Bedtime Routine

I remember when my dad use to tuck me in, like a burrito. I didn’t want to move to mess up how comfortable he made me feel. Simple securities, like tight covers every night, kept me quiet about my fears. Abandoned was how I felt from the age of six on, cut loose out of the womb too soon. So the routine; fluff, tuck, pat on the head, maybe a story, it shut me up. I use to listen to him from my bedroom window after he put my sister and me to bed, pacing on the deck or cheering to the hockey game on the radio broadcasted through the garage. I stayed awake to hear him come inside; make himself dinner; a fried ham and egg sandwich or my leftover Sloppy Joe’s. I listened to him crack open a beer. I worried he was lonely, that he was tired of using the Snoopy blow-dryer on our wet heads every evening and quizzing us for our Friday spelling tests.

“Back to bed, Kirstin,” he would say, sternly, when I crept down the white stairs to check on him. A comment that went completely ignored. I remember the cold tile on my bare feet; I’d tiptoe closer to the living room to see what he was doing. Peeking over the corner of the wall, he sat on the black leather couch, eyes fixed on a baseball game, a plate of food on his lap. I would stand in the dark as long as I could, breathing quietly so that maybe he wouldn’t notice me. Without ever turning around, “I hear you, Kirstin. Bed.” Immediately, I’d scramble for an excuse, “I’m hungry,” or “Can I have a cup of water?” It was always met with a blank “The kitchen is closed; you have a cup of water in your room.” Defeated, I’d climb the stairs back to my room filled with pink blankets and a million Barbie’s and my very own pink doll house.

I remember how I would settle back into my Minnie Mouse bedspread, grief stricken that I had ruined the wrap of covers that my dad had created earlier in the evening. I looked at all my toys, covered with darkness and worry that they were sad. I wished I could fit them all into my bed so that they wouldn’t look so lonely. “Good night Daddy, good night Mommy,” I would whisper. I had every night that I could remember, and even though she was gone and even though I knew he couldn’t hear me, it made me feel better. Holding onto Honey, the Cabbage Patch doll my parents gave me on my second birthday, I would sleep. Later, only sometimes I would wake up to my dad climbing the stairs, finally heading to bed. First the door to my sister’s room would open and then to mine. He never said anything, just checked.

Cheeks as Red as Strawberries

“Oh my God!” I hear myself scream. Overreacting, as usual, I sound more like a victim of violent crime than an absent minded seventeen year old trying to make a smoothie. My stupid, blood curdling scream. I’m standing here, behind the counter of a yogurt shop, covered in strawberry juice from the strands of brown hair that leak out of my ponytail to my black shoes which squeak when I walk. I hate these stupid shoes, splattered with the pink slop. The revering of the blender is persisting, and I’m just standing, paralyzed with the ice-cold liquid flowing down my leg like the Monongahela River, collecting in a pool in between my feet and I look so ridiculous, so down right idiotic.

“Turn it off!” my manager screams, pointing at me, “Oh my God!” Turn it off, turn it off, “How do I turn it off?” and I hear the panic in my voice, that pathetic panic.

It stops, finally; I find myself examining all the gunk, strawberries, wasted, all over the dirty floor. I see his feet, just across from mine, I’ve got them too. I made his tan Diesel shoes victim to my hurricane of fruit, water, and ice. And it’s splattered up his black pants and on his striped polo, too. I bare my strength to meet his brown eyes, his gorgeous brown eyes that stare down at my stupidity personified, my failed concoction. He’s laughing hysterically, and the sound begins to ring in my ears, like Notre Dame at noon. His laughter is as strong as a man and as happy as a child.

“I am so sorry,” I’m pleading, I feel my cheeks flushing like a ripe Globe Tomato, flushing like they always do when I talk to him. He laughs harder, studying my mess, shaking his head. He laughs harder and harder and I blush more and more, I feel purple.

