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Category Archives: Daily Prompt
From sex to an Insane Asylum
Earlier, I had been sitting at the piano, thinking of my deceitful yet productive visit with Mr. O’Connell, when Sadie shared her story in the kitchen. Horrifying as it was, curiosity forced me to stay. I heard every word. When she finished and said good-bye to Sheriff Tobin, I crept upstairs to our shared room. I opened my novel but the words blurred without meaning. (Meaningless)
I awoke to find the room I shared with her different, salty and sticky. No wonder Miss Fannie worked so hard to keep Sadie out of jail. It wasn’t just about her guilt or innocence but about Sadie’s demise if she were locked up again, secluded from the rest of the world. I wondered if the man who had raped her knew where she now lived.
I tried to imagine a girl of only fifteen placed in an asylum with no one to defend her, comfort her, or give her hope. Yes, she had been too young to have sex with Timothy, but that didn’t make her crazy enough to be thrown into a madhouse.
Excerpt from The Last Bordello
Staying with a less than ordinary fruitcake
“Come out to the family room. Gladys wants a word,”Olvie yells from the front room.
Now I’m creeped out that a mannequin wants to speak to me. What will I say? Oh for Christ’s sake!
I take my time opening the bedroom door and peek out before exiting. Olvie’s hovering over the plastic body so if Gladys is saying something, I can’t tell. Yep, I’m going nutso.
“Good. There you are.” Olvie says turns toward me and stands erect. “What do you think?”
“Why, oh, did you take her shopping?” I say, trying not to think about myself in a straight jacket.
“No, silly-billy. Gladys doesn’t like to go out. I had it mail-ordered from Sears and Roebuck.
Gladys is no longer flapping in the 1920’s. Her fringed dress and headband are gone. She’s caught up with our decade and, although too big for the thin mannequin, I can’t help being impressed. The moo-moo is light green with white daisies attached to darker green vines that run diagonally down the dress. Orange stitching accents in between.
“Well, what do you think?” Olvie, or maybe Gladys says.
“It’s perfect. She looks like a new person.”
Olvie smiles. “She wanted a change so she got one.”
“Everyone wants a change, don’t they, Olvie?”
“Not everyone,” she says, and stares out the front window.
I’m so excited about the change in Gladys, I remind myself I need a real friend. Someone who’s not crazy or made of plastic.
I make myself a bowl of Trix cereal and try to remember I’m not a kid like the floppy-eared rabbit tell us on TV.
War. What is it good for?
“All war is a Symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal.” – John Steinbeck
- This photo is one of many pictures I took when I had the great fortune of spending a few nights in John Steinbeck’s place in Sag Harbor, NY. Such an amazing experience. More photos and additional info can be viewed in this post.
A minimal meal
Cono Dennis, his sister Delma & Pooch – late 1930s
For a week, the whole house feels pain of one kind or another. Delma’s in one bed crying, Dad’s moaning and cussing in his. But the only sickness Mother and I feel is a mean rumbling in our bellies from lack of food. Since Dad’s been bedridden, we don’t have any gambling money to spend on groceries.
Mother walks over to the kitchen cabinets and looks inside. No salt, no pepper, not even a lousy piece of stale bread is sitting in there. No sir, there isn’t a dang thing to eat. She goes to the last cabinet. There, all by itself, sits a medium-sized onion. She takes it out, holds it in both her hands and stares at it like she’s thinking a roast was fixing to pop out of it. At least that’s what I’m thinking, when my mouth gets all watery.
She peels that onion real slow, like it’s a prized Hereford being slaughtered for steak. She slices it up just as slowly as she’d peeled it. She puts it in a skillet and adds a little water, looks at it and adds more water.
The onion soup doesn’t taste like onion or even warm water. It tastes like cold hunger seasoned with poverty and sprinkled with fear. And the stuff that settled on the bottom of the cup? That’s anger. I drink it anyway. I feel like a Devil’s Claw, stacked up and falling back down on my own self. It’s like being slapped without even having a hand laid on me. Maybe it’s because the slap I feel is on the inside instead of the outside, a slap like a burning face just as uninvited.
Excerpt from No Hill for a Stepper, a story about my father.
The Prostitute takes a position (not on the bed)
“What is it, Meta? You seem quiet today,” Sadie <the prostitute> said.
“I’m thinking of Emil. He would love this place.”
“You want to marry this Emil fellow?”
“When the time is right. But I also want to go to college.”
Sadie turned away. “Well, marriage isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It cements a woman’s future and her feet to a kitchen floor.”
I wanted to tell her that some men look at prostitutes as mere fodder for their tumescent phalluses. I held my tongue. “Did you not hear what Miss Fisher said at the meeting? How women need—”
“I do know one thing.” Sadie inhaled a deep, scrappy breath. “I don’t think men care for their wives after they’ve poked them a couple of times. That goal’s already been Conquered. Girls like me? We sleep with money the same way wives do, but we get paid without the bossing.”
