Brick

This exercise was pretty cool and turned out a pretty neat product.  Just incase you were curious the book that I use for this class is called Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft by Janet Burroway

pictured to your right.
For this exercise we were given a few minutes as a class to look and feel a normal everyday brick.  Then we were to give as many adjectives we could think of to describe the brick.  When we were done with that our professor told us to write whatever we wanted involving a brick without using any of those words.  Pretty cool huh? What I came up with was a poem about a brick without once ever saying the word brick.

It came crashing through his living room window,

landed on the rug his daughter used for tea parties.

Leaving jagged pieces of glass

cutting at the peaceful darkness of his home.

The noise faded as quickly as it came,

the only thing to show for it cool evening breeze blowing from the broken bay window.

It lay there so unthreatening, so small,

but in message so devastating.

Hate.

Fear.

Judgement.

The whole int the window four times it's actual size.

The echo of such actions leave in history surpass the action itself in decades.

He looks at the remains of his safe haven,

His bleary eyed wife and trembling child on the stairs behind him.

He wonders

how something that created the sanctuary of his his home,

can be used to destroy the very same thing.

It's a Joke

Ok so this is a shitty little monologue that was a second part to the bumper sticker exercise, be warned it's kinda stupid but I thought I'd put it up because, hey, why not.

I know the bumper sticker must look weird on our car. I mean there isn’t a penis between the two of us and clearly we’re not hunters.  We weren’t always this happy.  We’ve worked really hard for this family Sam and I.  We met in college, back in 1996.  My family was more accepting than Sam’s, the refused to help pay her loans, she was working three jobs at one point just to pay for loans and rent.  We drove all the way to Massachusetts to get married.  Only my immediate family was there.  No one from Sam’s family came.  She said it didn’t bother her but it bothered me.  Why couldn’t they just be happy for her? For us?  Instead of gaining a daughter-in-law they chose to disown their daughter.  We had never really considered kids.  It was Sam who brought it up and once it was an idea that we acknowledged it was something we wouldn’t give up on.  We didn’t know how incredibly depressing the whole process would be.  Door after door closed on us, saying we weren’t a proper family that they couldn’t allow a child to be raised in an unhealthy home.  We had been trying to adopt for three years and I had all but given up when Sam came home one day with a bumper sticker she thought was funny.  “Penis to small? Try hunting!”  She had stuck it onto our run down minivan we had bought second hand three years ago when we thought we’d be filling it with children.  I was infuriated.   I thought it was awful and how could she make a joke like that when things were so terrible.  We fought for an hour straight, cried and then laughed at how stupid we were being.  Three weeks later we were told that we were eligible to adopt a little Vietnamese girl if we would like to look into the procedure for adopting over sees.  We jumped on the opportunity and brought Joy home within the year.   A few months later, to our utter amazement, we learned that they embryos we had been planting in my uterus, starting a year ago had finally worked and that we were expecting twins.  In a year our family had doubled and then some.  It was crazy, it was difficult, and we couldn’t have been happier.  Call us dysfunctional, freaky, or whatever you want, but we couldn’t be happier with who we are and what our family has become.

What the Bumper Sticker Said

Ok so here we were given a bunch of bumper stickers to look at and then pick one.  Once we did that we then had to write a short story about the type of car it was on, the interior of the car, something that surprised you about that interior, the owner, and then finally one thing the owner of the car said to you. This was my bumper sticker and what I got from it.

