Peculiar Girl & Tick-Tock Clicking

Peculiar Girl and Tick Tock Clicking

Click, click.

Stay taps her finger. Click, on the metal sink as she stares out the wood bordered window of the kitchen, her eyes multiplied and gleaming in the glass crane on the sill.

Click, on the claw foot tub, water gone cold, toes pruney.

Click, click.

The sound of her heart, locked up behind tall, icy walls of skin and bone. Click, click, her heart ticks on. No thump or bump, pound or beat. Click, click, like a clock, second hand itching toward endless minutes, caged behind arctic glass, marking down numbers and moments.

What did Stay’s heart click down to? What waited for her at the end of her tick tock heart?

No more ticking, clicking or tocking, Stay thought. She knows what this is about. She knows what has come to haunt her.

Stay, alone, never experienced loneliness. With the click, tick, taping of her finger echoing through the empty home, loneliness began to echo in her tick-tock heart, creaking and cracking through frosty ice.

How? How could this be? Her friends dance in porcupine bones and swim in paper cranes. Her love and life live in collecting leaves and bones and deceased bugs hiding under brown leaves. No room for loneliness, no space to give.

Yet now she understood, loneliness ticked in her with every tock, tapped on every surface, scratching the blue flowers from her delicate finger. A finger not hers. A replacement, cold and aching, without true sense of feeling. Stay felt like the finger, in her home, in the world. Not truly a part, barely connected, sticking out. Cold, as the blood of life did not beat to her. Breath made no difference. All she had was click, click.

Alone, a loner, all one. Stay is one. Perhaps she was just one even when her mother was around. One amongst a thousand paper cranes, one among her vials of rain, and snow creatures built in the winter. One, even when she knew she was not.

Is this growing up? Is this a passing, fleeting, tick tock moment? Perhaps tomorrow it will be gone. Minutes will have ticked and clicked it away, dissipating the loneliness, the oddness, the bloodless finger feeling.

Click, click.

For now it goes on. Second after second, her soul a mechanic meaning, her thoughts are gears and drives spinning for something, working to get somewhere. Click, click.

River Voices

642 Things to Write About: You are about to take a nap by a river, and as you are dozing off, the rush of the river begins to sound like words. What does the river say to you? What does it want you to do?

Spring arrives by thawed rivers and lakes, in the flowers blooming in every yard. I stroke the soft, cool, dark green grass and close my eyes. I feel myself drifting like the lazy river winding around me. Then I hear it. The bubbling, rumbling of the river over rocks sounds like a voice. Oh no, not here too. I'm napping on the riverside to escape the songs and voices that mumble through the box-fan at home.

I groan and try to ignore it, concentration instead on the suns' heat soaking through my lids.

"Sopphhiieee..." a voice whispers up like mist from the water's rippling surface. I don't open my eyes and I don't dare move. "Sophie," it says again, "I know you can hear me now. All this time I was trying to contact you through the fan. I should have known a more natural approach would be more successful."

I must be dreaming. I open my eyes and look around, I'm alone. There's a swirl of water spiraling in the center of the river. I swallow and take a step away. The swirl lifts up from the water and the voice returns. "You're the only one who can help me."

City Raccoons

642 Things to Write About: Write a story from the point of view of raccoon. What is the city like at night? Why do you knock over garbage cans? Do you get along with other raccoons?

Fortunately, I belong to  small tribe, the City Racs. It's easier that way. The lonely ones receive no help, they stick out and become loathed. They give raccoons a bad name, knocking over cans, causing commotion, mayhem, and awareness.

In a group you can create a raccoon ladder, quietly climb up the fury bodies of your fellow raccoons and remove thrown away food in a quiet and more dignified manner. Not that all is swell in the City Racs group. There are a lot of squabbles over scarps and fights to earn more stripes.

Not all are cut out for city life, either. It's busy and crowded. There's a lot of struggle for territory and a constant need to feel part and protected by and in the group. I wasn't always part of the City Rac group. I know how it is to be a loner out there. That's why I'll do anything to stay here, among the group. I'm the bottom of the ladder, I'm the bandit of the bunch.

The Hummingbird

642 Things to write about: A bird has been following you everywhere you got for a week. Why is it following you?Whom does it work for?

Is it the same bird again? How many could there possibly be in my apartment on the 11th floor, and in the city? I only ever see it in my peripherals when I'm not thinking about it, when I turn my head to get a look I see a flash of green and it's gone. And of course, I hear it all the time, like a large bee buzzing on my shoulder, driving me slowly, ever further, into insanity.

