Circumstances Change

The trigger was from Somerset Maugham’s short story. The Force of Circumstance. This time we both wrote about a long married couple not communicating well. Both our couples were married for 25 years.

She was sitting on the veranda waiting for her husband to come in for lunch.

As always he was late, which annoyed Cook, but after 25 years of marriage, Marjorie knew there was no hope to change him.

She heard through the kitchen window the cook slamming pots and pans. Cook had made a hot meal as Bob had requested. Usually they had cold salads, sandwiches for lunch, but today Cook had roasted a chicken stuffing the bird with olives and bacon with potatoes and green beans. Well none of that would spoil, it was not like a soufflé on anything.

Marjorie knew that she and Bob had to talk. He would be surprised when she announced that she was leaving, moving back to London. He would ask why.

She would say she was tired of living in Africa, in the country.

He would wave his arm around to the lush garden leading out to the land where their coffee crop was growing and ask how in God’s name would she be able to put up with a dirty, smelly city after all this.

She would not be able to explain about plays, concerts, museums, tea shops. Or rather she could explain, but he would not understand.

There were many times before when she had prepared to leave, but lost heart at the last minute. This time she’d bought airline tickets, non-refundable.

A hour went by. This was late even for Bob. Cook came out and asked “When?” her face twisted in anger.

“I don’t know,” Marjorie said. “Perhaps you should serve me and put a plate aside for my husband.”

She finished eating and Bob still hadn’t appeared.

As she waited for Cook to bring her a cup of coffee, she saw Kofi running in from where Bob should have appeared. “Master Bob is sick.”

Marjorie was wearing slacks and trainers which let her run after Kofi. The field where her husband lay was a good ten minute run away. He was gasping for breath. Having trained as a nurse, she noticed the blue of his gums and thought heart attack.

How quickly she was able to organize Bob being carried back to the house. She went to the room where they had the medical supplies, including oxygen, called the helicopter from the hospital in the city. As she watched the helicopter air lift her husband away, she realized he was the only one that would be flying.

Ice cream

 I'm so happy. My writing buddy and I are back on doing our writing exercises, this time on Skype because she's in Argelès and I am in Geneva. The hiatus was caused by her moving. Now that she is settled our next writing date is tomorrow. The exercises are a wonderful trigger. Interesting in this one she concentrated on Betty and slowly unwound thread after thread. The book we used for this exercise was...(she said it was the only book unpacked.)

Welcome to the World Baby Girl

Fanny Flagg

Trigger: Betty said, “Mackie get some vanilla ice cream in a dish. I’m a nervous wreck.”

Mackie sighed. Betty solved every problem with ice cream which was why she was no longer the lithe girl he’d married twenty years ago. Now she heaved herself out of chairs and panted when she walked upstairs. She used ice cream as something to calm her nerves or to celebrate any event such as the sun going down.

Who ate ice cream on a winter night?

His wife did.

He took his car keys off the peg by the door where they always hung. His truck was parked in the yard. He had bought it shortly after they were married and it had over 154,000 miles on it, but it still was in pristine shape.

He wasn’t one of those good ole boys who let his truck get rusted. Any spot of rust and he was out there with his sandpaper and spray paint can. Even the bed where he hauled wood and landscaping equipment was cleaned every Sunday.

The engine hummed with the turn of the key. He pulled out of their driveway. Sometimes he felt like just going down the road and to keep going to he didn’t know where—a new life somewhere. He could set up a landscaping business anywhere.

He loved his work, turning chaos into something beautiful. His latest job had come from the new rich bitch in town who had bought the $4.8 million mansion that everyone said would never sell because of the price. The lawn had been boring she’d told him, and she’d wanted him to create a magic spot. He’d done that with fountains and bushes that hid a silent place with a mosaic bunch where she could sit and read.

He suspected she never had time to read, what with her being head of the software company that he was always reading about when he looked at the financial papers.

Quite a looker she was. Not skinny-skinny, but well curved and not over curved. Her hair was always in place not like Betty whose roots were two inches of dark trimmed with blond.

