The Minnow and the Trout--Updated

Peter sat. The bench had lost its initial comfort, and he intermittently shifted his weight to accommodate the impartial slats beneath him. Peter waited. The sun moved--shadows developed and morphed into the October twilight of almost night. Peter waited.

The cold air did not agree with Peter. He hunched over in an attempt to preserve heat, the length of his forgetful hair obscuring his equally forgetful face. A passerby might have thought him a vagrant (the hunch of his shoulders belying his young form) waiting to be towed from the street--another hour or so and he would be.

C'mon, he thought. C'mon. The wind teased--finding each isolated pocket of warmth and snuffing it away with the last of the season's burnt leaves. The overly excited tumble of their frisk past his feet suppressed the silence, and his cold ears strained to hear the expectant limp and stick.

Peter sat. Peter waited.

Peter sat to count the minutes. Seven, four, two. Peter started. At last, footsteps--a long heavy, followed by the quick step and stick sounded the gait. Peter straightened...

As he sits straight up in bed Peter realizes that he had been sleeping, it was only a dream.

The windowless room is dark and muggy with only the light from his monitor to let him check his surroundings. Peter glances around the room, but everything appears to be in order. Everything, except that noise.

Peter closes his eyes and listens closely. It doesn't take him long to realize that the sound is growing closer.

But that suddenly becomes unimportant when he notices the dull pain slowly working its way from his hind end Peter opens his eyes and looks down only to see that he is sitting on the bench again.

"Maybe the acid was a bad idea" Peter thinks to himself as he readjusts on the hard wooden bench and looks around to see where that noise is coming from.

Ah yes, the sound of approaching steps walking briskly in the autumn chill. A rhythmic clicking with each step announced the gender of her curious gait. Peter raised his nodding head, awakened by an effervescent curiosity that grew more urgent from the perfumed scent wafting in the breeze before her. Questions flooded his brain, immediately cleansed from all previous thought, as his wonderment commanded further analysis. Who was this sprightly coiffed co-ed with an independent air that seemed to say, “Eyes to yourself, you somnambulistic nerd. You deserve not a single glance from these emerald sirens that would only haunt you for the rest of your bewildered life.”

Questions! Time froze as his life passed before him, a panorama of memories, hopes and dreams flooded his brain. Was this the epiphany that fate had promised him? Was this that crucial moment in time that exacts winners from losers, and calls men forth from the disparagement of failed hopes to a new beginning? Peter somehow knew this moment would change his life forever if he could only summon the courage to seize it.

Then in an instant, as fate would have it she tripped on a crack in the sidewalk and went down to her knees as her purse fell open scattering the contents—a paper lined with numbers fluttered in the breeze and landed in a pile of leaves beyond her gaze. In an instant and without thinking, Peter jumped up and quickly offered her his hand noticing her bruised knee. Awkwardly, she took his hand and tried to compose herself, withdrawing it to brush the fractured leaves from her torso. “Are you OK” Peter queried as he gathered the scattered items and returned them to her purse. “Yes, I’m fine” she protested, as she quickly thanked him and with an embarrassed look gingerly continued on her way…

It happened so fast, Peter thought. I didn’t even get her name. Who was this creature and why did fate call forth this unlikely event? Peter analyzed the past few moments over and over as he began to walk across the fading grass strewn with wine colored fragments of passing summer’s glory. Then he saw it! Almost by accident as he brushed through a pile of leaves hiding the paper he now remembered. Curiously he picked it up, wondering if it would somehow restore his failed attempt to triumph over his own self effacing passiveness. Five lines of six numbers each were printed above a barcode. It was a “Lottery Ticket” without any doubt and on the back a phone number scribbled in pencil.

Peter paused with measured thought. Perhaps he would call the number after this night's drawing---Perhaps another day would help him think more clearly. Who knows whether fate would share its millions with him, with her or with them both…?

Moving on...

Your attentions overwhelm--at the risk of embarrassment, we move on.

Sometimes we get bored--or stranded in the library waiting for a ride home. Sometimes each piece of the day seems to lend itself to that moment when you have to put your books aside--shelf Saussure and Lacan, and try the world on in a different size. This week, we tried poetry...

Not Writing: Three Haikus

New facebook alert
distracts eyes eager for being
Sorry, facebook said."

It is loud. Tele
vision off--reconciled
account with roommate.

