Creative Writing Samples
This page contains various creative writing samples. Some of the examples are excerpts from longer pieces.
Published in Shaking Literature June, 2011
Finding Value
Laura encounters Hank one evening a couple of streets over from theirs. She wears a hooded sweatshirt and jogging pants to keep warm. Most of their neighbors have set carved pumpkins on their doorsteps. Laura notices a man staggering down the street clutching something partially hidden underneath a trench coat. As he walks underneath one of the streetlights, she recognizes him. She waits for him to pass, unsure of what to say.
“Hey you,” he says. “Aren’t you my neighbor?”
She nods. “I’m Laura.”
“Hank. Can you help me with this?
“Um, okay.”
She grasps the bottom of a small brass cart. They walk down the street with the cart stretched between them. From flashes of light, she’s able to see his face. He has a patchy beard, and short dark hair that curls at the edges.
“So how do you like the neighborhood?” he asks, smiling as they cut across someone’s yard, leaving scuffled footprints in a clump of dirt surrounding goldenrods. She sees the owner doing laundry in the basement while signing along to the radio.
Laura holds onto the cart trying to avoid one of the spinning wheels. “It’s all right,” she says. “I haven’t met many of the neighbors.”
“It was a friendlier place, back when my parents were living.”
“Oh, you grew up here?” she asks, stepping sideways over mums in another yard. She suddenly wonders where he found the cart.
“Yeah. I went away for a little while but ended up back here. People had block parties and shit like that when I was a kid. Now everybody’s insulated in their own tuna cans.”
She laughs. Now they’re on Linden, their street. She hopes Josh doesn’t look out the window and see her.
“Help me get this to the door?” he asks.
“Okay.”
They set the cart down at the front door. The house is completely dark.
“Thanks,” he says, reaching out to shake her hand. “Nice to meet you.”
“You too.” She stands on the little front porch and watches as he unlocks the door. He holds the storm door open with his shoulder, and hoists the cart inside. He doesn’t look back as he closes the door, leaving her standing there, alone.
…
Laura and Josh knew about Hank before they moved in. They knew he was considered the neighborhood kook, and their view from the kitchen window showed why. A portion of the fencing separating their yards had caved in, and the collapsed section pointed accusingly at a yard strewn with junk. In the weeks since they’d lived in the house, Laura had watched Hank work with a variety of things, including a rusted 73 Impala he had backed in a few days before, wedged between a washer and dryer.
She watches him now as he sits in a convertible VW Rabbit with missing wheels. The sun’s glare has leached the color from the car’s frame over time, so the probably once vivid blue has faded to an innocuous gray. Hank’s oversized hands grip the steering wheel at 10 and 2 as if he thinks the car might suddenly become drivable.
“He can see you, you know,” Josh says, walking into the kitchen. He opens the fridge and removes a bottle of Yoo-Hoo, jiggling it from side to side.
“Go back to your project,” Laura replies. She crouches down on the homemade stepstool one of his Alabama relatives had given them for a wedding gift two years ago. She hadn’t really found a use for it until she started spying on Hank.
“Yes, m’lady,” he answers, heading back to the living room to install the new flat screen TV he won in a golf tournament. Josh has always been lucky. That’s how Laura knew this house with the exterior of an aging dollhouse would be theirs.
From her vantage point, she can see a pedestal Kohler kitchen sink, an old freezer, and toilets: one with an old-fashioned pull chain, another in olive drab, and the third a tea-colored porta john with the words FriendlyFlush barely legible. A kayak is next to a canoe that is next to an ancient treadmill.
Hank visits his backyard possessions in the mornings and disappears inside his house for the rest of the day. Additions to the collection mysteriously appear. The convertible is new, so he spends the most time with it, sitting in each seat, as if he’s waiting for someone to begin driving him across town. Soon it will be replaced by another possession with even more potential value – at least to him, Laura guesses.
