Loving

Write about a person you love. This apparently simple instruction may be much more difficult than you think. Your greatest challenge will be to make you reader love this person, too. Healthy love is one of the more rarely written about emotions in fiction, especially smart, literary fiction.
(from prompt #28 in The 3 AM Epiphany)


Read my response:





She has a thick bruise on her arm and both my dad and I just ask her what happened to the other guy. The other guy was a middle-aged woman, and Megs laughs when she tells us we don’t want to know. Her soccer team played against some corporate office team, and this older woman started aiming for my sister.

“I wasn’t gonna let her push me around,” and she shrugs. She gets red-carded all the time. Usually for being the aggressor, and usually in defense of a teammate getting picked on. She’s quicker to fight for someone than against someone, but she’s a fighter all the same.

She’s standing in the kitchen, drinking Gatorade like she’s advertising for them. Her hair sits knotted up on her head, stray strands everywhere, and she’s got her usual “I just ran 8 miles for fun” flush. Seven years younger and three inches taller. It’s unsettling to look up to the growing up version of someone I used to carry on my hip. She’s got hips of her own, which she denies out loud (“I’m straight down like a boy”) and without speaking, wearing her soccer shorts and baggy t-shirt and standing straight up like a man. She doesn’t slouch, or bend easily. Even as a baby, she wouldn’t let herself be held. She’ll hold you, she understands people and the idea of comfort, it’s just not anything she needs herself.

She skirts around being the girliest girl, by her habits, but just barely: with blue eyes that inspire comparisons to clear skies, birds of happiness, Frank Sinatra, at first glance she's called angelic. But she uses her eyes to see, rather than be seen, and I don’t that it’s ever occurred to her that it could be the other way around.

Her boyfriend, in his Manchester United jersey, holds up her arm and she flexes. He and my dad nod at each other, mutually acknowledging whatever it is dads and boyfriends mutually acknowledge, and it’s heartbreaking to see how much this kid loves her. She makes a menacing face, flexing her bicep, and she moves from mock punching him to putting her arms around him without relaxing her muscles. She cocks back her head to look at him, and says, “You saw, right? She was being a bully.”

“She didn’t expect you to do anything, that’s for sure.”

Our littlest brother, autistic and a little bit of a drama queen, comes running through, practically knocking her boyfriend down to get to her. “Joshie! Be nice to Charlie!” Joshie is throwing all of his weight into his sobs. He has this amazing way of crying so that it sounds like demons dying, but sort of tenderly; simultaneously frightening and vulnerable. How I imagine Grendel sounds.

Megs bends, puts her hands on his shoulders, soothing and steadying him without saying anything. Sometimes when she talks, she gets nervous and talks too fast. Her words get jumbled together, and sometimes she’ll say something bland as if it were exciting. It frustrates me, hearing a story told so clumsily, and our fights revolve around this difference: my instinct for words, and hers for action. She struggles to understand my slowness, my reluctance for movement, my cautiousness and my laziness. She is quick to shove me when I talk over her, when I interrupt her stutter for a smoother, more mature interpretation of whatever she’s attempting to express. We approach problems from opposite ends. As much as this results in pulling against each other, it allows for mutual support, too. Once what I needed was money, and I didn’t know how to get it: dumb with fear, all I could do was cry, complain, telling my mother and myself that I just didn’t know what to do. Megs overheard but didn’t say anything, just left, and returned suddenly with more than I needed, handed it to me with a hug, and left again. I tried to express some fraction of the complicated emotions this provoked, and she just said, because it was all that mattered, “Well, you’re my sister.”

I keep staring at the blackened fist-shaped mark on her arm, and she notices, and turns a deeper shade of flushed. We have such different arms, the two of us, and hers so far today have defended, fought, flexed, flirted, calmed, soothed and steadied. They’ve barely rested. How can anyone look at her and not expect her to do anything?

Family Consciousness

In a short piece of prose (800 words), dip into the consciousness of a family. Rather than one or two distinct points of view, this fiction should allow us into the minds of a marriage with children--adult children or young children. This will be different from limited omniscience because a family can reasonably know a great deal about the goings-on of its various parts.

