There are no lonely women in Los Angeles

There are no lonely women in Los Angeles. If you live alone, or love alone, it is not without purposefully doing so. You can’t walk down the street without a stranger commenting, “Hey there pretty baby.” Some call this just a compliment, some call this harassment, but I call it living in the community.

It’s Sunday morning when my next door neighbor, Marly, a squirrely librarian type, is visiting with me. For real, she’s a librarian at the university library. She’s sitting on the fire escape with me, smoking a cigarette with her wool socked feet up on the edge. The man who digs through our trash for recyclables is down there, even on Sunday. He shouts up at us, “Hey there, pretty birds!”

I wave at him, but Marly snorts disapprovingly. “It’s harassment to look through someone’s trash, I mean it’s goddamn illegal, isn’t it? Identify theft and all.”

I sit back in the plastic patio chair, adjusting the candy-colored nylon slip I sleep in and live in on Sundays. “If you threw it away, what does it matter to you anyway?”

She stubs out her cigarette in the plastic ashtray on the ground. “Yeah well, he shouldn’t be making suggestive comments while he’s doing it either, unsolicited advancements are sexual harassment. Now that is illegal.”

“You’re not in your goddamn workplace, what are you going to do, sue him?” My turn to snort, pressing a cold glass of orange juice and vodka to my barenaked lips.

“There are laws in this world, Sunny, just because you live beneath it all--”

“I don’t live beneath it all, as you call it. I’m an entertainer, a choreographer and a costume designer. I’m not a goddamn whore, Marly.” I say indignantly.

“You’re a stripper, Sunny.”

“I’m not a stripper, Marly. It’s burlesque. It’s goddamn theater with a long, respectable vaudevillian history. And brilliant comediennes came out of it. Brilliant, beautiful comediennes with style. That’s it, I’m a comedienne.”

She snorts with laughter, “Oh yes, you’re a regular Lucille Ball in sequined pasties.”

I stand up swiftly and pick up Marly’s half-empty lace-print glass and my own now-empty glass.

“Hey now!” Marly drops her feet to the ground and sits up straight. “I’m not done with that – I didn’t mean to be insulting, Sunny – I just meant that you don’t have rules like – oh holy shit!”

I’m walking into the kitchen of my tiny studio flat, glasses between my fingers, and I ignore Marly. In the kitchen, I stride past a gold sequined music box set on top of the counter. This is all my grandmother left me – okay, to be honest, this is what I managed to sneak out of her house before her children swooped in on the estate to argue over who deserved what. Grandmother Heather was more of a “live-in-the-moment” kind of lady, so much as mention a will and she would throw one of her legendary thunderstorm fits.

My grandmother’s screaming reminiscing in my head faded to Marly’s real time screaming outside.

“Move it, asshole, move!” Marly is screaming over the bar of the fire escape. I run up next to her and look down.

Below, the trash collector is sprawled out on the asphalt in the alleyway. His leg is caught underneath the back wheel of a trash truck whose warning beep is sounding indifferently.

“Stop! Stop!” We both shriek down, but to no avail. The trash collector just stares up at us, with panicked, dark silent eyes like marbles. He grasps the asphalt with flat palms, spread in a perfect plié. He wiggles like a mermaid, trying to escape from under the massive, treaded wheel.

A man pokes his head out from the truck window, and looks around. Shrugging, and with our voices lost in the grinding and moaning of the trash truck, he doesn’t see the trash collector.

With a final act jolt, the rust-wrought truck rolls backwards over the trash collector – leaving a fantastic blood splatter across the cement driveway, like a jeweled headdress.

The men in Los Angeles, however, are more alone than ever.

(683 words)

Day 10

24: Ways of Seeing. Imagine a person with an idiosyncratic way of seeing the world (for instance, an occasional drug dealer who, because of his amateur status, is more than usually prone to seeing danger where there is none; an entomologist who tends to categorize the world dryly, as if seen through a microscope; a world-class athlete in top shape whose clarity of vision is almost hallucinogenic). Have this character witness a traumatic event that does not directly involve her. Narrate the event from a first-person POV, making sure that the perspective is carefully built around the idiosyncrasies of this personality. 600 words.

The Bathtub

I gingerly crouch on all fours. My right ear is barely an inch above the surface of the plastic floor of the bathtub in my apartment. There are little scratches and scuffling to be heard, muffled as through the hollowed walls between neighbors. If I listen closely, I could almost make out distinct voices: an old woman, a young boy, his mother, two men (bearded, I’m almost certain), and two young lovers.

Just as their words start to articulate through the diaphanous tub bottom, the lights flicker. They flicker again, and then I’m submerged in sub-darkness, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the streetlights expand its faint glow through the high bathroom window. The voices went out with the lights. I climb out of the bathtub and into my bed, crawling underneath a thin pile of quilts.

Over a lukewarm cup of Earl Grey the next morning, I relay the story to my younger sister Marly. She’s twenty two, but has the sensibility of a sixty year old bus driver.

“I know what I heard.” I sigh, swirling another sugar cube into the teacup.

"You may have heard what you heard, but it doesn’t mean it is what you think it is,” Marly asserts and, with a tilt, finishes her mug of tea. “Thanks for the breakfast, Ariel, I’ve got to run. Maybe you should start looking for a job instead of laying on the floor of your bathtub.”