            I went to open up my passenger-side back door, but arms were completely full of grocery bags so this simple task wasn’t as easy as I had hopped.  I managed to open the door but as I was loading my bulky bags in the car I pushed the door to far and I heard the heard stopping sound of car door on car door.  I quickly shoved my bags in cursing under my breath.  First I looked around, no one was there to witness my crime. I then I began assessing the damage.  To my enormous relief it didn’t leave that bad of a mark.  Or did it? Was mine the little nick bellow the window, or the huge scratch right next to it?  As I began to examine the car and realized it would be hard to discern my nick from the rest of the scratches on the beat up minivan.  The blue paint was faded and dirty and like I said scratched in various places.  It had to have been old to begin with early 2000’s I was guessing.  I began looking around the beat up bumper when I noticed a sticker, “Penis to small? Try hunting!” Nice. I thought sarcastically.  What looser had that kind of bumper sticker I wondered?  I looked around again; there was only a couple loading up their car half way down the isle from me and an elderly couple with a shopping car walking past.  I curiously peeked in their window.  My jaw dropped at the site.  I saw two car seats and a buster seat, juice boxes everywhere and toys peeking out from under seats. Okay so clearly lots of kids.  What the hell was that kind of bumper sticker doing on a car that clearly drove around a lot of kids? Around the mirror were hand made plastic bead necklaces.  A flower sticker was stuck above the radio and a man’s baseball cap over the center council.  I imagined a young couple maybe, a handsome young man and a sweet looking woman with their motley crew of young children. Then under the passenger seat I saw something weird.   The looked like self help books…about sexuality.  A pamphlet near one of the books was adoption for same sex couples.  Before I could begin to form an image I heard a shopping cart and voices approaching. I jumped and began to go around to my driver side door when I saw them all.  Two women, one was pushing the shopping cart, her hair short and she wore a t-shirt and blue jeans.  In her cart, besides groceries, was a little girl with her wispy four-year-old hair in pigtails, the woman was making faces, kissing the girls cheeks making her laugh.  The other woman wore a simple dress with her long hair held in a clip out of her face.  She was watching the first woman with a loving smile and pushing a double stroller, which held what looked like infant boys.  They were clearly partners.  I felt stupid for immediately jumping to a man and woman, these two women looked so happy, so loving, it was amazing to me how people still refused to consider them a family. But I was a bit dumbfounded I looked at the bumper sticker and back at this family extremely confused.  The longhaired woman noticed my glance and smiled ruefully,  “It’s a joke.” she said to me and then gave her partner a smirk that said it wasn’t her idea.  Her partner replied, “Hey I think it’s funny.”  They both laughed and the one began putting groceries in the trunk while the other strapped in the two boys. I got into my car smiling to myself.  Not really sure why, but not really caring.

The Wheels on the Bus

So for this exercise we were given a card with a person, another with a place, and then later a postcard with a work of art on it and somehow put them together in a short story.  I got Bus Driver, Hospital, and a painting by Theo van Utrecht of four black boxes, as shown to the right.
Don't ask me how I got the story I did, I honestly couldn't tell you, but what came of those three things was The Wheels on the Bus, enjoy.


The wheels on the bus go round and round.  He hated that song. Someone was humming that song as they left his bus.  He hated that song.  If it wasn’t an extreme amount of effort to get up from his seat he may have gone ahead and strangled whoever it was.  But his back was bad, and he had gotten

into a position where it only twigged every once and a while, and his knees stuck and it was normally a long and painful process at the end of his night.  Reggie had been a CTA bus driver for the city of Chicago for 35 years.  He was drafted into the Vietnam War at the age of 19 in 1969.  At first he felt honored, a black man serving his country. He was young and stupid and thought he was doing something great.  He was very wrong. He saw things and did things in that war he never wanted to remember for the rest of his life.  He was only 25 but he had seen enough war for a lifetime.  The injures he suffered and lack of a college degree made it very difficult to find any sort of job.  It was his uncle that had taken pity on him and got him a job with the CTA.  He had always said it wasn’t where he would end up but here he was almost 40 years later close to retirement. Here he was he thought, alone, old, and grumpy.  What a life to live, if you could call the routine of motion he put himself through each day a life.  It was about 11:30 on a Sunday night and his bus was empty until he made a stop on Madison and Pulaski.  A mousy sort of girl with a large bag got on.  She looked small and too pale in the bus lights.

