January 2012
4 posts
Hi. So drabblerousers is going on hiatus. It was a fun concept that never really caught on. And Eleni and Peter are super busy writing novels and blogging and being generally awesome. If someone loves the concept of drabbles so much that they’d like to take a crack at running the site, drop Peter a line at peterdewolf(at)gmail.com. Otherwise thanks for stopping by. And especially thanks to...
The crow lay upon her neighbor’s frosty lawn, a frozen bundle of feathers and bones. Its legs were curled up beneath its body. Its dark eyes stared at nothing. She briefly wondered whether the bird was dead when it fell from the sky, landing with a thump among the bright Christmas decorations littering the lawn.
She shook her head. A dead bird falling from the sky portended nothing. No,...
Some folks mistakenly prefer the waterfront, but she knows that the second street up from the harbour is the best one. She knows that the fog is just a little less thick. A little more magical, enveloping the streetlights. The cobblestones are a little less eroded. You can hear the waves lapping. But from a street away, they announce their arrival with a gentle rap on the door, not by...
She sat sideways on the hard plastic bench. Her feet up on the seat, knees hugged tight against her chest. Her dirty skate shoes pointed toward the aisle, with their hot pink laces prominently displayed; daring someone, anyone to sit down beside her. Headphones in her ears, and an angry scowl obscured what could otherwise have been a very pretty face. The battery on her iPod had been dead since...
December 2011
6 posts
She can’t decide which she enjoys more, the sound or the feeling. But the anticipation of both is driving her wild. Goosebumps trail his hand like an obedient pup as he traces. Slowly. Deliberately. Knowingly. He hugs the curves. He knows the terrain. She feels the love in his touch. Her hips move. Impatiently. So. Very. Her hips move. On their own. Yes. She feels the desire when...
At one point she had begun apartment hunting for the two of them. They more or less already lived together, why not make it official? Their demands were simple: dog friendly, giant kitchen, a south-facing living room to fill with bookshelves. They’d like a porch, too, but knew it was a luxury and that the likelihood of actually having one was slim. She moved all her good cookware to his house...
The waterdrops from the hole in the eaves trough follow him. He leans left. He leans right. The drops always hit him in the head. He doesn’t lean too far. From her. She stands silently. He searches her eyes for answers. He leans in and his mouth finds hers, trying to provide some. He plays with the soft cotton scarf she wears even though it is seventy degrees. She tucks her thumbs into...
She crosses the street, takes the underpass to the main road. This is a route she’s walked every day, she could do it blindfolded.
On her right, there’s a pile of blankets against a brick wall. “Hey,” She says to the blankets. They move. A dirty face smiles at her, “Well, hello there.” She passes him a package, “Your lunch.” “Thanks, Curly.” Four men in business suits are walking...
“How are you?” “I hate that question. It’s a serious question that merits a serious answer. But you don’t care about my answer, not really. You expect me to say ‘fine’. And ‘fine’ is such bullshit word. It means I’m shit but I’m not going to tell you that. People are uncomfortable with pain expressed publicly. They say they’re okay without even thinking about it, just to be polite. The concept...
“All I wanted was a refund.” The words fell from her mouth, inert, like a sidewalk bird under a plate glass window. “The show was cancelled in the snowstorm, remember?” Remember? What are you asking him about, memories of prom night? Jesus. “Well, I could help you with this problem if you’d just do as I say.” His voice dripped with pretension, bordering on malice. “Do as you say? And...
November 2011
30 posts
As she approaches, I scramble in my mind for comforting things to say. Instead of crying, she asks to use our “hair buzzer”. I oblige and smile, but can’t help to wonder what her outlandish intentions are. Owners never take the death of their pets well. I sit back down and read a magazine, hoping it will keep me distracted. Instead, I’m fighting with myself to look...
The backs of her legs are slightly itchy.
It figures, of course, that she’d forget to put sunscreen on them on the last day of vacation. That’s the kind of girl she is. You know – the kind who thinks she’s formed a habit right before she breaks it.
Her mind wanders. Sprints ahead. Stops. She deletes another email. She hardly sees the words on the screen.
Sometimes she thinks in haiku to pass...
She watched the maid clean hotel room 327, then stepped in the open door as if she’d lost her key. Restless, she found a deck of playing cards inside the nightstand next to the bed. She patiently stacked them. By the fifth level, she considered the structure lucky to be standing. The door opened. She met him before he got to the bed. A long, deep kiss disarmed his surprise. It was a red...
