On the Way

Standing knee deep, the two women slipped the third into the water. She was very weak and in a lot of pain. They looked at each other, unsure, as she reclined in the shallows with her eyes closed.

"Well? How do you feel?"

"What. You never really thought this lake had healing powers, did you?"

"You did! You said--that's why we came so far..."

"Yes. And didn't we have a blast on the way?"

#FridayFlash #200words Empty

“Ew, gross,” she thought. 

The old man picked up the horseapple from the road and bounced it up and down in his hand.  He had tobacco stains down his shirt.  She thought it really didn’t matter that he was handling poop because he couldn’t get any dirtier.

 

“Get to the station!” he cackled.  That’s what she thought he said, because his toothless speech was indistinct.  Then she wondered why there was a pile of horseapples in the middle of the paved road. 

That’s when he winged it at her.  He actually threw it at her head, surprisingly fast.  She ducked and backed up against her stalled car.  She felt a flash of anger, not just at the old man who was throwing horseapples at her, but at the idiots who screwed up the gas station signs so badly.

He picked up another one, and she edged around the car to put it between her and the loony old man.  He scuffled toward her vehicle, bouncing his ammunition.

“Stop it!” she yelled.  He didn’t stop.  He threw it at her.  So she bolted into the high grass on the side of the road.

Right where the others were hiding in wait.

#FridayFlash #200words Close the Gates 3

Part 1 
Part 2

Ting Ting dropped Rachel’s hand and walked to the base of the hill.  She sat down on the ground cross-legged and arranged her skirt around her knees and feet.

“What’s that?” asked Rachel.

There was a visible shimmer in the air around Ting Ting.  It hadn’t been there before, but when the others looked at her, they could see it, as if they could see the very air around her.  She turned her palms upward on her knees and closed her eyes.

Darla winced.

“What’s that racket?” she asked.  The feeling of dread had coalesced into a low humming, almost buzzing sound.

“I feel it in my stomach,” she said.  The pitch was so low it was almost beyond their capability to hear.

“I wonder,” said the priest.  He stopped himself.

“Wonder what?” asked Amrita.  She had taken half a step backward, terrified.  Unconsciously she had turned as if to run away.  Yet she remained.

“I wonder if making yourselves known so soon will prove to be disadvantageous.  You’re not nearly ready…”

“Damn straight!” said Darla, before her eyes widened and her mouth dropped open.

For Ting Ting, legs still crossed, eyes still closed, was slowly levitating from the ground.

#FridayFlash #200words Intellectual Property

“How’d it go with the attorney?” he called out as he entered the house.  He could hear her crashing around and talking to herself.  Only when he entered the office, saw the chaos, and approached her could he see that she was crying.

“That asshole is turning it around!  Saying I got the idea for the show from his novel!”

“Which asshole?” he asked.  “Not your attorney.”

“No!  That plagiarizing, pseudo-writer asshole!” She began digging through papers randomly, not even really looking at them.

“What are you looking for, honey?”

“The first draft of the script.  From four years ago.  The one I printed out and marked up all over in blue pen.  It’s dated and it’s written on with ink, maybe they can CSI it and show the ink is four years old…”

He stopped her and gave her a hug.  He held her for a long time.

“We’ll find it.  Okay?  Just stop crying, that’ll help, yes?”

“Okay,” she said, and wiped her eyes. Then she lunged to the floor, startling him.  She stood up with a bunch of papers triumphantly clenched in her fist.  “Intellectual property, bitches!”

#FridayFlash #200words Meet Cute

Wham!
This was the first time she had ever collided with someone hard enough to make a sound.  Neither of them fell in the coffee shop, but they crashed together so violently that the noise made everyone else look up.  Of course there was now coffee everywhere-her clothes, the floor, his clothes.
“What the hell,” she said to him.  She couldn’t gather her thoughts to come up with a sufficiently withering rant.  She hadn’t even intended to come in for coffee; she had changed her mind at the last second, turning around after almost passing the door. Now this.
“I’m so sorry.  Really, sorry.  Look, I’ll buy yours,” he said, looking mortified.
“Why don’t you just look where you’re going?” she said, grabbing a bunch of napkins from the counter.  Again, this was more pedestrian than she would have liked, but she had never been quick with a barb.  Perhaps it was her Southern upbringing.  Insults were couched in compliments in her experience, and that sort of discourse takes time.
“I was.  I mean, I didn’t know you were coming in.  What I mean is, I wasn’t looking where I was going.  I was looking at you walking by.”
“Oh.”

#FridayFlash #200words Disaster Relief

"Hey, darlin, what's wrong?" He asked, trying to make eye contact through her steepled fingers in front of her face.

“I’m just tryin’ to help, that’s all.  I got junkies who don’t want the diapers for their kids, they want money to buy diapers for their kids, which they won’t, I got grandmas too proud to take a box of food, I got roofers with busted fingers too scared to go to a doctor cause they’ll have to give a name…” her words petered out as she wiped another tear from her jawline.  She had given up trying to catch them in the vicinity of her eyes.

