“Mmph.” Snap grunted with a grimace. If he remembered correctly, Mary Lynn was wearing a particularly enticing lace top he’d been real interested to see her get out of. He wanted to catch Joe’s eye with a wink, but he couldn’t open his own just yet. He enjoyed the breeze too much, feeling the comforting whoosh across his face and down his left arm.

“Good times.” Snap could hear Joe’s smile, could practically see the slash of his salty grin.

* * *

            When he came to again, his friend was asking him a question. “Hey, Snap. You know what I miss most? Bacon. Crispy, fatty bacon. And my mama’s cornbread. These gooks do up a mean rice, but don’t nobody beat my mama’s bacon and cornbread.”

“Mama Dee sure could cook it good.” His own mother, God bless her, couldn’t tell a skillet from a stick.

“When I get home, that’s the first thing I’m gonna’ do. Ask mama to make me some bacon and cornbread. And you know what she’d say?”

Snap grinned. Mimicking a throaty, Southern woman’s voice, he said, “Boy, you got some brass on them balls.” They both laughed. Snap tasted blood on its way up.

“And she’d do it anyway,” reminisced Joe.

“Yeah. She’d do it anyway.”

He tried to sit up, but it damn near made him pass out again. He cursed under his breath. Taking a few steadying breaths, he pushed himself up on his left elbow. Searing pain shot up from his right arm, straight to his spine, on up into the space behind his eyes. The movement caused Joe to groan.

Looking around he saw they lay in a ditch several paces wide. The lifeless faces of four other troop members greeted him. Johnny T’s eyes were still open. Snap looked away. He turned his attention instead to the gaping wound in his arm. It seeped blood from his bicep onto his sleeve and ran down to the soil below. Gingerly, he tried to move it and intense pain shot up again, making Joe cry out. That’s when he realized his maimed arm was trapped underneath something metallic pinned down by Joe’s chest. Joe, his best friend since the squashed toad incident in the third grade, lay on his left side facing him. He had no arm at all. His entire right side had been sheared off by blast burns, both his legs turned at wrong angles. Snap struggled, pulled, and strained, trying to get his arm out, but each tug aggravated his friend’s open wounds and exacerbated his pain. He lay back down, assessing the situation through dim, hazy awareness. He used the dirty fingers of his left hand to investigate the wound, nearly fainting again when he caught a glimpse of bone.

He remembered an explosion about thirty paces off. They had all turned to see five of their squad go down in a landmine blast. There was a voice in his ear, crackling, issuing commands…then all he remembered was waking up. The air was silent, save for the wind brushing the trees. He strained to hear a helicopter, voices, anything. None came.

Panic set in, and with it, came clarity of purpose. He tried to move his legs. His right ankle hurt like a mother, but he could move it a little. He didn’t think it was broken. “Joe,” he urged. “Joe. We gotta’ get outta’ here.”

“Tour’s almost over,” came his friend’s muffled voice. “Two more months. We can hang in two more months.”

He frowned at his friend. By the looks of it, he wasn’t gonna’ last another two hours. He’d already lost too much blood. Joe’s voice cracked and groaned with every word yet he seemed not to have any idea of the state he was in. Snap looked at his own arm. Gruesome, but they could fix it if he just got help. There was a camp not three miles away, if he remembered right. But every move he made only caused Joe more pain.

Life flowed out of Joe, seeping into the ground like liquid rust. The color of his face turned unnatural.

Snap felt the beginnings of fever. If he was going to make it, he had to move fast. But he couldn’t, not with Joe on top of him. Pushing him off to free his arm would surely kill him, pain the last thing he would know as he went.

A surge of anger coursed through him. He pounded the earth repeatedly with his one good fist.

“Snap?”

He gritted his teeth. He ached to yell and scream. The only thing preventing him was the desire not to disturb his friend. “Yeah,” he said, at length.

“I love you, man. I just…you’re my best friend.”

A chasm opened up beneath him and he fell into flames. That was how Snap felt to hear those words. He bit his cheek, willing himself not to lose it. “Love you too, man.”

