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i wrote this tell me what you think
| Passions in Prose |
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i wrote this tell me what you think |
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SunShine913
since 2001-08-19
Posts 211Italy but from NC 
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Burnt coffee has a certain smell. I came home to find the odor permeating my house, kind of hanging in the air. The kid was at the mall with his friends, policed by the parents of the birthday child. The party was two hours at an arcade, an unlimited supply of nickels, pizza, and a slasher movie. Happy to get the crap out of there before I got volunteered for something, I did the old dump and dash. It's a parental maneuver of the highest order. I'd been at an arcade in a mall with thirteen year olds. There's a circle of Hell that looks an awful lot like this. We've all been there, but as a single dad, I'm kind of a special ambassador to Hell. A consultant, if you will. At home with hours to spare, I clicked on ESPN and set the volume to numb while I scrubbed out the coffee pot and started the dishwasher. The smell lingered, burnt and sorry like a bad dream. I could almost lay my finger on a memory of turning the pot off this morning before we left, grabbing up my keys, yelling for the kid to brush his teeth. The orange light had gone out. I really thought it had. Wouldn't be the first time all the mornings had run together in my mind. I mean, something you do everyday, turn on the pot, turn it off, with no variation in the routine--how can you remember what day was different? But still. There was golf on TV, which I'll watch if there is honestly no other sporting event on in the entire world. Except bowling. That I'll watch only if there's no golf. I toasted a bagel, and when some idiot with one of those skull-less golf caps bogeyed, I went for a little ride on my clicker. I'm forty, so I guess I could be slipping. Leaving a coffee pot on would be one of the first signs. Next I'll forget where I parked the car, the kid's name. It could happen as early as forty. I settled on the local news. The talking head was a woman I'd met at a party once. Her co-anchor was a chummy guy who made her laugh. It was like wandering into an alternative universe. "Well, Julie, I left the coffee pot on today. What do you think about that? Oh, Ted, you could have burned the house down! What's the weather going to be like for the three-day weekend?" They went to commercial, and I drifted off. I had a list of things to do around the house, gutters and furnace filters, a loose brick in the patio, a few business calls. I've never quite managed this being alone crap. I'd grown up with three brothers and two sisters, a full complement of parental units and other relatives. I lived in a dorm, then a fraternity in college, so it wasn't until I got married that I actually spent any time alone. Extended time alone. Time where not turning off the coffee pot, and not remembering I hadn't remembered, actually meant something. Funny, most people are alone before they get married. They get married so they don't have to be alone. But then, they hadn't married Alison. Pausing on the carpeted stairs to the second floor, I sniffed the air. It was up here, too, that smell of scorched coffee. It triggered something, a memory, a day like this I'd lived long ago. I've gotten used to having a few fears. You know forty is like that. Three a.m. rolls around and what do you have to do but think about the furnace pumping carbon monoxide into the kid's bedroom or the cholesterol count you keep promising to do something about. Or whether the fire extinguishers were properly pressurized. There was one time I'd come home from work early, and found coffee on the stove. Alison and I were still married. Funny how you can totally forget a detail like that, but suddenly it was as clear in my mind as if I'd just walked in to the old apartment on Salmon Street and seen it, the burner on low, the pot scorched to the bone, sitting like it had been there all day long. I called her name, "Alison, are you trying to burn the house down?" I remember hearing nothing but silence after I clicked off the burner. Alison and the baby must be out somewhere. Shopping or visiting. I'd actually thought that. She'd gone out with the kid and left the burner on. I know it doesn't matter anymore. She's been gone a long, long time. The kid and I have a whole new life. I shouldn't think about it. In the master bedroom, I kicked off my Nikes and sat on the edge of the bed to put on my work shoes. Everyone--the doctors and psychiatrists--said the baby blues would pass. Baby blues, like the color of the kid's bleary newborn eyes. All I had to do was go to work, be supportive and gentle when I came home, and it would be okay. We'd been reading those books, you know the ones? What to do when you're pregnant books. There was a rule for every day, every feeling, every detail from the yellow (word edited by Moderator)in the diaper to pink scale on the kid's head. Day One, day two, day three. Follow everyone's good advice. So, what happened on day sixty-three? By then descriptions of yellow (word edited by Moderator) and rashes didn't have much to do with us. Alison barely coped. I kept thinking if we just did what we were supposed to do, the pages of the goddamn books would wrap us up again in safety. There would be