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anotherwriterinbrooklyn · 6 years

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Writing Under the Influence

On Tuesdays I like to go to one of my favorite bars and partake in their writing club. The organizer comes with four prompts and we write in 20 minute chunks. Here's what I came up with last night. Enjoy! 1. Pretend you’re in a tree-house eating breakfast around a table with a number of other people. Someone enters the tree-house and gives you an important message. Describe the ensuing events. A psychic friend of mine invited me to a treehouse in the middle of a Pennsylvania mountain range with five strangers. I was getting sick of the New York City heat, the hot train tunnels and unbearable bike rides to coffee shops with cranked ACs, so it seemed like the perfect getaway when I responded to the email. We were sitting in the treehouse having breakfast when a crow flew the window with a message and dropped it on top of the pancakes. My friend, the organizer, fished it out of the syrup with her fingernails, unfolded it and said. “Find A or else B.” I chewed on a piece of sausage and washed it down with a swig of coffee and it scalded my whole throat. “Find A or else B, what does that mean?” A friend of a friend said. I didn’t know him, we had just met last night. There wasn’t a distinguishable quality about him and I doubted I would see him again after this trip, but I trusted my psychic friend that this man must have something going for him, maybe that he was so unrecognizable, almost translucently pale with milky blue eyes. “Find A or else B, that could be anything,” chirped another friend. She was a little more recognizable than the man, with blunt blonde bangs and a dime-sized birthmark on her cheek. She was a hairdresser, spunky and quick-witted. “So who dies first?” Said Raphael, my friend from college, tipsy from a few glasses of mostly champagne mimosas. “It’s very vague,” I said, agreeing with the hairdresser. My psychic friend inspected the piece of paper, folded it up and opened it again. It was on a notecard, written in pencil. “Well, it looks like the owner has a game for her guests. What starts with A, and ends in B.” “I don’t know, you’re the clairvoyant one,” Raphael chirped, raising his eyebrows and pouring himself a forth mimosa without the orange juice. “How much time do we have?” I said, “How are we supposed to play if we don’t know the window?” “I think we should wait,” said the hairdresser, wrestling a pancake onto her plate. “Nothing good comes out of acting in fear or panic. The white man looked even whiter. “This concerns me,” he said. “I knew this wasn’t a good idea, I knew I shouldn’t have come to this treehouse in the middle of Pennsylvania. This is so unlike me.” He started breathing very heavily, pressing his fingers into his temples. “Calm down,” said my psychic friend, “I hear something, there’s a voice whispering.” 2. Write an elliptical conversation. Maybe they’re speaking about a grave matter that they don’t mention, or maybe they’re just being elliptical for the hell of it. You decide. “There’s a snake in my bed and I keep trying to tell it to go to go away but it keeps coming back. It laid an egg in my ear and now I feel sick.” This is what his son said to him from his hospital bed at the psych ward. He had been there for two weeks and hadn’t stopped hallucinating. “Seriously, dad. I don’t have a problem, I just need to get away from this snake. I promise I won’t use again, I swear.” His son had overdosed on methanthetamine, xanax and fentanyl 17 days ago for the third time in two years. He had been admitted to rehab five times, clocking in at a grand total of 6 hours in rehab. He remembered when his son was younger and they’d buy trading cards at the grocery store when he was well-behaved, and how often that was. Then at the end of the trip, while he was in the check-out line, his son would pick through the packets of trading cards until he found the one he wanted, then placed it at the end of the line-up of food for the week. When his son was 12, two shiny packs fell out of his pocket when they were loading groceries into the van. Instead of reprimanding him, his father decided to ignore what he saw. Maybe he paid for them with his allowance money. He wanted to trust his son. His son was a good boy. He got his homework done and picked up around the house, said please and thank you. He didn’t want to accuse his son of stealing if he wasn’t stealing, and most of all, he wanted his son to like him more than his mother, especially in the middle of the custody battle. Even if he did steal two packs of cards, so what? They were just playing cards, and when he was younger, he had pocketed candy bars and cans of soda, too. It’s something that he grew out of when he realized that the cashiers and people who worked at the grocery store were the ones who got in trouble when things were stolen. He knew because he pushed carts at the grocery store down the block from his house in high school. His son would learn naturally. There was a certain order about the world that could be followed, but in the middle of a heated divorce, he didn’t seem to know why to tell his son to follow rules and what they would be good for anyway. He had followed all the rules growing up and look where he ended up, at a corporate office, the same one for ten years, continuing to ask for a raise but not getting one. “Dad, the snake, get it out of here or get me out of here. I am sad and I want to go home. I will never use again.” 