I was alone since the day the power went out. Mark left me, went to the city to find out what was happening. The radio had said something about war and we were worried. He was supposed to be back in five days. Terry visited on the third day, dropped by with a treat of fresh coffee. Kind of him in such hideous weather. That was the day the storm began in earnest. That was a two hour hike from his place in four foot snow with barely any visibility, something I wouldn’t dare alone. It was too cold. Too dangerous. The forest was ice and the sky above an inviolate gray. I kept the house warm with wood that Mark left. There was no shortage. It was an antique thing, our stove. I loved it. I could burn kindling for a month and not run out. The fire lit the house with an orange gold that made the walls glow like pictures I’ve seen of churches.
I never have any idea what I’m going to write down when I sit down at my keyboard. I don’t make notes in my head, except in jest, “Dear LiveJournal, today Sophie tore my clothes off while we were pretending to be porn lesbians on the trampoline. I’m not sure how to mend the skirt, it may actually be ruined.”
The man of her dreams was slightly taller than the fellow standing in front of her in the grocery store line-up, but she thought, “Yeah, I could take that one home.” Her glossy beauty magazines gave her a litany of interesting things that never happened to her and she was beginning to notice. Hauling her white plastic bags out to her car, she realized that there had to be a change. She sat behind the steering wheel, staring off into space, unable to move, unable to decide what to do next.
I wonder occasionally why I do this. What impulse it is that tells me that words are piling up inside my head, pestering me, when there’s hardly anything with form, anything with any foreseeable purpose. When I’m asked, I say I use this place for networking, for spreading the word, for collecting interesting everything, but half of what I put here has nothing to do with any of that, I’m sure.
Weighing his options, that’s what he was doing, narrating silently a litany of why he should go any direction. He was twelve and running away for the sixth time that year. It was June. This time it was because he caught himself being condescending the same way his teacher used to be. His glance fell on a cloud floating above him and for a moment he tried to imagine what he would look like from the cloud’s point of view. A tiny speck, he decided, a blue one, because of his torn jeans and baseball shirt. A plane went by, drawing a pale white line behind it on its way to Indiana. “I’ll follow that”.