Archive for April, 2010

Today’s topic: Love – topic from @mothstories

***First of all, I’m changing Mimetic Monday a bit. I’ll be posting a topic each Friday for the following Monday. Then anyone can write up a story along that topic line and post it to their own blog. When you do post it, send me a link to your story (all stories must be family friendly, i.e. rated PG) and I’ll include the link to everyone’s story on that week’s entry. I won’t be judging or filtering entries (unless I see that the story submitted wouldn’t be considered rated PG), just including them as links. When you do submit a story, please make sure to include links to other participants on your blog post.***

Chains – (a fictional account of the narrator written as a free-write over the course of three hours)

I found myself standing in a desert. Though the country was desolate and unchanging as far as the eye could see, I was not alone. There were others standing in the desert as well, though too far away for me to talk to them or see the details of their faces. They were equally spread apart one from another as I was spread apart from them.

I stood for a few minutes, wiping the sweat off my brow. I had a distinct impression that I was not supposed to move from my spot on the dry cracked earth, and so strong was the impression that I dared not move my feet. Several hours passed and I waited for I knew not what, but my growing impatience increased when I realized that the sun was not moving in the sky. I tried squatting in order to rest my elbows on my knees and my head on my hands, but it was too difficult to maintain balance.

Just when I was beginning to think I would faint of exhaustion, I heard a distant voice raise itself in argument behind me. I turned to see who it was. Two men were conversing heatedly in the distance. One had evidently approached the other, causing a stir by trespassing on his territory. He ought to know better, I thought. I waited and watched for the man who had left his spot to go back, but he did not and the argument continued.

It was about this time I began to wonder where that man had come from. I turned myself in circles without moving my feet and wondered which spot in the equally spaced out desert this man had left unguarded, but I could not see which spot it was. My curiosity was aroused and I wanted to go looking for it, but that same distinct impression told me that if I left my spot as he did, someone else would move in and take my place. It would be unlikely that I could earn it back.

I twisted back around to watch the argument. Both men were black, or African-American, rather–as they used to call it. They gesticulated wildly and the one who had come from somewhere else pulled at the man who was rightfully holding his spot, but not so hard as to make him fall over.

It was then that I noticed that the man who was not in his rightful place was not dressed the same. He was barefoot, wearing a white t-shirt and light blue jeans. There was something unusual about him as well. The other man, the one who held his ground, had on a pleated pair of pants. The pants were tailored so they fell perfectly about his shoes, which were black and shiny. He also wore a white shirt, but his was a button-down, and he had a solid-red tie about his neck. I looked about the other men standing in the distance and saw that they, too, were all wearing exactly the same dress, which was certaintly appropriate for conducting business. And I checked my own clothes to make sure that I was no different, and found to my relief that I was as neatly dressed as the others. I breathed a sigh of relief before looking back. Read the rest of this entry »

“Be yourself” – Story topic sent by Nicholas Rose

P.S. make up a story topic for next week and email it to me at bryanbeus gmail com

I graduated early from high school; technically I was in the class of 2000, but began college during the fall of 1999.  That made me miss out on a lot of the memories that most of my high school friends were making.  It was sad not to be with those I had grown up with during our last few months of school, but as I had always been a bit of a lone wolf anyway, I thought I would be o.k. with it.  The evening before I left home marked what is still a journey of being alone most of the time.  It was a beautiful departure, but all that in a minute.

Let me skip forward for a second, because it was at night on the following day, when I sat in my new apartment complex writing about my departure in an email to my good friend and cousin, that I was able to sort out the series of unusual and unearthly experiences I had gone through on the evening of depature.  My first night in college I sat downstairs in a dimly lit laundry room, a buzzing neon light behind me, and my busy new roommates were moving their furniture in above me.  My parents had given me a sweater for Christmas and its freshly knit sleeves looked funny against my tattered backpack sitting on the floor.  I was eating a large box of raspberry twinkies, knowing that they were fattening and greasy as my health-nut rooommate had offered me a carrot when he saw me eating them.