“Lemme see if I can cheer you up.  Another beer!” he said to the bartender, leaning in toward her and smiling.
“Oh no, I’m one over my limit.  And two over my limit for deciding to go home with somebody.”

“You’re a very smart lady,” he said. “I’ll call you a cab.”

“And you are charming.  Really.” She said.  And he was.  He had an easy way about him, an easy way with a smile that showed he liked people and liked being around people.  She smiled.

“There y’go,” he said.  “Cheered up.”

#FridayFlash #200words Static

She didn’t mind the work.  There were some, she knew, who looked down on cleaning, whether it was cleaning a house or a person in a hospital. She didn’t mind cleaning the bar, even though the bathrooms were gross.  Parents take care of newborns, and that’s often gross, and well, what’s gross anyway?  As in a definition.  It’s different from person to person.  Kids think kissing is gross.  In some countries they think keeping a pet in your house is gross.  But she had regular work and when she was done she could see the difference she had made.  But the next day the bar would be back to gross, and she’d do the same thing again. And again.  That’s what she minded.  Over the long haul it didn’t matter one bit. If she disappeared, they’d find someone else.  It would be as if she were never there in the first place.  There were people out there, inventing things or writing books, and others knew what they had done.  She got her paycheck, sure, to go on living.  But was she, really, if no one knew she had been there?  That’s what she wondered as she scrubbed.

#FridayFlash #200words Getting Ready

“He’s just gotta,” she thought.
Looking into the bathroom mirror, she brushed her bangs straight down, then over to the left.  When she brushed them back over to the right, she noticed her hand was shaking.
“Wow, I need a drink,” she thought, but then grimaced.  “Tsk tsk,” she thought, not knowing what that sounded like, only knowing what it looked like in books.
She looked back into the mirror.
“I will make a good first impression, and speak clearly and confidently, and answer questions but not talk too much.”  She wondered again about her clothes, and yet again reminded herself that she didn’t have a lot of choice at this point.
“He’s just gotta,” she thought again.  “But he might not. Will he even like me at all?”
She put down the hairbrush, and looked at her hands.  Still shaking.
Exiting the bathroom, she picked up her purse from the hall table and checked for her bus pass.  She checked, again, to make sure it wasn’t expired.
“202 days sober,” she thought.  “Is that enough?”
She left the apartment to go ask the family court judge for custody of her kids.

200 Words Earworm

“Oh no,” she thought, as the bus driver banged his hands on the steering wheel. City bus drivers have subtle and not-so-subtle ways of expressing their moods. A crabby bus driver can make a commute range from neutral to downright unpleasant in no time. The banging changed to a beat, though, a rhythm. Then she picked up the patter. Doot-doot-doot-bee-doo-wah-doot-doot doot.

“Is that scat?” she thought. She glanced up, and the rider across from her was wearing a bemused smile. La-did-diddy-wah-doot- dooty-dooty-wah. Oh, it was a melody all right. But what is that tune? Six or seven stops left. He was getting louder.

“It’s going to make me crazy if I don’t figure it out,” she thought, as the driver interrupted himself to let more riders on.

“Good morning!” he said, revealing that he was in a good mood, rather than just distracted. Doot-beedy-beedy-bee, doot-beedy-beedy-bee! Doot-doot-dooby-doo-doot-dooty-dooby-doo. He was really getting into it, and she got slightly embarrassed. It was a little beyond normal bus etiquette.

“Oh, two more stops! What is it? What is that song?” she panicked, when he solved the problem for her, and she could disembark infected by his good mood.

“Oil, that is. Black gold, Texas Tea.”

My entry in NovelDoctor's contest

NovelDoctor is an editor and he's running a fun contest at his website. 200 words and it has to include a wristwatch. Here's my entry:

“Gimme it.”

“Uh-uh.”

He tried to wipe the sweat from his forehead with his cutoff t-shirt, but there was not enough fabric left to do the job.

“ Never understood why people cut off t-shirts. That’s the important part,” she mused, standing in the mud next to her man and the broken ATV.

“Just gimme your goddamn watch so I can rig this throttle and get us home!”

“No, Mama gave me this.”

“Your mama’s dead. Hand over your buttwipin’ watch!”

She looked at him. He had become foreign to her, like a word viewed so many times it becomes strangely unfamiliar or looks misspelled.

He looked at her. That weird gleam in her eye behind the lanky bangs and the frosted eyeshadow implied something in her that he’d never seen from his mama, or Loreen, whose bed he’d left this morning, or any other female.

So he grabbed her arm and unhooked the wristwatch as she squawked and struggled. He turned to the ATV and jerry-rigged the loose throttle, stretching the cheap leather to its limit.

She wondered how far she could get a knife through his gut before it stopped. She wondered how much a bus ticket to Atlanta costs.