Tiptoe Writes!

“Are you lost?”

The voice, boyish and barely inflected, came from beneath a braided sun hat, a kasa, standing four feet below her in the neighboring rice field. And it was in English– regular, gentle English, with a trace of an Australian accent. Jane jumped back.

The stranger was holding rice plants in each fist. He tilted his head back, and she could see the glimmer of a smile beneath the shadow cast by the kasa. Her eyes wandered further south and took in the loose-fitting cotton shirt and baggy pants, rolled up almost to his knees and yet still floating on the surface of the water that surrounded the evenly spaced spikes of green. “Are you lost?” he repeated. “Eigo o hanashimasu ka?“

“H…hanasu kedo,” she stuttered. Strange how it was easier to find her tongue in a foreign language than in her own. “I’m, I’m looking for the high school,” she said. “Kurimoto Kohkoh.“

He waded through the water and laid the plants down on the edge of the irrigation gutter. Then, bracing strong arms on the concrete blocks, launched himself over the small stream and onto the highway’s shoulder to stand face-to-face with her.

Jane’s knees went a little weak. It was such a natural gesture, so fluid and relaxed, all a single motion. Yet to summon the strength to make such a leap he must be built like a tiger. She let her gaze flicker to his hands, huge and callused, and the tanned skin of his arms, just as tight and muscled as she’d expected. And then he reached up, again in a gesture both larger than life and utterly effortless, and pulled off his kasa, revealing a tuft of wild, wheat-colored hair.

Squinty eyes blinked blue at her. He was young, and his pale face was out of place above the sun-tanned arms, as though it had been dropped atop the wrong body. He stretched out a hand. “You see the gas station on that corner?” he said, and Jane nodded, although she couldn’t turn her head to actually look. He was too interesting to turn away from. “Take a right there and keep walking. You’ll pass a bus stop on the corner, Kurimoto kohkoh-mae. Go up that side street to the top of the hill, and on the other side you’ll see the high school.”

“Oh my God, sounds like a trek,” Jane sighed, ruffling through her short-cropped hair with the fingers of one lean hand.

“In this weather, yeah,” the man agreed. “You picked a weird time of year to show up.”

“I guess,” she said. “I didn’t really think about when I was getting here, I just–”

“Got here, right?” He grinned as though he’d gone through the same thought process himself. Jane wondered if he had. Was he as enamored of the country as she had been? But his Japanese was so distressingly pedestrian– he spoke like he’d memorized it all from a phrasebook. She sort of wanted to beat him about the head for making foreigners look bad.

Then God got her for being self-righteous. An elderly farmer wearing an identical outfit was wading through the rows of rice and waving a hand. The farmer shouted something that Jane, to her great chagrin, couldn’t
for the life of her decipher. Served her right, she supposed. What had he said? He was going to put on the tea? Cha hairu zo, with a weird regional dialect, maybe?

The man in front of her waved back, and then turned toward Jane and wrinkled his brow at the sight of her quizzical expression. “It’s my name,” he said. “Child.”

“Oh.” Chairudo. That’s what she’d thought he’d said. Utterly pleased with herself, Jane forgot to ask why the heck a grown man would be going by the name Child.

“Well. I need to get back to work,” he said. “See you around. Welcome to Kurimoto.” And in one more stunningly easy gesture, he reached his arm up in a great sweep and plopped his kasa onto her head. Then he was jumping down into the field again and within a few blinks was deep in conversation with his farmer friend.

Jane stared after him a moment. “T- thank you,” she called out halfheartedly, but there was no sign that he’d heard her. Puzzled and feeling slightly lightheaded, she adjusted the kasa and trudged her weary way toward the gas station.

Jane looked at her map again and ran a hand over her forehead. What planning genius had forgotten to name the roads? There was a name for each section of the city, and there were a few numbers, and that was the only clue she had. And it was like that through the whole country. The Japanese were clearly insane, she decided. It was too bad, because they were so very polite, but they had to be insane.

How do you deliver a letter without a street address? How do you say to a taxi driver what road to look for? What if, like Jane herself, you’re new to the area and need to find one single building in the mesh of maddening crisscrosses? It was bad enough that cars tended to drive on the sidewalks and that the side of the road was lined with a gutter full of rushing water that was just perfect for tripping and falling into if your heel caught on the ridiculously patterned pavement. Honestly, if the engineers had time to design those intricate spirals of pink and green cobblestones, you’d think they would take two seconds to give the streets names.