3. Find a piece of artwork over 300 years old on the internet, and write a story about it. The men gathered the young king and shifted him onto a cot made of blue silk and golden tassels. This is where the man’s body would stay while his people prepared his burial site. Underneath his home, workers sifted through his belongings, finding a brass and onyx gong that was a gift from a neighboring kingdom, one that he restored peace with and created trade sanctions. He was a diplomat, a father of ten, but that’s not who he was now. In the afterlife his body would find sanction in a tomb built just for him, his family and his legacy. He would be buried right next to his father, buried right next to his father’s father. With turquoise, rubies, and statuettes of the gods to protect him as his soul was ushered into the spiritual realm. In his new form, he felt weightless yet saddened that he had to leave his family so soon. He was 50, and had passed of natural causes. He had prepared for old age, said his respects to his family, assigned his second born son as the heir to the thrown, since his first born son had died in battle, in an effort to make piece with the neighboring country who had gifted the gong. His guards carried the gong and the king’s body out into the air, and rang the gong to announce to the community that the king had passed away, that there would be a successor to the throne. The king’s soul was torn. He wanted to stay to watch his body be prepared for burial, he wanted to feel himself anointed with fine, aromatic oils, but knew that he would never feel his skin from inside. His bones were not his — now they were the earth’s, and they would stay wrapped together in place with a thick winding cloth, then placed in a sarcophagus that would defy time, dust, and war, discovered hundreds of years later by a rich civilization from another hemisphere hell-bent on a treasure hunt. But for now, he would find his son. 4. Write a story in a style you don’t normally use. It’s changing things are changing wooooooooo can you feel it things are changing. It’s fall and the bugs are still biting they are making little holes in legs and arms, necks and cheeks, fleshy smelly holes. Lick the sweet sweat from your lover’s side and know that you are exactly where you need to be right here right now. Nowhere is how it feels to be everywhere all at once without reason. Find a purpose and stick to it like a mosquito finding a fleshy crevice to drink out of. Pour yourself a Guinness and start tapping on the keypad anything that comes out of your fingers is magic. No disrespect to the mosquitos they’ll keep on doing what they came to do but how do you concentrate if you’re always itchy and irate. Grrrrr you bugs you bugs find your own earth. Let’s collect all the mosquitos and put them in the trunk of an old car then send it to space. Let’s smash all of those bodies into the trunk and send it off to space. Let them eat each other make them feel the weight of their blood, human blood, all of it. Don’t you feel itchy reading this it makes me woooooooo zyyyy. There’s no one but you and I and this fly that’s on the table, circling around the candle. That fly is telling the other flies where to find the light, don’t you see. We are doing that too, we find the lights and like flies, like mosquitoes my draw more people toward it. There’s something to it, something to the light. It’s California. Let’s pack all of the people you know in a city bus and send them out west where it’s warm and bright and see how they live there. Let’s evacuate the flood lines before Miami’s submerged. Don’t you love how it feels to live fearfully of the flies and the waves, doesn’t it feel nice. Don’t you want the heat. When you have these worries to distract you what can you really get done. It’s so easy to focus on the flies and mosquitos. If we just pack them up and put them somewhere couldn’t we get more done. Who do you think you are telling me how to focus my attention when there’s this fly buzzing around my head and mosquito bites all down my legs. I’m afraid for my attention span. Wooooooooooo one point for admitting what comes naturally it’s who I am. I suck the life out of writing prompts and pound the table to find my voice. I drum my fingers and mosquitoes fly out and they bite my face as I bike home and it’s all I can think about, how I’ll have more bites and do I really need bugspray in October? WINTER IS IMMINENT so why worry at all about the bites isn’t there something like Zika in the air or West Nile virus or sssssssssss who is this person typing these words I don’t recognize them I think I’m going crazy because I should be writing pop music not this and I should always be writing something that I’m not writing but it’s more fun to just write and not look back. Like the horse, the horse that runs away with the reigns and there’s nothing you can do except keeping riding because consciousness just keeps on coming and you have to find a step back from it and watch the process from a distance, what’s really going on. There’s a beauty in not controlling it, it cuts through the mosquitoes, it feels triumphant to let the horse go crazy and you’re just riding it hoping that it goes forever but even horses get tired, even mosquitoes get tired and have to sleep. The flies die in the winter and then they come back again. Once the horse rests it will keep going for awhile. It starts and stops so when there is this motion you might as well ride it wooooooooooooooooooo

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