Author: Christine

Christine http://www.mombie.com I'm a writer/storyteller/director/creativity & lifestory coach with a black belt in ITF Taekwon-do. I read voraciously and I write like my fingers are on fire. I'm the founder and Co-Chair of the Association for the Arts in Mount Pearl and I'm the current president of the St. John's Storytelling Festival. I bake a mean chocolate chip cookie.

Story-a-Day May – Magic

(I wrote this last night but forgot to post it. There will be two posts today. Also, the last line really doesn’t work so I have to let it simmer for a while until the right words bubble up.)

    At first, Joanna used her newfound magic for good. She didn’t know how long it was going to last, and she figured that she might as well spread as much fun as she could. So little old ladies had flowers appear in their hands, the writer-guy at Starbucks saw his coffee cup fill right back up, and the Mom at the grocery story discovered $30 in her pocket right after her card had been declined.

Joanna felt like someone from a fairytale. She kept checking behind her to see if she was leaving a trail of sparkles or rose petals, as would befit her magical status. She smiled so hard her face ached, there was a little hop in her step as she walked home.

She probably would have just gone on adding fun to the world around her if that guy sitting on his step hadn’t been rude. She could have handled a wolf-whistle, or even a ‘Hey, beautiful!’ – that would have been creepy but somewhat tolerable. His comment, however, was not the least bit tolerable and she wasn’t even sure anyone COULD do that, even if she had been interested. Her first thought was to wonder if his technique had worked on some hapless woman before so he was trying again. Her second thought was to wish that he’d come down with a dreadful itch in a tender spot so he’d stop dreaming up suggestions for passers-by.

It was only when he smacked at his crotch two or three times before jumping up to run into his house that she realized that she could apply her magic a lot more broadly.

She started making a list of what to wish next.

Story-a-Day May: Coming Around

(slight trigger warning for descriptions of aggressive behaviour)

       “I can’t believe he hasn’t left yet.” Her voice was soft, with a sort of apology in it. The way she was curled around the pillow at the end of the worn grey couch meant I could barely hear her. It wasn’t the first thing that I had to get her to repeat today, but this one had taken the most repetitions to be coherent. It wasn’t the volume, it was the content that my ears wouldn’t wrap around.

“Cara, I don’t want to tell you what to do…Wait, no.” I took a breath, I wanted to get this just right. “I do want to tell you what to do. You need to kick him out.”

“I’m not kicking him out. I love him! He loves me.” She was looking up at me now, the mascara smeared under her eyes made her look like a football player. “We’re just having a bit of a bad patch. I just need to try a little harder. If I could just stay on top of things, we would be fine..”

I bit the end of my tongue to keep my first words in.

“You don’t understand, Diane. He works so hard, all he wants when he comes home is some peace and quiet. And maybe to have his supper ready at a decent time. That’s not a big deal, I should be able to do that. Why can’t I just do that?” She drew in one of those ragged breaths that we all do when we want to stop crying. “He’s not asking much.”

If it was just supper and some quiet, I could maybe see some room for compromise between her and Dean, but I knew that it didn’t end there. The house was spotless because of the cleaning schedule she was supposed to keep. His shirts had to be ironed and hung a specific way or they’d be torn down and thrown in a pile to be re-ironed. Her outfits were closely inspected to ensure that she was ‘decent’ before she could go out.

It was a dangerous road she was on. So far he hadn’t hit her, he was apparently wearing her spirit down first. I felt it was coming though and this might be her last easy chance to get out. She could probably feel the danger, too, but once you get stuck trying to please a person like that, you lose all perspective. There are so many details to manage that you forget how to move your mental camera back and get a better view.

“You’re right, Cara, either of those isn’t asking too much, but you work, too. When’s the last time he made supper?”

Before she answered, I realized that I had asked the wrong question.

“Hang on. First, tell me when you get off work.”

“Six o’clock, but I don’t get home until about twenty after.” Her eyebrows were practically meeting as she tried to figure out why I was asking.

“What time does Dean finish?”

“Four-thirty. He’s home around 4:45.”

“And he doesn’t make supper because?”

“Well, he needs to relax a bit after work, take some downtime. He works so hard.”

“What time does he like to eat supper?”