“Um, I’m sorry where do I…”

He looked at her, was she slow? He was about to open up his mouth and ask that very question when he caught a glimpse of her face.  It was bruised and cut old healing with new ones overlapping.  He just pointed to the little dispensary where she put in the two fifty.  She quietly apologized and shuffled to her seat.

Before Reggie could shut the door though a man came barreling though.  He was a monster of a man.  A t-shirt and jeans covered in oil and other kinds of grim, his hands clenched in fists, “Ann!” he shouted, “Ann you get off this bus right this god damn second don’t make me come get you.”

Reggie heard the woman whimper and start to cry, “Sir if you’re going to be ridin’ this transit you must pay-“

“Shut up ya geezer, I’m not gonna be ridin’ this transit, I’m getting my woman.”  He then he ran to where the small girl was sitting.  He went right up to her and grabbed her by the hair and proceeded to try and drag her out of the bus.  When she began to struggle against his grip he brought out the knife.

Reggie felt even muscle in his body come alive, muscles he didn’t even use anymore.  The sound of blood rushing in his ears drowned out any other sound and with a speed and precision he didn’t even think he was capable of he reached the man and wrapped and arm around his neck.  Reggie held on.  The man let go of the girl’s hair; he hoped she had enough sense to call 911 now. The man’s arms began to flail and hit, but Reggie had the blind strength and firstly tightened his grip. He swung the man and his head collided with a metal pole.  The large body went limp in his arms and he let go.  His chest heaved; he hadn’t felt that alive in years. For some reason there was blood, it was all over his side and dripping onto the floor.  He looked to the girl to see if she was injured but she was on the phone.

“Please, we’re at the 213 stop on Madison and Pulaski.  Please hurry a man has been stabbed.”

Reggie was confused he didn’t stab the man?  He looked down and his side.  While he was trying to incapacitate the man he must have cut him with the knife, and badly. That was funny, he thought, he didn’t feel anything. Reggie fell to his knees feeling lightheaded. Soon his face was on the bus floor, he didn’t remember lying down.  He began to shake, he felt cold. The last thing he remembered hearing was the girl’s voice, “Please hurry, he just saved my life.”

Reggie smiled.

One Last Kiss (revision)

Last week's exercise was to take something you wrote and simply revising it.  You could pick something you wrote for class or anything you've wrote in the past.  I chose my Zombie Dream post which I put up here back in June and edited it slightly for my class.  I titled it as One Last Kiss and tried to make it a little more clean cut and precise.  Hope the new version is better than the old, tell me what you think.

We had to constantly keep moving. To stand still was to die.

            Even if we found a safe place we couldn’t stay for long, and anyway it was a daydream no place stayed safe for long. 

            The safest plan was to keep moving, keep finding food, and keep finding shelter. That’s all you thought about, food, shelter, stay alive.

            We tried to stick to suburban areas.  Rural was ideal for seclusion but suburban would have the most supplies that we could carry and take along with us.  We never went near the city…for obvious reasons. 

            For the first time in a long time our group had maintained its number, the five of us, John, Nancy, Maggie (our sort of leader), her son Ted and myself.  We had been together for about 3 weeks now. A world record by everyone’s standards.

            Nancy was our newest addition.  We had found her wandering out on her own.  She had done a fairly decent job of surviving for being all by herself.  She was in her late 40’s; lean and tall with short chin length black hair that she parted down the middle. She was probably very pretty once, back when things like that mattered. 

            We had found some strength in our consistent number but their was also the beginning of tension in the group, namely between Maggie and Nancy. 

            We were in Nancy’s home suburb, which proved to be extremely helpful, as she had kept her house in running condition as much as she possibly could.  She had lots of stored water and nonperishable foods and she was willing to allow us to stay with her.