Not reasonable to compare the two women. Betty was his wife. She was loyal, took care of the kids, kept the house nice.

The store was coming on his left. He started to signal a turn and then changed his mind and gunned the engine heading toward the open highway.

A knock on the door

My writing pal both dealt with the end of a relationship based on the first line taken from The Butcher of St.Peter.

It was the knock on the door that made her move at last. Only then was she aware that the room had darkened while she’s been sitting in the chair, his chair. He’d play with his iPhone with the television reporting the news in the background.

This was the time she sat at her desk, playing games on her computer. She didn’t like the violent games, but played things like Mahjong or Bubbleburst. Cricklers too.

She should have spent less time on the computer and more with him. Now she couldn’t.

Maybe she should have seen it coming. The clichéd working late, the too tired for sex. He’d just bought her a diamond necklace for Christmas, a guilt gift, she thought now.

When she came at noon at first she thought the flat had been robbed. Where his DVDs and his computer had been were now empty spaces. A robber wouldn’t take his clothes and toiletries and leave hers.

She found his note on the kitchen table. It too was clichéd: Couldn’t help himself…so in love with…didn’t mean to hurt her…Alan.

The knock was more urgent. She forced herself to answer it.

Janice, her best friend, stood there. “Alan called. He said you might need some company.”

Liking yourself

 My writing partner and I noticed the obese young girl strut by the tea room where we were doing our writing exercises. We always try and pick out someone a bit different to describe and to work into a flash fiction piece. This time we both wrote how happy the person appeared. However, the picture I found to illustrate this piece is no where near as fat as the one we were writing about.

Her hair was cut almost into a crew cut except for five tendrils of different lengths sticking out from different sections of the back of his head.

She decided years ago as her body expanded if she couldn’t be pretty, she’d be interesting.

Her belly jiggled under her horizontal striped shirt. Any fashion consultant would have shuddered saying how the stripes accented the fat.

Micheline would have been pleased that they, the fashion consultants that is, even thought of her.

Years ago she’d developed a strut when she walked, her head thrown back and a smile playing intermittently on her lips.

People, okay women, gravitated toward her. She’d be invited to couples parties, probably because the women didn’t see her as a threat with their men. At that thought she smiles. More than one husband had reached out to touch her breasts, probably some latent memory of mother’s milk.

Micheline didn’t mind because she knew it would go no further. They wouldn’t want to and she wouldn’t want to hurt her friends.

She glanced at her watch. She was late for work, but she’d make up the time later in the day.

God, how she loved her life.

Condolence book

My writing friend and I are back at La Noisette to do our flash fiction exercises by identifying a person then writing for ten minutes. Sometimes we pick up the same thing. She also had the elderly woman that inspired this piece as not liking the dead person, only she made the defunct as the French call it, the wife of her lover.

Janine signed the condolence book on the gold-legged table just outside the 13th century church. The hearse hadn’t arrived, but some early funeral attendees were straggling in.

She still had trouble believing her arch enemy from grade school on was dead. Decades of animosity flowed from her pen as she signed her name. She still remembered Maria throwing paint on her new blouse, tripping her on the playground and stealing her homework.

Janine gave as good as she got. Her late husband, Jean-Luc, has been Maria’s boyfriend first  although during Janine’s marriage she wasn’t sure she hadn’t done Maria a favour by taking Jean-Luc off her hands.

Janine leaned heavily on her cane. Despite the winter sun, her arthritis was hurting today.

She hadn’t known Maria was ill, even if the lived side-by-side. Each had called the police from time to time to complain about noise coming from the other’s house. Maria had won her case with the fence argument forcing Janine to move the structure six inches back towards her property.

Janine took a minute to read the names. People could be Maria’s friend or hers, not both. However some of the names on the list were people she had thought had been on her side.

Looking up she watched the hearse park by the side of the church. Maria’s sons and sons-in-law moved to shift the coffin into the church.

The line of people waiting to sign the condolence book had grown behind Janine. 

She debated going in, but instead shuffled off to buy bread at the boulangerie.