Renewed pain coursed through his arm. A sense of urgency filled him; his instincts for self-preservation had woken up. He had to move – and soon – or he, too, would die.

“Snap?” said Joe. This time his voice had grown undeniably weak; it was almost inaudible. “I still owe you a bottle of whiskey.”

Snap heaved a breath, finally gaining the courage to look at the mess of his friend’s body. He had three options. One, he could send Joe into a final spasm of pain and death as he wrenched himself free. Two, he could lay back down and die with him. Tempting. That option was tempting. Or three, he could reach over and quietly end his friend’s misery and life, free himself, and run for help.

They looked at each other in the eye, though Snap couldn’t tell that Joe saw much of anything at all. He could have been staring at a pile of bricks for all the expression left in his face. He thought of how many times they must have looked at each other, knowing just what the other was thinking without saying a word.

“You don’t owe me nothing, man. Not a goddamn thing.”

He rolled over closer to the only person he’d loved as a brother, and passed his hand over Joe’s eyes to close them. With his good arm, he reached across his friend, enveloping him in a final embrace.

This piece is a product of a Bigger Picture Blogs Writing Circle, where writers come together virtually to share their writing. In each Writing Circle, three to five writers are called together by a moderator who sets a prompt. Each person writes in response to the prompt and shares it online via a Skype conference call, wherein the other writers listen to their words, reflect on them, and offer praise, encouragement, constructive criticism and feedback to help us stretch and grow. The prompt for this Writing Circle was “Embrace,” in the genre of Fiction/Short Story, with a 1000-word limit.

linking up with just write

The bell twinkled like a dance of faerie lights as she pushed open the door to the gelaterie, the cool shop interior a striking contrast against the warm night air. Like the display of white doves hanging outside the door, and hand-written menu, the bell imparted an inviting welcome. Mrs. Shu, the gelaterie’s owner, had a keen eye for such details. Elizabeth supposed that was why she preferred this little shop to the larger market down the street.

Mrs. Shu grinned in greeting and shuffled in padded slippers toward the front. “Hello, Miss Keane,” she said. She had been speaking English for more years than Elizabeth had lived, but she had never been able to pronounce ‘Mrs.’ properly. “How are you today? Is Charlie feeling better?”

“Oh. Yes, Mrs. Shu. He got over that nasty flu and was back in school this morning.”

The old woman nodded, warming a metal ice cream scoop in an ancient painted bowl – cobalt blue, with a delicate gold trim and rust red roses – full of heated water.

“How is Mr. Shu?” asked Elizabeth, hitching her mustard yellow bag up her shoulder. It was perpetually slipping off.

“Oh, same-same. His back, you know. It ails him.” She said this every day, as if to complain, but Elizabeth knew the comfort of the predictable. Mrs. Shu could not be unhappy or overly worried; her wrinkles were all in the right places, her silver-gray bun always loose, yet neat.

She pulled out three paper cups, lined them up on the counter, and opened the gelato case. “Let me see. Coconut lime, hazelnut, and Oreo again?”

Elizabeth laughed as she always did. Mrs. Shu knew her family’s preferences: sweet-tart for her husband, John, rich chocolate decadence for herself, and the sweet crunchy chocolate for their son, Charlie. She smiled; they had always shared a fondness for chocolate, she and him. Only John preferred fruit flavors.

But as she watched Mrs. Shu scoop a small round ball of each flavor into each of the three cups, her smile faded and the lump in her throat got heavier, hotter, harder. She shifted to the pastry case, staring hard at the custard berry tarts and samples of mousse.

“Here you go, sweetie.” Mrs. Shu held up the bag to indicate her order was ready.

She stood rooted to the spot. She could not make herself pay and leave as always.

“You okay, Miss Keane?”

She shook her head and offered a feeble laugh. “Oh yes, I’m fine,” she managed, knowing her eyes must look shocked and glassy. “Actually, can I get some of this berry tart? And the opera cake? And maybe some of that almond one.” Stop, she told herself. Just stop it. “And the black forest,” she added, unable to keep her mouth shut.

