Prompt #4 Response -- The Slow Fade

Steve calls her “Ice Queen.” She's no royalty, so I call her “Cold Bitch.”

I’ll admit that she is beautiful. She has thick dark hair and penetrating blue eyes. But her frigidity overpowers her beauty. She rarely smiles. Instead, she seems to celebrate her own aloofness. Revel in her ability to distance herself from others. She never even looks at me, apparently, because I’m his new girlfriend.

I despise her, not only for everything she did to him, but for her refusal to be decent to me. As if its not bad enough that she broke his heart and treated him cruelly, she’s relegated me to ride in the back of her mini-van, shivering on the floor like a refugee.

When Steve had first mentioned that since he didn’t have a car, he’d ask her to drive us from the airport to his apartment, I thought he was joking. He assured me that Cold Bitch owed him a favor and she was his only friend with a car. But when he’d lost his phone at the airport before we’d left, he didn’t have anyway to let her know that we’d arrived. She wasn’t waiting for us inside at baggage claim or at the passenger pick-up area outside. When we were waiting outside, shivering in the winter cold, I could only hope that she’d come.

After about ten minutes, she pulled up to the curb and rolled down her window. She didn’t acknowledge me; the chill in her voice was for him alone. “I have been waiting for almost half an hour. You can find your own fucking ride home.” She continued to yell about how she'd wasted another thirty minutes of her life on him and why hadn’t he answered his damned phone.

He screamed back at her in a failed attempt to explain. They weren’t yelling at each other, as much as over each other. Their angry outbursts were practiced and bitter. I started singing in my head to distract myself and I was startled when Steve defiantly ran in front of her van as she was rolling up the window.

She looked at him, then over her shoulder like she might back out of the parking lot to avoid him. She sighed and rolled the window back down.

“Get in,” she said acknowledging me for the first time. “Don’t break anything.”

I reluctantly reached for the door. I was surprised to see that she’d removed every seat in the van except for hers. The floor was covered with stuff – clothes, a guitar case, books. I tentatively started pushing things out of the way, wondering if she’d removed the seats just for picking us up. Steve was more aggressive and he pushed her stuff into a pile so there was a small place for us to sit.

The quiet tension was unbearable.  I thought maybe I could diffuse the situation and that she’d be more kind if I showed some appreciation, so I told her, “Thank you for the ride.”

“I don’t want to hear a single word from either of you. I swear if you talk again, I will fucking kick you out of my van. I don’t care where we are.”

Steve wrapped his arms around me and whispered in my ear that it was going to be okay. He kissed me on my cheek and I believed him. I thought about how we’d laugh about this later. He’d tell me other stories about the awful things she’d done to him when they’d been together. He’d tell me again how much happier I made him. He laid his head in my lap and I rubbed the base of his neck where his boyish unruly curls ended until he fell asleep.

I noticed that I could look at Cold Bitch in the darkened rear view mirror without her seeing me. She was watching the road with her piercingly blue eyes. When she suddenly looked away I was afraid that she’d seen me looking at her until I saw she was reaching for a CD.

She put it in and sang along quietly to a Rilo Kiley song. I wasn't sure if I could hear her but I was sure I saw her lips moving in the mirror. “The slow fade of love." Her gloved fingertips tapped the steering wheel with the beat of the acoustic guitar.

I couldn't believe it, I loved Rilo. She kept singing, louder now, so that her voice was audible, “It's my gradual descent, Into a life i never meant.” Her voice, softer and sweeter than I’d guessed it would be, revealed her fragile side. She lost her inhibitions as she slipped into the lyrics. I realized then that her icy exterior was her protection from the hurtful world. I saw her not as Cold Bitch, but as a girl just like me looking for true love and grasping for happiness. Maybe she’d admired his curls once too, long before their mistakes and regrets replaced their love.

I wanted to tell her all these things, maybe even suggest we could be friends, but I was afraid if I spoke, she’d return to her icy façade. So instead, I sang along with her, quietly whispering the lyrics under my breath.

Prompt #3 Response -- The Dancing Shoes

The stress of the last few weeks had weakened her.  Under usual circumstances, she was charitable toward her husband.  Since the night they met, and he’d asked her to dance in the crowded room, she’d admired, and eventually loved, his boyish smile and contagious glee.  Whenever she thought she heard disinterest in his voice or felt that his touch was dismissive, she made a conscious effort to reexamine her judgment of him and to assume her assessment was wrong.  Although the hardships and years they’d shared together had aged him, she still found it easy to forgive him when he smiled.  She’d avoided most arguments with him simply by thinking of him favorably.

But that evening, she was too tired.  The responsibilities that she’d been juggling and the emotional weight of the last few weeks had taken their toll.  Their upcoming cross-country move had brought domestic upheaval and extra duties at work and her ailing grandfather’s health had worsened considerably. 

So when he’d asked her, casually enough, if she had remembered to pick up more boxes on the way home, she’d been incapable of charitable thoughts.  Instead of treating it like the innocent question it probably was, she’d heard in his voice a tone of disrespect of her stress and a critique of her forgetfulness. She’d already criticized herself when she’d realized, only moments before, that she hadn’t remembered to stop at the store.  But now, she resented him for pointing out her faults.

