Category: micro monday

Drawing from Life | Miles Parnegg

Between poses, we eat Oreos and ginger snaps while the animators smoke on the patio. I keep pulling off your hood to run a palm over your buzzed scalp, frosted with bleach. You dip your head as though taking a sacrament. By now, we know the models, not personally or by name, but by their jawlines and hip creases. The drawing saddles are uneven wood, and sandbags still line the studio’s back wall from February’s flood. Paint pigment circles the drain in the bathroom sink, lit by the waving flames of votive candles. The soundtrack is spa-like and ambient, heavy on flute. Spooky, you lean over and jot on my sketchbook. 

You went to art school, offer tips, gentle corrections. I want to learn this without learning, through blind seeing: no books or lessons, no regimentation—but I want your strokes on my page, the impressions of your fingertips and knuckles. You draw only in color, I only charcoal: a difference emblematic of something I can’t quite nail. You shy away from eyes and nose, preferring instead the suggesting shade of a high cheekbone, lifted by a thumb wetted on your tongue. Because you’re late, or you prefer the angle, you’re often on the floor in front of me, away from me. I smear charcoal across disproportionate masses while you hold a fistful of pastels and sit on the floor, cross-legged in your black boots. The bell rings to switch poses, and the model reaches for a stool, and I remind myself she’s the reason we’re here, that it’s foolish to think I can keep drawing you.

About the Author:

Miles Parnegg holds an MFA from the University of California, Irvine. He lives in Los Angeles.

Once I Lived in Heaven | Mea Cohen

Remember when we were clumsy and gloomless? New lovers undressing in front of each other for the first time. I want to keep this story there. In the curls of your chest hair, in the uncrossing of my arms from my bare breasts. In the stroke of laughter from your lips as my fingers ran their way across your manhood. Oh, I said, surprised at my own bravery. Oh, I said, when you bravely found your way inside me. I want to keep the story there, in the sunlight that fell across your sweat-dappled forehead in the aftermath of our love. In the damp white sheet we turned into a tent and swore we’d never leave. 

Regarding loss, I’m afraid to bring it into the story, worried what I might bring back to life. Like my marble belly so swollen with time and excellent time. And how I woke one night to find my innards scattered around my knees. They say that blood from the belly tastes sweeter than blood from anywhere else. How we held each other differently that night, how we wept tears we’d never weep again. Christening tears for what wasn’t born right. Can tears christen what wasn’t born right? 

I kept dreaming I was a creature pulling out my wings to sell in a market stall, next to stacks of pomegranates and shovels. Once I lived in heaven with you, because I wanted to. 

We didn’t ask for God that night. Or any night thereafter.

About the Author:

A Haunted House at the End of the World | Autumn Bettinger

Is this the end of the world?

“It may be, old girl. Are you ready?”

Marigold slid a wrinkled hand up the faded post of her house. The ghosts were heavy with the coming storm—anxiety manifesting in creaky floorboards and swinging tapestries. Marigold leaned over the porch railing as the first plump drops of the apocalypse battered her front garden. The other seaside towns along the bluffs began to wink out, obscured by the storm that ingested the world with a swirling, single-minded intensity. 

The satellite images had been all over the media before the internet went dark—a storm cell so large it covered half the planet. Earth’s own great red spot, only the color of bruised and necrotic skin: mottled purple veined with oily black. Sickly. Contagious.

KA-CHUNK. The backup generator kicked in. 

Marigold closed her eyes as the storm consumed, bloating on snapped branches and tsunami waves.

I will protect you.

“No need.” 

The house shuddered. Marigold was nudged back inside by rolling porch boards that nipped along her fuzzy slippers. The door snapped shut behind her, and the locks chunked home. 

“I’m happy to be here with you, at the end,” Marigold said as she shuffled towards the kitchen. The wind exploded. Rain drowned gutters and sloshed beneath the foundation. 

Is it, though? The end?

“I don’t think we’re getting out of this one.”

Marigold settled herself in the breakfast nook. A cup of tea waited on the table. It smelled of garden lavender and lemon balm. The house must have hidden a bundle of those dried herbs from last harvest. Marigold’s favorite tea. The bond she shared with the house lay sticky with memories and murmured adorations. She mourned its destruction much more than the passing of her own unremarkable life.

  We got out of that thing with Ron.

“Murdering my asshole husband was decidedly less complicated than surviving an extinction event.”

But you are resourceful and clever. You fed me so many. 

“Killing men is easy. I’m just sorry you had to keep their weak souls inside you.” 

Once they were a part of me, they loved you, like I do.

Hail whipped through shingles, softball-sized chunks of ice splintering rafters and shattering siding. Marigold sipped her tea as the house crowded around her with every last ounce of structural support. It coddled Marigold, collapsing into just one, tight room. It crumpled offices and bathrooms, slapped hallways against kitchen walls to reinforce this last bastion of safety. The storm sucked up the windows as the exterior shredded.

