Story A Day 2014

I’m writing a story every day in May 2014. Some will be good, some will be awful, all of them will be fun to write. :)

Story-A-Day May – Stairs

        The whole place was like a horror movie or like something from Doctor Who. Furniture covered with sheets, streaky windows, tables furry with dust. Creaky sounds like something your over-enthusiastic neighbours would play on Hallowe’en. Mouse tracks. Wind whistling through the broken window upstairs.

The stairs.

The stairs were the worst. The whole house gave her the creeps but somehow the stairs were creepier than everything else. There was something so vulnerable about being in that space, like it would be easy to push someone down or to sneak behind them while they were going up. She even found stairs in her own house a bit off-putting so it was no wonder that the stairs here were even more distressing.

They were ordinary stairs, wooden, with a carpet trailing up the middle. In a different age, there would have been a runner of that knobbly plastic covering it, but instead, there were metal rods at the juncture where the riser met the step below. They rattled with each step she took and the sound did nothing to make her less creeped out. Neither did the cloud of dust that rose with each footfall. It had to have been years since anyone had taken a vacuum to the place, and she had no intention of being the one to do so.

If she had any sense she wouldn’t be here at all but she had to get her purse back. Of course, if she had any sense she wouldn’t have come out to the haunted house with Dana and the rest of the cheerleaders, and she probably would have left when Bill and the rest of the team showed up. And if she had any sense, she would never have given Bill a hard time about not wanting to go inside. And she definitely would not have clucked like a chicken when he refused.

If she had done any of those things, he might not have picked up her purse and flung it through the upstairs window. And if she hadn’t made such a big deal about him being a chicken, then he might have cut her some slack, but she hadn’t and he didn’t and now she was trudging up the dusty steps, eating her heart every time it shot up into her throat.

Every step took an eternity, she was a living example of slow motion, the sound of her own breath rattled in her ears, she worried about peeing in her new GAP jeans. She wasn’t backing down though, she wasn’t giving Bill the satisfaction of being able to call her a chicken. And if that wasn’t motivation enough, her car keys were in that purse and it was a long, long walk to her house. Especially if she had to walk it alone.

The room housing her purse was at the front of the house, to the right at the top of the stairs. Maybe 25 feet away. She could do this. She could totally do this.

*****

The purse was sitting on the floor in the middle of the room, light streaming in from moon outside highlighted the clear spot in the dust where it had landed. She bent down to pick it up. A shadow crossed in front of the window.

They could hear her scream from outside.

Story-A-Day – Compromise

Once I heard the door close behind him that morning, I stood and pulled the spread tight across the span of the bed. I fluffed the pillows and pressed them against the headboard. I took off the red silk nightgown and laid that in the centre, placing the gold necklace on top. I pulled the smallest suitcase down off the third closet shelf. I didn’t know if everything would fit, but that’s the case that I had bought when I went to France with Mom so it seemed fitting to take it.

I went through everything on my side of the closet. Short skirts on the bed, flowing skirts in the suitcase. Low cut shirts on the bed, crew neck in the suitcase. Silver jewelry in the suitcase, gold on the bed.

Everyone says that relationships involve compromise, but I’ve always hated that word. Compromise is one of the words they use in the military when something has gone wrong – their position has been compromised. In space shows, things always take a turn when the hull gets compromised. Our hull didn’t really start with integrity, so compromising it wasn’t hard. It was a matter of one small bad decision after another. Compromise – when neither party gets what they wanted.

Ethan wanted a quiet wife, a helper, someone whose ambition would be about improving his position in life. I wanted a life of my own with a husband who was behind me all the way. We both acted as if we had married the the person we had meant to. I told the world about every small thing he did to support my ambitions, selling the story of a man who was behind me all the way. He bought things for the wife he wished he had – showy clothes to accentuate a figure I didn’t possess, expensive jewelry, fancy cooking implements, tennis lessons, and wine tasting tickets. A compromise, with neither of us getting anything we wanted.

I took books down off the shelves, piling the romances, the fitness books, the cookbooks on the bed, placing the few mystery novels and career guides in the suitcase. I took down the drawings from my brother’s kids, and left the showy art prints on the walls. I took the carved artifacts from my solo trips, and left the elaborate trinkets from our honeymoon. I dragged all the expensive shoes out from the closet floor and threw them on the pile on the bed, my sneakers and hiking boots went in the suitcase. I dressed in my one remaining comfortable pair of jeans and threw on a hooded sweater over my t-shirt and struggled to zip the suitcase. I paused in the doorway and looked at everything remaining in the room, then down at the case full of my treasures. I was okay.

I pulled off my rings and laid them on the pile of unwanted things.

This was not a compromise, this was at least one person being brave enough to get what she wanted.

Story-A-Day May – Three for Dinner?

(My site was down last night due to a server error, so two posts today!)

        They thought that she didn’t know but she had seen it in their eyes long before they had acknowledged it. She could have predicted the whole tawdry thing. The pretense at trying to avoid each other, the attempts not to touch, the plan to keep it platonic, the ‘accidental’ progression, the one thing leading to another. It would have been funny if it weren’t so sad. Sad and painful.