Mrs. Shu raised an eyebrow. Never in four years had Mrs. Keane ever ordered anything but the gelato. “Of course,” she said, brightly, ever the professional. But Elizabeth saw the surprised concern on her face.

“Oh, it’s just that we’ll have guests in the morning,” she explained, nervousness coating her voice.

Mrs. Shu lined a pastry case and selected the appropriate tongs. “On a Wednesday?”

“Um, yes,” she laughed. “It’s for Charlie. It’s a school thing. I mean – it’s his friend from school. We’re meeting his family. We invited them over. To meet them.” She looked at the large number of pastries she had ordered. “There are rather a lot of them. Brothers and sisters…they’re all coming. So we can take them to school together afterward, you see?” Why couldn’t she stop talking?

Mrs. Shu nodded. She smiled as she rang up the order, but Elizabeth knew something had shifted. The air in the gelaterie was no longer cool. The sight of the sweets on display turned her stomach sour.

She paid with exact change. “Thank you, Miss Keane. I see you tomorrow,” said Mrs. Shu, as polite and friendly as ever.

“Yes, yes, thank you. I’ll see you tomorrow.” Elizabeth nodded and bowed her way out of the shop, armed with the large box of pastries and scoops of ice cream.

She strode away from the shop as fast as she could, but suddenly it was impossible to breathe. Her chest began to heave and her hands grew sweaty and trembled, threatening to drop everything she held. Her legs lost their strength and it was the most she could do to turn the corner out of the sight of the ice cream shop.

She was just two blocks away from her apartment, but she couldn’t make it. She couldn’t get there because she knew when she walked through her front door, there would be no Mr. Keane. There would be no Charlie. There would be no lights on in the living room and no pasta simmering on the stove, with a husband and child waiting to greet her and tell her about their day. There would just be emptiness. An empty, dark gaping hole of an apartment with sympathy cards on the table instead of dinner plates, unanswered messages from her sister instead of kisses from John, and faded flowers in murky vases and frozen casseroles from the ladies at church, instead of Charlie’s untied shoes littering the floor and the free-wheeling croon of the Snow Patrol album John played when she wasn’t home so she couldn’t lovingly mock him.

There would just be incomprehensible nothingness, as there had been for the three weeks since the car accident that took everything away.

She spied a trash bin down the street by a few meters and dropped the whole sorry lot of ice cream and pastries into it. She stood over the mess, staring down at the gelato melting, unsure why she had been unable to tell Mrs. Shu the truth.

Perhaps she would tell her tomorrow.

She trudged the rest of the way home. But with every step away from coconut lime and hazelnut and Oreo, and every step closer to her black hole flat, she knew with increasing certainty that she would not tell Mrs. Shu the truth tomorrow. Or the day after. She would not visit Mrs. Shu’s gelaterie again.

– shared with Just Write

And this week, I realize I haven’t been approaching my writing with much intention lately. Since I finished writing the draft of my novel, it’s been harder to get immersed in my writing. (Editing is a very different kind of beast.) I write almost every day: blog posts, more blog posts, timed writings, presentations, emails, and comments, and notes in the margins. Almost every day I’m creating something. But I find I’ve had too many days…too many weeks!…where I’ve just shoved my writing into the crooks and crevices between point A and point B.

That’s good – to an extent. I’m writing, even when it’s hard and I have to eke the words onto the page, like tears when you’re too defeated to cry. But it has been too long since I really engaged with my own words or since I tried to see if I have something to say other than just something.

So this Saturday, I’m taking a writer’s retreat. I’m shutting off the computer, logging off from the internet, and unplugging to go play with words. I’ll bounce around from cafe to park to home, wherever I need to be to say welcome to Miss Muse. I’m officially inviting her on a date.

Do I have chores to do? Yes. Things on the to-do list? Of course. Deadlines approaching? Yeah…don’t remind me. Because this is at least as important as that, and I know I’ll regret it if I relegate myself to writing only in the cracks.

Right then. Tally ho!

“Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take,
but by the moments that take our breath away.” 
- Author Unknown

What moments stole your breath away this week? 

