Fictionized Nonfiction

[lukkucairi]

Write a short, single-graf account of a memory of yours. Fictionalize as necessary.

***

I'm looking up through the eye of the storm. Last I saw on the cable before they cut the electricity, this monster was the size of five southern states taken together; 1500 miles wide, and as loud as a billion freight trains. And we've only seen half of it. Above me now is an otherworldly blue. I've never felt so much the nearness of outer space, as if the eye were a giant hole in the sky.

[brightpearl]

When my friend laughs, his teeth show oddly white against his sparse, black moustache. His wife, her hair tied to itself on top of her head, hides a grin by biting her lips and training her attention on the children -- the youngest is blowing bubbles with the gravity of a scientist handling enriched uranium; the next youngest, my favorite, is punching out his multiplication tables on the purple calculator I brought for him. I wait, knowing an explanation will come after the obligatory pause. My friend chuckles again for effect. No, he says, it wouldn't be safe for me to walk there. Someone might take a shot at me. The people out there are superstitious, and when they see me -- a tall gringa -- they'll think I'm the devil's wife. I cast a glance at his wife, thinking they are toying with me, but though they are mirthful her eyes tell me that it's true. I ask for and receive a long story about the devil's wife, whom I've never heard tell of before. On their advice, I don't go to the countryside after all; it's an uncertain time in any case. In another month, I am standing in the produce section at home crying over the unjust plenitude, my favorite of their children has dropped out of school to make money shining shoes, and their first grandchild is dead of the fvcking measles.

[Brynn]

The hot water is orange with sulfur, and the crowd quickly swims backwards and away as we arrive. They stare as we tiptoe into the steaming clouds of liquid mineral that has bubbled up from the depths of the earth. We are contaminating the purity of the waters with our pasty, foreign otherness. Apparently, they have never seen the likes of us. We want only to bask at the base of a volcano like everyone else, but it's clear that we have somehow overstepped. We stay as long as we dare, step out, and under the rapt, hostile gaze of our audience, rinse the sulfur out of our hair under icy showers piped in from an adjacent stream. In postcards home, we omit the xenophobia, and paint pretty pictures instead.

[Pixie Cherries]

Although you died a whole week ago dad, I keep hearing you 100 times a day buzz the house in your Cessna, and the sound won't go away, nor the sight of you out the front window rolling your wings right then left on your way down into the great Wyoming sunset, to the airport and the tarmac that leads back home again; and there you are as I hear you coming down low and loud toward the house again and feel that tension on the umbilical cord that is tied to your plane, how it pulls at me, having winnowed all my tears this last week... and there you are again, I hear you coming up on the house and I am running to the window as you tip your wings right then left... and the umbilical cord is tight and I can't take this any more when you don't come home when you don't hug me again before dinner... and there you are, I hear your plane buzzing and I run to the window where your plane is pulling my heart out of my chest, but this time, the thousandth time, you abandon your normal descent and keep going gently up and into the blue waving one last time with your wings and I realize this is goodbye... the umbilical cord breaks and I am free because you finally let me go, having postponed your time to touch the face of heaven that you might assure me I will always be your daughter, I will always be loved by you, and that it is for all eternity and for all time.