No. 3 : After the Fact
It was May. The garden was dressed in luscious greens and the water of the pool glistened outside. The outer porch had been contained with a screen structure. It kept the mosquitoes away and somehow gave the sensation of separating us from the heavy humidity of the air.
It sucks being old and white and into hip hop, and all you wanna do is dance and move and feel the beat, but you gotta take a whole lotta shit from every direction when you do...
Sometimes, when I’m lying with Izzy in her bed, we look out the window at the funny tree in front of our house. Ever since the big storm that tore one of its large limbs off causing a hollow gash in the perfect round outline of the branches, the tree has looked confused, sort of bi-polar.
I want to be spared the wrecking ball, I want to stay in this place, the best place I've ever lived,
in the best city there is to live, forever. But my Brooklyn haven is a precarious nest because it's
slated for demolition.
My children, who I call the dwarfs, at the end of the day, after I've concocted them three meals, sometimes four, have a habit of asking for warm milk and a platlet of fruit or bowl of dried banana.
We shuffle in the grass. Andrea is close to me, much shorter in the dark. There is the smell of wood smoke among the bare trees, it is on the roof of my mouth. We search but there is no rope to see. We get our jeans muddy.
I definitely wasn’t expecting any of this and had no idea the night was going to take such a turn.
At 5 a.m. I heard the phone ring. It must have been the ring’s tail, because as soon as I heard it, it stopped. My first thought — a mistake. I returned to deep sleep snoring like a koala bear, hibernating. And as my body slowly sagged into to la-la land, I tried to revisit my dream, but alas, it was gone!
I live in Israel, Kate in New York. Since our parents died, my trips there have become less and less frequent. I hadn’t seen my sister in eight years. Suddenly she decided to attend my daughter’s wedding.
It hurts him so to see his love in pain that, to keep him from seeing her, he dream builds a very tall ice palace to keep her wandering spirit away from seeing him, from seeing that there is more to him than he lets his words convey.
How is it that you could make us laugh // even in the most dire of times?
Surely I knew, right? That I should be grateful. That I had something — someone — special sitting next to me? Didn’t I? Surely I appreciated the friend who put her life on hold for me.
“Did you ever imagine that Granny’s old oak table would serve this purpose,” I heard my daughter-in-law whisper to her father as she leaned over to him.
Sunrise at the sacred circle of stones. We have joined hands and now we separate with instructions to find the stone that calls to us. Some one else claims the one I was first attracted to.
I wondered about why our eyes change colors. Climbing up and down the wooden ladder of the ship throughout the night as if between the earth and sky.
You told me once,'
The heart has room for only one Lord'
I lean my face forward towards the tall glass of coffee, my nose fits inside the narrow opening with room to spare. The steam fills up my nostrils making my face feel warm a maybe slightly wet too.
I know my heart will never be strong as theirs and my senses never as clear. But for a moment my neurons get to mirror them, and for a moment I get to be much more than I actually am. I raise the mug to take a sip. It’s when I burn my tongue that I realize: I’m just sitting on a chair.
It was a Saturday afternoon. We were exhausted of and from each other. The room was full of anxiety. I guess it was a normal thing to feel if you were living in a new country, had secretly moved in with your also nineteen year old boyfriend and were supporting both financially with the money your parents sent you to pay for school and cover life expenses for one.
The light changes and off you fly, my body is still in yours. Knee touches knee, helmet cheek on helmet head. We’ve barely met. You pick me up from the station. We throw my weekend bag in the apartment. “Do you want to watch the recommended French movie?” you ask. I hesitate, “Yes!”
He came back to bed, bringing one glass of water for the both of them. She took it, quickly sipping a bit. She had no idea what she was supposed to say. She had no idea how she was supposed to feel. But the water was cold, and asked for nothing in return.
She wakes to the sound of sirens and calls out “Madelyn. Let’s go."
It was May. The garden was dressed in luscious greens and the water of the pool glistened outside. The outer porch had been contained with a screen structure. It kept the mosquitoes away and somehow gave the sensation of separating us from the heavy humidity of the air.
Share your story!
Popcorn is a bimonthly zine. We accept any and all submissions from current and former Sense Writing students. Story length should be 1000 words or less, and inspired through the Sense Writing practice. While every submission will not necessarily be featured in the upcoming edition, we are committed to featuring everyone's work eventually.
Edited by Hannah Sparks
Christian scripture writes, and you may have heard before, “The truth will set you free.” And while not a theologian, I am confident other religious doctrines contain a similar teaching and that several interpretations exist as to what this might mean. For me, a woman in her twenties working and living in New York City, being free means staying true to myself.
Truth and telling can have potent consequences in narrative. When you speak the truth, a weight is lifted, and the burden of your secret is spread evenly throughout your history. The truth becomes a part of the fabric of your life. But it’s not always our turn to share our truths; sometimes, secrets are revealed to us. And they are frequently not welcome.
We sometimes talk about protagonists revealing and not revealing secrets in Sense Writing III workshops, as a way to create subtext in a scene and anticipation in the reader. In the stories chosen for this issue, our protagonists find themselves, instead, on the receiving end, either dealing with or just enduring the weight of the truth.
The story “Mourning” from Christie Barron, set in Israel, begins and ends with a boom. I like to think of these as “truth bombs,” relentlessly blasting reminders of this fractured reality. In this apocalyptic landscape, our protagonist is reaching out for tranquility, even vapidity (“the vacuous Twitter feeds”), only to be inevitably shattered by another boom.” But there is no shelter from what she knows is coming and cannot stop.
Mortality is possibly the most difficult truth anyone will face, and many don’t give enough credit to achieving its reconciliation—until it’s too late. In Pilar Rueda García Yakar’s “Intimate Silent Storm,” we find the narrator approaching this very milestone when she visits her dying aunt. This realization is depicted almost literally in the cleaning of the jar: “ I surrendered to knowing with all my being and sobbed quietly, with the sparking clean vessel…”
In the other stories, our narrators assume a more proactive role. Dan Martin’s “Old White Dude Does Hip Hop” explores, almost aggressively, what it truly means to be an “old white dude in a hip hop club.” Amidst hearty conversation with just the right kind of inquisitor, he is finally able to ask himself that question. In “Wound,” a wife imagines her divorce as a personified version of the severed tree outside her window. Healing would take time, she knew that much, but how to treat the gash? Emily Tobey writes, “I didn’t know whether to cover it or let it breathe.” The pain of divorce did eventually subside, as it should, and the narrator finds herself free to explore her unencumbered truth.
Certainly, in any good story there is a revelation. Conflict by its very nature reveals at once unseen truths that at least one character was not wishing to face. From compartmentalizing it or rolling with it, the intrigue in a story does not arise from the truth itself, but how the characters use it.