Like the Prose: Challenge #12 – Write a story in third person omniscient tense with stream of consciousness in it.

Claudia heard the bell over the door and looked up to see who had entered. It was ten at night, the last hour she was typically open on weeknights, but there was one customer who always came in at this hour on a Thursday, and when she glanced around the mostly-empty tables she saw him.

He was probably twice her thirty years old, and he dressed as if he’d come out of a 1950’s movie, with a black fedora and a proper suit and tie, not just a sweater and jeans (or dockers, she supposed most men his age actually wore dockers). His suit was scruffy, though, the sleeves were worn at the cuffs and the elbows were shiny, while the hems of his pants were starting to fray slightly.

Claudia often wondered if he simply didn’t realize his clothes were wearing out, or if he didn’t care, and yet, at the same time, his slightly out-of-time look suited him, though if pressed, she’d confess to being curious about his profession. Was he retired, or still working? A professor at the university down the block, perhaps? Or maybe he’d been a spy in his younger days, and hadn’t quite shed the last remnants of his cold war habits.

If truth be told, what really loved was watching the graceful way his hands moved as he picked up his cappuccino cup and lifted it to his lips. How he managed to drink the stuff without ever getting foam on his salt-and-pepper mustache she never knew.

With a start, Claudia realized her customer was starting at her, even as she’d been watching him, and she blushed. “Hello, Viktor,” she called softly across the space between them. “Your usual?”

“Yes, please?” he answered her in softly accented English.

She smiled at him and moved to pull the shots and steam the milk for his drink.

* * *

At his usual table, the one that allowed him decent views of the front and back entrances of the café as well as the bar area, Viktor allowed himself a long moment to observe the young woman who owned the establishment.

He had been coming here once a week in the two years since his Sophie had died, as much for the organic fair-trade coffee as for the young barista herself. Something about her reminded him of a woman he’d known in Paris decades before – not so much in the way she looked, for that woman had been a brittle blonde and Claudia the café owner had vibrant red hair – but in the way she carried herself confidence, and treated all of her patrons as if they were family.

Just when he was certain she’d noticed him staring at her, Claudia called his name. “Hello Viktor. Your usual?”

He’d confirmed his regular order and then turned his attention to the buttons of his overcoat, undoing each one, slowly, and then shrugging his shoulders out of the thing. He knew there was a stain on the right lapel, and if Sophie were alive, she’d never have let him wear the thing out of the house, but he liked the way he felt in it: as though he were a man of substance.

Perhaps, he thought, this would be the night he invited Claudia to sit with him while he sipped his coffee. And perhaps the younger woman would accept. He would look into her warm brown eyes and find the spark of connection he longed for, and they would begin a conversation. Conversation would lead to an invitation to dinner and dinner would turn into… he didn’t know what. It had been too many years since he had courted a woman. Hell, he was pretty certain that ‘courting’ wasn’t even done any more. Kids today ‘dated’ or ‘hung out’ or ‘hooked up,’ none of which sounded appealing to him, and none of which seemed appropriate for a woman like Claudia.

* * *

“Cappuccino for your thoughts?” the woman in question appeared at his side and set his drink on the table. “It’s a nice night tonight. Probably be warm enough to open the patio this weekend.”

“It always feels festive, drinking coffee in the starlight, of an evening.”

“I think so, too,” Claudia said, smiling. “Mind if I sit down?” She hoped he wouldn’t object. He’d been a mystery for two years and it was time to change that.

Viktor returned her smile with one of his own, his blue eyes dancing. “I had finally worked up the nerve to ask you to join me. Can you afford the time?”

Claudia looked around. “You’re my last customer,” she said. “Wait a moment.” She left his side and went to lock the doors and flip the signs from OPEN to CLOSED. Then she went behind the bar and made her own drink, and also served a slice of cheesecake, returning to his table with drink, dessert, and two forks. “Share this with me?” she invited settling into the chair opposite his.

“Did you bake it?” Viktor asked. He knew that Claudia made many of the pastries she sold at the café, as well as the soups and pastas, but that others on her staff also cooked.

Claudia nodded, offering him a fork. “Family recipe. The key is to use real lemon. Try it.”

