trouble with the first prompt, though. My first attempt turned into unpublishable erotica. Here’s my second attempt:
Fragment #2
I want all of my life to be like these moments:
- The day that Continental canceled our flight out of Rome, so we spent the day exploring Ostia. We surprised ourselves with how much fun we could cram into one unexpected extra day of vacation.
- The day you led me through rush-hour traffic to Griffith Park, then showed me where the trail began. I was energized by your kindness.
- The day the cold front blew through the city, and then you took me to your soccer practice. It was too cold for me to spend two hours waiting on a bench, so I wandered the unfamiliar neighborhood until I found a coffee shop open. Then I came back and climbed up and down the pedestrian staircase to to the road high on the hill above the soccer field to keep warm. While I walked the stairs, I had a heart-to-heart talk directed at a silent God. I told him that I thought he was irrelevant, and that I’d listened to his people and their bad ideas for long enough.
The Fisherman’s Brother
One Christmas season I drew my
big brother’s name out of the pot.
He was a fisherman; he decorated
his half of the room we shared
in eclectic Field & Stream motif.
Naturally, I shopped a sporting goods
store in search of the perfect gift.
My knowledge of fish and my interest
in fishing began and ended with threading
half of a squirming earthworm onto
a rusty hook and dangling it in the water
weighed down by a soft clump of lead
under a red and white plastic bobber.
(I thought of myself as a purist.)
I knew in the abstract that one could
angle for largemouth bass or smallmouth
bass or brook trout or rainbow trout or
any desired species in creek or lake
or stream, but I had no patience for the art
and science of attracting and catching
anything without a taste for worms.
So I selected a jar of fluorescent
orange roe. I imagined the plump,
squishy balls looked delicious to fish.
I also picked a gorgeous lure, an oval
of convex stainless steel painted in faux
fishy stripes and spots of red enamel,
a beauty to win a fish’s heart.
Note: The prompt for today was to describe someone who was “as close as a blood relative,” though not related. I decided to go in another direction.
© 2008 Edward F. Gumnick
Loteria is a traditional Mexican game similar to bingo, played with a tarot-like deck of picture cards. In card number 34, El Soldado, I see M., my “ex‑husband” of eight years and still one of my very closest friends. Long before I knew him, M. was one of the thousands of Mexican-American soldiers from Corpus Christi, a native of the area where his family has probably lived since it was still part of Mexico.
The brown and smoky tones of the card remind me of a photo of M. from his service during the first Gulf War. He served as a specialist in the U.S. Army stationed in Saudi Arabia …more
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