The kitchen walls were so close, bent so deeply that Marigold could brush the wallpaper with her pale fingers. She smiled, love radiating between them as the roof buckled and plaster rained down, splashing into her tea and dusting Marigold like sugar. The room disintegrated. 

“Buying a haunted house was the best thing I ever did,” Marigold whispered as the wind ripped them away.

About the Author:

Discovery of Newborn Girl on the Greenway, Newham, London | Leah Mullen

Discovery by a dog walker at 9.13 pm on Thursday, 18 January
junction of Greenway and High Street South in East Ham
child was taken to hospital, without any injuries
police are appealing 
to find the baby’s mother.

The baby could’ve been laboured out of a Dickens novel, born as she was and left like an unexploded bomb on the pathside.  The caul fell foul of the 10p plastic bag charge.  She mewled against it, spiking her newborn panic in the stubby grass. The mother was gone.

The mother was trafficked in an anonymous hospital ward.  The mother was fearing for her life, handcuffed in a cell, in a basement, in a cubicle on a boat.  The mother was sent overseas for daring to come overseas. The mother was anonymously dead or drunk and loving it.

Wise Men?  Too late in the season.  Too far north for storks.  Fortunately for this scrap of prey, too built-up for hawks to be buzzing the wasted verges. In the spring, hollers of sparrows murmured up from the long weeds there, surprising out of poppies and thistle along paths thick with joggers and crabapples. But January sprung almost sudden in the city with its grey promises: a season of steel wool, eczema, grass just stripes of prickle.

But the baby, for now just a collection of kicks in striped plastic, just a collection of scents, of blood, of milk, of meat to a wet and searching lurcher nose in the stubby grass, just a collection of slightly less grey promises: the baby

was found.

About the Author:

The Cashier | Trish Cantillon

I pulled the wrinkled dollar bill from the front pocket of my too-tight shorts and laid it next to the bag of M&Ms. The Cashier looked at me, then at the candy.  I knew I wasn’t supposed to eat candy because of my diet, but he didn’t.  Or at least I assumed he didn’t.  

I lied when I told my mom I was going to hit tennis balls against the backstop near the courts in the apartment complex we lived in.  My real destination was The Grog Shop, the convenience/liquor store in the lobby of our building.  

He lingered too long with my dollar in his hand, “You don’t need these,” he said, “They’re really bad for you.”  It was as if time stopped.  I was frozen, unsure what to do, but certain I didn’t want to put the candy back.  My humiliation gave birth to another lie, “They’re not for me, they’re for my brother,” I answered and made sure to put my racket on the counter so he could see I was an athlete, not an overweight twelve-year-old girl desperate for the M&M’s she would eat in secret.

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Drunk Husband Crashes Yard Sale | Alice Kinerk

You decide to hold a yard sale, because it’s a nice thing to do, a homey, all-American thing to do. Also, you’re broke. You place a classified ad, mark the date, start stickering. 

Night before the sale, Drunk Husband goes out drinking, and by dawn has yet to return. Nothing unusual there, but given his recent promises, it hurts.  It’s for the best, you tell yourself. He’s sleeping it off somewhere. With all the hauling to do that morning, all the folding tables to set up.  Linens, CDs, tapes, pot holders, trivets, posters, books, magazines, clothes, garden tools, shoes, clothes, unused wedding gifts and parental cast-offs, beach stuff, utensils, plant pots. Everything out the door, down the steps, onto the front yard for liquidation purposes. 

It’s for the best. It is. It is. It is.

But then, Drunk Husband is rounding the corner. He’s tipping back a paper bag, stiff-legging it. Trespasser! he bellows at the old lady Q-tip who is your first customer. He’s half a block away, bellowing. 

Then he gets close, hovers over her like an interrogator. The Q-tip drops an eggbeater and beelines it to her Cutlass, drives away.

Another customer appears.  Scene repeats.  

You tell Drunk Husband to go to bed, but he doesn’t hear you. Instead he does a King Kong through your cityscape of folding tables, picking things up and dropping them. 

You cajole. He refuses. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

Until finally, mercifully, he does go. He stumbles inside to use the bathroom, some time passes, and he doesn’t return. Peace falls again upon the yard.

More customers arrive. Sales are made. 

But then, from inside the house, the bedroom window opens.

Trespassers!  

It won’t be the final time he hurts you, nor the worst. But one day, twenty years later, remarried, middle-aged, you will watch the sunset through wildfire smoke, and this is the image which will surface.  Drunk Husband’s face in the window that morning, round and red like the sun is now. Just as angry.  Every bit as impossible to contain.

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