Viktor accepted the fork and sectioned off some of the cake. It was perfectly crumbly, and there were none of those too-sweet fruit sauces on top. He tasted it and his eyes went wide. “But, this is lovely. It… it tastes like home.”

“I’m glad you like it,” Claudia said. “I’m a cheesecake purist. Most people these days want all this stuff on top, but I think if you can’t do a perfect plain cheesecake, you can’t do anything.”

“Have you always wanted to be a baker?” Viktor wanted to know everything about this woman but it was their first real conversation, so he was restricting himself to safe topics.

“No, when I was little I wanted to be Mata Hari.”

“The spy?”

“Yes. I wanted to be the femme fatale who seduced secrets from handsome men.” She laughed to show that she was joking, and let her eyes go wide. Would he find her too audacious? Claudia hoped not. “For the longest time I’ve wondered if you might be a spy,” she confessed.

Viktor laughed. “Me! A spy! No… oh… oh, no. Not at all. I teach at the university.”

“That was my second guess. What subject?”

“History.”

“Tell me more?”

Viktor took a sip of his cappuccino, noticing that the woman across from him paid close attention to his hands when he lifted his cup. Smiling softly, he said. “Well, I’ve always liked to know the stories of how things came to be…”

Claudia put her elbows on the table and her chin on her hands. This man was all she’d hoped he’d be. Charming, funny, smart. She could listen to him for hours. To think that she’d been watching and wondering about him for two years, when all it took to get him to open up was cheesecake.

Like the Prose: Challenge #11 – Write a first-person narrative where the narrator is not the hero.

I can’t help but stare at her hair. Chestnut coils cascading down from the top of her head nearly to the small of her back. I fantasize about running my fingers through it and letting them catch on the curls.

The weight of her tresses must bother her for she rolls her head back and forth from shoulder to shoulder as if working out tension. I can only imagine what it must feel like to carry that mass around with her on a daily basis.

I decide I must have it. Her hair. Her.

I learn her patterns. She works in an art gallery, wears black far too frequently. I understand that dark colors are less likely to detract from the art, but a deep green would set off her hair, and suit her pale coloring, so much more favorably.

I spend time gazing at the works she represents. I strike up a conversation about one of the better pieces. Most is contemporary, abstract, cold. The piece I gravitate to is all warmth and curves. The female form exploded.

“Do you like it?” she asks. “It’s one of my own.”

I invite her for a coffee.

She suggests wine and tapas instead.

I accept.

We see each other several times over the next few weeks, months, but never on a set day. “I’m in town for a day,” I lie. “Dinner?” This continues. Our acquaintanceship becomes a friendship, a romance, a casual relationship.

When we’re sitting side by side in a banquet seat at a restaurant, I tease her by playing with her hair. It’s soft, I realize, and smells faintly of peaches. When our lunches and dinners become bedroom trysts, I watch her hair curtain my nether parts from view as she kneels over me to give me pleasure. When, later, our positions are reversed, her hair is fanned around her on the pillow, and I’m nearly overcome by the sight.

“Sometimes,” she teases, when I’m playing with her hair as we sip wine and nibble artisan pizza in front of the television, “I think you only want me for my hair.”

She is more correct than she knows.

Relationships built on lies and half-truths never last. She begins to suspect that I’m not what I seem. I claim to travel for work, but never tell her what that work is. I never invite her to my place, only spend time at hers.

When the news begins to carry the story of a serial killer whose kills are on certain days of the week, she laughs and notices, “We never seem to meet on Thursdays.”

“I never got the hang of them,” I answer, quoting a cheesy science fiction novel with a line that is both funny and suitably cryptic.

She is not amused.

She tells me she’s not comfortable with our arrangement.

She wants answers, or an ending.

I give her the latter.

We were in bed, of course. I made sure she was satisfied before I wrapped my hands around her neck.

It doesn’t take that much strength to squeeze the life out of someone, but it takes patience. Perseverance, really.

Of course, I kept a memento of our time together. I’m sure I don’t need to specify, but I will, because where others will see one more box of hair, I see a treasure chest of chestnut coils.

