I spent the 90s in the San Francisco Bay Area and have written a couple of short pieces featuring (versions of) people from the time. Was Ist Ist is one of those. So is this…

‘We could watch them from here,’ Zack said. ‘Right across downtown, just the other side of Broadway.’ Zack picked Jane’s binoculars out of the box nearest him. They were big and heavy. One of the few items Jane possessed that had belonged to her father. A veteran of Korea and administrator of the Stanford MK trials, Stan Vondel committed suicide a month before Jane’s birth. He left behind a note, a government insurance policy and more questions than either answered.

His hobby was bird-watching in his native Virginia, and Palo Alto in the early 60s still offered wetlands enough to satisfy Stan, but that were paved over by the 80s. ‘Doesn’t mean there aren’t birds to be watched, Zack was fond of saying.

The fifth-floor loft into which Zack and Jane had just finished moving their possessions afforded them a view of North Oakland and Berkeley and, more immediately, Highway 880 about a hundred yards and sixty feet down.

Jane didn’t want to humor Zack’s voyeuristic streak and really didn’t want to see Victor with someone else, but Zack was already focusing the glasses. Jane looked over the highway and into the hills while Zack found Victor’s room.

‘It’s at an angle – you can’t see much, but it’s just across from Tribune Tower.’ She took the glasses almost automatically and twisted the old leather neck strap around her hand. A rusted grenade pin  was knotted into  it. Her mother recounted four different stories of the pin, saying Stan at different times had claimed them all to be true.

and focused first on the clock atop the old empty newspaper building. She didn’t move until the clock ticked over a minute and then turned her head a few degrees to the Hyatt.

‘Find the corner of the roof closest to us and then tilt down three floors and left four windows. She turned the knob to see clearly into the dimly lit hotel room. ‘What’s he wearing Jane?’

‘Black jeans, three-hole Docs. Trench and necktie are on the bed.’

‘And the girl – What does she look like?’

Zack listened and looked at his wife as she described herself.

Jane thought about Zack’s need to hurt her. Was he even conscious he was making her do the same things she’d done to him? Each step in putting their life back together seemed to involve him reclaiming, reforming something she’d hurled at him, that had crumbled at his feet. Would his aim, like his focus, be more sure?

‘Do you think Rael was a violation of type for him – a stray waif in a crowd of tall, strong, curly-topped women?’

‘Don’t make the mistake, again, of thinking Rael’s not strong. Damaged more than most of us, but not weak at all.’ She turned to look at Zack.

‘Just a comment on the physical resemblance the new girl bears to you. Don’t put those down. What is she doing?’

As Jane described Victor’s sex, she fingered the pin, like she would a rosary bead. She wished, not for the first time, but for the first time since she’d known Zack, that it still served its original purpose.

Last year’s unfinished NaNoWriMo decided to be a bit of fantasty/SF. The working title Bangs and Whimpers was an effort to get away from the first title I came up with, Fission Chips.

Rano Simon awoke well before dawn and picked up his packed duffel from beside the door to the bedroom he shared with his brother.

The duffel contained an extra pair of sandals, a small repair kit, a change of clothes from walking to meeting with the Lord and some extra layers as the weather this time of year was unpredictable. He would don the nicer outfit after bathing in the river which ran two kilometers from the Manor’s entrance.

The room had no windows and so he left the room by touch. A single narrow window let a sliver of moonlight into the house’s main room by which he could see a package of food prepared by his mother and left by the oven. A hunk of bread, a few slices of cheese and a skin of small beer would see him the 22 kilometer walk to Thatch Manor.

The Simon family had made their goodbyes to one another the night before and while Mrs. Simon would have liked another few words with her son, he didn’t want to wake his parents and delay his leaving the time they would insist on spending with him over tea and breakfast.

His mother had also put out a plate of late summer strawberries. The white fruit would make the first part of the journey a little sweeter. He put these in with bread and cheese.

Rano looked about the room as if he wasn’t sure when he’d return. The round trip would be two days give or take, less if Lord Thatch denied him a corner to sleep that night. No reason at all to think he’d not be participating in the rest of the harvest.

He tied the skin and the bag of food to his belt and shouldered the duffel, trying to take care not to carry it in such a way that the clothes would wrinkle too much. “Damn these formalities. We’re just men. I work harder than he does for being one of the peasants. Who knows whether he pushes his brain hard enough to account for the difference in our stations.

