I write every day whether I like it or not. In about three years I'll stop.
I keep wanting to tell my mates I just got laid. Not just laid but exceptionally laid unexpectedly.
Right now it’s a one night stand, but it’s only the next day. It’s a one night stand that shouldn’t be–better not be.
My mates sip their pints and so do I. They don’t know yet that I have changed and I am not sure how to tell them.
The above is badly inspired by "The Holiday".
Word count: 78
Shunder Bon Thon translates to ‘the mighty workshop of Shunder’. The main building–which is not what draws first attention–follows the curve of the hillside like a fat dilapidated snake. Apparently no one new how to excavate or build up and down the slope because it meanders along the contour cantilevered in some places on stilts in others. Sometimes the lumpy thing even loops out from the hillside altogether to create little grottos or atriums. From the right angle, one that you can only reach from another hillside a mile to the south, the entire mess grades perfectly level.
Of course it was built in sections over many years, but always with the same local trees and same practical style. A local could tell you ten maybe twelve sections of construction history. Travelers are lucky to guess correctly two sections deep.
At night the multicolored windows light with a surprising pattern you wouldn’t expect from an otherwise arrhythmic structure. But even those panes are susceptible to the vagaries of materials availability. The regular six pane pattern might be four or five deep red and one or two red-orange. Some sextets will be entirely clear with a single out of place blue or green or lavender pane. Others alternate two glass, two painted over, and two glass again. If you want to focus on the main building you must see it at night, because during the day your attention just can’t get past the monstrous hoops circling the building.
Shunder Bon Thon is encircled in a horizontal column of twenty-three copper hoops.
These cyclopean rings rise as high as a wren ever needs to fly and measure maybe a large woodshed wide. No one knows who made them or how they remain erect. All of them are partially buried in the hillside, but a few not as much as you’d like. Number seventeen exposes it’s entire inner surface and worries even the oldest of the locals. But even their outrageous size draws less attention than the reality that all twenty-three align perfectly along a single axis. The workshop winds in and out following the hillside, but the hoops never veer from perfect.
Word count: 362
It was June again and time to make new year’s resolutions. Matt Stevens, Mr. Stevens, had taught high school for too long to feel like December 31st was the end of anything. Even with it’s muggy weather and lingering allergies nothing felt as fresh and clean as June.
Next week his classroom would host summer school. Instead of stacking up desks and chairs for the cleaning crew and the eventual waxing he just had to clean out his desk and lock a few cabinets. Matt finished that before the last bell. Now he sat at a student desk–six students’ desk really: Clark, James, Chrissy, Herminia, Allison, and another James (Jimmy)–scratching a bed of triangles with a #2 pencil. He looked to be thinking. He even felt like he looked to be thinking. Instead he was fucking around.
He taught for twenty years in the same school. Seventeen of those years in this room. High school Chemistry had not changed in that time and apart from a few experiments OSHA no longer allowed, he taught the same course each year.
Matt didn’t know what to write in is little book that would make the equilibrium go away. He stopped drawing triangles. He placed the pencil quietly on the desk. He leaned back.
Fear shot through him for a moment till he realized his mistake. He was no longer in college where leaning back in a wooden desk might mean his long hair would get caught in a rivet separating slightly from the back of the desk under his weight. Strange that old memory should come unbidden to his brain. Or maybe not. When water boils slowly there is always one bubble that has to form first, cling fast, then rise to the surface before any of the others.
"Probably I should quit denying I’m gay."
Word count: 307