She takes walks at night, continually feeling restless. Josh stays at home and watches anything that pops up on TV. He doesn’t discriminate between reality shows or crime dramas or even cooking tips. This is the first time he’s had cable in years, so he claims to be making up for lost time. He’s an accountant who hates his job. They’ve been together four years, and he’s worked in four different firms. Each time he leaves, he talks about how the next will be better. But it never will be, she wants to say.
Their new street is quiet in this older section of Atlanta. Not far away, teenagers break into cars and sell drugs over in Edgewood. But here in Kirkwood she feels safe enough. Laura looks into homes as she walks, not to see the families, but to see how they’ve decorated. Her favorite is a retro kitchen in green and orange. Instead of a typical dining room table, the owners built a banquette next to a wall of windows. The elderly husband and wife sit there every night, each reading sections of the newspaper.
She knows if anyone peeks into her own windows, they would find she and Josh in separate rooms. Josh sprawls on the small couch across from the fake fireplace and oversized TV with his feet propped on the undersized glass topped coffee table. The room seems as large as a football field without enough furniture. Laura prefers to sit in the tiny guest room with a window seat. That’s where she brings her novels and papers from work. As a massage therapist, she spends all day working out the tensions of strangers. At night, she remembers their bodies in vivid detail: that tattoo with the dragon’s head, the mole that looked like a face, and the woman whose spine is badly curved.
She’s tried to tell her husband about some of the clients, like the woman in her mid 20’s in chronic pain and so glad to see Laura that she cries each time. Or the man who recently split from his wife and talks about what went wrong, or the woman who was assaulted last year and never told anyone aside from her. But Josh doesn’t want to hear about her hands on anyone else. Sometimes she thinks they bought the house for more space from each other, and they’re just waiting to buy furniture to fill up the empty space between them.
…
Over the next month, Laura notices Hank during some of his nightly prowls, hands stuffed in the pockets of his ubiquitous trench coat, and he only nods to her. Other times he carries an item and stops to speak with her. One night he waltzes down Myrtle carrying a small wicker footstool shaped like a heart.
She laughs, but realizes something as they meet underneath the glare from one of the lights.
“That looks familiar,” she mentions.
He nods. “It’s from that monstrosity over on Gardenia, you know, that new construction. The owners obviously aren’t southern. You don’t leave wicker on your porch after summertime, ya’ll.”
“So you steal?” she asks.
“Its just stuff, okay darling? I’m not going to take anything from you guys, so don’t worry.” He stalks away before she can respond.
…
One night in December, she’s sitting on the window seat trying to read. The TV is blaring. When Josh thinks she should watch something, he continues to turn up the volume until she relents. Laura hears a noise outside, and struggles with the heavy window. She speaks out into the blackness of the night.
“Who’s there?”
“Hank. I need help.”
She climbs out through the window and perches on the sill before making the slight jump to the ground.
He’s lying on the grass face up. His coat is spread around him in a circle. An old fashioned trunk with brass handles is on its side next to his head.
“What’s wrong?” she asks, her hands instinctively ready to do their work.
“It’s my back. I can’t move,” he says in a low voice racked with pain.
“Ok, I need you to roll over,” she says, kneeling down. The ground is slightly damp, and she flinches against the chill. He flops over in one motion groaning with effort. She carefully removes his tattered coat, and gently lowers his head to the right.
“I’m just going to lift up your shirt, okay?” she asks while moving it up near his shoulders. She’s surprised to feel muscles rippling down his back. She places her hands on the small of his back, and hears a gasp.
“Just breathe,” she tells him. “I know what I’m doing.” She doesn’t ask why he chose her house. She always tries to focus on the body instead of what led to the injury. Her hands begin to lightly knead his back in slow strokes that radiate out in larger circles. At first he moves, but then quiets down as his body relaxes into her care.
“I know you don’t think much of me,” he mumbles.
“Don’t try to talk. Just relax.”
“But I need you to know something,” he says. “I don’t keep all of the stuff. I fix it. And then I take it back, maybe not to the original place, but to someone’s house who could use it.”
“Ok. Now just be quiet.”