The moon hung at just over a waning half and was low on the horizon leaving him an hour by starlight before the sun decided to peak out. Rano’s mouth watered at the thought of the strawberries, but he figured they’d make the morning of his journey a better place. He set a good pace for the manor in hopes it wouldn’t take him too far into the afternoon. The landscape was rough once he cleared the farm and made his way around the hills that surrounded the bay.

He had taken this road two years before, when he and the others in his year had presented themselves to Lord Thatch. There were four other boys born the year he was  – three minors and one other major. Petr and Karl Benson had spent the better part of the journey imploring the Yarrow twins and Bill Raynard not to embarrass them in front of Lord Thatch. That they were going in order to make a good impression and keep the village of St. Xavier in Thatch’s good graces. Rano didn’t really think the minor boys would make a problem, but expressing their superiority kept everyone in their places. At least that’s what he thought. The fact was, the Yarrow boys knew the woods and hills between the village and the manor far better than anyone else Rano knew and he was lucky they didn’t decide to do a runner and embarrass the major boys.

That hike had been quite a good one, the weather was fine and despite the heckling Rano and Karl gave the other three, they made the journey in good time and arrived together. He told his brother after, “They may be minors, but you underestimate them at your peril. There’s no differences to be seen and they may well be smarter and more capable than either of us. It’s a difficult row to hoe in this village, but if I learn nothing else this year, it’s not to think them lower than we are.” Petr just said, “I know you’re bigger and older than I am and you must be smarter, I think that’s the dumbest thing I’ve heard today.”

That attitude of his brother’s hadn’t changed in the intervening years and this is why, Rano thought, the Simon name sits so poorly with Thatch. I think I made a good impression when we presented ourselves. Each of us got the same pat on the head, so there’s no real way to tell.  And who knows if two years later he’ll even remember the time the Yarrow boys and a Benson, a Simon and a Jame presented themselves. He sees a few of us every year and. Rano continued to rumble the possibilities in his head but realised that the only way for these arguments to make sense, for his head to have any satisfaction in the matter, would be to actually know Lord Thatch. And he wasn’t going to know Thatch any better on his journey to the manor, and probablyt won’t know any more about Thatch in this lifetime that will make me know how he’s going to greet me today.

Rano looked at his feet and then at the path ahead and tried to recall just what was up around the bend, but all he had was the knowledge that there was only one path and that Xavier boys, or Thatch, or Thatch’s man Mayo trod on it, what, at least eight or nine times a year. The path with that many people coming along it that often should stay clear. The trees on either side were tall at two or three meters, and the shrubs, this late in the year were pretty bare. Some of the other boys took the goats up here to graze when it rained, and they didn’t want to let the goats wander on their own.

Rano knew about planting and harvesting, but very little about goats or why they came back from grazing. The minor girls who did most of the work with the goats didn’t share their secrets. Female goats, one girl told him when he was very young, are like young men. You tell them to come back, they come back. Especially if you give them a reason.  You’ll get this when you grow up, little Simon boy, you’ll get this. Later on it made sense that they’d go off and graze and come back to be milked. That nothing was going to empty their udders but the milking girls. Pain makes you return.

Rano thought about the girls who insisted that they follow the goats when it rained. It would make sense though, that they’d fill themselves, rain or shine, and come back when they needed a milkmaid to take care of the rest. And he wondered too about the pain. The discomfort gets a little much and they come back to the milking quarters, but they’re just coming back to the one causing them the discomfort. Can goats figure that part out? Or is it just food/pain/ease of pain/food?

This occupied Rano’s thoughts for a good part of the hour before the sun peaked up. He had long practiced the different ways to keep his mind going about some subject or another while he worked in the fields or couldn’t sleep. Meditate on something, anything real, and the mind will keep itself busy enough that passing into sleep or bugging a row of crops or harvesting the row once it was ripe, or covering the distance through the hills that separated Xavier from Thatch Manor would go by before he had to think twice about what was going on in the world or about the soreness in his feet or the scratches from the nettles that grew occasionally over the path.

His main idea when going off into thoughts goat grazing and why they come back when the rest of the world has so much more interesting grazing than that by Xavier was the strawberries. It made a little sense to put a few kilometers between himself and his house before enjoying that treat. Stretching these things out made them the sweeter.  But if he didn’t occupy his mind with something other than strawberries, the time would pass with painful slowness. As it stood a few memories and thoughts of goats with filling udders were enough. By the time he put the goat arguments away, the sun was peaking up and he extracted the first white strawberries from the pack at his belt.

