How does a story come to you? For me, the characters come first. Life gets put into them by the experiences I encounter throughout my days. A conversation between people while waiting in line sparks my imagination. Articles, documentaries, and of course my own existence, hidden in fiction, helps with that person, place and thing every tale needs.
I will confess, my life has been scattered. The discipline I would need to sit and take all the literary souls, I have on little pieces of paper, rounded up and put in the novel, screenplay, personal essays, save for a future story basket, I have not practice in years.
I guess, a New Year’s resolution, I didn’t proclaim as one, was to put my writing out there. Practice what I am trying to sale. Finish those stories, choreograph the dance in your head, write that album. I started looking into writing competitions I could realistically participate in with what I had already written or could expand on. I entered some and got my first thanks, but no thanks.
When I wrote my gal, there are usually no names. In my opinion, I have a few forte’s, names is not one of them. The conversation in the story is pretty much verbatim of one I had with one of my colleagues from https://www.facebook.com/sharkbaitentmt/.
I watched https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Porn_Ends, there are three films now, with the third one being less depressing than the first two. My late husband enjoyed watching it, so I being game for most things, I tried, not my fav genre, but I did have a favorite star, Madison. He had a few, but top billing was Christy Canyon.
Anyway, after I hung up the phone with my colleague, she flashed in my head, my retired porn star. In my 2020 vision year, I found a 1500 or less word competition, and she was just under 1300. I needed a name for the application form. I give you:
front porch
Sitting on the front porch, eating a supped up form of a rice crispy treat, wondering what was it she wanted to do with her life, the cliche hit her hard. And she powered it up by 100, and she thought she could do it; blow her brains out, od, hang. Oding would be the easy way, but splattering herself, now that’s a statement. Making someone clean you off, up and out, with a sponge, mop, or maybe just a paper cloth, the strong kind, ones that never tear or break.
Who would care really? The perverted would cry and shed a tear, millions possibly. She couldn’t remember the height of her fame, the top of her game. She now had a house in the suburbs, a made-up name. A shameful past covered up by a fortune’s story of cash through death. Just living the simple life.
“I just got one of those faces.” She would answer when that twinkle hit the husband’s eye.
“Hey don’t I know you from some place.”
Funny thing is, it’s the women who could spot her a mile away. They knew, they ones that watch with husbands. They knew and would never say a word. Some, very few would befriend her, but never a full embrace. Getting past was, is, and will be forever a hard thing to accomplish, even for the most opened minded, open-hearted. Will the husband, boyfriend, future lovers ever recognize?
Most don’t hide their sneer of discontent, of judgement and disgust. One gets used to it, she hardly cares, but just enough, that it secretly eats away and makes the question of why go on, an easy question to ponder. But god, was that just so boring.
She snorted just as the cute, and what she could gather from years of ease dropping, exchange student, walk by. The JC across several streets was well thought of, as JC’s go. Kids from other countries would enroll. And it seemed her young, cute neighbor, living with the middle class couple, with two in private, across the street, was one of them.
The snort startled him, which startled her. Both startled, both laughed. They had quick bantered chatter, and at a comfortable pause the young man excused himself.
“I guess I’m outtie,”
She smiled at the new phrase she had yet to hear, and feeling juvenile.
“Like a bellybutton,” she replied.
“Oh, I can’t leave with that thought in my head. What about a belly button?” He laughs and turned back to continue the conversation.
“You said outtie.”
“Oh,” he laughs with a question, “Ok, I mean I still don’t get it, but it sounds harmless.”
She is a bit taken back that he didn’t know what she was talking about, and now she was sort of stuck trying to explain what she had meant.
“There are inny bellybuttons and outtie. “Do you not have these expressions where your from?”
He burst out a laugh, “No.”
“When they cut your umbilical cord, they way it’s cut, I guess gives you an inny or an outtie.”
The fence between them blocked his lower region, so she didn’t feel she was being as suggestive as she was.
“Stick your finger in your bellybutton.”
She focused on the very loud crow gossiping to some unseen someone.
“Does your finger go into a little crevasse or does your finger feel something, like a cap, a nipple to a bottle.”
“My finger goes in slightly.”
“Well, then you have a slight inny bellybutton.”
“Oh”
“Do you not have an expression for that?”
“For bellybutton, or what you just explained?”
“For what I just explained?”
“No, just bellybutton.”
“No expression for the different kinds of buttons, just the fact that there is a bellybutton.”
“Yes.”
They chatted for a moment longer. The young man forgetting about his needing to be outtie. As he talked, his English improved as he relaxed and didn’t feel the need to be proper. The slang of the average JC student snuck in. She saw a man who was a well coddled boy, who left the nest to come up North to experience life. The girls back home paid him no mind. The girls here will find him exotic and therefore irresistible. Something he must not have yet figured out.
She picture their affair: The Sex, the talking, the sex, the drama, the romance, the bittersweet moment of their last embrace, both changed, her secretly heartbroken, him ready to re-enter life without mama. She smiled at that. His smiled brought her to, and remembering a false engagement, excused herself with an, “outtie.”
“As in bellybutton,” pointing out their inside joke.
She watched him disappear through the front door, smiling before shutting it.
~
I entered a screenplay I completed in 2006, as a rewrite of the play I produced in 2005, the potted plant: a housewife’s guide. There’s even a Trump joke in it. 2006 being retro, I figured, what the hell. And I have two more short stories out in a https://www.writersdigest.com/ competition. Keep you posted.
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