Like the Prose: Challenge #10 –  Write an anecdote. (I couched mine in Basil & Zoe’s first meeting.)

“It’s not like I’m ever going to need this kind of math later in life anyway,” I grumbled at my mother as she led me through the different biology labs of the ship. “I’m going to be on stage.”

“I know you have your heart set on an arts career, Zoe, but that doesn’t mean you should skimp on your education.”

“I have a 4.0 GPA. I’m in all advanced placement classes. I’ve been accepted to three Ivy League schools, two conservatories and the Space Fleet Academy – ”

” – where you will never even consider attending – ” my mother’s tone was wry.

” – where I wouldn’t attend if you paid me,” I corrected.

“Say that a little louder, kiddo, I don’t think the captain heard you.” She turned into a door marked ‘aquatics.’ “Here we are…” We walked through three more labs, pausing in one that was lined with tanks and lit with only dim blue light. There were benches down the center of the room. “Sit.”

“Here?”

“Yep.”

“Why?”

“Because this is the jellyfish lab, and jellyfish are calming, and you, my sweet daughter need some calm in your life. So, sit here. Get a grip. Come home in half an hour and try the math homework again.”

“Half an hour?” I whined.

“Complain again and I’ll lock you out for an hour.”

“See you in twenty-nine and a half minutes, Mom.”

“Smart choice.” And she left, heading out the way we came in.

And I… well, the jellyfish were kind of entrancing. So much so that when someone else came in the room and spoke to me I jumped.

“Pardon me,” a smooth voice said. “I did not mean to disturb you.”

“You’re not bothering me,” I began as I looked up into a face I’d never seen before. But I was thunderstruck, because the features I saw above the collar bearing pips of a lieutenant commander were pale silver, like moonlight. Belatedly, I added, “Sir.”

“May I ask why you are in the aquatics laboratory at this hour? Traditionally students are restricted to the civilian decks after school hours.”

“My mother is giving me an object lesson in relaxation.”

“I am afraid I do not understand.”

“I was freaking out over a math assignment and she brought me hear to stare at the jellyfish for half an hour because ‘fish are calming.'”

“Ah.”

“My mother is Dr. Harris. Lieutenant Harris. I’m Zoe.”

“You may call me Basil.”

“You’re a synthetic lifeform?”

“I am.”

“And you’re an officer?”

“That is also correct.”

“If you stay with me, will that count as lifting the restriction on being here?”

“It would, yes.”

“Then, Basil, would you like to watch the jellyfish with me for twenty minutes?”

“Thank you, Zoe, I accept your invitation.” He joined me on the bench and we were quiet for several minutes but then he broke the silence. “Were you aware, that the term ‘jellyfish’ is not accurate?”

“I’m not sure what you mean?”

“These creatures are neither jelly nor technically fish. Rather they are varieties of the phylum Cnidaria which includes the ‘true jellies’ but even those are not fish. In fact the word ‘jellyfish’ actually proves this.”

I was understandably skeptical. “The word ‘jellyfish’ proves that a jellyfish isn’t a fish?”

“Yes. You see, in scientific nomenclature we compound names imply an inaccurate description. Consider the name ‘starfish’ for sea stars, or ‘seahorse’ for the creatures that are obviously not equine.”

“Huh. I’ve never really thought about it. Interesting.”

“I am glad you found it so.” He gave me what I perceived to be a considering look. “Does your mother allow you to spend time on Deck Zero?”

Deck Zero was the domed recreation and observation space at the top of the ship. It wasn’t a deck, hence it’s name, and it included a formal officers’ mess as well as common space.

“I’m seventeen. As long as she knows where I am, and I maintain my grades and meet curfew she doesn’t care where I go. I mean… we live on a spaceship.”

“Then, if you would care to adjourn to the Deck Zero lounge, I believe I can assist you with your troublesome math assignment.”

“You mean, you don’t agree that staring at jellyfish to rest my mood will magically fix the problem?” I teased.

“I am certain a calmer mood will help,” he hedged. “But it will not impart understanding where there is none.”

“I’d need to get my tablet,” I said. “But if you truly don’t mind, I could use the help.”

“I will accompany you,” he – Basil – replied. “I would like to ensure that your mother does not object.”