As it was, Jane was wedged in between a series of ugly-looking office buildings and a seemingly endless array of rice fields. Between horizontal and vertical, only a strip of highway keeping urban and rural from running all over each other in a sticky mess. America didn’t let its farms get this close to the cities. It ruined the whole idea of pristine farmland. Clearly the Japanese were insane.

That said, she loved them, and had loved them for years, which she figured gave her the unique ability to call them insane and know precisely what she was talking about. She couldn’t wait to get out of school and into this country doing what she did best, talking and teaching and translating. Now here she was, with a school-subsidized apartment waiting for her somewhere in this tiny town at the foot of a row of brown, muddy mountains, and aside from the man at the station who had cheerfully informed her at 9 a.m. that he was drunk, she had yet to have contact with a single local. And she was lost.

So far, Japan was failing to meet expectations.

Age 7

Nobody has ever been able to hit Nicholas O’Halloran with a dodge ball.

He’s just uncanny that way, the gym teacher thought as the kid darted left and right, diagonally or horizontally or whichever way he had to go to steer completely clear of the flying balls. He’d seen enough kids go by to know true athletic talent when he saw it, and Nicholas had no true athletic talent. He was just psychic. He reminded the teacher of no one quite as much as Spider-Man. Nicholas had a spider sense.

---

Age 12

They don’t help Nicholas take tests.

The voices are good for telling you what’s coming a second from now, but a day from now? The voices can’t pop into the far future, look at your score, and then return to tell you that the answer should be B, not A. So Nicholas does have to study.

---

Age 17
Nicholas is with a girl in the back seat of his car going half out of his mind with how bad he wants her and just as he’s about to lift up her skirt the voice says “she’ll slap you.”

Nicholas doesn’t care. He does it anyway and gets slapped. It feels great. He thinks about slapping her back.

The voice says “She’ll stop fighting.”

Nicholas likes that prospect.

Two weeks later he knows when she’s about to call and takes the phone off the hook. He knows when she’s coming around the corner and disappears. He pretends not to hear what the school is whispering about where she’s going to have to go if she wants to stay in school.

---

Age 22
Nicholas is in love.

This girl didn’t need to get slapped, she likes him, she likes how easy he makes it and how well he knows just what will make her coo and scream, and she still manages to surprise him from time to time. Her name is Bree and she has dyed her hair black and has a nose stud and Nicholas adores her, wants to make her happy forever and ever.

But now there’s a second voice, and it’s contradicting the first. It’s the voice of two seconds later, and that’s not the same as one second later. And now for the first time there is a choice he has to make. Which voice should he listen to? The one that says take what he wants? The one that says ask for it? The one that says run away and the one that says stand up for yourself?

Nicholas has never had to make these choices before. Everyone else around him has had a lifetime of decision-making to lean on. He doesn’t. He’s never gone past the two-year-old stage of decision-making. He hasn’t had to. He’s had the voice.

She’s leaving him now. And now there’s a third voice.

---

Age 25

He’s lost in New York (Wall Street, Broadway, Stay where you are) and while he’s able to make money (click now, sell, buy, go, do it) and eat food (chocolate, turkey, salmon, takeout, cook, eat out), and in general survive (go clubbing, go for a walk, stay in, kill somebody just to see what it’d be like), he’s not happy (kill yourself, cry, scream, be quiet, disappear). He thinks he might need (nothing, a fuck, a bite to eat) some professional help.

He thumbs through the yellow pages and waits until all the voices say “yes” before he calls. John Van Dorn is the name. He makes an appointment and hangs up, then goes to bed and hides from his head.

---

Age 26

There’s a girl with grey eyes in the room telling him that she knows what the voices are.

And for once in his life, they’re completely silent.

From a friend on Livejournal: Write a poem using the jargon of a specialized area. For the professional poets, we’ll know what you’re talking about, but if we have any structural engineers…. The trick will be to use the vocabulary we deal with every day in generally not very poetic environments and make it meaningful to the readers of our poems.