It was painful for her anyway, but she was pretty sure that she was only a minor player in the drama that they were living. She was the wife who didn’t understand, or perhaps she was cast as a woman too involved with her children, or maybe one who had ‘let herself go’. She recognized that they had to choose to see her that way so they could live with themselves. If she were the misunderstood one then their story wouldn’t work, they would be the bad ones. If she was the problem then Zach’s behaviour made sense, no one would fault him for it. A man whose wife doesn’t understand him must naturally seek comfort elsewhere. And if that comfort is to be found with her good friend, the person she had confided in when she first felt the tendrils of Zach’s heart shrink away from hers, then who could blame him. It was logical that he would turn to someone already close to him. There was no version of this in which she was not the problem, in which their greed and selfishness was the issue. There was no alternate scenario in which Zach was behaving immaturely and got pissed off when he was called out on it. That version didn’t play out in their world.

She assumed she was supposed to sit by and let the whole thing run its course, she was supposed to just carry on as if she didn’t know and then, when he tearfully confessed after it had ended, she was supposed to forgive and forget. She imagined that she might be able to forgive, but she would never, ever forget, and that is what would chew at her from the inside. There was no way she would be able to live like that, carrying on blissfully as if nothing had every gone wrong. As if she had never been wronged.

That’s why she had planned this dinner. They thought that it was another example of her willful ignorance of their behaviour, but it was anything but.

She set the table with flowers, took out the good china and dressed in his favourite outfit. She had made her specialty, fresh bread, a green salad, slow cooked chili – extra hot, and a lemon meringue pie. She had painted in the inside of each dish, plate and cup with a solution made with rat poison. She would sit them both down, then suddenly remember an urgent errand in town before rushing off in the car that he and Ginny had arrived in. Then, with her gone, they would share their last lovers’ meal.

 

Story-A-Day: Goddesses

Hathor didn’t understand why she couldn’t attract men the way she used to.

There was a time, only a few short years ago, when she could attract any man of any age with just a glance, she was positively hypnotic. Even infant boys would stare and reach out towards her. She could command attention from older gents chatting in the park, from teenaged boys loitering outside of schools, from fathers chasing toddlers through the supermarket. She was a living example of a pin-up girl, full of va-voom and intoxicating charm, with curves in all the places that a man dreamed of putting his hands.

That time was past though. She wasn’t sure why or how it happened. And she couldn’t even pinpoint when. She still had the charm and the va-voom, she was still intoxicating – or at least that’s what the mirror told her. Sure, her university classes (even timeless goddesses could get bored, you know) told her she wasn’t supposed to need a man’s approval to make her way in the world. Her life coach told her that she needed to keep the focus on things she could control. Her hairdresser, manicurist and her massage therapist all told her that she was a great looking woman and that the problem was just that men were ridiculous.

She couldn’t argue with any of it. She didn’t really need approval – but she did like it. She did want to focus on the things she could control – even men weren’t among the things she could control any more. And her beauty team were totally right -men were ridiculous.

Ridiculous didn’t begin to cover it, really. The men would all be much happier if they followed her around like ducklings the way they used to. What could possibly be bad about feeling like they were in love with her and that they were the most important creatures on earth. Sure, if you stopped to think about it, every man couldn’t be the most important creature on earth, that didn’t make sense, but she used to make them feel as if each of them were. It didn’t make sense that that had lost its appeal.

She looked the same, she acted the same, she smelled the same, she smiled the same. The problem had to be the men. It was enough to make her wish that she hadn’t outlived all the people of her homeland. A goddess with no worshipers was hardly a goddess at all, she might as well be an ordinary woman – at least then she could have had an ordinary husband and children.

Hathor sighed and swung her legs out of the car. Her red stilettos had barely touched the pavement when she heard a long, low whistle from the car behind. She stood up and smoothed her skirt, preening a little before she turned to see her admirer. The woman sitting behind the wheel of the lipstick-red Miata convertible had her sunglasses on top of her head, and was grinning in a way Hathor hadn’t seen in a while.

This was something she hadn’t considered. Perhaps all was not lost.

Story-A-Day May: One Potato

(I’m sleepy today and I’m reluctant to write, so I decided to just pick something silly to start with. Potatoes are silly, yes?)

Day 1 – I put the potato on his doorstep as I was instructed. A single potato, small enough to sit in the palm of my hand. I’m not sure why I was supposed to put it there, right in the middle of the step, exactly in the center of the doormat, but I was told it was important so I did it. I slouched in the front seat of my car across the street and watched him come out to grab the paper out of the mailbox and go back in. I thought he hadn’t noticed the potato but as soon as the door closed, it opened again and he stuck his head out and slowly looked down. He shook his head as if trying to clear his vision. The potato didn’t disappear, so he reached down, picked it up and slid it into the pocket of his bathrobe.

Day 2 – Carrots. That was my next mission. I laid them in the center of his mat and strolled away. I went all the way to the end of his street, turned around and walked back past his house just as he was coming out for the paper again. He looked right at the mat this time, sighed, and then picked up the vegetables.

Day 3 – Turnip and Onions. They were very roll-y so it was hard to keep them parked dead-center, but eventually I stood the turnip on its flat top and braced the onion against it. I didn’t want him to notice me so I didn’t stick around to watch him retrieve them.

Day 4 – Beef. I was concerned about the safety of putting meat out on someone’s step to await discovery, so I put the beef in ice in a pot – even though that wasn’t included in my instructions. I had no need to worry though, he was quick to come out to discover it. Too quick really, I was only part of the way down his driveway. I tried to look nonchalant, but he didn’t buy it.

‘Hey!’ His shout made me stand still. ‘Tell Mom that I’m not stewing, these things take time. Ally only left two weeks ago.’

I nodded and kept walking. I wasn’t sure if Marion would be happy that her elaborate message had been received or if she’d be annoyed that I’d been caught. Either way, she was doing her own dirty work next time – even if she was away on vacation.