“I’m really sorry,” I’m starting to laugh too, “What do I do now?” I’m laughing with him. Laughing hard because I don’t know what else to do, because I’m so full of emotion and my face is a ripe Globe Tomato and what else could I possibly do?

“It’s really okay. I’m gonna go get the mop and clean it up,” he smiles and I look down because I don’t know what to say. And I try to muster up some stupid phrase, something like, “Oh no, it was my fault,” or “That’s okay, I’ll get it.” But as he walks away, into the back of the store, his right hand squeezes my left shoulder I become the puddle of smoothie itself, liquefied on the pale brown floor.

In Greek mythology, the strawberry represents love, and I think it’s ironic because I am covered in it. It’s like cupid shot his arrow right to the lid of the blender, popping it off like an atomic bomb, sending the rouge juice all over our cloths. I am so in love, but I can’t admit it, I must not admit that. Stop thinking and just do something about this mess.

“Oh my God! Make a new one, now! Oh my God, what are you doing, standing there?” my boss is yelling and I am still paralyzed with emotion, still covered in the explosion. I move to make a new strawberry smoothie but my arms feel like they are shaking without control. My heart is pounding so heavy in my esophagus and my ears grow hot, hot like a Bhut Jolokia chili pepper, the hottest chili pepper in the world.

I look up to the customer, a woman with a kind face, “I am so sorry, just give me a minute to make a new one, I just started last week.” She only nods. Maybe she is reading me, maybe she sees my biceps convulsing with nerves.

He reappears; mop in hand, ready to take care of me, to mop up my stupidity from the floor. I can’t look away. He is mopping back and forth and his arms are so strong, I just can’t look away. He takes a minute, resting on the wooden pole of the mop, and is looking at me with a smile that I can’t return. I can’t smile so bright, I can’t bring so much joy in just a smile. He licks some of the strawberry from his wrist.

Writers Festival: The Kim Chinquee Challenge

Taking Kim Chinquee’s challenge, I wrote the same plot four different times. Each entry is exactly five hundred words:

A man walked into a corner bar with nine dollars and thirty cents in his worn pocket and a phone number written on a frail piece of receipt paper. Earlier that day, Alan Weaver gazed in the foggy mirror of his one – bedroom apartment. He noticed the grey hairs that had recently settled in throughout his scalp, his face wrinkled with loneliness. Focusing in on his hallow eyes, now such a duller grey, he finally admitted to himself what needed to be done. Alan was a structured man, only allotting himself exactly what he needed. Before he left, he counted out exactly nine dollars and thirty cents to purchase a roast beef sandwich and a dark Belgian draft, leaving a precise ten percent tip to the chubby blond waitress who always served him at the Ugly Dog. As he walked out his door, he felt the number burning in his pocket. He knew that he needed that draft to muster up the strength required in dialing that number. He planned on using his left over thirty – five cents when he crept into side phone booth of the bar, one of the only left around town, to make an anonymous call.

A young man walked into a bar down the street from his building, he had said he was going out for a walk to clear his mind. As an undergraduate he had every intention of becoming a writer. He sighed and ordered a Bud Light, knowing that he had the drive to succeed, and maybe even the talent. My life isn’t concussive to the needs of a writer, he thought. In high school, he considered himself awkward, tall and thin with thick Buddy Holly glasses. But in college, he came around to humor and suddenly everyone took his corky nature as a hip alternative style. He dated a beautiful blond sorority member and had four years of fun. It wasn’t until the two moved in together after graduation that he realized what had become his life. Initially, he looked at his page position at an editing firm as a step in the right direction. But when he really listened to his own dinner conversation, consisting of Sydney’s views celebrity gossip discussed like prayers, he saw his future embodied. Fearing that he was too late to save his mind, he looked forward to becoming quite accustomed to walks of that sort.