In the elevator on my way down to the street I feel a sharp flutter on my neck, like a mosquito bite. I don't even have the urge to swat or smack it. When I turn my head to look, a long, thin beak is pointed up at me and a tiny green and blue body shuddering with the energy of its wings. A soft blur. A hum.

I'm staring at it in awe, my mouth open.

Then it speaks. "I knew it, I said to them, I said you were the one. They had me follow you all week to make sure but I knew and I was right." The bird's voice was a mixture of song and whisper

"What?" I said, dumbfounded.

"The majestry of birds, of course. She is looking and I found you. You're the one, I knew it. I can smell it on you like sweet honeysuckle in your blood. You're the heir."

The Peculiar Girl and Glass

"What the--"

Stay nearly tripped over a box at her front door. Jumping over it she huffed and threw a glare over her shoulder at the stationary brown box neatly taped without a label, sitting perfectly intact on her porch. What the hell was it doing there? She hadn't ordered anything and nobody ever sent her things. Stay didn't know anyone who would.

Someone placed this box here. Someone walked up her front steps and set it down. The item inside given to her with purpose. The person who left it and left knowing what they wanted her to do with it. The whole moment felt surreal as she stared at the box and her throat swelled with the confusion. Stay walked around the box, going back inside to the safety of her home. Sitting down on her entryway rug she stared at the box with the screen door between them.

Stay lost track of time, as she sometimes did, staring at the box. The sun traveled across the sky, rising up and over the house wrapping its warm light like a hug. Only a hazy deep orange ray crept toward the box while the rest sat in cold shadow. Stay didn't touch the box. She got up from her spot, legs sore and aching at the knees from sitting cross legged - she stretched and cracked her spine. With a final glance at the offender, Stay closed the heavy front door and locked it.

* * *

The box lay open on the old wooden table of the kitchen, each flap pulled over and bent to display the object inside which now sat beside it. A glass crane. Not a crane made of glass that was chipped away and polished smooth. A crane made of folded glass pressed carefully as if it started as paper and turned to glass at the makers command. It was the size of a small bowl and heavy enough that it required both hands to lift.

A note inside read "How high is your sky if you only love it from the sea?" written in careful print with a blue fountain pen on handmade paper dotted with bits of seeds and petals. The crane and note sat on the table for days, untouched. Stay tried not to think about what it meant and who had left it for her.

Yet the crane beckoned her. She stroked the smooth folds and pressed her thumb upon the sharp beak. Her porcelain finger clicked gently against the thick, fragile, gleaming glass. The note now placed on the fridge with an old beaten magnet that showed up in the mail over a decade ago as an advertisement, and she set the crane on the kitchen window sill. It glowed with the light of the setting sun, splaying a rainbow across the floor and wall. Blue and green then purple and red.

Each day Stay went to her porch in hopes of finding another strange gift or cryptic letter. Hoping to find a reason or explanation left for the gift that meant so much to her that only her and her mother knew. Who else could possibly know about the cranes her mother folded? Was it coincidence? Could there be such a coincidence so large and meaningful left on her porch in an unmarked box?

Sitting at the table, tapping her fingers on the old grains staring at the crane glowing orange she wondered endlessly, losing hours and forgetting life. Was the crane pointing left? Didn't she put it up with the face pointing to the right? No, that couldn't be possible.

With a huff Stay sat up and began to pace the room. How dare some stranger give her a stupid letter with a crane she couldn't stop thinking about. The crane kept her up thinking of the dreams she had of it swimming on a frozen lake at night, cracking the ice in its wake until it broke off into a million pieces that reflected the sky. making it look like it was broken and the lake had stars. Then the crane became her mother standing on a slab of ice. She walked to the shore stepping onto the little pieces of frozen water, the dark water creeping and lapping over the white ice onto her mothers naked feet as she made her way to Stay.

© Ash Huntley

The Peculiar Girl and the Wood Table

Gnarly wood with knots and holes, divots and rings in shades of pale sand to roasted walnuts ran smoothly under Stay’s finger tips. Her porcelain finger caught in a deeper groove before jumping back on track with the rest of her hand lazily tracing the ancient lines. The wood table appeared roughly made; wide, uneven patches of wood set together with pegs, the grains not matching as her eyes jumped from one panel to another. Stay could only assume her mother, or possibly the father she never knew, had made it before she was born. Sitting strong in the center of the kitchen, the table had always held what was post important: a place to fold cranes, to build cakes and skin rabbits. She had bled onto the table, coffee rings almost created a pattern like a dream catcher created filigree along the edges. Gouges in the wood from an angry knife stabbed deep while shallower points were created to hold the blade in thought.