Excerpt from The Last Bordello, historical novel set in 1901
Crazy Olvie
The rock crashes through the front window and glass shatters over Gladys. Crazy Olvie reaches for the telephone that sits in its cubby space in the short hallway. “Hurry up, now. Read me the name of the Sheriff’s Department.”
I know she meant to ask me to read the number instead of the name. But I can’t help it. I look at her telephone list of numbers taped to her fridge and say in my best deadpan voice, “Sheriff’s Department.”
“That’s what I said.” Her voice is louder now. “Read it to me!”
She’s clueless.
Her cheeks flush and her eyes look like they belong to one of Dracula’s brides.
“Glendale-4123.”
Mom had laughed when she told me that every time Olvie has to phone her doctor, she freaks out and curses all the zeros. She hates sticking her fingers in the seven-through-zero slots because she doesn’t like waiting for the dial to spin back around to home base. Lucky for her, these numbers won’t take any time.
Excerpt from my Work in Progress, Olvie and Chicken Coop (working title)
That Fightin’ Instinct
My Dad
I yelled, “fall out!” But, there’s one in every crowd. His name was “Johnson,” an ex-merchant marine with big old biceps who thought he could fight a circular saw and come out ahead. He pulled the cover over his head as if that was gonna protect him from someone who knew better.
Everyone was watching me, so I knew I had an impression to make. I walked over, and said, “Well, aren’t you smart?” Then I took that cot and flipped it right in the middle of him.
He stood up, towering over me like a big gorilla, stared down at me and drew back. Now, the thing about big ole boys like Johnson is that they might have a lot of muscle and power, but for a lightweight class like me, they move like molasses. So that’s the last he saw. When he drew his big arm back, my fist landed square on his chin before his pea brain could register what hit him. He dropped like a loose button, out cold as a cucumber.
When Johnson started to stir a bit, he looked at me with surprise and reached up to feel his mouth, like he was making sure all his teeth were still there.
“It’s okay,” I told him. “I know a couple of folks without any teeth and they can still eat almost anything.”
He sat there glaring at me and I kept talking.
“And if you keep puckerin’ like that, pretty soon you’re your face is gonna match your asshole. Now get up!”
Everybody laughed except for Johnson. I guess he didn’t think it was funny. But he did stand up and, so far, Johnson and the rest of the cooks barracks have been looking at me in a different light. I don’t count on Johnson looking down on me ever again. Besides, he couldn’t fight the gnats off his butt.
I suppose the fighting Instinct was born in me, like red is born into a beet. Maybe because I started fighting in first grade when I had to stick that pocketknife into the thigh of Tommy Burns so he wouldn’t take my marbles.
Excerpt from No Hill for a Stepper, my father’s story
Bathing in Feathers
Immerse yourself in feathers
left by a magic swan
bathe in the salty water
from where the pearls were drawn.
Free yourself of tethers
that bind your heart’s delight
then dance the moon, so you will swoon
for freedom and insight.
When Dancing Doesn’t Help
I don’t believe what Daddy told me an hour ago. He’s not checking on things at the dairy. He’s out trying to find Mama. I’m sure of it. Daddy knows I refuse to turn twelve without her.
My legs move so fast, I almost forget Mama ran away. But my feet remember what Mama and Betty Beauty Bedford, her used-to-be bestie, told them months back. “Right, left, right left, up back,” they’d chanted.
Beauty had inhaled a ciggy from its ruler-long holder. “Pivot your knees, Emma June. Knock them together then point them out. You too, Carla,” she told my used-to-be. “And for Pete’s sake, move your arms. Let everything flow! Dancing takes away all your worries.”
Now, the Charleston ends. Victor Victrola’s needle ch-ch, ch-ch, ch-ch’s searching for something that’s already been used up. Like my memory at the end of carnival night. And Beauty was wrong. Worries still thump my insides.
Big Chief Tablet glares at me from the kitchen table. I tell it to shut up, that homework can wait till I’m good and ready.
Extra careful when I plant the needle a different Recording, I turn the crank again. The green and yellow squares of our sitting room rug melt together as I spin, and my braid pings one shoulder then the next like two different suitors asking to be my dance partner. My skirt puffs up like a wild mushroom, and it’s swoosh seems to say, “Everything will be right again, Emma June.”
“How do you know that when I can’t even remember?” I yell. Then I jump up and down trying to stomp out my stupid.
Excerpt from The Moonshine Thicket by CD-W
NOTE: For those of you who have been reading excepts from this novel, thank you! This excerpt if the beginning of the novel. I hope you liked it!
Carolyn Dennis-Willingham 