She stands up, zipping up her navy down jacket with her name and title embroidered in gold across the left breast. Marly Blunt, Cheer Coach.

“It’s a weekend.” I mutter as she gathers her things and heads towards the door.

As Marly leaves, I spy my next door neighbor fumbling with his keys across the hall. I run up to the door, take a breath, and slowly pull the door back, peeking out. Still fumbling.

“Hey Blake,” I cough. He jumps and looks up, brushing a strand of brown hair out of his glasses. Blake looks like Clark Kent, with highlights.

“Oh hey, Ariel, how are you?” He turns back to his keys, finally selecting the right one to unlock the door.

“I’m fine, listen -- ” I start.

“What time did your electricity come back?” Blake interrupts, stepping into his apartment and turning around to face me in the doorframe.

“What? Oh last night? I’m not sure, I went to bed when it went out and woke up some time around seven this morning and my clock was blinking at me…”

“Oh good, I went over to Sandy’s place last night – there was some flickering there but the electricity stayed on all night.” He turns to close the door.

“Wait --” I shout abruptly, stepping out of my doorframe. Blake looks up at me inquisitively, door half shut. “Did you happen – this is a weird question – but did you happen to take a shower last night?”

He raises one eyebrow wearily, scratching the back of his neck. “I mean, were you in your bathroom or anything at all last night?” I quickly follow up.

Blake shakes his head. “No, we went out to dinner and a movie with some friends last night, and when we came home and saw the lights were out, we headed over to her place.”

“Oh,” I murmur softly, lowering my eyes to the ground and my mind whirring. “Thanks.” I step back into the house and close the door behind me, leaning back and burying my face in my hands.

“Oh.” I slide down onto the hardwood floor and stare at the small tumbleweeds of hair and dust curled up in corners against the legs of my grandmother’s couch.

(616 words)

Game On, Day 9, v. 2.0

Apologies for the month-long interlude that unexpectedly happened as Gina and I both moved around our respective towns on our respective coasts. We're buckled in for Fall, and we're going back to the hope of 30 stories in 30 days. Hope you'll join us for the season!

Since we didn't do Smart Pets last time, we'll start with Day 9 again and throw that prompt back into the book. This one just seems appropriate to come back to.

Day 9 (Version 2.0)
111: Home. Use a house in a story fragment. Think about the power of rooms (kitchens, basements, unfinished attics, walk-in closets) on psychology and conversation. In this fragment, make the house a unique, though passive, participant in the unfolding events. The room need not be in a typical house. Think about all the other rooms we become familiar with -- classrooms, office cubicles, public toilets. What are their personalities? How do the more public spaces we inhabit affect our behaviors? You might consider keeping several characters permanently stuck in different rooms in a house, communicating by shouts, cell phones, intercoms, Dixie cups and strings, or telepathy. Ghosts haunt houses, and writers are often ghosts to their own cherished or bedeviling childhood homes. 500 words.

Apologies, apologies.

We will be back to our regularly scheduled updates starting this week.

Day 9

47: Smart Pets. Write a very short story about an animal -- a dog, cat, or parrot, say -- that is used to spending time around humans. Let this pet observe, with familiarity yet bafflement, the way males and females of this other species interact. The animal cannot understand much of our language, so its observations will have to be based on physical behavior and gestures, but it could still be an intelligent observer, with its own built-in biases and clarities humans are incapable of (the sense of smell, for example -- a dog would know when a woman was menstruating or a man just had sex with someone else). A caged animal would have a different perspective than an animal free to roam. 600 words.

On the Vine

She walked across the lawn, damp and trampled by the feet of her friends, her enemies, and people she’d neither met nor ever seen in the past four years. The heat pressed against her body like a blanket, causing pearls of sweat to grow both on and beneath her gown. It was suffocating, but her attempts to free herself from it were as futile as wanting to climb out of her own skin. She took a deep breath, squinted her eyes until the wide expanse of land and sky before her was but a blur, and walked on.

It was graduation day, and the world smelled like sunshine and secrets.

Memories sprang from their hiding places, as if every step set off a nostalgic time bomb. The thin white heel of her shoe sank into the soft ground below her and she remembered dressing up for her first college party, donning a little red dress and shoes much like the ones she wore now. She’d accepted a plastic cup of lukewarm beer from a stranger, had pretended to drink it, had pretended to enjoy herself, had pretended to exist in the midst of new names and faces, books she’d never read and songs she didn’t know. There were many days and nights when she thought she was dimensionless, invisible. She didn’t even think God would notice if she jumped from the roof of a building or dove into a bottomless pool of water. She felt small and imprisoned, as if she were trapped behind glass, denied the experience of both life and death.

But the hand on her shoulder, the gentle, warm greeting was real, as was the smile that accompanied it. All of these things are what had saved her. And suddenly those painfully awkward recollections seemed unworthy of her time, and crawled quietly back into the recesses of her mind.

“How’d you find me?” she asked, her fingers lacing through his. “Everyone looks the same – slightly hungover and absolutely ridiculous in these oversized gowns.”

“It was easy,” he replied. “I stared out into this crazy sea of people and you were the first real person I saw.”

(word count: 359)