A man walked into a smoky bar to meet her, an old friend. She was the kind of sleek that gets men into trouble, the flow of her dark chocolate hair brushing her plump chest, the way she sipped her beer out of its skinny neck. Her eyes became so small, Asian like, when she was drunk, and her smile barely fit her teeth. He did not love her, but the energy refreshed his leather skin. They knew each other well, but never really knew the other’s life. He had devoted to another woman, his children, two girls. Years ago, his wife had past, taken by ailment of the heart. He remarried, for the girl’s sake, into misery. When they were grown, they wished he would find joy in life, they did not know that he did at the smoky bar. The man never slept with his joy, he only admired. She laughed and touched his arm and made him feel full, and if he had the desire, no morality would stop him from his pursuits. He paid for her drinks and laughed as they walked to their cars. His daughters worried and worried about his happiness, without any need.

A man walked into a bar which he had never been in, but always indented to visit. Henry spent his time in coffee shops more often, picking the skin on his hands and reading from science text books. Sometimes people sat around him and he listened to their conversations, how to wrap a ball of yarn, how to make love while pregnant. When he ordered a bagel with cream cheese and tomato, he imagined that he was deaf to hearing his order called. He entered the bar, intimated as hell, alone. A slender man with long blond hair approached only after he had just placed himself on the tall stool, “Never seen you here before.” Henry shuddered and sipped from his round cup of vodka and ice cubes. “No,” he looked down, “never.” Henry was short with dark eyes, he was always said to look mad. He wore all black and allowed his hair to shag in his face. The man smiled and looked down, “That’s okay, my name is Scott.” Henry shook his projected hand and sipped his drink again, it burned going down, worse than he remembered. “Can I invite you back?” the man asked. Henry, relieved, followed.

Perhaps Ambiguity is Positive

I was reading a book by a man I was assigned to interview, I’m told he is shy. In his story, a character finds a lone newspaper flipped open to the crossword section. He creeps to it and writes, “Could everybody please be a little less specific? Starting right now?”

There I stood; drink in hand, stirring the contents of the Styrofoam cup with a bendy straw. What did they think of me, perched in the corner of the beat up house on the South Side Slopes? A short girl with messy brown hair tripped into me, her shirt so faded with use that one final tug could leave her before me, bare breasted and drunk. I let her pass, realizing that my hostility was wearing thin. Hostility is funny like that; it consumes until it becomes a baby, nursing out the life of me.

It was St. Patrick’s Day and the city was green and flooded. I felt like a burden to the world until I realized that the festivities kept everyone too occupied to notice. Earlier in the day some friends and I walked the streets of the Strip District and touched the small goods in each shop, touched everything. Our footsteps keeping meter, we constructed an orchestra among the immigrants making their sales of cheap alpaca scarves and sizzling beef fajitas. We walked and looked and smelled and felt. And I hardly noticed the clear puddle I walked through.

I napped after. Noises still buzzed from the Strip while I built my cocoon, but shut out when sleep set in. The fog of an afternoon nap sends my heart out of my chest, beating violently. I don’t know why. When the sun filtered into my friend’s nineteenth floor loft I hatched from my shell. The noises returned and they sounded sweeter; sleep brought me a strange feeling which I now attribute to a transition.

Sometimes I dress myself with the intention of making other females envious. It never works, but the intent is what I notice in retrospect. I dress in tight jeans and a casual gray t – shirt, so I don’t appear to be fulfilling my own purpose. The white Styrofoam cup is put into my hand, and the scene is set. But my day on the carnival – like street where everyone was too busy to notice my shortcomings rings in my mind. I leave my hostility for adoption, I don’t know why.
I thought of those words of ambiguity opening a new faucet. My presence and perception skewed, I wonder if I am bitter at constant or if the months stained with snow made me lose; no.

The ambiguity of brilliance in writing; an interview with short fiction writer, Gary Lutz

While I prepared to interview writer Gary Lutz, I found myself more intimidated than I expected to be. One page into his book Stories in the Worst Way and I was astonished by his use of language and the element of ambiguity included throughout his work. His writing is the kind that makes your mind spin, questioning every word in every sentence. That is what writer and Pitt – Greensburg professor of writing, Gary Lutz intends for his reader to experience. He is the writer of many pieces of short fiction including single stories and books which compile them.