“Yeah, that’s probably a good idea. Although, it would have been nice to let her think her jellyfish plan worked.”

Basil looked at the tank in front of us, and then at me, again. “In a way,” he said, “you could say that it did.”

Like the Prose: Challenge #8 – Shape a story inspired by football (soccer).

I’m in a café in Madrid, and inevitably the conversation turns to fútbol – football – the game I know as soccer. As has happened time and again on my visit to this city, my companion’s demeanor has the song “Gay or European” from Legally Blonde: the Musical  running through my head.

I apologize for my bad language skills. “Me Español es muy mal y Mexicana,” I explain.

He counters, “Me Ingles es como humo.” Like smoke.

But I understand more Spanish than I can speak, and even though the Castillian accent throws me a little, somehow, we manage to communicate.

He asks me if I follow the game, and I have to admit I don’t. “I’m not really a sports person,” I say. “Except for figure skating and horse racing.” I blush and add, gesturing to the television, “I like the outfits. The shiny shirts and tiny shorts.” I’m quoting the musical again.

He laughs at that. “Well, who can blame you. It is why men watch gymnastics and swimming, no?”

I have to agree. It is probably why some men watch those sports.

“The problem is, you look at fútbol and see a ball game,” he says. “And really, you should see a dance. It is a dance with a ball. A great dance on a ballroom made of grass. The ball, she is your partner, and the other team, they are trying to steal your partner, and get her to go home with them for the night.”

“Okay,” I say, “you make it sound almost sexy.”

“It is sexy,” my companion insists. “Come, let me show you?”

“Now?”

“Do you have other plans?”

I don’t, and I admit it.

“Alright, so…” and he asks for the check, and pays it before I can make even a token protest.

He leads me a few blocks away to a terraced square where young boys in school uniforms are kicking a ball around. “That building,” he points, “was once a palace. Now it is a school.” He calls the boys over, asks if he can show the Americana how to appreciate fútbol. Asks if they will assist him.

At first, I just watch, but gradually, I’m drawn into the pick-up game. It’s casual. Informal. All good, because I’m told not to put my purse down (thankfully it’s a small cross-body bag) lest someone wander off with it.

And after half an hour, or an hour, I’m breathless from the activity, and the altitude (Madrid is much higher than where I live), but I’m also beginning to see what he means. It’s a dance. Patterns upon patterns.

We treat the boys to limonadas or Coca Colas and join them in their refreshment. The afternoon is dying, and my companion asks if I want to extend our afternoon, tour the literary quarter, then go to dinner “… and perhaps another kind of dance, if you are interested…?”

He’s a wonderful flirt, and I’m definitely interested. I accept his invitation.

* * *

Weeks later, I’m sitting in my office racing to meet a deadline when a box arrives from my Madrilleno dance partner. It’s a regulation fútbol and an invitation to return for a proper visit.

I laugh at the gift because I expected our encounter to be as ephemeral as his professed English skills.

Like smoke.

Then I reach for my phone to send a message over WhatsApp – asking when’s a good time for a visit.

He says after the World Cup.

I tell him it’s a date.

Like the Prose: Challenge #6 – Write about a deep secret.

Sometimes, she thinks, the writers should have given her better lines. Like when they had that stupid argument about the kids’ beds. She wanted paired captain’s beds with desks at the ends, and he insisted stack up bunk beds were better because they’d have more floor space.

“But they’ll fight over who which of them gets the top bunk.”

“No, they won’t,” he’d argued, pointing out that their older son liked to stay up later, reading, and having the bottom bunk meant he could have a clip-on reading light, and the younger boy was a marathon sleeper, never got up in the night, so putting him up top wouldn’t disrupt anything.

She’d wanted to counter that he was a marathon sleeper now, but she’d ended up just yelling that since he knew so much more about their boys he should do whatever he thought was best.

It wasn’t the first such argument.

And it wasn’t that she didn’t love their boys, wasn’t madly, scandalously in love with her husband, but sometimes it felt like she was just playing house. Like this wasn’t really her life, that she was an actress playing a part and she’d wake up and walk into her real life as a foreign correspondent or a famous chef or… something.

