Short prose
Written during Short Prose Forms with Alan Ziegler.
“Writing is just finding an optimal embedding space for your ideas”
You leave a painting of two twisting dragons almost-finished on your desk for weeks. One airy afternoon you finally make the four dots that will be their eyes. The dragons blink, then peel themselves off the paper and fly away into the sky.
“Somewhere on the California-Nevada border…”
Somewhere on the California-Nevada border is a sea of mirrors redirecting sunlight onto three steam turbine towers enabling over a hundred thousand Americans to light their homes, charge their devices, and cook their dinners. I want to write about this but can’t figure out what my ‘way in’ is. Is it the spots of desert air whose bright shine can be seen from the Vegas Eiffel? The swarms of insects drawn to the warmth and the birds in pursuit of these insects that, caught in the solar flux, burn up in more sunlight than they’d ever feel in their lifetimes, trailing ash as they fall? Is it one of the plant workers who call these birds streamers? Someone trying to save them? Or is it the driver going north on I15 who sees, maybe in the distance and off to his right, two wisps of smoke spiraling down against the shining blue sky?
Fragment #1
Raised in the kind of summer heat that melted an asphalt road, he likes the room hot. Raised under more misty rain than blue-sky sun, I like it cold. But one night he’s asleep before I am, hand still in mine. Where we touch we’re so precisely the same temperature I can’t tell at what point my body ends and his begins.
Fragment #2
I remember that a slow beast marches towards Bethehem to be born. I remember you trying to remember what happens in Bethlehem. You remember me waking up that morning and looking at you before turning over and going back to sleep.
Progress
Cook makes me a mug of hot milk with cinnamon on nights I stay up too late. I drink the whole thing. In the mornings Father still isn’t home, so the two of us eat breakfast in the dining room surrounded by his maps and model steamships. Father takes those ships out there so that all of us can have progress. Meanwhile I sit at the table and drink my milk.
Fragment #3
I’m trying to write about how to this day I’ve never tasted a plum as sweet as what the tree in front of my house used to grow for us before the city sheared its top off to make room for more telephone wires.