This week’s prompt is your own selection from, or an inspired amalgamation of, the following random thoughts:
Spiderman – Future Professions – What I wanted to be when I Grew Up – Love in the Ruins – Obedience to Authority – The Sweaty-Toothed Man from Qinghai
Little Victor broke apart his bed sheets with his thickly gloved hands. As the blankets cracked apart he edged out one shoulder, then the other. Freed, he bobbed slowly above his bed and fumbled with the panel of buttons on his chest. Pressing the release valve in short gusts he floated to the window, and then out into the night sky. He couldn’t feel it through his thick suit and pressurized helmet, but he knew it was cold out there. Out of the confines of the bedroom he unleashed the pressure valve with abandon, moving faster into the blackness.
Lolling his head on the edge of the rolled down window, Victor felt each bump in the road as a clacking of teeth. Molars resonated like deep bassoons, accompanied by the tinny clicks of his front canines. Humming at the back of his throat he provided the melody.
“Victor?” His mother turned to look at him, “Do you feel sick?”
“No mother.” He stopped humming.
Outside, the scenery was flat. Flat, pale yellow and dotted with black rocks and spindly ghost trees. Victor sat his head upright, his chin on the back of his palm, and rolled his eyes. Tipping his head, he flipped the sky vertically, and left it there for a while, white and indifferent. Squeezing the muscles at the back of his eyes he willed the sky to topple sideways and down, to now sit at the bottom of the picture, like the sea he had been to one time with his grandmother.
The water had lain flat, like a giant mirror.
“Where does it end?” He had asked his grandmother.
“It doesn’t,” She replied, “the sea is endless.”
Victor shivered at the memory.
“Look ahead, Victor,” his father said, his voice loud in the silence. “An old graveyard.”
Victor looked out the window and saw a dilapidated, single room church. Out behind it he could see a broken cast iron fence and some crosses, bent over like someone had kicked them. With the scene drawing nearer he rasped air into his chest loudly. His parents laughed softly and his father’s sun burnt hands adjusted their grip on the wheel. The old church drew near, and then loomed above him. He followed it behind him with his eyes to show he wasn’t scared. The church was old and broken, and the wood was white like an old man. Victor breathed out after he’d waited as long as he could.
“There’s no way any ghosts got into you.” His mother laughed.
The roaring sound shook Victor awake but his eyes wouldn’t open, so he lay still and listened. Eventually the roar gave way to other less offensive mechanical sounds. A hiss from behind. Grinding and tapping from above and below. He became aware of his body and wiggled his fingers, a simple but familiar feeling. He remembered where he was and opened his eyes.
Through the window it was black, seemingly endless. Waiting for time to pass he moved other parts of his body. He opened and closed his jaws, screwed up his nose and spread his toes wide apart. And then in a place where hours move like minutes, the rocket finally revolved and lighting up the window was the planet he had come from.
We’re branching out this week in the writing group with a prompt inspired by images.
Prompt:
(1) Go here: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/08/russia_in_color_a_century_ago.html
(2) Read the background of the photos
(3) Browse the photos.
(4) Write.
You want me to tell you about Berlin? In the twenties? You know that Hitler labeled it decadent, the time of my youth. And later his conquerors, strangely, used similar language to denounce us, saying we hid in our nightclubs while the clouds gathered around us, while they rounded up the Jews, the gypsies, the fags. But we all knew what was going on, and it was the doomed who sang the loudest, spun the maddest. Maybe some of us were trying to ignore it, but I think that this was our means of battling the storm. Think about it. Was there any other way? It was plain that masochism ran through those uniformed youths. They relished struggle. But if we could have drawn those serious men into our wild parade, do you think they could they have done what they did?
We took pride in Hitler’s accusations. But the others talk as though we were ignorant of suffering. And this is not true. Do they forget that we had just lurched blind and beaten through the first war? We did not hide from anything. On the contrary, we saw the world more clearly than anyone. We knew exactly how ugly it was, and we loved it in spite of itself. I think what we lost after that war was the obsession with wholeness. Catastrophe. It was catastrophe we were coming out of. The challenge was how to love the world in the face of its own undeniable monstrosity. And the only way to do that was to give up on the romantic.
So we danced, unromantically. And now I contradict myself, because maybe we didn’t see it coming after all. That second war is such a large historical fact. Sometimes I think it blocks out my own memories of the time before, though I know that they were the happiest days of my life. Don’t make that face dear. You’re too old to be petulant. You were a great gift, but I would give all of my remaining years for just one day of my youth. Yet all I can piece together from that time are certain sensations, frozen images. And the only reason I can do that is because I still remember Otto’s paintings. Some survived, but most were destroyed in the fire after Hitler’s grand exhibition of “decadent art.” And if he hadn’t burned them, we would have done it ourselves. We may have been decadent, but we knew when a holy thing was desecrated.
I’m wandering again. The point is just that I don’t know if I really have any memories of that time. Instead I have memories of Otto’s paintings. So I remember this: an afternoon of sunlight and flies. We were still in bed, and our bodies were rancid with the stench of last night’s “decadence.” I asked Otto to go check the time, and right away we started arguing. The smallest thing would set us off those days. We loved and hated each other in equal parts, as you do when you’re young. So Otto suggested a bet. If it was before three o’clock he would penetrate me from the front. If it was after three o’clock, from behind. Oh, don’t be such a prude dear. You did ask me to tell you about Otto. Up until then, I hadn’t allowed him up there. But he came back from the kitchen with a big grin on his face, and I knew at once how late it was. And it was fun, after all. Who knew? That afternoon he started on a new canvas. The colours were muted, exactly capturing the light through our windows that day, and the forms were round and gentle until they gathered into a sudden mass of dark lines in the right corner. Kandinsky loved the piece, especially the big black star in the right. Black star! Ha. We laughed over that, Kandinsky’s obsession with my anus. Bu where are you going dear? I’ve only just begun…
The kind folks at the presShoppe have put MaLa Literary Journal Vol. 1 Issue 1 on their site. So we are now live in NYC. A big thank you to Jen Hyde for helping us get the word out.
presShoppe (and Small Anchor Press) founder Jen Hyde became involved with The Bookworm during the 2009 Bookworm Literary Festival. Jen toured the festival (Beijing, Chengdu and Suzhou) teaching the art of making chapbooks. After the festival she stayed on in Chengdu teaching and working on translating some of Small Anchor’s previously published works into Chinese. Small Anchor’s limited edition bilingual series has mostly sold out since its release in late 2009.
If you’re a part of the writing group in Chengdu that founded MaLa then you can now check here for new writing prompts.
If you’re stopping in to see what we’re up to you’re more than welcome to keep up with us and use our prompts to inspire you to write. Our prompt for the coming week is – the 1920s.