She came to the conclusion that he was criticizing her so quickly that she’d responded, “No, I didn’t, did you get them" in a voice slathered with sarcasm, before she’d even consciously realized that she was angry with him.  He hadn’t sensed her mood before then, but her tone was so unmistakable that he quipped back, “I didn’t get them, because you’d said you would.”  It wasn’t a particularly clever remark, but the simple truth of it, spoken so cool, unnerved her.  She was shouting back at him now in a high-pitch strain, “Only because I am doing everything for this damned move.  Maybe I wouldn’t have forgotten them if you helped with anything.”  He responded, still cool.  The rhythm of the argument continued jaggedly as she shouted long-winded rants and he responded with calm staccato.

When she'd shouted as much as she wanted, she’d picked up a shoebox that she'd intended to throw with furious deliberation to punctuate her point, but he stopped her, grabbing the box.  “Are you putting on your dancing shoes?”  She was flustered and speechless until she saw the slow boyish smile spreading from his eyes, looking youthful now, to his mouth.  She was startled that he still transfixed her, as he had when he first asked her to dance, despite her anger and the heaviness of the years.  Charity swelled back into her, and she laughed, “Only if you put yours on first.”

Prompt #2 -- The Sum of All Things

Reluctantly, he handed over the key.  He’d considered refusing but he knew they would kill him and take it anyway.

He’d made a promise to his creator when he accepted the job that he’d take the key with him into the next life.  He’d keep it hidden from his boss at all costs and maybe save someone.  He believed in karma and knew that he’d pay for what he’d done in the next existence.  He had wanted to believe that when his last breath escaped him, he would disappear into nothingness.  But he’d seen things that made it impossible for him to deny that there was a powerful fate that kept score.  Good things happened to some people, and others, like him, just couldn’t catch a break.

He’d worried that in his next life he’d come back as the child of one of the men he preyed upon.  The men who were so desperate to find a way to be good that they turned to him, believing that fate just had to hand them something good.  Men who drank themselves mean and hated the world for their inability to resist their addictions.  Men who, when sober, felt so remorseful about all that they had done, that they were too weak to even look at their children to see what they had done.  Instead, the men turned to him, with their last dollars, and the silent wish that they would get lucky.  They’d win this time, they believed, and give their children something besides bruises and broken bones.  They wordlessly prayed that their winnings would be enough to make their children forgive them.  But that didn’t happen; fate forbade it, he knew.  Even if the men won once, they’d lust for more, and bet again, with renewed faith that now their luck had turned.  But they’d lose again, and turn to drink to dull the knowledge that they couldn’t be the men they wanted to be or the fathers they needed to be.

The key unlocked his safe securing all his records.  Records of the debts he’d collected, unofficial records of men who had left this world with violence, some had taken their children with them into death.  Records of outstanding debts too.  He wanted to keep the key hidden, even now, so that his boss wouldn’t have those records.  With his death, he’d free the men he couldn’t help in life.  Maybe some of the children would escape.  Maybe fate had something better planned for them.

But, as he was kneeling on the bridge, the gun was pressed to his head, he accepted that fate wouldn’t give him this one thing – he couldn’t die a hero.  

Prompt #1: A Glimpse Into a Childhood Lost

Rachel sighed, looking at the long to-do list in her planner, and wondered when she'd grown so very old. She closed it and, looking up, glimpsed a woman sitting in the crowded mall food court and was startled by her familiar face. The woman was beautiful with short black hair and slanted dark eyes, and at first, she thought she was an actress. Then Rachel noticed she was wearing scrubs and sitting with an older man. Surprised, Rachel realized the man was familiar too – he had a patch of grey hair at his temple that was striking in his dark hair.

Like a bolt of lightening, the streak of grey focused Rachel’s memory and she knew he was the woman’s father. Recognition spread thru her and she realized the woman was her childhood best friend. She pushed through the crowd toward the woman and nearly embraced her before she saw the woman didn't recognize her.

“Lindsay Richman,” she asked expectantly.

“It’s Lindsay Hunter now,” Lindsay replied, her eyes flitting to the oversized diamond on her hand.

“It’s Rachel. Rachel Brown.” Lindsay stared back at her, puzzled only for a moment, and then stuck out her hand. “Of course, it has been so long.”

Rachel returned the shake and Lindsay asked her to sit. Rachel and Lindsay spoke about their jobs and attempted to build a bridge across the last eighteen years. As Lindsay spoke, Rachel recalled the long-forgotten movements of Lindsay’s body, unchanged despite the time. As she'd had in her youth, Lindsay’s posture was confident and her hands moved with a causal grace. Rachel recalled memories of their shared girlhoods too and felt dizzy from all the images rushing into her mind at once. She remembered the forts they built out of the couch cushions in Lindsay’s basement so they could talk away from her brothers. They’d shared secrets and dreams there. Her secrets were small then but her dreams were so big. She remembered they’d watched the movie “The Sound of Music” and danced on her backyard playground singing, “I am sixteen going on seventeen” as they daydreamed together about growing up and falling in love. Rachel had been so heart-broken when her parents told her they were moving and she'd be parted from Lindsay. They'd written for awhile but lost touch entirely after a few years. The memories came to her as Lindsay spoke like waves on a still lake, and Rachel knew that ripples would remain.

Rachel was thinking about the club the girls' had formed (they'd called it ALARM), when Lindsay abruptly interrupted, saying that she had to return to her shift at the hospital. Rachel nodded, “It was really good to see you,” Lindsay said as she slung her bag over her shoulder.

“We’ll have to do it again sometime,” Rachel agreed and as Lindsay walked away, she realized that they hadn't exchanged contact information. But Rachel didn't call to her -- she was sure they couldn’t rekindle their long-lost childhood friendship. Rachel was grateful though for the glimpse into her memory that their chance meeting had given her.