Stay imagined the wood holding onto her memories.  With no mother, father or people to remember or create memories with her, the table was the only one she could imagine capable. Once a living thing, growing strong and tall, reaching for the sky in an endless craving for life, it understood.

Reminiscent and in need of a friend, Stay brought out her old friends. The porcupine bones were still tied together with string being held together like puppets ready to dance and run with her. Stay admired the contrast as she set the bones on the wood table. Smooth creamy bones against rough woods. The combination screamed time and life at her, life gone and time always going. The tree had grown into the earth, sinking roots into the ground while branches spread into the sky. Bones of the porcupine held the life and structure of the animal while the beast remained unaware of its skeleton, the only part of the creature left. The wood and the bones would continue to live on in death, time deepening what they once were. Everything was backwards. The tree and porcupine they were dead but in death remained alive forever, they held age as time went on. Both so beautiful and so different.

Stay craved immortality in bones.

She imagined her body lying on the long kitchen table. Her form slowly decomposing and the wood soaking up what it could of her body, allowing her soul and essence to become part of the world until years drift by and it would only be her bones left on the table. Creamy, slender and elegant cradled by the table, her small bony fingers settling in the grooves of the wood, her skull pitched back to rest along a worn knot in ecstasy.

Stay rubbed the back of her head, feeling the gentle curve of her skull bend in toward her spine, the delicate balance of her entire being resting at that pivotal point. She couldn’t help wonder at how easy it would be.

Standing up and pushing away from the table, Stay shoves those thoughts away. Thinking of life and death and the potential immortality of death is dangerous. Though she never knew what happened to her mother for certain, she felt it in the center of her heart; her mother was dead.

Stay’s mother had problems. One of the comforting things Stay read in her many books was every single person had a multitude of problems. They could have problems that were solved but created new problems, problems that followed them through life and problems they never even know they had. That was the kind of problem Stay’s mother had. The kind of problem that ate away at her happiness and told her she wasn’t ok the way she was until she didn’t know how to feel. She thought the only way she could feel normal again was through pain. Stay had seen the scars forming on her mother’s arms and peeking under the hem of her shorts on her thighs.

The life left her eyes until she looked at Stay with nothing buy greyness. There were moments when Stay thought she was ok again, when her mother would fold cranes and line them on the sill in the kitchen, she would bake a strawberry tart and dust it with powdered sugar, blowing it like a cloud over the table and smiling through the cloud at Stay. The times of momentary rightness were quickly shadowed by hours, sometimes days, of stagnation. Her mother would sit in the living room staring out the window, barely moving. No more cuts, only staring into the woods as if waiting for something. Was she waiting for Stay’s father to return? Was she waiting for a reason to live?

Her mother had a problem she didn’t know she had and she couldn’t fix it. Pills might have helped her. There was a pharmacy in town and an old, kind doctor Stay saw once as a child when she had a fever. But, her mother didn’t go. She went to the market and bought food and other necessities as if she could bake it all away.

Now Stay glared at the table that held the confections of her mother’s love. The table that taunted her with life and death, making a mockery out of all Stay knew. The table soaked in their life and love and acted like its support was enough to give in return. Did it keep her mother alive? Did the hard-hearted table stop Stay’s mother from hurting herself? Did it offer support when Stay cut her finger off? Perhaps 18 years with this table was enough, maybe it was time for her to move on from the problems of her mother and make this home her own.

 Stay wanted to stay alive. The table sucked the life out of her. It would stand like an unmoving stone as a constant reminder of the pain her mother held, making it her own. It would cut at her heart making her wonder at her father and hold resentment toward her mother.

The house had an unused landline she could dust off to call information and get a technician to install internet. Then buy an old laptop from the resale shop and purchase a new table online. Stay wouldn't have to leave the house often. She could remake the home she had into anything she wanted, a Parisian coffee shop or a Buddhist temple.

With the decision made, Stay took her porcupine pals and hung them from a hook above the kitchen window. Opening the window allowed a breeze to pulsate through, the bones becoming chimes as they gently knocked on one another like laughter.

The table would have to go.

© Ash Huntley

Peculiar Girl and an Orange Birthday

Stay wanted an orange cake for her birthday. She wanted it to be bright as the sun and sweet on her tongue. Oranges were common in the area, growing in groves in abundance on the other side of town. Stay’s mother didn’t often bring oranges home, she was keen on red fruit: strawberries ranging from blood red to lip pink to sun-kissed peach, raspberries in small bundles to be munched on in one day, watermelons cut in slices, red apples with shiny skin, cherries with their pits to be spit in competition; Stay and her mother giggling as the grass became littered with cherry seeds, secret hopes of them growing played like a song in their minds.

