March has always felt like the time for new beginnings to me. More than the new year, certainly more than the doldrums of cold and dark January, March feels like a month for exciting changes and fresh starts.
I’m thinking about this now for a couple of reasons. The first – Rebecca over at Fake Flamenco asked for my ideas about a poetry challenge theme for this month. I don’t know if she’ll choose my suggestion, but the question got me pondering nonetheless, and here I am. The second – Y’all, am I ever ready to start writing some fiction again. So, so ready.
I’ve mentioned several times over the course of the last couple of years that I miss writing. It’s been hard to find the time to really sit down and work. Even now, as I’m typing this, Lucy is right beside me, chomping on some blueberries and watching me type. But I want to commit to finding a routine, to making a way forward, and to getting words down on paper once more. I’m not afraid of a challenge.
And in that spirit, I thought it would be fun to share some of the…let’s just call them starts…I’ve gotten on some new stories. These have come together in pieces since Lucy came, and I’m not sure where to take any of them. But I feel like there’s some good stuff here, and I’m excited to see where it might go.
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Here’s a haunted house story I started in October:
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“It’s like something out of a storybook,” said Gracie.
My sister says the same thing about orange tabby cats and latte art, but in this case, she was right. The house on the bluff was a dream. It was more than we could have hoped for. And there’s a lot you’ll ignore, when your family needs a new start. The Boatswain’s House sat quiet and empty for almost five years. Everyone thought it spent that time just crumbling. It didn’t crumble. It waited. It waited, as it turns out, for us.
There were three of us, when we moved in. Soon it would be four. My mother, my sister Gracie, and me. My youngest sister, Haley, was still in my mother’s belly. I was jealous of her, to tell the truth, warm and safe and protected in there, even before the house. At seventeen, I had two jobs, school, Gracie, and college applications to take care of. My mother, bless her, had her two jobs – waiting tables in a diner at night and managing a lawyer’s office during the day – and a home to make for us. And my dad’s mess. My father was a good man, once. Before the injury, and then the pills, and then the online gambling. I remember him before, all hugs and heart and calloused, loving hands. I haven’t seen him in years. We don’t know where he is. He probably doesn’t, really, either.
He left us in the one-bedroom apartment we had to rent because he didn’t pay our mortgage. He left, and my mother bloodied her fingers every day for months while Haley grew inside her, trying to pick up the broken pieces of the life he’d promised all of us. He meant it, when he said it, and for a long time, he delivered on it, too. She worked all the time, and when she wasn’t working, she was cooking, and cleaning, and singing and dancing and playing with Gracie and smiling even though she wanted to scream loud enough for the devil himself to hear her and answer.
All of it changed with the house.
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And here’s something about a work retreat. (I’ve never been on a work retreat, but I hear they’re a nightmare. Seemed like good fodder for a story.):
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There’s one thing you should know about me, before I tell you this story: I am not an outdoors person. I like air conditioning, and clean bedding, and functioning toilets, and please, for the love of God, running water. But a requirement is a requirement, and so, just like all the other poor schmucks at the office, away to Camp North Star I went. If not exactly against my will, at least against my better judgment. But when the boss says “Mandatory,” well, money’s money, you know? Need it to live.
The brochure advertised four nights and five days in “scenic woodlands.” Great teambuilding activities, like “our challenging ropes course!” Gag. “Rustic cabins.” All the usual crap. And as we loaded onto the bus – a bright yellow school bus, of all things – I could tell that not many of us were looking forward to the “adventure in the mountains” ahead. Gary from accounting actually looked like he might throw up, and Susanna from HR stood there counting her hand sanitizer bottles. Bob from customer support was hosing himself down in Deet.
“God, I hope this stuff actually works,” he said, desperately, as I walked past.
“Don’t look at me,” I told him, my hands in the air, a gesture of defeat. “I’m just planning to let the bugs win.”
I went to camp once before, when I was in middle school, at the insistence of my exhausted mother.
“You’ll love it,” she’d said.
A sprained ankle, a stolen backpack, sun poisoning, and about a thousand mosquito bites had proven that mother really doesn’t always know best.
But I slapped a stupid smile on my face, and climbed aboard the big cheese, determined to prove once and for all that I was, in fact, an enthusiastic team player, and totally worthy of that promotion I’d spent the last six months chasing.
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And here’s something about a mysterious book:
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The book waited, as books do. Books are patient things, and this one was no exception, at least in that regard. And so, in a gloomy shop on the corner of Washington and Chestnut, it sat gathering dust, minding its own business, and waiting for the day someone would notice it, pick it up, and take it home. And, best of all, read it. It had to be just the right person, and the book knew that person would come. One day. Until then, it waited.
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And here’s something about a ring. What about a ring? I’m still not sure:
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Just a ring in a shop, that’s all it looked like. Squeezed in among others, behind a shabby glass case, you’d barely have noticed it. But I did. I wish I hadn’t, but we can’t go back in time.
“Pretty one, that,” said the frail old man behind the counter. “Came in just a few weeks ago, part of an estate out in the country.”
It was pretty. Even crammed in with all the other, more flashy rings, this one stood out. A simple, thin gold band, and a bright, rainbow-flecked fire opal, cut in an oval. Understated, I remember thinking. Elegant.
“Do you know how old it might be? Or who might have made it?”
“I’m afraid I don’t,” he answered, “but I’ll tell you what. I can give you five off the price, if you’ll take it today.”
I walked out of the shop with a lighter wallet in my purse and a new ring on my hand.
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And here are just a couple of good opening lines from two different potential stories. I’d like to do something with these one day:
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“There’s a saying in my family. I don’t know where it came from, or how long we’ve been saying it, but I’ve heard it every day, ever since I can remember. We say: There is no cure for dreaming.”
“The first time I heard it, I confess, I didn’t believe it. But lies are like that. They have a way of winding themselves into your soul, of spreading and growing and devouring, like kudzu vines on the trees, like wildfires in summer.”
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So, what shall I do with these?
I love writing. I love creating. I know that a lot of your love it, too, and that’s why we’re here: To make, and to share, and to build a community of people who support each other. I’d love to know your thoughts! Tell me which one you think I should return to first, which one’s your favorite, or which one you just don’t think you’d read.
And maybe, someday soon, I’ll post a new story.
Until then, keep dreaming and creating, and I will, too!
A Virginia Writer's Diary 