Stet That

If I could dele your lede I would
Cause (like the T-shirt says) it makes me [sic]
But you get the byline, that’s how these things work.
I’m in the masthed in 6 pt, just below the intern’s name.
(That’s the back matter, a place you don’t dare tread.)
But let me give you a nut graf or two:

Unless you want to walk onto that front page
with your modifiers misplaced
your antecedents foggy
and your possessives all amuck

Unless you want nothing in your hed and dek
And col after col of bad breaks
Spastic colons
Noun clusters
and “public” spelled without an L…

You’ll stop before you stet that.

(Cause I’ve stetted it before
and we had to run the correction anyway.)

(Three-word Wednesday: Picture. Reflected. Stop.)

I pulled to a stop. The rain, hammering down on my windshield like it was going to punch right through and soak the steering wheel, made gerbil-sized blobs of light dance on the dashboard. They danced over my hands. The wrinkles near my knuckles looked so much bigger when spotlighted like that. It made me want to look away.

Behind me, a model was staring at me on a billboard. Her eyes reflected in my rear-view mirror. All told, her face was smiling, but the eyes themselves were sort of accusatory. How dare you get old when the better of us can remain forever young? they asked. For a moment I had an urge to drive into the oncoming traffic, just to get out of her way. Why should a fossil like me keep living, when the newer and better ones were urging me to make way for their arrival?

(Prompt-a-day: …and it was beautiful)

If there were ever a time in his life when Pete was liable to use the word beautiful, it wouldn’t have been that moment. The girl who skipped across the lawn to him was gangly and red-headed and something like a nightmarish version of Pippi Longstocking. That was the moment he met Sandy, and it was anything but beautiful.

For one thing, Sandy came right up, grinned at him, and then spit in his face.

Pete was seven and stunned and in the moment it took him to think to wipe the saliva from his eyes Sandy was already heading in the other direction, laughing gaily. His fists clenched and he tried not to run after her and punch her in the eye . Dad always said you never hit a girl, after all.

But it was Pete who was assigned to walk his next-door neighbor to school the next day, and it was Pete who was told to be a man and just take it and not demand an apology from the squirt (that was what he called her when nobody was around, squirt) in the overalls and jeans. She blew bubbles in her bubble gum and did cat’s cradle and generally acted like a squirt, so squirt she was. And she was far, far from beautiful.

And that made her easy to talk to, even when Pete’s voice was cracking and scraping over the edges of his hormones or when he was crying so hard over Melinda’s rejection of him that there was snot running down his nose. At the end of that night, the squirt spit in his face again, or rather, she spit in her hand and wiped away the grime from his face with wet fingers, and he felt for the first time he could go back inside and show his face in public.

Then there was high school and she still wasn’t beautiful, she was still skinny and had no boobs which meant Pete was bored by even the sight of her, but she knew girls, she knew what made them happy and what made them mad, and she knew Frida on the swim team which made Pete very excited because Frida didn’t speak much English and didn’t know many people. Lots of people looked at her, but nobody knew her. Except the squirt, because she and the squirt shared clothes. The thought of Sandy in Frida’s bathing suits made Pete kind of ill, but Frida did lovely things with Sandy’s clothes because Frida did have boobs. And then when the squirt put on those clothes again it made Pete all confused inside.

The squirt was on the gymnastics team, and when Pete got bored he went by to watch the girls in their leotards going upside down and inside out and in general making him feel pretty funny and giving him great dreams. Sandy invited him to a match and he said sure, why not, loading up his inner Playboy photographer to mentally capture each leg-spreading neck-craning moment. Not of the squirt, of course. Of Kim and Angela and that other girl whose name he could never remember because it was something unpronounceable in Chinese. And that, oh, that was something else, but still not beautiful. He wasn’t a beautiful kind of guy.

It got him in trouble, actually, not saying the word. He took Angela to the junior prom and she was so nice and quiet and held his hand in the limo, but then at the end of the night he wanted to kiss her and she said, “First tell me how I look.”

“You look really nice,” Pete said, confused. “Didn’t I say that? It’s true. You look really pretty.”