Sitting in his cluttered office, decorated with stacks of paper, I feel captivated by his spoken word. Lutz is the kind of brilliant that doesn’t seem forced, but rather intended, quite like the way he writes. As I interviewed him, I attempted to understand his perception of writing and being a writer.

Kirstin: In your one story, “Slops,” a character finds a newspaper open to a blank cross – word puzzle and writes, “Could everybody please be a little less specific? Starting right now?” I find this to be a really wonderful image, but I wonder why do you choose to write in such an ambiguous tone?

Gary Lutz: I like ambiguity. I don’t like certainties. I don’t like things that are resolved or explainable. I prefer things that are uncanny and ultimately unknowable.

Kirstin: During your discussion at Columbia University, you call the sentence the loneliest place for the writer, in fact, that is the title of the lecture. Where do you get inspiration to compile the individual sentences?

Gary Lutz: I don’t really feel as if inspiration plays any role in the writing that I do, but I’m drawn to the sentence as a kind of self – contained utterance that can be almost a universe unto itself. I like sentences that can be detached from their context and be able to stand on their own as interesting artifacts of language with unusual acoustical properties and their own topography of shape. I am less concerned with the contextual surrounding of a sentence, or rather, I like to stack one sentence on top of another so that the relationship between the sentences are not necessarily a consecutive relationship but more of a relationship of mood or tonality.

Kirstin: So your writing is less about actual content, and more about the overall tone of the piece?

Gary Lutz: Yeah, I’m not drawn toward plot in any conventional sense, and I’m not concerned with causality the way a lot of fiction is. I think it’s because there are certain people who experience or apprehend the world in a series of flashes as opposed to a continuous stream of perception. I don’t think in terms of overall structures, I sort of zero in on the individual phrase, the individual word, the individual sentence and certain forms just arise as a consequence of placing one phrase next to another or one word next to another. So, I think very carefully about each individual word.

Kirstin: Is that difficult to expand into larger compositions because, typically, you hear of poets describing the writing process with such scrutiny and less with novelists or short story writers?

Gary Lutz: Yeah, it takes me a very long time. To write a twenty story it might take me four or five months. I will write it one sentence at a time. One afternoon I might be working on two sentences and I really won’t know exactly where those sentences will fit into the story until I’ve generated maybe a hundred or so sentences. So, it’s a very laborious, very time consuming process. I often spend hours on a single sentence; I’ll write multiple versions, I’ll keep substituting different words in particular slots in the sentence. So, some people have said to me that essentially I am writing poetry; it’s just that I’m formatting it as prose. I think poetry is defined as the most compressed, condensed form of utterance, and I think my work shares those qualities, but I never really think of it as prose – poetry or poetry. But, I don’t really think of it as stories either, so when I was using the term stories in this interview, I think simply fiction might be more accurate.

Kirstin: So then, how do you develop a character?

Gary Lutz: I don’t really develop characters in the conventional sense. The characters emerge from the language itself, so I don’t start off with a preconceived sense of who the narrator is going to be or who the other people in the story are going to be, but they essentially form themselves out of combinations of words. A lot of writers start with an apiary notion of what a story is going to be about and I try to do this the opposite. I never want to know in advance what the sentences will add up to, and often, I’ll rearrange sentences individually into shapes or configurations that I would not have been about to come up with if I were writing in some kind of sequential, logical fashion.

Kirstin: I was going to ask if you saw yourself in any of the stories or found any of your writing autobiographical, but I see that your writing is not so much based on the creation of plot, but rather finding the story created in what you write.

Gary Lutz: I would not call my work autobiographical at all, but the emotional states, the moods in the stories are certainly ones that coincide with some of my own moods. There really isn’t much in my work that is drawn from my first – hand experiences, but nor is it drawn from imagination. It is something that materializes through the shapes of the language.

Kirstin: What attracts you to the genre of flash fiction?

