Yellow Stickies

I have a whole folder of stories I wrote in my I’m Going to Be an Author days.   My brother gave me the idea of publishing a few of my favorites here on Older Eyes.  This light-hearted romance is perhaps my favorite.

The first one flutters like a wounded yellow butterfly from the medicine cabinet door and lands face down at the edge of the sink.   I eye it unenthusiastically as I scrape the lather from my cheek, debating whether or not to nudge it into the bowl, letting the steaming water and the dollops of shaving cream wash away whatever ink is hidden on the other side.   Ten-to-one, it says paint the hallway before Thanksgiving, or maybe clean the garage.   Why the hell can’t she just ask instead of leaving these God-damned notes everywhere?   I’ve heard her answer often enough to play it back in my head without asking.

“If I just ask, you’ll forget, and I’ll have to ask again.   Then, you’ll say I’m nagging!”

Shit, I think as I dry my jowls with the pink floral towel taken from an ornate brass ring next to me.   If she finds the towel crumpled next to the sink, she’ll say, How many times do I have to ask you not to use the decorator towels?    I try to fold it into a neat rectangle over the ring the way she does, with the embroidered primrose perfectly centered, but I know I’m caught.   With a sigh, I pick up the yellow Post-It and stick it back on the corner of the mirror, but without my glasses, the words are a blur.   Her meticulous block printing comes into focus when I step back… I am just where I’m meant to be in my life !!!!   The four emphatic exclamation points float like red balloons beneath the words.   “Oh, oh,” I say to myself, “she’s wandering the self-help section of Barnes and Noble again.”

Friday Favorites 5/17/2013

It was bound to happen.  A Friday would come along when I’d sit at my keyboard, searching for a Friday Favorite and find the hopper empty.   After all, I’ve been doing this for a long time.   Looking at my WordPress dashboard, there have been 142 Friday Favorites.   There have been music (lots of music), books, animals and places.  There have been favorite numbers, ice cream flavors and colors.  But today, nothing seemed to be leaping from the almost sixty-nine years of memories that are my life.  Jack London has said, You can’t wait for inspiration.  You have to go after it with a club.  So, I picked up my club, donned my night vision goggles and wandered off into those cobwebbed back rooms of my brain.   It took a while but what I found was perhaps my favorite day as a writer.

Nightmares

Did you have nightmares when you were a kid?  I did.   According to WebMD, nightmares are most common in preschoolers (children aged 3-6 years) because this is the age at which normal fears develop and a child’s imagination is very active.  Nightmares may involve disturbing themes, images, or figures such as monsters, ghosts, animals, or bad people.  Yep, I had those.   How about recurring nightmares?  I had those, too. There was the Aquaboo Elephant, a miniature elephant with electric eyes who hid behind my bedroom door and woke me long after my parents went to bed with its signature call … aquaboo, aquaboo, aquaboo.  Sounds funny now, but some nights I was afraid to sleep for fear of those eerie eyes.  Are you still with me?  How about nightmares that occur exactly once a year on exactly the same day, the day your creepy Uncle Will died?   Nightmares that leave a memento hanging from your bedpost, the scariest dog tags in history?   Remembering those nights still quickens my pulse and ices my blood, even though the dreams stopped fifteen years ago.

Sticky Situation

Tuesday, Muri and I are leaving early to drive to Arizona for Thanksgiving. We are WAY over due for a grandkid fix.   So, I don’t think I’ll have time to post for Writing Wednesday.   No, that’s not such a Sticky Situation.   The title is a clever play on words designed to draw you in … the real title is Yellow Stickies, and it is the first few pages of a short story I wrote some years ago.   Yes, unpublished but my favorite.   I’m hoping that by posting the beginning, I can seduce you into reading the rest, which is on my fiction blog, Through Older Eyes, here.  What’s that?   Oh, yeah … I meant induce.  If you decide to read on, when you get to Through Older Eyes, just scroll down until you see START –>.

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The first one flutters like a wounded yellow butterfly from the medicine cabinet door and lands face down at the edge of the sink.   I eye it unenthusiastically as I scrape the lather from my cheek, debating whether or not to nudge it into the bowl, letting the steaming water and the dollops of shaving cream wash away whatever ink is hidden on the other side.   Ten-to-one, it says paint the hallway before Thanksgiving, or maybe clean the garage.   Why the hell can’t she just ask instead of leaving these God-damned notes everywhere?   I’ve heard her answer often enough to play it back in my head without asking.