Angela shrugged and let him kiss her, and the whole world knew they were going out by the next week, and life was great, perfect, unbelievable. Angela was nice if a little quiet and seemed to blush a lot, which he thought was cute, and she let him take off her shirt and stuff, which was, yeah, unbelievable was a good word for it.

She talked to the squirt a lot a lot a lot, way more than she did before they were going out, and that weirded him out a bit, because sometimes the squirt would look at him funny when they were hanging out on an afternoon, and sometimes he’d call her up to see if she wanted to hang and she’d say “If you have free time why don’t you go buy some flowers for your girlfriend or something” and hang up the phone. That made him feel like icicles were dripping from his fingertips, and the phone would drop right out of his hand.

Then one day after a gymnastics meet (Sandy did great, she was like a little firework in her floor exercise, he’d never seen so many backflips) he took Angela to the lake and tried to put his hand under her skirt and she got all teary and said “Do you think I’m beautiful?”

“What?” he said.

“Beautiful,” she said, her lower lip trembling. God, he hated it when girls got that lower lip trembling bit. Sandy did that sometimes, when she was trying her best to keep up with him in geometry but got her sines and cosines mixed up. He never knew quite what to do. For one thing, her lower lip was kind of, well, shiny, and it made his ribs do a funny shudder. Also she turned her eyes up when she did that and it made her eyes look so big and so green that he couldn’t even look at them for long. Something caught in him and he had to turn away.

“Sure, sure you are,” he said, trying to kiss her again.

“Tell me so,” she said, stopping his hand at the wrist with her own. Now her eyes were turned up and her lower lip was out but she wasn’t shiny or big and green anywhere, just dark and angry-looking, and he thought he didn’t much want to kiss her right now. She looked really upset and really volatile, like she was going to explode or something, but she did not look beautiful. So he couldn’t tell her so.

And she spit in his face.

That wasn’t her job. It wasn’t her in that memory. He got really mad and got back in the car. That was the end for Angela and Pete.

The squirt stayed away for a week or two, fulfilling her sisterly obligation to defend her teammates with her life. Pete wished it wasn’t the case. He wished she didn’t take that obligation nearly so seriously. It was one thing to ignore him at school, but when she didn’t even call he felt a bit like the squirt was actually mad at him, and that wasn’t possible. He’d done far more disgusting things than just refuse to call a girl beautiful, and she never got mad. Still, he was so relieved when she showed up in his bedroom doorway one night, frowning, her arms folded over her chest. (Still no boobs to speak of, he noted.) “You’ve got a problem,” she said bluntly.

“Hey, there,” he said, trying not to grin in utter bliss at having her finally there. His squirt, there to ease his hurt. Yes, he’d gotten so despondent he was practically writing poetry. Good thing she showed up before he decided to join the literary magazine.

“Don’t give me hey-there,” she said, squatting down next to him, hands between her knees. Like a monkey, he thought. She tilted her head, and he thought maybe there was something he wanted to think about that pose. There was some word for her being in his room that he couldn’t find. Familiar? Comforting? All of that, sure, but something else, too. But Sandy was mad and that took precedence. “You really hurt Angela. Would it have killed you to just tell her she was beautiful?”

He shrugged. “Maybe not.”

“She is beautiful, you know.”

Another shrug. “I guess.”

“But you didn’t say it.”

He paused. “Maybe I just don’t like saying that word,” he said, leaning back and looking away. “It’s not a guy word.”

“And she’s not a guy!” Sandy kicked out her legs, landing with a thump on her butt. “And neither am I, in case you hadn’t noticed. Did you think I was gonna take your side on this?”

“Not really,” Pete said. “Doesn’t matter. S’over.”

“Anyway,” she went on, rolling your eyes, “you don’t learn how to say that to a girl, you’re gonna get spit at a lot. Maybe you’ve just never seen the right kinda girl. What is your type, anyway?”

“Don’t have one,” he said. “I like big boobs. Can I say that to you?”

“No,” she scowled, “you can’t. What else?”

“I really don’t know,” he insisted. “Are you trying to fix me up with someone?”

“I’m just trying to figure you out,” she said, letting out a great huff of air. “Cause you’re never gonna be happy if you don’t find someone or something that you think is beautiful.”

“Well, what do you think is, then?”

“Is what?” she challenged.