Stay begged her mother weeks prior to her birthday for an Orange cake. It started with simple suggestions of how fun orange would be, her mother would suggest pink strawberries or apple pie. After a week Stay’s mother shook her head with a small smile as Stay talked about the skin of the oranges making funny faces on the cake, whole slices of orange within the cake, the possibility of tarts and orange pancakes for breakfast.

Stay, at eight years old, woke up on her birthday to find oranges heaped in woven baskets and piled in pulled out desk drawers. They covered the chairs and sat in bowls covering every flat surface higher than the floor. Orange peels filled the kitchen sink and fell scattered on the kitchen's tiled floor. The floor slick with juice and rinds, Stay’s feet crinkled as she walked, her skin sticking, wanting to stay attached to the sweet coating.

Orange cream, chocolate covered orange segments, candied pecan rolls and caramelized orange rinds, orange butter and orange banana bread. Orange frosting on a frozen orange cake, hollowed half oranges filled with mousse, a bowl of rising yeast, no doubt filled with oranges, cinnamon sticks soaking in thick orange syrup and oranges in the freezer, peeled and unpeeled, as popsicles and fused in ice. Oranges soaked in jars of various liquids full of spices, oranges sliced, diced, whole and squished.

The smell overpowered stay, a waking dream as the world around her turned into the color, smell and taste of orange. Stay's eyes watered, Orange. She could smell the tangy color as she hurried, blind, to find her mother outside making orange jam, oranges piled beside her waiting to become some new delightful creation.

The warm air of the summer morning steamed over the dew speckled ground, the orange sun rose in the sky, a happy birthday lighting its way into Stay’s heart. Stay dances, her mother laughed as she continued to peel oranges, tossing the rinds into a boiling pot over a crackling fire, the segments being set aside to slowly simmer in another pot. The scent was intoxicating. Stay plucked a segment from the pot and plopped it in her mouth, the warm juices flowed down her throat, thick and tangy it puckered her cheeks. She grabbed a segment of rind from her mother’s hand and stuck it in her mouth, sucking out the morsels of juice and giving her mother an orange smile.

Stay’s orange birthday was the best birthday she ever had, it lasted for weeks, remnants of orange constantly being found and the smell lingering until this very day. The smell of her home would forever be wood, smoke, and oranges.

© Ash Huntley

Fiction piece I wrote a year or so ago, before I learned so much! I may continue the story but I'm not sure where it'll go

My name is Lana. I destroyed the world.

I stand amidst the falling white grey ash falling around me. I am tempted to brush it away as it gathers on my skin, a reminder of what it was. I resist the urge, instead welcoming it, a prize for my accomplishment.

Flakes create fog around me, cascading in a blurry haze. I walk away from the still smoldering ruin that was a city, the heat of it stroking my back looking for comfort, for a reason why.

Maybe I regret it. Maybe none of it was deserved. Still I walk slowly into a cloud of soft destruction. My hands now empty, like my heart.

I was once happy. I thought I had everything I needed and that I could love the world with all my heart. I was betrayed. In return I ruined everything. What holds more power than a broken soul? All the energy of my broken self released into chaos and torment. Revenge.

I stop when I hear a voice. A figure is running toward me, from the piles of ash and stone.

“Hey!” the voice grows louder, rougher, angrier.

I turn and run. There shouldn’t be anyone left. How could there be?

“Wait, stop running!” A man.

I hear his heavy footsteps gaining on me. Fear pumps through my veins for the first time in over a year. A hand grabs my arm. I try to yank it free but it only grips harder causing me to lose balance. I tumble to the ground.

I yell as I awkwardly hit my left hip. The man falls on top of me, his elbow digging into my ribs pushing air out of my lungs and bruising my side. “Ughh,” I groan.

“Shit.” He doesn’t move so I have to shove him off. I stand quickly, blood rushes to my head but I refuse to wobble or fall again. He grabs me, pulling me down. I give up, there’s nothing to lose anyway.

“What happened?” He says.

What? He doesn’t know? He doesn’t know I did this…How could he?

To him I’m another survivor.

As the ash continues to fall, coating my throat again, making it hard to swallow, to breathe, I start to cry. I did this. I ruined it all. Selfish, greedy, hurt. I have nothing left. Nothing except this man, a man who will surely kill me once he finds out I did this.

I cry. On my hands and knees at the end of the world, with ash coating the entire inside of my being, breathing in the particles of everyone that just died, becoming one with the world. I sob for everything did and lost.