“Well, we’ve compromised. He’d prefer to eat at six, but if I make sure to take out something the night before I can usually have something ready by 6:45 or

7:00. I couldn’t manage tonight though, work ran late and there was an accident on the crosstown so I was caught in traffic.”

“So, he gets almost two hours to relax after work and you get to rush in, whip supper together and get it on the table? And tonight he got super mad because he

had three hours after work to relax but you were being too chatty while preparing his supper a little later than usual?” I deliberately kept my tone neutral, just presenting the facts as I heard them.

I practically heard the switch as she pulled the camera back and got the wide view.

“Yes. That’s exactly right.” She let go of the pillow and sat up, swinging her legs down off the couch to put her feet flat on the floor. “And there was a pile of shirts on the closet floor for me to re-iron after supper, too.”

I smiled at her realization. “So, tell me Cara, when is your time to relax after work?”

She smiled back. “I guess that would be now, Diane.” She took the crumpled tissue from her fist and wiped the mascara from under her eyes. “Can you maybe pour us a glass of wine?”

When I came back in with the wine, she looked like herself again, leaning back on the couch, her feet on the coffee table. Dean hated when people did that, but it was her table, in the house that she had bought long before he was in the picture, and she was obviously remembering everything she owned. I handed her the wine and we raised our glasses and nodded to each other before taking a sip.

“I can’t believe he hasn’t left…yet.” Her eyes held a dare this time and she was grinning. “I wonder what else I need to do to get him to go?”

(60 minutes total – writing and editing)

Story-a-Day May: Revenge Fantasies

And then as he moved his hand closer to her leg where it rested on the bus seat, she pulled the pencil she was clutching out of her purse and jammed it into the fleshy space between his thumb and index finger. She felt the corners of her mouth rise as he screamed.

Maribeth would like to carry out all of the revenge fantasies she lived in her head. If she could do it without consequences. She didn’t want to go to jail or anything, she just wanted some justice, no matter how small. Her daily rounds were a death by paper cut – not one fatal blow but hundreds of tiny slashes. She was tired of the pain.

Like the man on the bus this morning who kept ‘accidentally’ touching her leg. Nothing adding up to an actual assault of course but it was no accident. She knew better and so did he, and his tilted head and smirk showed that he knew there was nothing she could do about him touching her.

Karen at the front desk let the coffee boil dry again. She always took the last cup, leaving just enough at the bottom to cling to a sliver of truth in the phrase ‘it wasn’t empty.’ Maribeth found herself soaking and washing the coffeepot for what had to be the thousandth time since she started working there.

Sherry stepped ahead of her in the lunch line, Mike had taken all the pens off her desk again, a client belched in her ear. The doctor kept her waiting while he chatted in the hallway about the hockey game, the grocery store clerk put the bread on the bottom of the bag of tinned food.

None of these things were significant in themselves but they made up the avalanche of tiny indignities that would have crushed her if she didn’t imagine her revenge.

In her mind, she was much more assertive. She wore red heels, and maybe a pair of those enormous sunglasses. She carried a great purse, she had a brain full of witty comebacks, and she took action immediately. She didn’t shuffle like she did in real life, revenge fantasy Maribeth had a bit of a strut. No one got one over on that Maribeth.

Lecherous men found themselves extracting pencils, coffee bandits got ex-laxed, line skippers and pen stealers were featured in Wanted posters on the company bulletin boards. Nasty clients got accidentally left on hold. Disrespectful doctors encountered a wall of rage in red heels, and grocery clerks found themselves in long meetings with their managers. Revenge fantasy Maribeth did not fool around.

Real-life Maribeth looked out the window on the bus and pretended nothing was happening. She washed a coffeepot, waited longer for her lunch, bought more pens, and ignored the belch. She slouched in the chair in the doctor’s office, and then went home to make sandwiches out of oddly-shaped bread.

She chewed quietly, sipped some tea and browsed online for red heels, enormous sunglasses and a great purse that she’d never buy.

 

 

(30 minutes writing, 5 minutes editing)

Story-A-Day May – Getting Home

I’m doing the Story-A-Day challenge. This is a quick story I wrote this morning, I gave myself 15m to write it and 2m to edit. The writing prompt was ‘Getting Home’     

 

Janna leaned her head back against the bus seat. It should have been more comfortable than it was, but even one of those plush bus seats offers no comfort when it is worn thin over the metal frame. She left her head there anyway, the base of her skull bouncing on the fabric covered metal. It generated a kind of muscle-y headache but it distracted her from thoughts of facing her aunt.

