I won't tell you what the prompt was for this four-part series, just enjoy if you like. I should practice writing fiction more often, I can just never get myself to form an actual coherent story. I'm much better at snippets; therefore, I rather like how these turned out. . .
She had heard something once, about the difference between a single point and two points. The single point can have an infinite number of different lines stretching between that point and oblivion, but two points can have only one line drawn between them. Reading this was like living that principle in verbal motion; each of those words created a point, and between them, only one line--one steady line, forming an idea. Someone else’s words, and the picture was so clear, almost painfully so. She felt the familiar discomfort that comes from clarity, because it’s infinitely easier to throw one's hands in the air and say, “I don’t know”. There is too much responsibility in knowing.
Funny, really, that the abstraction of poetry could ring so clearly in her mind as she read:
I know that each one of us travels to love alone,
alone to faith and to death.
I know it. I’ve tried it. It doesn’t help.
Let me come with you.
It was no longer a matter of whether or not she would go, or even why she would go, only how. How to make someone else understand what is so clear to your own mind, to your own intellect, and how to make yourself understand how that part of you, that belongs so solely to you, how it can be carved so deeply by the hand of someone else.
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The dishes clattered as each course was passed, ceremoniously, around the oblong table. Even the baby knew better than to make a mess, or a sound. The only sound could be, then, the television. I guess we left it on for comfort, to remember the old idiom that there is always someone out there who has it worse than you. Always.
Dead words, about the dead, came from dead lips, painted the deadest kind of pink--one that could not commit to being red,
After months of investigating, police are beginning to acknowledge that the shooting may have been nothing more than a random act of violence, without the political motivations previously suspected . . .
Strange that there was any comfort in those words, anything to take our minds off of the clattering of the dishes, and the nothingness that otherwise filled the spaces devoid of metal on porcelain and crystal glass. Someone always had it better than us, because somethingess had to be better than nothingness.
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“You don’t have to sound so bitter about it!” Emery scoffed.
She scoffs.
“I’m . . . not bitter. I’m just saying, she could do things . . ” and I had to pause, because it’s one of those moments where you know you’re about to say something that shows your hand, and the only thing you can do is laugh at yourself before you get laughed at.
“I’m just saying she could do things more like I do them.” Though it took me a while to get the words out between the grins and the giggles, plastered there to cover up the disappointment in myself; the disappointment that I couldn’t see past this strange sense of competition I felt whenever I thought of her. I turn away, effectively ending the conversation, but I do so out of a different motivation, so that Emery couldn’t see the flash of, “well she started it” that was about to cross my eyes.
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“Political motivations! Everything in life is personally motivated; everything else is just a coverup! When will people ever learn that?!”
The drunken man’s declaration was unwarranted, and filled the entire bar without difficulty. The handful of people who had been watching the T.V. now seemed ashamed of being even referentially associated with the loud-mouth, and looked down instinctively. The evening was a competition, to see who could be the most silent, the most unemployed, and I sat and watched it all with interest.
The man whose eyes darted about, as though sure of encountering a bar-room swindler in any one of the dark corners; the short blonde who’d obviously had enough, surreptitiously scribbling her number on a stained napkin for the benefit of the man who was seeking no benefit; the couple with their backs to everyone, wondering what brings them here when they could be at home; and the man in the doorway, deciding whether or not to step out for another light.
It wasn’t merely a question of whether or not someone would connect the dots, drawing us all together, but who? And it might as well be me. Somehow, I could see it all for what it was: a parade of the absurdists, each of us trying to avoid the eyes of one another, not because of the television, not because of the loud-mouth, not even because of the alcohol on everyone’s breath, only because we should not be there--we could not be there. Each of us had something we were supposed to be doing, and taking on the additional burden of anyone else’s failed dreams was too great a task, so we drank alone. Even those who were with someone drank alone, because in so many ways, it was the only option, considering the current state of affairs. It had to be done.