My cousin and I had both worried about what our respective depatures would be like.  Though she would eventually arrive at my same college, Brigham Young University, we were coming from completely different environments. We had spent the previous several months sharing through email what things were we nervous about losing and what we looked forward to seeing.  Both of us knew that everything would be alright; it was the moment of – as we called it – biting down on that “salt-and-vinegar chip” of saying goodbye to everything you know that left us wondering whether or not it would be awkward – and I had just taken the bite.   I chewed on my twinkies as I sorted out my thoughts.

Departing from my childhood for me had seemed like a series of pictures, I said.  When I was leaving, each moment felt like it paused and I could walk around within it as if time stood still.  I had finished packing my bags and got into my red truck to visit an extended-family member’s house and say my goodbyes.  As I drove down Shepherd Lane towards the house, the Salt Lake Valley filled with fog.  By the time I reached the place where I knew there was a stoplight at which I was supposed to turn right to the house, I could not see anything at all.  The fog had turned into soup.  My headlights lit perhaps two feet of grey asphalt in front of me and then the road disappeared beneath a white wall.  I drove slowly with my head pressed to my windshield towards the house, but when I arrived there was no one home, just an empty house on hill half way up the mountain.

So, I continued on up the hill.  Eventually, the fog didn’t go any higher, but the road did.  The car drove out of the fog like an airplane rising above a cloud and the black road before me ended abruptly as it became a rocky cliff jutting out from the mountain side.  I brought my car to a halt and stepped out of my car.  Stepping out of that car was like stepping onto the tip of Mount Olympus.  The fog had filled up the valley like a bowl of heaven; on the other side of the valley you could see Antelope Island sticking up like the Corbenic Castle of the Holy Grail.  Between the two mountains, the fog crept up towards my feet until it was right beneath me.  I could have run down, taken a flying leap and jumped into it like a pile of white clothes fresh out of the dryer.

I barely had time to appreciate my surroundings before the sunset began.  My entire view turned from white to red as the sun reflected off both the rolling clouds above me and off the fog below.  It lasted only a few minutes, and when the sun had gone and the stars were appearing overhead, I laid back and the black sky above felt like a giant Starship Enterprise floating inches from my sternum.  The stars were moving against the mountains slowly, but visibly.  Then the city below began to dress itself in its own lights, as if in competition.

I watched as the many people from whom I was departing turned on their lights one-by-one in the soup-like fog.  As each window and streetlamp flickered on, the shining white spot of fog around it connected with another spot until every house that I knew blended in with its neighbor.  By the time the night-time city was lit, what lay before me looked more like a sparkling sea turtle’s back than a valley.  And on my perch, soaring halfway between the stars and the city, I could not tell which of either of them moved, or if they both moved against each other and it was only I who remained still.

I wrote that story down in an email to my cousin, telling her that stepping off on your own for me had not been anything to worry about.  I was excited to hear of her own departure from WI, to see her and spend time with her at our university, and I only briefly wondered what it would be like when she and I had to say good-bye.  The thoughts occurred to me not so much as I wrote them down, but more as I paused to think and eat my twinkies.

Looking back, I remember that I had eaten many twinkies that night.  My fingers were so sticky that even my keyboard sucked hungrily at my finger tips.  The twinkies were covered in enough oil that even in the dim light of my basement they glittered like a pack of miniature nuclear bombs, ready to blow up my stomach.  My tongue was detonating them one at a time.  And I knew from everything I had learned in high school that they were hurting me as I ate them, and that it would later take me days to run off the calories.

But I did not know that my cousin and I would swiftly drift apart the moment she arrived.  College would become so busy for the both of us that over the next four years we would spend time together only once.  Not knowing any of this, I simply shared with her what it was like to say goodbye to everyone I knew back in high school, thinking that the goodbye’s I had said did not apply to her, and biting off the tip of my yellow-breaded twinky cases and sucking out the feathery cream filling.  Their taste was just as pleasing as a bag of our salt-and-vinegar chips.

And so it is now, when I think about those twinkies that I ate as I wrote about going off to live my own journey, that I remember their sparkling surface not as a glittering nuclear bomb, but as the sheen off a sea turtle’s back in the night, and I am still on my perch.