a cover shot of Allie and the kid in the rocking chair, both asleep like two angels. "Hello, honey. How was your day? Fine I missed you. I missed you, too." It was so quiet that day I thought everything was fine. I took off my tie and turned on the television. And that's when I heard something like a mouse rustling in newspapers. Rustling which seemed to come from the bedroom. And all I thought when I heard that noise was how quickly newspaper goes up, especially if you leave the burner on. We moved to this house a year ago. The kid and I call it home now, though he'd hated moving last time. Lately, we've started talking about the future, vacations, a basketball hoop. Maybe it's not a good idea, but things have been going especially well. The new job is great. I took a moment and pushed open the kid's bedroom door. Out of habit. Looking at the dump he calls his room, it's hard to imagine anything in its place when everything seemed so completely out of it. But he still has a picture of his mother on his bedside table. I walked in and picked it up, turning the glass to face me. The picture showed Alison and me smiling into the camera. She's in a hospital gown since she's just given birth, and the blue bundle in her arms is the kid. It's the closest we ever came to gracing the cover of a pregnancy book. Happy Outcomes, you'd call it. In that picture she was sweet and young. She still loved horses and Bon Jovi. She hadn't yet tried to burn down the house with us in it. I'd walked into the bedroom that day, "Hon?" on my lips. I remember seeing her big fist over the kid's face, his little starfish hands closing and opening, one catching the hem of her nightgown. She made a sound, like "sshh, sshh." "Hon?" Like (word edited by Moderator)Father Knows Best. "Hon?" like Betty Crocker's husband. "Hon?" like logic didn't already leave this house eight (word edited by Moderator)hours ago when she decided to leave the burner on. The doctors assumed I blamed myself for what happened to Alison. I agreed with them if only because it sounded like something I ought to do. But she stopped being human for me right then, and I didn't blame myself for anything I did to her, before or after. She stopped being Alison, and never was Alison again, even when I saw her later at the hospital. What I blamed myself for was standing in the doorway while she smothered the kid with her fist. I'll never forget that mental stutter, that gray moment when I couldn't move or even think. Sometimes at night, when I've done the cholesterol count for the one-thousandth time and I still can't sleep, I imagine I left the coffee on, and his little starfish hands reach up to me. _______________________________ this is a story i wrote a few nights ago lol tell me what you think *!~!* Andrea *!~!* [This message has been edited by Poet deVine (edited 11-24-2001).] |
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| © Copyright 2001 Andrea L. Figueroa - All Rights Reserved | |||
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cherish Senior Member
since 2001-03-25
Posts 1639swimming in fairy floss........... |
A...this is AWESOME!!  !!!you TOTALLY captured my attention from the very first line! i loved the way you started with the smell of coffee and ended with a haunting picture of it.  this is a great piece of writing. i LOVED the read. i think you did an outstanding job of it.i loved the way you refered to the child as "the kid" and gave the persona's wife a name. i thought that that was a really good device to work with.  again, i thought it was great! |
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PoetryIsLife
since 2001-10-27
Posts 1763...in my boxers... |
Wow... |
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Skyfire
since 2000-12-27
Posts 3381Riding |
Excellent writing!! That is just awesome! ~Love Rhon for she is as good as Zu... Yeah, that sounds right...err all hail Zu and Rhon~ |
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Spice Senior Member
since 2001-04-13
Posts 1266Resting in my cardboard box. |
*Pipes up beside Cherish...* *Praises your work while filling her mouth with bunches of popcorn and skimming it over again and again pointing out her favorite parts* DAMN GIRL! This was INCREDIBLE! *Fills her mouth with popcorn again* The tone was awesome...I too loved the way you used "the kid" And how the coffe thing was brought up throughout the ENTIRE piece...and how it tied in completely..This was awesome...I...I...*crams more popcorn in her mouth* I absolutely loved it. You have an incredibly refreshing and captivating style...Keep writing short stories like this, Deary. I can already say I'm a huge fan already! *Walks out of the room in awe, still reading the piece over and over again while munching on popcorn...* Good friends are hard to find, harder to leave, and impossible to |
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Kosetsu Member
since 2001-03-10
Posts 450Alabama, USA |
WOO!! Dude...this is....Woo!! I'm speechless. This entirely rocked. Kicked major boot-ay!! -Adam "Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice Doggy' while you search for a rock." - Will Rogers |
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Doug Pretorius Member
since 2001-04-08
Posts 81Ontario, Canada |
Terrifyingly realistic. I thought it was a true story until your comment at the end! This is really a great GREAT piece! Doug |
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