Read my response:


"stew fixings" by Muffet

Eileen managed to make chopping vegetables appear as simple, or at least as instinctive, as opening her eyes. The knife seemed to be a part of her, a third hand. Like an assassin, her comfort with sharp blades intimidates outsiders. When her eldest, Michael, brought girls over to her house, Eileen would interrogate the poor young things with constant, mostly polite inquiries, chopping carrots or celery all the while without taking her eyes of the girl. Eileen had prepared dinner nearly every evening that she’d been married, and now the years she’d spent doing so were far more than the years she’d been independent. She liked to think she set the bar high for her children; she’d wanted to instill certain values in her offspring even before she had any. She woke up at the same time every day, like a farmer. She cherished routines, and their fancy cousin, traditions. While she chopped she surveyed her home, confirming that the windows were clean, the floor recently swept, the pantry full. Only her youngest, her daughter, was home. Today being Friday, Michael was probably out at a happy hour after getting out of his last class at the community college. He wouldn’t be home till late, she must remember to keep the porch light on, to pour a little more generously her husband’s wine at dinner. Jim made no effort to give his son a break, and in fact made great effort to do the opposite. Like many sons and fathers, Eileen understood. But no point in both of them losing sleep waiting for Michael to sneak in, and no point in the whole family having their Saturday breakfast marred by Jim’s passive aggressive questions about what time Michael got home. Better she dealt with a snoring Jim and then a hung-over Jim than having everyone sulking. Ginger was getting in the habit of defending her brother. Or she was just getting better at getting involved in fights. Eight years her brother’s junior, Ginger had some vague idea that being an adult meant yelling at her father. Ginger was probably laying about upstairs now, doing her best impression of Michael.

No matter how much her mother tried to enforce them, some priorities didn't stretch across generations. Ginger preferred sleeping in, naturally, but to her mother, it made no sense. It reeked of laziness. Ginger figured she probably was, in fact, lazy, but it didn’t bother her. She used to want to cook with her mom, she used to drag her little step-stool to the kitchen counter, clapping her hands and begging for some task. For her seventh birthday party, Ginger, per her mom’s suggestion, had a baking party. Instead of a cake, Ginger and her mother made four different kinds of dough for the second-graders to roll and shape. Eileen had outdone herself, providing homemade frostings, multi-colored sugar crystals, and all the candy ever sold that could conceivably go atop a baked good. Even Michael and Dad had helped, clearing out the kitchen and dining room to make room for the oversized craft table they had made for the day. Amy, Ginger’s best friend since second grade, had brought up that party again, just they other day, remembering it completely differently than Ginger. Amy made it sound like her mother was overbearing, bossing the girls around, encouraging the children to take greater pride in decorating and shaping cookies. Amy was probably right.

Once, when Michael first got his car, he took Ginger out for a drive. He told her she didn’t have to be like Mom. He told her, eight years old, a tiny thing with too big eyes and oddly pulled back hair, so she looked like she was all skull and eyes, that he’d love her no matter what. That no matter what Mom and Dad said or did, she could count on her big bro. Ginger hadn’t said anything at the time, she probably didn’t get it, she was so young. But despite the fairly wide gap between them, they were always close. Even when she tagged along, when she was four and still had a security blanket and seemed like such a baby, and his friends came over to play Nintendo and didn’t want a baby sister with her thumb in her mouth hanging around, even then Michael couldn’t bear to shoo her away. Most of the time, at least. Not because his dad told him to look out for his little sister, nothing to do with that, it wasn’t an obligation so much as a need. If his Dad wanted to think he had anything to do with Michael being a decent sibling, fine.

But Jim knew better. He knew that in his family, he was protected. His wife looked out for him more than she need to, his son avoided him more than he needed to, and his daughter was a fighter, despite Eileen’s claim that their youngest was passive. She was a rebel in the oldest sense, his Ginger. And in that way his two girls were alike. Give her a couple of years, and Ginger would be chopping apart whatever she wanted, be it vegetables or boys hearts. Jim knew that. He wondered about himself, worried about himself, more than about his surprisingly self-sufficient family. At any rate, dinner was ready. All he had to do was eat it.