Far Enough Away

Laura got out two stops early. Woozy from wine, exhausted by the muckraking, she was determined to shake off the heartaching airlessness of the subway cars before she got home. She hadn’t been fully aware of the passage of time, less so of the rain. Leaves were strewn all across the sidewalk and the gutters were noisy with runoff. She took a fickle breath, wrapped her coat around her and headed down the wide avenue, circumventing the intense emotion of the train station. By the duplicitous park, kids were out riding on their skateboards, sluicing up the metal dragon like liquid despair and then crashing down again in spectacularly failed jumps. She marched past them and their gullibility to stand and examine the cheating horizon. Dark storm clouds still hung heavy and low in the unjust sky, while the towers guarding the park had just been lit. Between the evil grey of their concrete summits and the painful skyline, a strip of neon blue rimmed the curve of the earth, as if announcing the apocalypse or judgment day. Laura stopped cold just past the dragon and tried to take it all in, the sky, the wet ground, the light, the dark clouds. Suddenly she realized what was missing. There were no seagulls screeching from the towers or bobbing in the pond, no pigeons strutting across the tarmac, flying over the ramp to the park, pecking at old gum. She thought if she could stand absolutely still, unhear the vile scraping of the boards, the excrutiating wheels, the hackneyed shouts, and see nothing but the fading light, then a change, like destiny, might be possible. She held her breath and tried to heal.

  HEAL  3: to restore to original purity or integrity

Iber Ubis Sub Ubis

On the way home, Laura stopped the car outside the Stop&Shop.

“Your turn,” she said. “We need frozen peas.”

I knew I should have worn more than a pareo to the swimming hole.

This weekend Trifecta are asking us to write 33 words that will make them laugh or smile.

Dedicated to Dana.
: )

Foreclosure

   You thought you would be exhausted by now, thought the past weeks, months, years even, would leave you without the energy to be afraid. You imagined you would be drained to such an extent that when the papers finally came, when the notice was finally served, you would be able to handle it. You would be prepared. You would be ready. How wrong you were. The nerve-wracking interviews with the bank, the startled awakening to a sleep-knotted stomach, the jangling hours of insomnia were only anticipation. The underlying, ever-present dread has built up, gathered like storm clouds until you feel fear the size of a tornado grip you by the throat and shake you. And still this is only the beginning. Still to come is the day when the knock on your door will not be a bailiff delivering notice, but a sheriff to evict you onto the street.

You think: powerful beings always find a new way to dupe you, to fool you into doing something that will be the end of you. You understand how the non-entity that is you has called upon itself the wrath of this financial entity, the new century’s god, and you are powerless to do anything but bow before it, render unto it. With no patron, no backer, no governing ear, you are at a distinct disadvantage. The bank is casually balancing its books while you play monopoly.

Forget about Park Place and Marvin Gardens. The only thing giving this property substance is your name on the deed, the same name that now appears on the defaulter list at the bank, on debtor records in the courts. When you open the door of your ground-floor apartment, there is a small area enclosing the stairs in front of you, mailboxes to the right. You slam the door shut then spin the keys to lock it. You stop before the mailboxes and look at your name. You remember: Do not pass GO.

 

ANTICIPATION (noun) 3a : visualization of a future event or state b: an object or form that anticipates a later type
Your response must be between 33 and 333 words
 

Dedicada a la invencible Cristina Fallarás
 

Trouble

Grab a pool cue, chalk it with care, lean seductively. Make a spectacularly clean shot, five ball in the corner pocket. Follow that with the cue ball, any pocket. All pockets. The floor.


Trifecta says: We need you to give us 33 words back, and 2 of those words must be either "cheap flights," "sandwiched in" or "spectacularly clean." This weekend, your piece must also be non-fiction.
This weekend's challenge, being a Trifextra evenly divisible by three, will be judged by the community. Click on your favorite three posts (or up to three posts).

 

Crush

   Laura had not made it home in a very long time. Her first day, she took a long walk to the beach. She was undisturbed in her reverie, the roads empty until she began to make her way back, when she recognized the only other person out on this frigid, dull gray afternoon. Her best friend from the fifth grade, the year they learned how to sew badges onto their Girl Scout sashes, was walking straight towards her. They met up at the corner of Hatherly Road. The thing that embarrassed her most about this unexpected reunion was not that she smiled so disarmingly at a stranger, but that the bewildered look she received in return was from a man.

   She was concerned that the world might have expanded beyond her ability to govern it, that her life was being scripted by a hand that was not her own. She feared she had become as delicate as a vase that could be dashed to the floor and brushed into a pile of broken ceramic pieces awaiting the crush of some cosmic, steel-tipped boot.

 This week's    word is: CRUSH (transitive verb) 3: to reduce to particles by pounding or grinding

Also, according to Oxford Dictionary, the top 10 most frequently used nouns in English are: time, person, year, way, day, thing, man, world, life, & hand.

So I used all of them. Plus a few more.

Oh, and I tweeted "crush", too: tweet

First World Revolt

General Strike. Armed peace keepers circle around the demonstrators, leaving only one way out. A rubber bullet fired into the crowd takes a left eye. No apology is issued. She will march again.

                         wanted us to write exactly 33 words about rebellion and/or revolt.

Ester Quintana, 42 yrs old, begs to differ with Catalonia's Dept. Public Safety Minister, who said that no shots were fired.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksm7f3ey1bc&feature=player_embedded
(Use the interactive transcript for translation)

San Lorenzo

He is a mess, a mess she doesn’t want to disentangle. She’s glad he’s not her mess, and yet there is a definite magnetism about him and his mess. Because he’s so messed up, she often thinks he must be a genius. She’s dying to, but dares not ask him if he has flashes of brilliance. She says the sentence to herself, practicing the right intonation so it doesn’t sound accusatory or jealous, facetious or snarky. Hollow. Do you have flashes of brilliance? She can’t envision the situation in which that would ever sound anything other than puerile. Do people have flashes of brilliance? She can hear him guffaw, saying, People have their head up their ass.

But she can also imagine him naked - hugely naked because, unlike Alfredo, he is huge, bulky, hairy - naked and lazy and sated and watching her from under hooded eyelids. In that lethargic state he might be capable of saying something along the lines of: flashes of brilliance. Like a shooting star, when you glimpse one on the night of San Lorenzo and it gives you a thrill, and then it’s gone and you wonder if your brain was just firing sparks off behind your eyes because the back of your neck was seizing up from staring at the goddamned sky at the stars, waiting for a shooting star so you could say you saw it, marvel at the luck of having actually seen one and then not giving up for the night, saying to yourself, to the person who is sitting there with you, one more? One more for the road? So you sit into the night, shivering, your neck twisted in a way you will never be able to straighten. And then you think you might like to replicate that. Do something that might give you that same feeling, make other people stay and watch and be unable to put their chairs away and go the fuck to bed.

HOLLOW (adjective)

3

: lacking in real value, sincerity, or substance : false,meaningless <hollow promises> hollow

 and without triumph — Ernest Beaglehole>