She could almost smell the salt from the tears making a mess of her cheeks. She almost wished he’d hit her, again, so that the sadness would be conjured into hot rage. But she’d already left. Her ring was on the kitchen counter, waiting to be found. And though she knew leaving was the right thing to do it felt wrong in ways she hadn’t anticipated. Cold was seeping through the...
“Is that straight?” she called back.
“I think so.”
“It looks skew!” she shifted the painting a little to the left. “How ‘bout now?”
“Looks fine from where I’m standing.”
She stepped off the chair, holding onto the back for support and then walked to join her mother at the other end of the room. “It’s still not straight!”
“Maybe, the house was built skew.”
“Yea, maybe the street was built...
“Weekends were never so short before you,” She said. She tumbled out of bed, reached for a discarded shirt, any shirt.
“You’re so melodramatic,” He turned away from her, “Time is time, it passes just the same, it never changes.”
“Times change! The way I feel changes over time,” she finished buttoning the shirt, his shirt, and scrambled to...
We’ve been friends for almost three years. From the beginning, I’ve felt our meeting was divine intervention. How else could I so love everything about you, down to the way you drive like a thief in a getaway car? I should have said something before. I waited too long and he came around. I waited longer, now for him to break your heart so I could pick up the pieces and you’d love...
We’re standing face-to-face on a wooded trail I’ve never traipsed, trees familiar but out of place, his eyes locked on mine as rain falls in a weightless mist, perfectly obscuring everything but what’s immediate. I decide he’s taller, but otherwise unchanged. Same soft, unmistakably sad brown eyes, hair still black as crows wings.
I’m close enough to touch him, but my...
“Don’t fall in love in love with me” she said. He looked confused. As if that was even an option. She was just a lay- a filler of an empty Tuesday afternoon. He laughed to himself. “My heart can’t be trusted. It feels too deeply. Loves too quickly. Forgets too slowly.” She whispered as she lay engulfed in his arms. She fit perfectly in his arms & for a moment he knew he had never met...
It started with a hug. Many things do, but logistics are important, here. He sat on the edge of the bed as she stood over him and hugged his shoulders.
One of his thumbs idly stroked the back of her knee. The back of her thigh.
With thumb and forefinger he found the cotton of her shorts as her lips connected with the base of his neck.
Logistics are important. They never spoke. They never locked...
My mug is painting the air, an encouraging signal on a cloudy day, yet as my arms rest on the edge of my desk and I stare at a 24-inch screen, I wish to be anywhere else. If I were to be specific, I wish to be on my couch, four days ago, in a warm pile that landed me above a loving boy and below a purring kitten; but I would settle for anything that gets me above numb. These days I dream only of...
“They are in the next room and I hear him say, ‘I don’t see a difference. She’s even more erratic. She never eats. She’s always angry.’ I don’t hear what she says to him. All I’ve kept is that he called them ‘crazy pills’.
Today I wanted to buy a t-shirt that said:
IS SHE SCHIZOPHRENIC?
I laughed and said, ‘It’s funny...
“Imagine,” he said, “for every choice, for every cellular division, a new variation spooling out into infinity.”
His fingers traced divisions, spooling paths along her hip, crossing the delicately marred flesh of her belly. Her skin sang with wakefulness in the quiet.
“And all these possibilities careening along convergent trajectories towards this fixed point. You...
Some days she hates her life. She hates that she has to live, to breathe, to act… to go on. Life feels hard to her. She is nervous. Her head trembles. She feels a stroke coming on. She is scared to lose her mind. Or is she? She yearns for sweet relief. She stands up. She must; they are all watching. She speaks a foreign language. One she knows. She reads the part she is considering for life. She...
She bit her bottom lip until blood formed in her teeth. He touched her hand across the table and offered.
“I’m sorry, but this is how I feel. I think we’re better off apart.”
Through malevolent eyes, she made a her decision too. The waiter asked to refill their wine glasses. She nodded yes and he excused himself to the restroom.
She reached inside her purse, removed a...
At first he didn’t notice it missing. He sits in the same seat on the same train home every day. So does she. He’s never spoken to her but always finds her presence reassuring. He sees them as rocks in the ever changing sea of people. He likes constants. He appreciates things he can depend on. But her missing engagement ring has filled him with a level of sadness that surprises him. ...
When you walk around Manhattan at 12 on a Monday, it’s really quiet.
No sirens (if everyone is lucky). No dog walking.
No drunk people; everyone has their priorities in order. Or it’s too early for those who don’t to have left the bar for the night.
Look up. Look. The lights. They’re off.
