ONE HUNDRED: Zed

He liked to ride around on buses, and no one ever noticed because they all walked around with their heads down.  One little girl lost a red balloon, and as she followed its progress up into the clean sky she saw him sitting there atop a great yellow and blue commuter.  He smiled, then leapt up impossibly high to grab the string and return it to her.  They both smiled.  The string was warm from his touch.

I might have seen him the first time after my car accident.  The more I consider this, the more I think this is correct.  I got out, walked around the steaming and crumpled hood to see if the other driver was alright, and he was leaning against a pole, watching intently.  The other driver slid himself out his passenger door, and when I glanced back to the curb, the witness was gone.

The second time I saw him was after my son was born.  My wife was discharged, but my son remained, his yellowed skin reflecting the liver’s battle within.  I stood by the nursery resting my head against the glass, willing health to that tiny body.  In another room my wife tangled with suction and bottles to infuse our boy with her antibodies.

He was leaning against the far wall, plaid shirt, lanky frame, midwestern boots scuffed and darkened from time.  I nodded to him and he strolled over, adding his forehead to my field of glass.

“One yours?” I asked.

“Mm, hmm,” he said.

His longish hair fell forward, covering part of the face that I sensed I knew from somewhere.  “You from around here?”

“Yes.  No.”  He smiled, a quick flash that transformed his face and was gone before I realized it.  “No.”

He placed a hand on the glass, then touched me on the shoulder.  A current of electrical heat ran though me.

“Are you an angel?” I blurted.  I don’t know why.

Again the quick grin.  “No.”

After he left, I put my hand where his had been to soak up the residual warmth.  I looked at my son; his skin glowed pink with vitality.

Eighty-Six: The Teacher

The teacher breathes in the air of cloistered rooms, chalk dust, textbooks, and heat.  The cases are still covered, the boxes of new materials still taped and stacked in the hall.  This is the bitterest time, when the memories of dead semesters are sifted through for remnants of danger, passion, love, mistrust; learning.  What to save, what to toss.  What to resurrect for the future?

The teacher wonders why they still come.  Education is not found in this building, these books.  Education is a perpetual Vegas show broadcast in hi-def in hotel rooms with jacuzzis and mini-bars.  Education is driving too fast down the hill and finding out that the brake shoes won’t save you in the end.  Education is kissing the girl who promises so much more with her eyes, and then hearing her rate you the next morning in the coffee shop queue.

The teacher opens a journal from a student gone many years:  “School means nothing to me, because I mean nothing to school.  All they want to do is control me, make me learn things that have no use, no value in the real world.  I don’t care about stupid dead guys and their nature walks or their plans for the world.  It’s not my world.”  How true.  How sad.

The teacher cleans off the desk in the corner with a sweep of determination.  What misses the garbage slaps on the floor as if wanting to call attention to the anarchy, the sudden revolution.  The teacher clicks on the laptop and begins a new syllabus, a new plan, a new idea:

“Teaching With Air” is typed.  “Unit One” follows quickly, along with:  “Write an article about the future of the world.  Put in any information you feel is important to developing the world the way you want it.  Caveat:  you may not cite any sources from the past 50 100 300 years.”

The teacher sat back and smiled.  How many Shakespeare books should be ordered?  Not for reading, of course.  Just for laying around.  Just in case.

Sixty: Edwin

http://www.space.com/common/media/video/player.php?videoRef=SP_090715_apollo11

When Edwin was small his uncle showed him a trick.  “Watch real close,” he said to the boy.  It was night, and in the backyard fireflies tagged each other in the bushes.  The moon was full, round and brilliant in the blackness above the neighborhood.  The coals in the grill still glowed some remembrance of heat, but above all the moonlight shown.  “If you take your thumb and hold it just so, out all the way, it’s bigger than the moon.  See?”  The uncle blocked the moonlight from his face with that one a-okay digit.

Edwin measured his thumb against the moon, and was unsure of the results.  His telescope said the moon was much bigger than that.  He held up his flat palm so the moon rested on his hand.  He pinched thumb and forefinger together to carry it like a marble.   He tried laying out on the picnic table and holding his feet up to it.  If his legs were ten thousand, fifty thousand, a million miles long, he could stand on the moon.  Or maybe not so long as that.

Fifty-Six: Primo

“Ah, and here’s the first one,” she said, lovingly smoothing the picture in the photo album.  “He would have been special.  Smart, like you, and handsome, like your brother.”  Her hands roved over a blank paper.  I could not see the resemblance.  I could not see anything.  It was white and empty.

“What do you see?” I whispered.

Primo was a moment, a shared intimacy whose lifetime could never be altered by war, by death, by moving or breaking china.  Primo existed on a separate plane, with no access to cloudbursts or rainbows or mowed lawns.  Primo lived, yes, but insubstantially, fitfully, adrift on recollection only.  Primo lacked eyes or ears, hands or feet, dealt only with a rough outline of torso and head.  Primo lived secretly for a time; then Primo went away.

“Did you look for him?” I wondered.  “Did you see where he went?”

“I see a backyard full of flowers,” she said.  “It is warm, and somewhere there is a sprinkler chattering away at the birds.  That would be Primo’s summer.  No bugs, no knee scrapes, just laughter and puddles and light.”  The paper could have hinted at that; yes, I thought.

“What else?” I prompted, but she was silent again, speaking only to Primo.

Catching Up!

Today’s my first day in the group, and I’m already a week behind.  Welcome to my facet of the 100 Days Project, “Characterization”; what I’m also referring to as 100 People.

As a writer, I usually begin my works with a grand vision, a scenario so overwhelming to my senses that I can actually hear traffic, smell aromas, and feel everything happening.  It is wonderful if I happen to land within a character who is experiencing these sights and sounds–the piece practically writes itself.  Usually, though, I am a bystander to events, and need to peek around characters’ shoulders to see what is happening.  In my gruffer moments I will push them along, resulting in stilted dialogue and jerky plots.  When I’m calm these people introduce themselves and allow me to experience their worlds.

I’ll let some of them come to visit, drawing inspiration from others’ work in the collective, be it photography, writing, or another form of creation.  All works will be credited and linked.

Enjoy your visits here, and please travel on to view everyone else’s works.