There were nine of the fruits which would just about fit in a cup made of both of his hands. He pinched the pale green stem off of the first one and flicked it away, and then bit into the top of the fruit. He wanted to make sure each would last two bites – one with almost no flavour and the second, the tip of the berry with the hint of sugar in the heavy moisture. The first one bite, he though, was almost perfect for being the top half of the berry – the seeds had almost no flavour, and there was none of the bitterness that an under-ripe berry offered. He looked closely at the tip of the remaining half of the berry. Nice – it’s full size – the seeds have spread out – none of that crunch of the bitter seeds all scrunched together. This bite was sweeter than the first. The hint of sugar and no bitterness at all. Bite and bitter. He chewed the sweet fruit and though of Biting and Bitterness and how those words must once have been the same.  But he didn’t want to think about bitterness at all – if the word were in his head, it might take up residence in his tongue where there should just be the sweetness of the strawberries his mother had left. The pale sweetness made the trip’s uncertainty a little easier to bear.

He decided to make the berries last a little longer by eating a hunk of bread with a little cheese in between the first ones and the others, but he regretted it. After the sun had been rising for an hour or so, he ate the cheese and bread, but something in the cheese was left on his tongue and made the next berry taste weird. Not bad – the fruit wasn’t off. And it wasn’t bitter either. Just strange – not the way a ripe strawberry should taste on an autumn morning in the woods. The thing was, he didn’t know how that should taste either. He finished the berries anyway, even though they weren’t so nice as they should have been. I won’t tell mother about that. She’ll only say that I should know these things. Cheese doesn’t go with anything but bread. Or something like that. Rano figured people who talked that way only said you should have known because the lesson he was bringing by telling the story was one they were only learning in the moment he said it. Even his mother, he guessed, hadn’t eaten strawberries after cheese since she was a little girl and she didn’t remember learning the lesson any longer either. So she would say as if teaching the lesson herself, of course you don’t do that. Draining all the sweetness out of the retelling. So he retold it only to himself as the sun rose a little higher and he figured he must be about a third of the way to the Manor. He looked at the sun as it rose of the short trees around him and tried to calculate how high the sun should be before he ate any more of his breakfast. Knowing that the sweetness of the berries was lost, he opened the skin and took a couple swallows of the bitter small beer.

This is from the middle of a novel I started a couple of years ago.  I was challenged to create a female hero. On a whim I decided on a black female ex-con. I realised far too late in the game that I didn’t have the skills to portray her realistically. I did, however, write about 100 interesting pages. The scene below features the head of a crime syndicate and his son. Nicholas George, referenced in this section, is the ostensible villain of the novel.

Around his friends and siblings, Ben Athos tended to be outgoing and the leader of whatever group he might be in. He put forth ideas in such a way (show don’t tell) that people would naturally buy into whatever he had to say. His siblings engaged in whatever plan he might have for an adventure and his classmates considered him the most important member of any group (how?).

Around his father, however, he became sullen. He answered in single syllable sentences. At the age of 20, Old Athos called him.

“Ben. I have something to discuss with you.”

“Yeah.” There was no lilt even to the word, though he dragged it out a bit.

“I want you to come to my office. It’s better this not be done over the phone.” Ben was still too young to actually believe that some things had to be said face to face, but answered anyway, “When?”

“Is there anything keeping you from coming now?”

“No.”

“Good, I’ll see you here in half an hour. Til then.”

Though it hardly seemed necessary, Ben added a “Bye” before putting the down the receiver.

The drive over was easy enough. Midday traffic was almost not there at all. Ben pulled into the extra space by his father’s car, the one next to the one marked “handicapped” and pulled up the handbrake with a little more force than was necessary. His face had gone from the sullen scowl that took over whenever he heard his father’s voice, to something brighter as he took the curves of the road from their house into town, and back into a scowl as he parked.

He entered the building and nodded to the man at reception who nodded back, with a nonchalant “Afternoon, Master Athos.” The receptionist had been greeting people in the town’s largest office building since the days when the town didn’t seem to be able to support an office development that large, much less the six that sprang up later to define downtown. The receptionist remembered when young men were called Master until they married, or at least had a college degree, just as young ladies were called Miss until they married. Ben’s memory wasn’t so long and the appellation just added to his resentment as he boarded the elevator. Of course Ben didn’t remember the days when the man who now greeted visitors to the building actually ran the elevator.