Easily forgot
are the simple pieces that
teach me contentment.


Let's

let's argue--
let's tease the painful, gasping meaning
from each tortured line.
let's pretend it can go anywhere--
that he stopped in the woods, snowy or otherwise,
for a deep psychoanalysis of his
cold, muffled life. The woods are deep--he
talks to horses there.
bethespoon. Bend each longing sunflower
and poisonous motivation of experience.

Let's rename the world. Suns are years.
roads are choices. flirts are deers with doe brown eyes.

Here we care about undiscovered
rocks at the bottom of a cave
buried under the ocean
because they are
beautiful...
or are
they
?
ask keats...

Wait, don't--we don't care about keats.
keats' fears are realized--he's dead.
along with every other pen wielder
since eden. It's about
you. it's about me. it's about reading.

crazy? confusing?
yes--here
we listen to guys who talk to horses--
alone, in the dark, cold--snowy--
woods. Miles and sleep.

The Minnow and the Trout

Round Robin. Anything goes. The idea is that each reader adds to the story by posting a comment developing the plot and characters. Every so often, the comments will be proofread and added to the original story. Let's see where we can go...we are excited!


Peter sat. The bench had lost its initial comfort, and he intermittently shifted his weight to accommodate the impartial slats beneath him. Peter waited. The sun moved--shadows developed and morphed into the October twilight of almost night. Peter waited.

The cold air did not agree with Peter. He hunched over in an attempt to preserve heat, the length of his forgetful hair obscuring his equally forgetful face. A passerby might have thought him a vagrant (the hunch of his shoulders belying his young form) waiting to be towed from the street--another hour or so and he would be.

C'mon, he thought. C'mon. The wind teased--finding each isolated pocket of warmth and snuffing it away with the last of the season's burnt leaves. The overly excited tumble of their frisk past his feet suppressed the silence, and his cold ears strained to hear the expectant limp and stick.

Peter sat. Peter waited.

Peter sat to count the minutes. Seven, four, two. Peter started. At last, footsteps--a long heavy, followed by the quick step and stick, sounded the gait. Peter straightened...

...*silence*...

Some things are fated. Just think, Jerry could have skipped his cup of coffee this morning before his nine o'clock and not needed the restroom at the beginning of his session in the Huntsman Reading Room at the library. But he DID have his coffee--and was privileged to overhear a true "ohmygoshIcan'tbelieveIamhearingthis!" moment.

Jerry struggles with the public restroom system in general. The dingy lighting, conspicuously missing Jaws soundtrack, and the knowledge that you are exposed to the world with nothing but a connect-the-dots partition for protection (not to mention the colonies of viral plague) seem to create a stress counterproductive to using the "rest"room. However, guys have devised their own code of conduct to facilitate the necessary evil. They enter, take care of business, actively avoid eye contact, and, for all intents and purposes, pretend they are the only one in the room. There is certainly no conversation.

Jerry knows this, and was disturbed to hear voices upon entering the room. He was even further disturbed to find what appeared to be only one other person in the room: a set of particularly sad flat tennis shoes in the far stall. His disturbance culminated in the awful realization that tennishoes was on the phone...while peeing. Jerry assumed his vacant stare at the wall and listened.

"No Mom, I already know how you feel about that; you don't need to tell me. *silence* Well, I am sorry you feel that way. *not so silent silence* I just need to get my life together. *voice breaks slightly* No, I'm not being sarcastic. I don't know what I'm doing. You're always telling me I need to get my life together and I do. *silence* You don't really mean that--no, Mom...*voice breaks, sob is heard*...*swearing*...(call is over)..."

Jerry hurried out as quickly as possible.

"...I need to get my life together..." starting with a heart-to-heart in a public restroom while ON THE JOHN. Tennishoes, is not this perchance one of the travesties of your life that needs "got together?" Perhaps she can't take you seriously because she smells the insincerity of your plight.

Jerry is grateful fate saw fit to offer him this perspective adjustment: when he gets discouraged--thinking he can't take it anymore--he will remember he has not been dumped by his mom in a public restroom while peeing.

Pithy officially declares unnecessary talking in a public restroom as an item fit for the "Dislikes" list, and presume to condemn anyone who would speak ON THE PHONE while peeing (among other things), flushing, and washing as inconsiderate. This behavior should be reserved for telemarketers--not mothers!