            But around this third week Maggie said it was time we packed up and move on.  She told Nancy that she was welcome to come with, it would be safer for her and the group would appreciate the company.  But Nancy refused much to Maggie chagrin.  Nancy then explained why she was still here.

            Before the outbreak of zombies began she had lived here with her husband now that their two children were grown and in college out on their own.  Her husband had been bitten in one of the first out breaks.  No one fully understood what was going on in the beginning so they had no idea how to handle it properly and as things got worse they both knew it was not going to end well.

            Her husband had forced her to lock him in the garage so that he could be no danger to her and when he became what they both knew he inevitably would she was to take his hunting rifle from their shed and end it.   But once that time came and Nancy had the rifle in her hand she found that she couldn’t do it.  Her hand shook too much, her vision blurred with tears and she simply opened the garage door from inside the house and let him go.

            She was determined not to falter when the next time came.  And she would not leave this house before she accomplished this task. 

            Maggie tried to explain to her that it was a bad idea, that he could be miles away by now, or someone else could have already taken care of him, but Nancy refused to listen.  She said she knew he was still around…she could feel it. I thought she was crazy, but Maggie seemed to give up convincing her after that.

            We waited around for another week in hopes of convincing Nancy to come with us, till one night we didn’t have to wait anymore.

            We all slept together on the living room floor, it was safer to stay together in groups, and have two take watch. But none of  us slept very soundly any more so when the garage door went up we all heard it. Maggie slowly sat up and looked around.  We all had the same thought Nancy wasn’t here.

            We moved silently through the house our weapons at the ready.  We tiptoed through the kitchen to the door that led through to the garage.

            The door to the outside was coming down now and we saw two figures in the garage.  Nancy with her rifle, and what could only be assumed was Nancy’s husband.

            We all stood in silence waiting for what was going to come next our hearts beating in our throats.  We all knew this was Nancy’s fight not ours so we waited and watched glad we didn’t have to be in her shoes.

             He began his labored uneven walk to her, arms outstretched and terrible gurgling noises coming from his unhinged jaw, eye’s milky white and dead.

            Nancy held the rifle at the ready with a sure arm tears streaking down her cheeks. 

            And then it happened. 

            She lowered the rifle when he was only arms length away. Someone make a squeaking noise in alarm but Maggie held up her arm to stop anyone moving in on the two. 

            It all happened at once. Nancy whispered something none of us heard as her eyes glazed over not seeing the monster but the man she had loved.  His hands came around her shoulders and she looked up into his face as if she were expecting a kiss, the gun discarded and forgotten on the floor.  She smiled and gave a drunken laugh and then his mouth bit deep into her cheek still holding her up right.

            Then there was a gunshot. Maggie had one arm outstretched, pistol in hand smoking. “It was never going to happen any other way.  She made her choice a long time ago.”

            Nancy had dropped to the ground along with her husband but unlike his motionless corpse, she was twitching and writhing on the ground, blood gurgling from the mouth making the most terrible noises I had ever heard in my life. A large pool of blood was beginning to form around her head and neck.

            There was another shot from the pistol and she was motionless.  The dark garage was silent.  Then Maggie said, “Gather what you can, I want to be out of here in an hour.  The sound of the gun will have attracted visitors.”  She turned away from the garage without a second glance.

            The pool of blood from Nancy’s head was still growing as I looked away.  My entire body felt numb and I began packing without really thinking about my actions.

            Our party was down to four, again.

Long Time No See

Hey!  I have not dropped off the face of the planet.  I have no concrete reason why I haven't written in a while, I'm just lazy.  But I'm back and with new stuff!  I'm now in my sophomore year of college and I'm currently taking an Intro to Creative Writing class (which I'm actually in right now and should be paying more attention to).  But we generally have a post a week of some little creative excerpt.  I'm not promising anything amazing but I'm gonna post my work from that class on here along with the exercise it came from, if maybe you'd like to try it yourself!  Hope you enjoy.