Gary Lutz: I’m not sure I would really call my stuff flash fiction because flash fiction is generally stories that are one or two pages long. Some of my very first pieces were that short, but they gradually grew longer. So, the things I have been working on recently are usually maybe twenty pages or so. But my initial work, I wasn’t even aware at the time that it could be called flash fiction, I was just looking for something that was very compressed, very condensed, that presented the most crucial moments or instances without any kind of surrounding explanation of exposition. In other words, I was trying to excise every irrelevancy and just concentrate the language as much as possible and make it as potent in terms of its concentrated force.

Kirstin: Have your publications affected your relationships with other people in any way?

Gary Lutz: It definitely brought about good things in my life. I have met a lot of people, interesting people, through my writing that I never would have encountered in any other context. I can’t think of any really negative consequences of my writing.

Kirstin: As a rather ambiguous question, fitting your format, why are you a writer?

Gary Lutz: That is a difficult question. I think primarily because I find some kind of fulfillment in construction combinations of words that have not previously existed, that may evoke strong emotions in a reader. The aim of my writing is to have an emotional affect on a reader, whether it’s a reaction of disgust or a sense of identification. Some people have told me that my fiction makes them feel less lonely, that they feel as if they are not the only person in the world who feels a certain way, that they feel some kind of kinship with the characters that I write about, who tend to be outcasts and unconventional people in the way in which they peruse their lives. So I think ultimately a writer wants to be read and a writer wants to reach a particular audience that needs to hear certain things so that they feel more at ease with themselves in their own unusual circumstances or their own unusual interiority.

Sunday Morning

By Kirstin Kennedy

I have an idealized view of what a Sunday morning should look like. Every week I dream of waking with the sun on this new day and looking at my life completely objectively. I’d made a big pot of coffee that would fill the house with a smell of aliveness and I’d enjoy the Joe for its real pleasure, rather than its wakening effects. If it were summer, I’d take a long run, focusing on my breath, rather than my time while enjoying the nature of the park and the glistening of the shallow lake which it surrounds. If it were winter, I’d briskly walk in the woods, enjoying the beautiful contrast of the white snow on the dark brown bark. Maybe I’d even watch for the Cardinal, picking away at the small surviving berries.

I imagine the hot shower on my skin, steam lifting my muscles. And all the suds that wash the week’s shame away would smell of freshness and joy. I would take my time with the heat and unknown pleasure of water. I would then sit down with my coffee and rejuvenated body to write. Cranking our profoundness, my new state of mind would wow the page. I would be a tiger in the Sunday morning sun. Afterward, I would turn to Meet the Press with the Sunday paper and enjoy enlightening myself, not to mention the deep voice of the man who narrates PBS promotional. I would make the early Mass.

Turning to the kitchen, I would make a huge breakfast of egg – white omelets, turkey bacon and stacks of whole – wheat toast. I would probably have some smooth music playing in the background as I cooked, just as my grandfather does every Sunday morning. Perhaps that is the trick to making breakfasts like he does. Of course, everyone would adore my creation. My disposition to those who awakened to my feast would be nothing but pleasant and interested as we discussed their impressions to the morning’s paper. The whole house would smell fresh and lived in and by the hour of noon, I would already possess a sense of deep accomplishment.

My real Sundays only consist of a bottle of Advil and my face on the toilet seat. Typically the background sounds consist of my verbal pain, "Ohhhhh mmmm uhhgggg I'm never drinking again." There are no healthy breakfast foods in sight as I gorge myself with three Double Stacks from Wendy's and a large Dr. Pepper. Actually, that’s really how I should describe my Sunday afternoons. I do not know Sunday mornings. I only crave to. But today is different. Not in my dream way, but maybe I am a step closer. I am not about to create a fabulous breakfast or take a nature walk. I am going to drink coffee, but for the sole reason of waking up. At this point, I find it fits to spend my time this way. But now, I am going to crawl back in to bed, back to the warmth to keep dreaming of what a future Sunday morning will look like.