Each Thursday, we come together to celebrate living life with intention by capturing a glimmer of the bigger picture through a simple moment. Have you found yourself in such a moment lately? Share it with us! 

Before anyone freaks out, note: What follows is NOT a true story! It’s just a response to the prompt, and if anything, suggests I’m reading too much Jhumpa Lahiri.

The silverware clanged rather than clinked against the plate, the silence between us heavier than the lamb roasts in our stomachs. He sipped his beer and looked off to the side patio, pretending to watch the crowd. I kept my eyes on my plate, loath to look up and reveal their redness.

The words I wanted to say turned my mouth to concrete. The words he didn’t say burned in my ears.

“Do you want dessert?” he asked after we cleared our plates.

I said yes, but what I really wanted was not cheesecake or ice cream; it was bought time.

“Let’s get ice cream. Coconut or pistachio?”

By “pistachio,” I meant recognition.

He ordered two scoops and, catching the waitress just as she was turning away, asked me if I wanted coffee.

“A cappuccino,” I said. But an apology was what I meant.

Was he sorry or too proud? Was he, too, longing to say something, or just waiting for me? Or was he not waiting for anything at all?

With each bite of ice cream, I dove into sorrow. Each sip of coffee was another hurt swallowed.

“Good?” he asked, like it was any other dinner, any other night. “Good,” I agreed, sounding as if I meant it.

He asked for the bill. I smiled at the waitress when she brought back the change.

He pushed back his chair and reached for his jacket. “We done?”

This time, when I said yes, I meant it.

- also linking up with just write

I had a lot of fun putting together my family tree. Here it is:

What’s yours? Link it up and join in here!

An open landscape stretches out to the horizon line, the simple planes of view marred only by a crossroads and no signs. On an otherwise still day, a sudden shift in the air and temperature marks change, a disturbance, a sign to perk up one’s ears and pay attention because we cannot count on continuity.

I notice a tree beside me is bending with the gale. Dust fills my nose, desiccating the airways. Loose pebbles and debris clatter across the road, propelled by the force. I hug my jacket tighter.

I feel cold, though it is not cold.

And yet, I ignore the gale. One foot steadfast in front of the other, I push forward on the same trajectory. I follow the path I’m on, though I know the path of least resistance lies another way.

I keep marching towards the horizon beyond the horizon line – towards the secrets I know are there but just can’t see. I know new vistas are waiting.

I do not make that left turn. I keep going forward, because something tells me that the harder path is the higher path, and sometimes you learn more by staying than by leaving.

I might have been in Wonderland except I didn’t know until I got swallowed up by the rabbit hole. From sunshine and daisies, I fell off the edge of the earth down into a dark, cramped, musty hallway, following the music of a trusted voice, hoping it wouldn’t lead me astray. But stray it did, ‘til I found myself inching further on down that hallway, past the broken lights and misplaced candles, down deep to an open door. The voice called to me, to peek inside where I didn’t know I should not look. In loyalty and trust, I followed the voice and looked through that door, where inside, instead of one, I saw two.

I didn’t want to believe at first.

“No, don’t,” I wanted to say. I wanted to ask, “Don’t you mean this other door instead?”

But she was already inside with this other. They had already crossed a threshold, and all I could do was watch and wait.

The two, they stood there, all alone in this big, wide room, a space only they two could share. They did not touch, but I know you don’t have to touch to feel, and the air, it got so heavy it hurt.

In the end, they did not touch. They did not touch, and she walked herself right out through the front door, not the back. But still I was not unaffected. It is such a heavy weight, this weight of a sin not yet committed. It’s such a heavy weight, to witness a wrong waiting to be. I understood how it could happen and did not judge for a feeling, but I felt the shadow of pain of the one who wasn’t there, the one who should have been in the room instead, and I felt the inky wash of a feeling I could not name. I felt I had been witness to something awful, like the death of a star, something that didn’t even allow the satisfaction of blame. I’d become privy to a secret I should not know.

I clambered back out of the deep, dark hole, shaken and uncertain. I wanted to cling tight to my other half, to call him close to me, terrified of a hole that suddenly gaped. I think he must have felt it too, for without my speaking or even looking, he clung to me first, even though he hadn’t seen where I’d just been.