Old Athos’ office were on the 14th floor of the building and the elevator seemed to go awfully slowly. Time enough to resent that there was really nothing his father could say to make him any happier at being Old Athos’ offspring, son, and heir.

The elevator opened onto an office that took up the tapered top floor. A large Persian rug covered the floor in front of an antique oak desk. The chairs on the rug were only lightly padded, but Old Athos generally didn’t keep people sitting in them very long. Business was concluded, whoever visited stood up, and if the business was concluded well, Athos poured snifters of Metaxa to seal the deal.  If the business concluded poorly, the visitor made sure to convey that whatever blockages were in the way would soon be removed as he backed towards the elevator and Athos put his head back down to his work.

Ben came into the office and approached the desk and remained standing until his father acknowledged him a minute or two later. “Have a seat son. I just need to finish reviewing this document.”

Ben sat on the chair and put his hands together. He leaned forward as much as he dared, but couldn’t make out what his father was reading. Might have been a contract, or an article for tomorrow’s paper that the editor knew should pass muster. Never know where there might be toes sticking out. The most innocuous subjects sometimes had Organismos in an uproar. Ben had no way really to tell. If he were reviewing a contract, he’d have a pencil in his hand, Ben thought. But wasn’t sure. He didn’t spend any time actually engaging the business. The old man wouldn’t let him. Not since the day he told his son that the business had to pass to someone else.

“Right then, son,” Athos said without looking up.

“Yes.”

“Good gracious, my boy. Is there any chance at all you might speak to me in sentences as long, even, as the Bible’s shortest verse?” All the Athos children knew what this meant. “Jesus wept” was a favourite phrase of their mother’s and its source was discussed ad nauseum.

“Yes, father?”

“Fine, Ben. If that’s the way you want it. It’s come time that I follow up on what I once promised you. I told you that Organismos would not continue in our family, and I’ve decided on a successor.”

“What? You’re denying it to Jeremy and Frances as well as to me?”

“Finally. That’s more than you’ve said out loud to me since my last birthday. Yes. The Athos family will no longer govern the Organization. You’ll still be its main beneficiaries, but the day-to-day operation? No. I’ve got someone else to take on the business.”

A silence sat between them as Ben leaned forward to learn who had usurped his place.

Finally he rejoined, “Who? Who could possibly deserve to take over from our family. We’ve run it – you’ve run it for decades. We’ve watched you. We know what to do.”

“No, son. You haven’t and you don’t. Not that this is your fault. I’ve not let you in. This is why, despite your lack of respect in general and for me in specific, you will still reap the rewards of Organismos’ successes. You and your siblings and your offspring for as many generations as I can manage, will continue to be supported well, however much or little you earn.”

“So then, father. Who’s it to be? Don’t I deserve even to know that?”

“The man who will earn your keep, who knows what it takes to keep our interests producing fruit, or golden eggs – pick your metaphor – is Nick George.”

“What? Saint Nicholas’ whelp? What does he know? How does the son of every Greek’s little helper take my place at the helm?”

“It was never your place, Ben. You should know this. And how does he do it? From the minute I first spoke to him, he was willing to get down in the dirt to do the nastiest shit work Organismos does. That’s how.”

Old Athos remained silent for a moment and Ben didn’t break it.

Athos continued, “I said it wasn’t your fault, Ben, because the dirty work of what we do? I never wanted you, wanted any of my kids, to do that. That’s the work you have to be able to do to lead this company, but I don’t want my kids doing it. Let the company earn for you. Do you want to move someplace warm? Do you want to study in Athens or Rome? Do you want to surf in Hawaii until the volcanoes bury Honolulu? Or make movies in Hollywood? All of this is yours for the taking. The only thing that isn’t is Organismos.

“It’s up to you what you want to do, but please don’t fight me.”

I belong to a writing group and suspect that I’ll post several pieces here that derive from our exercises. A recent starting point we used was to modernise a fairy tale. I’ve taken Little Red Riding Hood and turned it somewhat inside-out…

A boy of about sixteen carries a heavy carpetbag down a narrow sidewalk that borders a wide treeless thoroughfare. Late morning sun draws sweat from the armpits and back of his cheap black suit. He walks unmolested past office blocks, car dealerships, chain restaurants decorated with plastic foliage. Fumes of leaded fuel fill his nose.

A small late-model car slows as it passes him before parking a few hundred feet ahead. A man gets out of the car and walks with some purpose towards the boy.

