three word wednesday~karma, wither, obey

arranged marriage

my husband; wither thou goest, i will go (even if it is rockford, il) wither thou stay, i shall stay (even if it is living in the unfinished basement in your uncle's house. in rockford, il). the commands thou gives, i shall... i shall. iiiii shhhhaaalll. wait, give me a minute. i can do this. okay, let me try again. the commands thou gives, i shall.... no. no. i’m not going any further. i am not going to say the word obey. i don’t care if karma comes back to take a pound of flesh from me, there is no fuckin’ way i’m going to say much less mean the word ‘obey’. i don’t care what my parents spent on this week long circus of a wedding. i don't care who flew in from how far away, i am stopping this fiasco right now. right. now.

i don't care about the whole next life payback i’ve heard about all my days! i’d rather worry about being a mealworm in my next life than go though this! do you hear me? do you? yeah, and good luck with that whole ‘wither’ shit on your next bartered for bride.

i’m outa here.

one word~shield

all of her life, she relied on her smile to get what she wanted.

powerful, full of white teeth, framed by friendly dimples, and made charming by a slightly wonky incisor, she used it though most of the day, meeting both friends and those she wasn't sure of, hiding true intentions behind the shield of that smile.

it worked beautifully; giving her access to the best tables, excellent customer service, and allowed her to easily remove from her life those who crossed her, with no one the wiser.

one word~certain

nothing is ever certain in life..the old saying is, you can only count on birth and death and taxes (unless you don't pay them).

what i know is certain is my love for you, my belief we are this couple that are bound by emotions; we are soul mates. what is certain is the knowledge these beliefs will carry on until my death.

ah! if only you felt the same way!

one word~clip

he clipped a bit off the top... then, a bit more on the sides, using the heavy garden shears as a sculpting tool. snip, clip, snip some more.

in the end, the teen boy's body fit nicely into the hefty bags, and they fit nicely into his trunk, allowing him to neatly place them into a hole in the old landfill he discovered not too far from his house.

when a sign says, "I ENFORCE THE RULE OF NO TRICK OR TREATERS OVER 12", it is best one heeds the unspoken warning.

one word~gem

it was a gem of an idea.. to go outside, in the dark, creep over the fence, knock on her son's window while he read 'the exorcist' and scare him to death.

it was a gem of an idea....until she fell out the window into the snow, got her nightgown caught on the fence, and finally having him shoot at her with a gun she didn't know he had as she scratched and moaned outside his window.

the next time she had a gem of an idea--she stayed in bed.

awards r us

thank you to a muse in me for this... i'm to give it to 15 other bloggers.. tough decision. i can't sort out 15 blogs of all the ones i follow, so, i hope you all share this with me.

you deserve it.

sunday scribblings~shame

That's Not the Way it Feels

There, on the deck of the ferry, she’d glanced over when she first heard his voice. He spoke far too loudly into his cellphone, voice and details spilling into the crowd around him. “One of those,” she thought, lips thinning in disapproval. Three things bothered her like nothing else; people who insisted on involving the world in their phone conversations, restaurants without someone who spoke decent English to take orders and reservations, and unruly children. Violate her rules and you’d find her glaring, avoiding your establishment or tutting loudly enough to shame both child and parent.

He spoke as if he were safe at home, carrying on that one sided argument, his voice starting to rise over the sound of the engines. He was near the bulkhead, close to where she stood enjoying the late fall sunshine, one of his hands holding a closed brown paper bag, the other pressed the phone into his ear, while his voice... loud, sliding from strident to coaxing...never stopped as he started to pace along the rail.

“You are my everything! My whole family knows about you and no one in your family KNOWS ABOUT ME!! You have me in some fuckin’ closet behind old clothes and shit. I wanna know, Jeanie, are you ASHAMED OF ME??” He shouted as if the sound could force an acceptable conversation with the unseen Jeanie.

She shut her eyes for a moment, hoping that childhood game of ‘if I can’t see you, you don’t exist’ actually worked. He went on and on, sentences stuffed with a wide variety of expletives, the voice slapping aside her hope he could be ignored. The deck was full, there was no place to move--she remained an unwilling participant in the conversation. Then, the woman next to her caught her eye, and they shared a conspiratorial grin, looking in unison to the talker, that glance bringing them into a sudden shared amusement over the man, his phone, and his one sided conversation. Covering their mouths like girls at the playground, they broke into low giggles, nudging each other each time he cursed.