He forced himself, nails biting into his palm. “Beautiful.”

She reddened, pink skin against orange hair, and shut her eyes. “I don’t know. Sunset, maybe, ocean. F- friendship,” she added hastily.

She looked like a sunset, all pink and orange. “Yeah, sunsets are good,” he said, kind of mesmerized. “And friendship. Sure.”

At that moment the squirt looked up, and he had managed to lean himself forward to look at her more closely. Now he had a sunset squinting into his face and didn’t really know what to do about it. It was easier when they spit than when they squinted, he thought, and the thought made him snort out a little laugh.

“Whaat?” She scowled now, and the cross between the scowl and the pout and the upturned eyes was something so funny he was leaning back dropping to the floor in laughter.

Because it was the squirt, it was Sandy, and it was beautiful.

(prompts: random words on wordies)

“I don’t want to say I’m capitulating to them,” said the man in the brown tweed business suit, running a wrinkled hand over his tie to straighten it. “But at some point there needs to be repercussions.”

The board members nodded sullenly. It was a Wednesday, and Wednesdays were always the hardest time of the week to be bloodthirsty. It was easy to get down on yourself during a Wednesday, especially when your suit itched at your collar and your company had made a major strategic blunder in its negotiations with a distributor. Accepting blame seemed to be the best possible option in this context.

Beisdes, John Francis was sick and tired. Sick of being dragged around by the neck by the press and tired of pretending he relished the attention. He was just about ready to capitulate, despite his protestations to the contrary. In fact, capitulation sounded more or less like the most inviting option he’d yet entertained.

Really, John wanted to go back to his apartment, put a kettle of tea on, and read a book. He considered the place his hobbit-hole, so to speak, the place where he could stop pretending and just be. Be old, be crotchety, be a shrinking violet instead of a corporate shark. Wasn’t that an all right thing to be? he wondered sometimes, when his younger deputies and vice presidents looked at him with fire in their eyes, all gung-ho adventurousness and bloodlust? He felt very much like the old hobbit who’d already had his adventure. Dragons and rings be damned, he wanted a cup of tea and a novel. Preferably one with boats in it. John dreamed very often of boats.

He liked stories of old sailors who left the world behind to sleep for days in the cradle of a wave. Men who had seen it all and wanted no more of it, wanted to chat with seagulls and catch only what they needed to eat, bones getting brittler and skin growing rougher until they were rotting skeletons forgotten and unfound, dots on the curtain of brine never to be found again. John wanted to die at sea. He wanted to disappear into the infinite, to fade into obscurity and be a small, forgotten part of eternity.

It hadn’t always been like that for him. He had once thought that there were two choices in life: to become one of the hell-beasts that preyed on the weak or to end up as prey oneself. Given that sad duality, what choice did he really have? What sort of person would willfully choose oblivion? Now he was sure he knew the answer to that question. But sadly, here he was in the middle of a Wednesday, giving what was bound to be a skeptically greeted manifesto.

There was no chance of fading into obscurity now; on the contrary, he could expect the inane chattering of the business networks to be repeating his every word for days to come. It was no small feat he was attempting here, but a sort of spectacular corporate kamikaze. Fly with all your honor into the heat of the flame and burn up for the good of the market. You are but a firefly in an ocean of light. Go toward the bulb and see in its reflection your own suicide.

“You are, of course, proposing a settlement,” said one of the men at the table, a young, earnest intellectual with round glasses. By all appearances he ought to be a lamb, but John knew him to be a tiger, with fangs and a thousand small chunks of bloody flesh dripping from his lips at any moment. What a hackneyed metaphor, the corporate jungle, the boardroom beasts. But John Francis knew. And he wanted to sail from that dark continent.

“Not exactly,” he said, pulling at the edges of his tie and fidgeting. “I am proposing– what is the word that is used so often in political circles?– reparations.”

This brought a buzz from the hollow oval of heads.

“Never a very smart political idea,” he said, “although so many have demanded them, they never bring satisfaction or reconciliation. But my aim in this is neither political approval nor even the continued survival of this firm, but a change in the broader corporate culture. To wit, gentlemen… I would like to become a nice guy.”

There was a trickle of laughter, but it was halfhearted and faint, timid. Such things were not joked about.