The boy registers the man’s light linen suit, close-cropped hair and easy gait. He figures him to be in his late fifties and tries to ignore him.

“Where are you headed, young man?”

“I don’t know, sir.” The formality comes easy. His grandfather always insisted on military address.

“That’s looks like quite a burden to carry without a destination.”

“There must be a fleabag hotel down here somewhere.”

“No money, son?”

Though the man‘s familiarity irks the boy, he replies quickly, “Not enough to waste on the bus, sir.”

“Or a plate of breakfast?”

They stared at each other a moment and finally the boy lowers his gaze. “Let me buy you soemething – get you a seat for a few minutes.”

The boy struggles between a scylla of hunger and a charybdis of having no debt and wanting to keep it that way.

He puts down the carpetbag between his feet and looks into the man’s face. The eyes seem small until he registers how thick the glasses the man wears are, and how nearsighted he must be.
The man catches the hint of the boy’s cocked eyebrow and steps back.

“Young man, I know you don’t need anything. And I don’t want anything from you. There’s a coffee shop a few blocks up. I’m sure they’ll put on a fresh pot if we ask nicely. What do they call you?”

He stares further into the man’s eyes, wanting to to see if the pupils dilate with the hunt, but cannot tell.

“It’s settled then. Let me carry this.” They both reach for the case at tyhe same time, the boy’s hand wrapping around the man’s. His skin feels as though it has never worked or even washed a dish, much less carried a burden. The boy withdraws with some hesitation, as a mollusk into a cracked shell.

Relieved of the bag, he speaks. “My grandfather’s funeral was first thing this morning. If you could call it that. Just the funeral director and me.”

A delivery van with shot suspension squeals by as the older man lifts the case up. The odor of underlubricated metal makes them both wince. They walk a little farther in silence, Without prompting, the boy continues.

“I closed the bank accounts and paid the corner store where gramps had a slip running and made sure everyone in his little book would have no resentment. ‘Debt is resentment’ was his motto. There was barely enough left to plant him.”

The old man almost asks how running tabs and account books with payable balances were different from debt.

The boy looks at him just as his he closed his lips over gritting teeth and sees that there must have been something hard in the man’s life – his front teeth were all ground to the same level. The man looks ahead.

“Hand it back. My arm has had a rest.” The man doesn’t argue, even though their destination is just across the road.

Just keep moving, the boy thought. Don’t go, don’t owe. But the day of walking and the weeks of waiting wear on him and he follows the man into the coffee shop. Its plate glass windows give the boy a nostalgia for something he feels too young to recall.

The force of the air conditioning cools him to a brief shiver as he places his bag by the cracked red velvet of a booth. It is set with four sets of stainless wrapped in cheap paper napkins, heavy cream-colored ceramic mugs, and short red plastic glasses. He sits at one end and smells the pumice a hidden cook scrapes across a hidden grill. Pumice mixed with scrapings of egg fried in too much grease.

He inhales again to clear his nostrils of that smell, like grampa’s kitchen before the hospice help scrubbed it clean and the apartment smelled only of bleach and the odors of dying old man that bleach never really cleans.

He looks at the old man who has sat down across from him. His ears seem to open wide, as if they could swallow his words.

A waitress the boy thinks is in her late 20s comes to them bearing two pitchers. Black curls escape her barrettes as she drawls “Regular or decaf?” The old man covers his mug, but asks “is it fresh?”

“Just brewed new pots,” she says as she tries to blow a curl out of her eye.

“Regular for the boy, and some tea for me. And proper milk as well, miss.”

As she pours the coffee, she adds, “Specials are the chicken-liver omelette, jack cheeseburger, and forest fruit pie,” before turning her back on them.

“Keep talking, young man.”

The boy looks up and the ears seem even larger and the eyes behind the thick lenses more intent. He sips his coffee and suppresses a shudder at its bitterness. “Debt is resentment, son,” he heard in his grandfather’s nicotine-stained voice. “Never owe or be owed if you can help it.” Had that codger given him no more wisdom than a piece of reheated Shakespeare? He searched the stones in his belly for something else to guide him and found only those same featherless words.

If my words cost him coffee and some AC and maybe a slice of pie, what debt is there, really?

I wrote this Summer 2012 for a contest held by Dazed and Confused Magazine. They had published a dozen or so short pieces based on song lyrics and asked readers to submit their own. My song is Was Ist Ist by Einsturzende Neubauten.  Please note that while the paintings in question existed, this is a work of fiction.