She’d gone through all the counseling after Zachary was born and then again when the arrival of Jordan had sent her into an emotional tailspin, but post-partum depression couldn’t still be a thing after nine years, could it?

Could it?

And really, Facebook is to blame.

Oklahoma? Her college editor had responded when she’d made the “friend request” a few days earlier. You’re living on a ranch in Oklahoma? And you’re married? I expected you to end up in New York, London, Paris. I thought you’d have published seven novels by now. But as long as you’re happy…

And that’s the thing. Feminism teaches that her life is her choice. That staying home and writing cooking blogs and raising two boys who are free thinkers and respectful of women is as valid as anything she might have done before (and there was a novel, actually, before she traded that life for this one).

And, really, that’s the secret she doesn’t share: that she’s happy. She’s so goddamned happy, and she feels fucking guilty for enjoying her life. Like she’s some horrible failure for not living up to other people’s expectations of what she should have been.

And so, she goes through periods where she wishes she had better writers handling her day-to-day dialogue.

And sometimes, she feels like she’s playing house.

Like the Prose: Challenge #5 – Have a friend tell you a true story. Use it to inspire a piece of fiction.

She’s never liked smoking the stuff. The taste, the smell, the way it makes her lungs feel tight and takes away her ability to draw breath – these are the things she associates with smoking pot. But she’s not a prude, and when the couple on the next blanket offers them some… enhanced… brownies she’s happy to take one in exchange for the beer her husband is offering in return.

She doesn’t tell them that she’s worried about her kids, but her husband knows. He’s been assuring her all day that they’re fine at home with her mother, that it’s okay to do something for herself for a change, that date night is important.

And he was so happy when he surprised her this morning with the tickets. His big grin had never been wider or more natural. He’d picked her up and swung her around giggling like a loon and kept spinning her in circles until she was giggling with him.

He was good at that.

At making her laugh so the anxiety stayed away.

That’s why it had to be a surprise.

* * *

“Maybe we should call home,” she says for the fifteenth time on their way to the arena. It’s only a ninety-minute drive, but they just don’t leave the kids that often. Mostly, they don’t have the opportunity. Sure, they can say that it’s because money’s tight – but honestly, when is it not? When is it ever not, for everyone, everywhere?

No, the real reason is that he’s working shifts and she’s working furiously on her novel, and there are four kids and her parents and his parents and church and social obligations, and all of that adds up and means that couple-time is relegated to those precious few moments when all four kids are asleep at the same time, and they’re lying in bed together in the dark.

Or, better, when they’re lying in bed together in the soft light of not-quite-dawn. She thinks of that time as their magic time, because the kids are still in bed, and they’re just them. Her hand drops to her belly, as she thinks of the way they spent that magic time a few mornings ago, and of the fact that in all the stress of having four kids she’s missed a pill here and there, and while she isn’t exactly trying for another kid – Jesus, but four is a lot to cope with – if it happens, it happens. They roll with the punches, she and her husband, her lover, her soulmate. It’s what they do.

* * *

The parking lot feels like it’s in orbit around the moon, for as far as they have to walk to get to the gates, and then they’re told they can’t bring chairs.

For a moment, she’s worried he’ll press the point. “Since when can you not have lawn chairs on the lawn?” he asks the guard.

But she notices the shake of his head and the dimpling of his cheeks that mean a smile is forthcoming. He’s being ironic.

All chivalry, he buys her a bottled water and tells her to wait while he treks back to their van to swap the chairs for a sleeping bag. He’s taller, he reminds her, and can walk faster.

She lets him do it.

The stench of other people’s pot makes the hike up the hillside to the top of the amphitheater feel more like she’s scaling Everest, and when she tells him that he says he’s way handsomer than any Sherpa and she agrees and tells him he has a nicer ass, too.

Laughing, they make it to where they’re supposed to be, glad they remembered to bring the binoculars. There are speakers, so they can hear everything. But without the binocs they might as well be at an ants’ concert.

They spread the sleeping bag on the soft grass, grateful that it’s been a cool, dry spring and there aren’t any mosquitoes. But they’ve forgotten how slick the material can be. They end up having to hunt down rocks to keep everything still.

