Spuddy wants more attention than usual tonight. I sit on the couch petting him for quite some time. I feed and water him and then pet him some more. He’s lonely and needy. I have an agenda. I want to write a Spuddy retreat piece for day 3. When he gets off my lap of his own free will, I sit at the table to write, thinking, at least he has company.
Earlier tonight I lost not only today’s work, but also yesterday’s. It wouldn’t download last night, something is wrong with the program. I probably need to uninstall and reinstall it. I suppose I shouldn’t talk about these behind the scenes aspects of writing. “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” Meanwhile, I am grieving the loss of two day’s work.
Today the muse is asleep. I prefer it when the muse speaks plainly. Give me something exciting, something tasty I can sink my teeth into. I think about the assignment for the contemplative writing group: to write from a dream. I had a dream to write from. In fact, I had several. And pieces already partly or almost entirely written.
When I come home from college, I find my father sitting on the livingroom floor in the small shack where we live. He is surrounded by newspaper and holds a scrub brush. He is scraping and scrubbing chicken poop from the floor. The floor is textured tin, like an old-fashioned ceiling, and the chicken poop is embedded in the textures. My father scrapes with a putty knife trying to remove the poop. There is one chair in the livingroom, a wooden dining room chair. I sit in the chair and tell my father about college while he digs chicken poop from the crevices. The chicken is still running around the room pooping. The newspapers don’t stay in place. It is my chicken. I feel deeply upset and guilty about this, but helpless to change things.
I wonder why the chicken is in the house, and why we don’t move it outside. I wonder if this is an allegory of sorts where the two or three characters in the story are parts of myself. There is part of me that goes around pooping and making impossible messes, part of me that tolerates this and doesn’t make an appropriate effort to change, and part of me that quietly cleans up. Or, is it poor Keith who is quietly cleaning up after me? And is the chicken Rocky the cockatiel whom Keith does not want pooping on Susan’s textured tile floors. He’d be quietly and patiently cleaning up while I’m gallivanting. Perhaps it is a message that I need to find a new home for Rocky. I am very torn—very torn—about that. I feel a responsibility to the bird, but I never really wanted it in the first place. I got it for Erin. Then Mom had it for a while. But he or she has become part of the family. And I would only want him or her to go to a new home if I was confident it would be a good one.
I am not sure I can make that dream into a story or poem. The fixer-upper part of me wants to get in there and move the chicken to a shed or coop with straw on the floor and access to the outside during the day. That’s hardly an interesting story.
I could write, like Russell Edson or Chris Kennedy a weird little piece, or I could make up a fairy tale about how the chicken is actually my twin sister under a magical spell.
This is a static image, fairly still. Very little happens. It seems to represent a condition or relationship or both.
I could write a prequel and sequel to the dream. Maybe. How and why did the chicken get there, and what happens next? Why do we seem to be living in poverty in a place I never lived in in real life? A hovel. My house is a hovel. Perhaps I’ve been neglecting the physical chores for the intellectual. But why would anyone build a floor out of textured tin or leave a chicken in the livingroom? The dream is too far-fetched to be real.
A story has to have action. It’s a sort of a mood piece as it stands, and brief, like a little flash piece.
I decide to stick with what I was given, only fleshing it a little:
A Calico Wind
My father scrubs chicken poop from the textured indentations of the tin floor in our livingroom. This is how I find him when I return for spring break. I walk from the train station up the series of muddy two tracks to our shanty in a wet, calico wind. Papa is surrounded by newspaper and holds a scrub brush. He doesn’t look up, or speak. He scrubs and scrapes with a putty knife trying to remove the poop from the crevices. I sit in the wooden straight-backed chair, the only chair in the room, and tell my father about calculus and physics. About the dorm, the sorority girls and their make up. The abundance of fancy food at the dining hall. All you can eat. Peg, my one-legged pet chicken, flaps her wings, scattering the newly laid papers, exposing the floor. I rearrange them, and go out for rocks to hold them in place. I bring in some groundnuts, too. As it gets dark, Papa leaves off scrubbing and stows the brush on the shelf under the washbasin table. The calico wind whistles in the windowpanes, rattling them slightly. The candle sputters, but doesn’t quite go out. In the pines around the cabin, screech owls quaver. With the one egg Papa left on the counter for me, I make us, for dinner, a groundnut omelet. It reminds me of the frittatas they serve for breakfast at the dorm.
Mary Stebbins
050424 Spuddy Retreat (3) Journal FLASH
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