(From Jason’s writing prompts: “You see them out of the corners of your eye, little black worms cutting holes in the fabric of our reality. They are everywhere, slowly eating away the world. But you are the only one that can see them.”)

It started with a missing sock.

She was sure the two socks had been locked and folded together when she put them in the laundry. She knew of her penchant for losing socks; it was getting so she could never find a pair that matched. “I’m just a walking cliche,” she said, throwing up her hands, when the one sock came out a happy bachelor. Where had the second gone to? Had it got stuck in the machine? She bent over on her hands and knees and plunged her head into the dull dungeon of the dryer to search for it.

It was more a matter of pride than anything else, but she was a stubborn sort, and she didn’t take well to socks getting divorced without at least registering their change of address. So further into the drum she pondered, sure it was just hiding on the other edge of the lint filter. She dipped her hand beneath the small groove where she suspected it had taken refuge.

Her fingers ran along something with the fuzzy feel of fabric, and she exclaimed, “Ah-HA!” before wincing as her voice echoed off the metal ring enclosing her. That was loud. Pinching her fingers together, she pulled hard.

What flew out at her was not the sock she was looking for, but a black sock. From a previous week’s laundry, perhaps? She figured they may well have built a secret sock society back there and were having sock parties and sock sex and smoking lint balls at a frightening rate. Pulling her head out and laying the sock on the ground, she glared at it disapprovingly. It would have to be brought back to the fold and rehabilitated for future use.

Then a black dot of color seemed to jump from the sock’s surface.

It was white below, just like the sock she’d originally set out to find. As for the black dot, it had crept onto a nearby T-shirt drying on the rack.

Then, as though following an inaudible call, other dots of black started jumping like little dark frogs or shooting stars. Some bounced off the floor. Each one made a barely audible springing sound, an almost-squeak, and wiggled slightly in place for a moment before settling into silence on the T-shirt’s surface. When it was all over, the sock she’d originally set out to find was sitting hopelessly, threadbare, on the floor, and the lower quarter of the red T-shirt was now dyed black.

She reached out to touch the sock, and it crumbled away against her fingertip.

“No, it really bothers me,” Sean said.

“What does?”

“She leaves without a suitcase.” He paused. “I guess it just bugs me that it took her so long to leave. She seemed so blind, right up until the end. Didn’t she realize that the guy smacking her around wasn’t normal, or healthy?”

“Maybe she did,” she said. “Maybe she didn’t.”

“But that scene before, when she’s all excited about the coat he’s bought her. Can’t she tell how shallow that is?”

She shook her head, closed her eyes. The girl had said, “He loves me,” with shining eyes and a renewed faith in life. And then it had all gone south and she’d left. That’s how fast it changes sometimes.

“It makes me kind of mad,” Sean confessed. “I want to slap some sense into her.”

She scowled.

“What?” said Sean, kind of scared.

“Don’t you think you’re blaming the victim a little bit?” she chided.

“I’m not blaming her, I’m just stunned she could be so stupid,” Sean said, throwing up his hands.

“It’s always easier to judge from the outside,” she reminded him, walking away. Now her heart was constricting painfully in her chest. Sean didn’t know, she told herself. She had learned that early on. What was sad was that his self-righteousness, his clarity of purpose– right was right, and wrong was wrong, and can’t you see it?– was the same naivete that would destroy him in the end. Because eventually something right would be wrong and he’d see things go from heaven to hell in a heartbeat.

That’s how fast it changes sometimes.

(3 word Wednesday: Visible. Touching. Stage)

You’re wearing a wire, aren’t you? Not that kind. I mean the kind that suspends you from the rafters when you’re on stage. The kind Peter Pan has to wear. I only ask because you’re not quite touching the ground right now, and as far as I know that’s the only way to do this. Not that I want you touching the ground. You’re the sort of person who always has to be removed from me. I like you in my line of sight. I like you up on the stage where I can see you and dream about what it’d be like to talk to you and touch you and put my fingers on the thin sparkling line of you. I like to chew on my hair and agonize about what I could do to win your attention. It took me a long while to realize it, but that’s where I like you. Don’t come down here. Don’t touch the ground. Don’t touch me. I don’t want to know that you’re real. That would only let me down.