But it doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter at all, because the music starts, and he’s got his arms around her and the stars are coming out overhead.

And when she’s eaten the brownies from the couple next to them, she stops worrying about the kids, at least for a while.

But in between songs, people are moving about, and at one point they get up to dance, and the rocks get kicked away. Clumsy, she falls to the ground, caught by her husband and the sleeping bag, but the impact sets the thing in motion.

They’re sliding, and people around them are glaring, but she’s not worried about what they think, because he’s laughing and she’s laughing with them, and their laughter only gets louder when the song being played reaches its chorus:

And I’m free
Free fallin’
Yeah I’m free
Free fallin’

She sings along with Tom Petty for a few verses, and she realizes free-falling isn’t so bad when you’re doing it hand-in-hand with the man you love.

Like the Prose: Challenge #3 – The most important short story the world requires. Or failing that, just write about the most important thing in your life.

“Aren’t you afraid he’ll turn on you?” they ask, when they find out she’s in a relationship with a synthetic lifeform. “I mean, can you really trust one of them?”

It doesn’t matter that Basil is an officer in the Space Fleet, or that he actually went through the space academy and earned his two degrees, rather than merely having the information uploaded into his neural net. It doesn’t matter that he plays the acoustic guitar, the violin, the piano, the French horn, and the Gemellian flute. It doesn’t matter that he’s published three volumes of poetry (under a pen name, of course) that were critically acclaimed and popularly adored.

They see Machine, and they’re afraid.

And the truth is, she’s afraid, too.

But not of him.

Never of him.

Outside their relationship, she’s afraid she isn’t really talented. That her latent telepathy is somehow making audiences think she’s a better actor than she really is.

She worries that the dark characters she tends to play, these evil dictators, serial killers, and literal madwomen, will affect her psyche. With every one, it gets a little harder to find her footing after the run of the play is over, and normal life has resumed.

Then, too, she isn’t always certain she’s cut out for normal life. She’s never really learned how to live in one place all the time, and even when she was on the ship with Basil, he was going on remote missions. Their time together is counted in days and hours, not in weeks, months, years, and she can’t imagine what it would be like if she… stopped.

But now she’s pregnant.

And okay, they used donor sperm, because Basil literally can’t sire children, but he’s the one who used the turkey baster and made her pregnant. They’d turned the lights down and played soft music in their quarters and tried to keep the clinical, technical aspects of artificial insemination to a bare minimum.

But she’s worried that their child will face bullying or bigotry because her father not only isn’t human, he isn’t even organic. And she’s afraid that same child will, one day, reject Basil and demand to know who the sperm donor is.

And she can’t bear to imagine the hurt on either face, either the one she hasn’t seen yet, or the one she sees every day.

Basil. Basil isn’t the most important thing in her life, but he’s the most important person other than her own self, and he knows her better than herself most of the time, and she doesn’t know how she’d survive in the universe without his calm rationality, or gentle guidance.

And that brings up a host of other fears.

She’s afraid she’ll never love him with the same devotion he offers her, that her fickle human heart can never be quite as steadfast.

She’s afraid she’ll lose his interest when he’s heard all her stories and learned all her secrets.

She’s afraid that when her age begins to show, and he retains his youthful appearance he won’t want to remain in their relationship, or she won’t. And she’s afraid he won’t be willing to let her go when it’s time for her life to end…

And she loves, him, she does. She’s loved him for more than half her life, and honestly can’t imagine sharing a life with anyone else.

But…

Sometimes…

She hears people whispering about how she’s got a taste for the exotic because her high school boyfriends (all two of them) were both aliens, and now she’s with a synthetic lifeform… and she wonders if maybe it’s true that she’s with him because she doesn’t know how to be with a normal human.

The Christian Bible has over three hundred variations of the phrase “Fear not,” in it. Parents and teachers and counselors are constantly telling us not to be afraid.

But she knows better.

She knows that her fear is what keeps her going. It keeps her motivated. It keeps her accountable. It’s her best friend, her worst enemy, her constant companion.

She’s afraid…

She’s afraid of what might happen if she stopped being afraid.