This piece came from a Bigger Picture Blogs Writing Circle. It was written in response to the prompt “deep/depth,” received feedback from other writers and edited to create this final piece. If you’d like an opportunity to try out your writing and get some feedback in an open, welcoming, supportive and constructive forum, join us in our next Writing Circle. Spaces are filling up fast! See here for details.

This is why witness testimony is so problematic. This is why a year after 9-11, people remember being in an entirely different place when it happened than they said they were just after the event.

This makes me think about the ethics involved. Do we make our memories, or do they make us? Aren’t we all at least a little bit shaped by not only our experiences, but how we remember them? If we take that memory away…what does it do to who we are?

And then it makes me think about the fact that we’re erasing bits of truth out of our mind anyway. That our memories aren’t exactly the factual representations we like to think we are. I itch to write a story about this, to process in my own mind what this looks like and does…but I don’t know how to write anything that isn’t Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

But the question I can’t seem to escape is this: What if every time you remembered your most cherished memory, a little piece of it changed, until what you remember is no longer the memory at all, but just a fiction constructed by your brain?

What if your most important memories, by virtue of being so important, eventually became lies?

* The article was in Wired. If you’re interested to find out more, you can read it here.

Thunk, thunk, thunk.

I stretch upwards and swing my knee, then body, with dancer-like control, down into a low pigeon pose. Breathing in, I straighten my spine, breathing out, I fold forward, touching my nose to my knee.

Ga-THUNK, ga-thunk, ga-thunk.

I ignore the din of the rubber ball and pretend not to notice the press of little paws up the back of my leg as I count for a minute’s hold. When the minute is up, I rise out of my fold…

…and get stuck under the little furry body standing over my leg.

Thunkity, thunk-thunk goes the black rubber ball.

“I know you don’t understand this, baby girl, but mama can’t play with you just now. Give me 5 more minutes, okay Dottles?”

Baby girl does not get it.

I lay down and move into a side stretch, and there she is, lying down alongside my back. I switch to upward-facing dog and all 23 pounds of my upward-facing dog plops down on my legs. I try happy baby pose, and thunk! she drops the rubber ball on my crotch. (Given its predictability, I mighta’ had that one coming.)

I give up, trying desperately to finish in one last restful pose, and there is Dot nudging the ball in my hands, up my side, between my legs, and over my chest until finally I can’t help it.

I laugh out loud, in a great big belly laugh. Then I get up and go toss her the ball.

I might not have gotten my shavasana, but it’s sure hard not to find joy in life when there’s a little cuddly buddy trying to get you to play.

I check for bruises. I run my fingers over the flesh, feeling for softness, for weight, for weakness, for resistance. I look for the place that gives under the gentle pressure; I watch for the telltale yellowing or brown. But my mind is on other things. The exploration is more ritual than studied operation; a habit wherein I can lose myself, as I fondle the Fujis and manhandle the Galas.

I discard the sad and the sour, the aged and all those too green, keeping only what will last or reveal itself in perfect time. I act like I know what I’m doing, as if I can do more than hazard a guess at the character inside.

I like the weight of the bag in my hand, and yet I reach for one more. It has a pretty scarlet and lime color, but a little too much give. It is probably too soft, too done, and even a little too small. I put it back and turn to leave, but as I rest it upon the others, it slips and rolls off, falling with a muted thud on the floor. I pick it up and run my thumb over the new bruise. I reach to put it back on the pile, hesitate, then slip it into my bag.

I pay in cash and carry the bag home. In the kitchen, I place all the apples in a basket, careful to place the last one where it won’t get further bruised. I tell myself I’ll pick that one up first, to eat before it goes to waste. But the truth is, I avoid it until it is the last apple in the basket, too soft and too done to eat anymore. And there is only an echo of regret by the time I finally throw it away.

This free write was done in response to the prompt “Write about picking fruit” from Judy Reeves’ A Writer’s Book of Days.

Need to write? Then just write and join in at Heather’s!