    She knew what Aunt Sadey would look like, wearing jeans and a grey sweatshirt – the crew neck, plastic-y kind that no one else wears anymore – leaning her left shoulder on the door frame, an unlit cigarette hanging from the fingers of her right hand, hair dragged back in a ponytail except for a scrappy little bang that would be standing up in sections from being swept off of Sadey’s forehead. And she’d be shaking her head, just a little, so Janna would know that she’d let her family down again.

“You were your mother’s pride and joy, you know. You were going to save the lot of us.” Sadey wouldn’t even have to say the words aloud, Janna knew the script. “I knows how hard it is. Sure, haven’t I had the same troubles myself?”

It was the same thing that Sadey said every time, but Janna didn’t believe it. She couldn’t imagine that grey Aunt Sadey had ever gone off excited for anything, let alone for a job. Sadey always seemed happy enough working at Mercer’s Convenience, keeping the local kids from stealing chips and beer, standing on the front steps for a smoke on her break. Janna wasn’t like Sadey though, she was excited. Every single time.

The problem was that Janna she always started with such confidence. She was always sure that this was the one that was going to pan out, this was the job that would switch them up over that line from almost having enough to finally being able to get ahead.

It never was though.

Lots of times it was close, but when it all came down to it, Janna just didn’t fit. Her clothes were a little too cheap, her make-up a bit too heavy, her language a bit too ragged. After the interview it was always completely clear, a glance in the mirror told her what she had done wrong this time. She’d love to have that insight beforehand just once, when it would be of some use.

She was just tired. She needed a break somewhere. But if that break wasn’t coming, then she needed Sadey to not be waiting at the door when she got home from trying. It was never not getting the job. It was never the pursed lips of the interviewer. Never the sad head shake from the secretary on the way out. The gut-wrenching part was Sadey, standing on the steps, knowing that Janna had let them all down again. The saddest part was never not getting the job, the saddest part was getting back home.

Yoga Again and Still

Yesterday marked 40 days of yoga for me. 20 minutes every day of downward dog, cat/cow, pigeon etc – it’s a wonder I didn’t have an allergy attack – including at least 5 minutes of savasana*/meditation. Most days were good, I looked forward to the practice, to getting on the mat and dropping into the yoga headspace. Some days, though, it was agony. I didn’t want to turn off the worries or frustrations or even to just stop what I was doing. I did not want to tune in to where I was, I wanted to stay kind of skimming along.

If I was doing just a personal challenge, I might have opened an e-book and done the poses while reading, but that’s not the yoga that Kara-Leah describes and it is not the yoga I signed up for. If I had read at the same time, I would have been just stretching, and that is not the same. It’s not even close.

Yoga requires a mental finger on the switch that lets your mind hop from thing to thing, the switch that puts your brain hamster on its wheel. You have to keep that switch held down because otherwise it flips up on its own and you find yourself jumping from idea to idea and worry to worry inside your head. When you have your finger on the switch, you notice when it has flicked up and you can flick it down again. It’s a practice, of course, so you’ll have to flip the switch down over and over until it starts holding down for longer times, but if you are just doing regular stretching instead of yoga, then it’s hard to notice that it is up at all.

For me, regular stretching and yoga feel different. I am impatient when I stretch – I just want to get it over with. Yoga gives me ease – I may wish I was done with the whole practice, but in each pose I don’t feel like I am checking it off a list. Instead, I am seeing what this pose offers me and deciding how long to hold it based on that, instead of based on boredom. It’s almost like yoga is something my brain does WITH my body, but stretching is something that my brain tells my body to do.

So, every day, for 20 minutes, my brain and my body got on the mat together, no matter how late it was, and I moved through the poses, and lay still through savasana – often counting my breaths in the effort to stay focused on my practice. And it was good. It was lovely. And it felt like a kindness to myself.

I wasn’t perfect, a couple of times I really had to force myself to get started and a few times I had to take a break in the middle to respond to the rest of my life buzzing around me. But it was an excellent way to spend the last 40 days. And I’ll be doing it again. Starting today.

*I’m not just being snooty, savasana sounds much better than ‘corpse pose’ hey?