I'm so pleased. Who needs commercial yeast when you can conjure it straight out of the air like a sexy bread witch?
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| I'm not a witch - they dressed me up like this. |
Anyway, today's prompt comes from writer Stephanie Danler, and it's a trip down memory lane.
Prompt: Meditate on places. If you’re working on fiction, perhaps choose places from that fictional world. The easiest might be your childhood home, but it could be: a restaurant, a street, a parking lot, a ferry station, a borrowed home in the Catskills where it rained for three days or a stranger’s glass penthouse where you once did too many drugs. Write down any images, details, or words that come to mind. Don’t worry about complete sentences. Don’t worry about describing the place as much as describing what it felt like.
This isn’t research, or even a place to collect lines of dialogue or turns of story. It is simply to remember, to feel out for a tender spot, search your own memories for the surprising detail, the “punctum,” which Barthes defined as, “the accident which pricks me.”
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Haddonfield, NJ, 2008
Last night I was trying to picture the linoleum pattern in the kitchen of our first apartment together. I feel certain it was identical to the one in the house where I was born. Three or four shades of brown squares and rectangles assembled in an irregular repeating pattern.
That was the galley kitchen where I melted the Brita pitcher and the whole apartment reeked of burnt plastic for weeks. The kitchen where our upstairs neighbor got stoned and took a nap in the middle of doing his dishes. His sink overflowed and flooded our drop ceiling so a few soggy tiles collapsed and left a gaping hole.
That was the kitchen where a squirrel scaled the side of the brick building, found a gap, and got into the space between the 2nd and 3rd floors. It found its way into the kitchen through the hole in the ceiling. Andy was up at Rutgers for the day, so I hid in the back room with Ajax, the cat who was scared of everything back then. We sheltered together while the squirrel tore from one end of the railroad apartment to the other, back to front to back, screaming and clawing at the walls.
The landlord was busy at his day job when I called about the squirrel. In his stead, he sent his elderly Greek parents who had about 15 words of English between them. The father beat the ceiling with a broom handle as he yelled at "the rabbit." He stuffed a raccoon trap full of peanut butter and lodged it in the drop ceiling directly above our bed. The bastard squirrel danced around the edges of the cage all night, sending showers of tile dust onto our faces as we slept, or didn't.
That was the apartment where it was 1000 degrees in the winter because the radiators for all three floors were controlled by the 300 year old woman who ran the antique shop on the street level. It was 1000 degrees in the summer because we could afford to buy and run only one window AC unit.
That was the apartment where timid Ajax used to hide in the 100 years of accumulated filth behind the ancient cast iron tub whenever we had company. The tiny bedroom where Ajax liked to paw open my closet door that never closed all the way. He'd pull down every sweater that I couldn't wear indoors anyway and make a nest in the pile.
That was the apartment where Ajax entered the room with a red ribbon from a Maker's Mark bottle around his neck, a diamond ring dangling at his throat, and like that, Andy and I were going to get married.
Every place we have lived since has been a little nicer, but none of them have been as good.
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