The man mistakes my pain and crying for grief, for the loss of our world. He hugs me without question and I sink into his arms, grateful. Still I am selfish.

© Ash Huntley

8/642 Things to Write About

My grandfather's girlfriend:

She's ancient! Holly didn't expect her age to be quite so...old. She imagined a young blonde, a gold digger. Though Papa was not rich. All he owned was his small home and charm. Old and kind Papa, his wife, Holly's grandmother, died before Holly was born. This was the first person Papa had seen since then. So late, so old.

Mom looked utterly stunned, open-mouthed staring agape at the woman standing beside her father. Speechless, Holly and her mother stood together, staring at the pair of them.

The old woman's face was wrinkled. Her wrinkles had wrinkles, her lips had wrinkles. Her eyes folded in, hidden within even more wrinkles. But, her smile was small and sweet, bright bubblegum pink lipstick smeared beyond the lips with her shaky hands. She made an effort. Her face remained tilted, eyes looking down.

"Welcome to the family!" Holly finally blurted out, starting to hold out her hand, but taking it back, unsure of protocol.

She looked up into Holly's eyes. Her smile widened. It dawned on Holly how long this woman had lived, all she knew and had done. How good it was for Papa to have her around, good for all of them.

Holly could not contain the sudden burst in her heart and she went right up and hugged her. She hugged Holly back without hesitation, arms surprisingly strong.

Family already.

© Ash Huntley

6/642 Things to Write About

What a character holding a blue object is thinking right now:

What am I supposed to do with this?, Jay wonders, holding the object up toward the light. Staring at the creamy sky blue glass eye as the shop's bare bulb casts a yellow sheen over the oddities of the store, giving the white of the eye the appearance of suffering jaundice. Jay's stomach rolls, the churn echoes through his emptiness.

He stares into the eye, through the pupil and to the other side of the sphere, What is this? A wonder creeps through his mind and tightens, he can think of nothing else. A dark blue tints the world. Jay holds the cold eye closer in hopes of getting a better look. The musk of mold on the walls, the dust coating all but the eye no longer matters. Further he pushes, harder he pulls the eye closer to his own, captivated by the shades and shapes of blue the glass eye has turned world into. He presses the eye against his own, it numbs and melds. Harder and harder he pushes until he falls right into the inky pool.

The eye bounces on the tiled floor with a ding.

© Ash Huntley

The Peculiar Girl and Porcupine Bones

Porcupine skeletons danced on moon streaked ice, propelled by fishing line stretched over the lake and to the hands of a girl. She twirled her fingers and flicked her wrists, watching the ghosts skitter and hop, joyous in their lively endeavor.

Fissures ran along the surface, chasing one another as they bounced beams like twinkling Christmas lights on a decked home of cheer. She imagined smiling faces shining through the window as laughter spills like smoke up the chimney and ribbons spin around the tree on red and green foil boxes.

This was not the girl's first time. Her peculiar interests left her alone and isolated. The time she spent in public was time spent with people giving her side long glances, where skittish whispers followed her shadowed footsteps, leaving echoed impressions in the snow. Reactions that only pushed her further away from furrowed brows and turned backs. It pulled her deeper into her strange hobbies, allowing her to have solace in the only friendships she ever had.

As a little girl, roaming the dense woods with a butterfly net she collected small bones of small beasts. She dreamed of bringing them back to life. Grateful to her, the beasts would never leave her side, trailing her wake as faithful furry friends.

The closest she came was watching them prance from afar, an illusion she was happy enough to indulge in.

The floating bones gleamed and paused. The girl threw the lines to the ground, something swelled in her chest like a balloon until she couldn't breathe. A wind charged over the ice, pressing and pushing the snow off branches to fall heavily atop her head. Wrapping her arms around herself, she shook with an urgency to stay warm as tears spilled on her cheeks and a forced breath steamed from her frozen lungs. Joy

© Ash Huntley

5/642 Things to Write About

The long-lost roomate:

"I haven't seen you in two years!" I wail, "And you walk in here, keys in hand and dump you bag, your ONE bag onto the floor and sit next me on the couch like what? Like you didn't disappear for two years? Like no one thought you were dead or kidnapped, like the cops didn't search for your body? You come back after all that time like nothing. You didn't know I would still live here. What the hell happened to you Kara?! I was so scared. I missed you..." Looking at Kara, tears streaming down my face, I try to see the best friend and roommate I used to know so well. At the girl who is no longer a girl. The woman sitting before me is a stranger. I look at her face, tanned, happy and free.

Finally,she speaks, her first words after returning,  "I fancied a bit of India."