Saturday, December 25, 2010

Sounds like search

Sounds like search: "Sounds like search
Please enter some word or phrase you'd like approximate matches for
Note: This gives you words which 'sound like' your word, but
it's not necessarily a rhyming dictionary

- Sent using Google Toolbar"

Thursday, December 23, 2010

Page views to this site by country.


Flash; Breakfast


BREAK FAST
Sarah carefully constructs my egg and cheese muffin, muffin well done, two, three times a week.

She works silently, diligently, caringly -- toasting, then re-toasting the muffins before she wraps them tightly in crinkly wax papers and places them in paper bag, folds over the top, neatly, and takes my few dollar bills and some change.

It's not a fair trade. I can watch her cook, assemble my order, take my cash, and answer the intercom to take other orders.

I inquired civilly, and came to know that she is a single mother of two. A boy, one, and a girl, five. She hasn't missed a day of work for years. Never sick, never tardy.

Today, all alone until her shift partner arrives, she seemed a little lonely and smaller still in the big kitchen, filled with shiny stainless steel forms and surfaces. The juice machine bubbles away, the milk machine letting a few drops fall into the waste tray and the espresso machine releasing a little steam. The grill smokes from a few pieces of bacon crumb or is it a scrap of egg?

Her skin is clean and clear and her pink ears stand out like little shells stuck on her head. She wears her hair in a ponytail. Her ponytail wrap is all business. A big, red, rubber band.

I noticed today that her arms are long and lean from holding and feeding babies and reaching over the hot grill to fry my eggs. The veins show through her arms from her wrists to her upper arms. Her forearms are discolored from burns from the black, iron plates covering the gas burners.

I left her a thousand dollar tip this morning at the drive-through window. I stuffed ten, one-hundred dollar bills in the jar and drove off just after she gave me a milk bone for my dog. I didn't say anything, and will deny everything the next time I'm in for an egg and cheese muffin, muffin well done.

Flash; Sketch III


I had just finished reading Ann Lamott’s book, and some of her anecdotes were fresh in my mind. 

I got into a conversation with my friend Judith, that morning, and we talked about our childhood. I told her that mine was terrific, unlike my school chum, Conrad, whose parents abandoned him after they drove a stake through his ankle and left him on the steep, clay bank above the old Mobile station.

Flash; Sketch II


Yep. I saw it. He pulled into the handicapped spot, jumped out, and walked to the front door of the gym. There was no handicapped card on his dash, clipped to the mirror, or anywhere in sight on his car. He parked in the handicapped spot so he wouldn’t have to walk from the only open space about hundred feet from the front door. I was curious, so I went in, pretending to be a visitor, and I saw him on a treadmill in the front row. He had taken off his sweatshirt, and I could see his muscle-t and the big, Adidas logo. He was in his thirties or early forties. In for a fast workout.

Short Fiction; Sketch I


He was in London with his wife, Edith. He bet her a dinner over a trivial fact in the morning Times, and the looser was to make dinner for the two of them that night. Edith lost the bet. They went to Harrod’s to shop for the ingredients. Bob wanted something special. Haggis is made with the sheep's 'pluck' (heart, liver and lungs), minced with onion, oatmeal, suet, spices, and salt, mixed with stock, and traditionally boiled in the animal's stomach. Harrod’s was fresh out of haggis, including the frozen. They ended up with a couple of tins of haggis, got some other ingredients, and headed for the hotel room. They opened the tins, and Edith cooked the meal in the suite’s microwave. Bob chuckled to himself, knowing what haggis was. Edith, not knowing anything about Bob’s Scotch heritage or diet, didn’t find out what she was preparing or eating, until they finished their meal.

Edith threw Bob’s suitcase out the back window into the lane behind the hotel, and told him not to come back until she felt that he was really sorry for what he had done. She was a sore looser. 

##

Monday, December 13, 2010

Flash Fiction


I Believe in Reincarnation

I promised friends and two of my favorite cousins that I would be coming back as a Golden Retriever.  A few months after I'm beamed up, “…the first Golden that sniffs their crotch or lifts his leg on your shoe, will be me.  Count on it.” I've always liked the Golden Retriever. They are smart, gentle, and everyone likes them.  Hence, my choice for a vessel to exist in after death.

The day I died, everything went quiet and black for a few months, then I found myself opening my eyes one day and I was nestled in a big basket next to an iron stove in someone’s living room. My stomach was full, I felt strong and rested. Big hands picked me up and I found myself staring into the face of an older, whiskered fellow with kind, brown eyes.  He tucked me in the hollow of his arm near his chest, and I could hear his heartbeat and his breathing.  A woman appeared, and then a couple of big flashes from her camera.  Her voice was familiar.  It was my cousin Joan. Somehow, I was in her home, held in the arms of her boyfriend or husband, and she was clicking away with her camera.  Matthew was the man’s name. He smelled like the woods, and had a deep and soothing voice. Joanie couldn’t stop smiling, and I swear I could see tears in her eyes.  She still wore the big piece of jade I had given her years earlier.

Joan gave me little bite of warm bread that she was eating. It felt good in my mouth, and the butter stuck to the little hairs on my muzzle. 

My hope to return as a Golden Retriever came true. I would live another thirteen or fourteen years as beloved member of Joan’s family, and then I would be happy to go to sleep and stay asleep, forever.

Sunday, December 12, 2010

Monday, December 6, 2010

One Page Per Day: A web typewriter for authors.

One Page Per Day: A web typewriter for authors.: "What is it?
It's a very simple web typewriter that presents you with a single blank page each day. You are free from the tyranny of the infinite page.

How does it work?
There is no signup, you just log in with your existing google account or twitter username and password. Then you'll see your first blank page in front of you. Go ahead, try it out.

Then what? You get a gentle reminder to do your page each day, then you just sit back and watch your book come together.

- Sent using Google Toolbar"

Sunday, December 5, 2010

What It's Like to Win the 'Bad Sex' Award

What It's Like to Win the 'Bad Sex' Award: "The sex scenes in Rowan Somerville's The Shape of Her are so excruciating that he was awarded the Literary Review's annual Bad Sex in Fiction prize. But you have to feel for him after reading his account of 'winning'.

To refresh your memory, here's one of the passages that warranted the prize:

The wet friction of her, tight around him, the sight of her open, stretched around him, the cleft of her body, it tore a climax out of him with a final lunge. Like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he screwed himself into her.

- Sent using Google Toolbar"

Thursday, December 2, 2010

Thinking about a book of Flash Fiction entitled Indeterminant Sentences

What say?  There are some books on Amazon named Indeterminate Sentence (singular), but I don't think they are talking about sentences in the sense I have chosen.

Top 50 Blogs in: flash fiction - NetworkedBlogs.com

Top 50 Blogs in: flash fiction - NetworkedBlogs.com: "- Sent using Google Toolbar"