The people inside the rooms have turned the switch on yesterday.
I will begin...
There she was, a girl of the Atlantic, facing a problem as big and wide as the Pacific. How to get from one to the other? Build a bridge. Go to him now, that’s the first thing. Just because you haven’t seen the Pacific doesn’t mean you can’t feel the tides in you. She opened the door and slid in next to him. Look at him, he’s right there. She reached her arms...
What is that marketing term floating around these days? Social Proof? Proving to the world you’re not a loser? I want that right now. Homely girl with hot man. Hot naked man. Nevermind he has a fiancé. Gorgeous fiancé. What does it mean that I can lure a man with a gorgeous fiancé to bed? Does that make her less than her perceived value? Me a little more than my perceived value? I know...
A tear crawls down his cheek. The orange cat was tasty, but he shouldn’t have eaten it. Beloved pets aren’t for snacking. But monsters get hungry. He looked down at his paws, covered in downy fur. She cries herself to sleep. Her father combs the woods behind the house, certain the cat is just lost. He wonders if it’s too late for him. Maybe if he finds her another kitty, ties a bow around its neck...
He caught himself staring at the roundness of her behind in its mustard yellow skirt, the fullness interrupted only by the ties that hung from her apron. She turned, a steaming cup of coffee on a saucer in her hand. He diverted his gaze and shook his head, embarrassed, even though he didn’t think she’d seen him seeing her.
A voice behind him asked for the check. He realized it was probably time...
She makes lists in her head: Things to clean, things to eat, things to do next year. A murmuration of hopes, numbers, regrets and questions take the opportunity to tumble around her brain unchecked by distraction as she races the dark home. The sidewalk, the paper crackle of leaves underfoot don’t register. Her feet know the way. Her mind is free to wander. She turns up her music. Checks...
“You have a problem with object permanence,” he said. “If someone shares something with you - a song, a band, whatever - it’s like it is forever bonded to who shared it with you.” She sipped her coffee slowly. “And you think that’s a problem?” “It is a problem. You need to live in the present.” Months later, after he’d moved, she called him. “Your house will always be your house to me. Other...
“Humph,” she thought. Then: “Is humph really a word?” She typed it, and it appeared, as commanded, on her computer screen. “Yep, it’s a word,” she said aloud. No red squiggly line scarred her black and white canvas. Backspace. Backspace. Backspace. Backspace. Backspace. She started fresh. She wanted to express her frustrations, her hatred toward the world. Her disappointment with life....
We were on the same pavement, walking toward each other, when I noticed them. She was tiny in her white parka and furry boots. He was tall and sturdy. They held hands at the bakery. I scratched my nose. She put her hand in his inside pocket. He laughed. I tucked my fingers into my scarf. At the crossroad, he put his arm around her shoulder and spoke into her ear. She held on tighter. Probably...
Go back to that room (6234, was it?) where you lost your keys, but not just your keys, friend. If only you could now. Think of the possibilities. But your mind was this heap, (insurmountable, I imagine) of shit and how cold you were, and how could you think of these lines as possibilities. Blurred like your words: Tell me what you need. No, not this room, love. Not this view. Not you. _____...
You and I flicker in and out of each other, our minds at peace at the same time only when the light bends the right way or the wind nudges our heads out of their mired thoughts.
Sometimes in the midst of our insanities, our spin cycles, our barrel rolls, we catch each other by the fingertips and fall into the safety net we each have built in the other’s arms.
This is not our time, yet we make...
Want know what I think? I’d said
Of course he’d be alright. But what nobody talks about is how awful it is to have sex with somebody that isn’t your ex. Doing it for the first time with somebody new; it’s all wrong. The angles. Positions. Your insides scream, THIS ISN’T THE LOVER I ORDERD.
He told me that was disarmingly honest. I told him I lived around the corner.
He was circumcised.
He...
Sixteen purple pens sit in an appropriately retro coffee mug on her middle management corporate desk. The office is small; her hair is brown, straight, and neat. Black framed glasses accent her dark hazel eyes, and her smile always brightens the room. They all think she’s cute, but no one dares to say a word that might be misconstrued in this politically correct world of ours. Head of Human...
Sunrise is the best truth serum. He jotted that down once, in a shabby notebook that had been gifted, re-gifted, discarded and rescued. “I like you,” he says. “Don’t blame you,” she yawns. “I’m going to be your boyfriend.” “What if I have other plans?” “I wouldn’t want to slow down your progress towards polycattery,” he says, full smirk. “You’re going to be my boyfriend.” He pulls out...