The boat docked, the two women were carried along with the initial surge of the departing commuters, moving from deck to dock in a few steps, enjoying the superficial bond they’d created. They whispered to each other about him, straining to hear his conversation as it continued while he wove through people, that voice carrying over the hum of conversation filling the terminal. Each woman bet he would end up with one of them during the rest of the journey home, a bet answered with each exclaiming to the other, “No, not me! YOU!”, surrounding the sentence with a wreath of laughter.

He moved past them, the shame and anger lacing his voice demanded you pay attention, pay attention now! Tattoos covered his neck and arms, and the uniform of an AC/DC t-shirt and pants in that low rider position with peek-a-boo boxers favoured by young men looked out of place on his 40 year old body. He looked like the love child of Michael J. Pollard and Lindsay Lohan--flaccid facial features holding a irreversibly lost innocence.

Watching him move towards her train entrance, she shrugged at losing the bet, and, after a last wave and rueful laugh, she left the transient friendship behind, moving down the stairs, passing him as he stood at the bottom, near the doors. He was closing the phone, muttering, “Fucking bitch.” to the air as she slipped past to walk through the turnstile. Finding her train, settling into her seat, she looked up to see him scrambling though the closing doors, into her car, into her space, throwing himself in the seat across from her.

It really was no surprise; stray dogs and sad people always followed her.

Train moving, the car full, he opened his phone again, that electronic line to his pain and heartache, and picked up the conversation where he’d apparently left off--again in that loud voice, the full vocabulary of expletives...only now, they could all hear the thread of a dying future that underlay the bravado of his speech.


“Please, baby. Please, move to another room where we can talk privately. What? You can’t hear me? Just move then, go to the bathroom or somethin’ where you can hear me over all that shit.” He went on and on, reminding her of the night they went out in the city and had such a great time. The carriage ride in Central Park. The birthday party he’d given her at the White Horse Tavern. Didn’t any of that mean anything? His voice dropped to a lower pitch...didn’t his love mean anything? He swore he knew he didn’t deserve her, but, he was willing to do anything, change, get a different job...anything to make her feel proud of him.

“My battery is dying, baby... I’ll call you from the apartment, I’m almost at my stop. Okay? Okay?? Why not? WHY THE FUCK NOT?? Jeanie, Jeanie?? Are you dumping me? ARE YOU DUMPING ME??" His voice stopped, silence upon silence. His face... as he looked at the phone, shaking it to make sure it wasn’t the battery, that it was a disconnected line... his face was a place of broken hearts and destroyed dreams.

She shifted in her seat, wishing she had a newspaper or a book to hold and look at as some of her fellow passengers did, instead of pretending to find something of great interest outside the window in the dark night. The full car was quiet now, each traveler wishing they were somewhere else while they had listened to his life fall apart in such a public place--privately annoyed they had to witness it happen, secretly fearful they might have that same conversation one day.

The calling of her stop brought her to her feet, automatically doing the subway surfer stance, balanced against the slowing of the train as she re-adjusted her purse, her laptop case, checking to see she had everything. Looking towards the door caught him drinking from the bottle inside that brown paper sack. He looked straight at her face, causing her to lose the studied unfocused eyes of those not wanting to be involved. Bringing the bottle to his mouth again, he held the stare a blink longer, then slouched down, going back to staring at the closed phone. Looking at him, she found herself wanting to shake him for forcing himself into her life, goddamn him! For breaking her rules. The need to shake him to make his head snap back and forth while she berated him for dragging her into his chaos made her start to shift her body towards him, to move into the action she craved.

Instead, she stepped onto the platform, down the steps, onto her street, and thought of telling the story to friends, switching it up a bit, making it amusing--his mannerisms, the crazy phone call, the drinking from the paper bag, the pants! The idea was eclipsed by the memory of his face as the realisation sank in he wasn’t good enough for his unseen love. She stopped under the corner streetlight, pulled in a lungful of the cold, wet air.

She knew she’d never tell the story to anyone. Ever.

Empathy has a way of changing your perspective. She walked on into the dark, switching her thoughts to the anticipated irritation of the eventual yelling of her dinner order over the phone as if the loudness overcame the communication barrier.