Laura has never thought of massaging outside without a table or any of her aromatic oils. But under the moon’s cover, she feels more like a therapist than she has in any studio, even with the blaring TV instead of new age music.
The next morning she walks to the front porch to retrieve the newspaper. There are two mushroom colored velvet wingback chairs facing her front door, their stuffed arms reaching out to her.
Published in Southern Women's Review Jan, 2011
Slack Tide
A man’s voice woke me up. Through the cocoon of darkness, I fumbled for a wire coat hanger that I tucked under my arm and crept toward the sound. On hands and knees I negotiated the distance to the living room where I saw his silhouette against the moonlight.
He sat on the screened-in back porch in a lounge chair. A TV show I had seen said if you could surprise the perp it bought you seven seconds. I tried not to think of the word victim, but envisioned Walter returning from his business trip to find my lifeless body on the floor.
Brandishing my weapon, I moved to the door and flipped the light while fumbling with the lock. It was hardly a surprise when I stumbled onto the porch wielding the hanger above my head like a sword.
“Good morning, Iris,” said Cecil Rathmore, our seventy-something neighbor who lived three houses down on the left. He wore a navy bathrobe and matching slippers. I didn’t see a gun on the table next to him. “You might want to turn the light off. It’ll wake up Betty’s dog and you know she’ll start barking.”
“What are you doing here?” I kept the hanger raised. I’d read enough newspaper stories about older neighbors who turned out to be killers behind an innocent facade.
“Do you want to lower your hanger?”
“Not until I know you don’t have a gun,” I replied.
He stood up and lifted his hands to ear level. “I’d raise them higher if it weren’t for the bursitis.”
“Turn your pockets inside out.”
The search turned up a piece of navy blue lint.
“Can I sit back down?” he asked.
I nodded, and stepped inside to turn off the light, self-conscious in my tank top and pajamas. I looked out at the salt marsh that glistened beyond our backyard like a prickly pool of silver under the moon’s glow. The spartina alterniflora, or marsh grass, slowly rustled in a slight breeze. I thought of the life teeming under the water’s surface: crabs, turtles, and fish. A plumed heron perched down by the water’s edge balancing on its long, delicate legs.
Everything belonged except for me.
“I never thought I’d scare you. I’m just an old man, you know.”
“You’re just lucky we’re northern liberals who don’t believe in guns.”
“I can see the headline in The Brunswick News,” he said.
“Geezer Shot Over Back Porch Invasion. Don’t you work at the paper?”
“How’d you know?” Even though I had years of reporting experience, my new editor forced me onto desk duty, answering phones while I ‘got the feel of the way things work here,’ so the paper had yet to run an article with my byline.
“Word travels,” he said.
***
Cecil had been among the crush of people who showed up at our doorstep after we moved to the island a month ago. But unlike the others, he didn’t stop by with a platter of fattening food. Instead, he wanted to talk about the yard.
“You have sod webworms.”
“What?” I asked, wondering again how much of a mistake we had made relocating from Chicago to Georgia’s coast. Cecil said the yellowed out circles in our yard was due to the work of a crafty worm. I felt pints of my blood sucked away by thousands of mosquitoes and no-seeums while I stood in the doorway, listening. That was the longest conversation we’d had until tonight.
“This always was the prettiest spot in the neighborhood,” he said shifting on the lounge chair. “I can’t see the water from my house. That’s something just for you folks with money.”
“You’ve been here before?”
“Oh, sure. It took about four years before this house was actually finished, you know. But after Betty sold the land, the builders went right to work on the framing. This porch was here long before anyone thought of moving in.”
I knew the original owner spent his loan money on unnecessary plans: a central vacuum system that was too expensive to maintain, a sunbathing balcony for his daughter, custom birch cabinets with a multi-tone finish, and tabby exterior made up of little crushed bits of shells. The family went bankrupt and the builder couldn’t afford to pay his contractors, so the house just sat unfinished.
“Muriel knew she could find me here late at night or the early morning.”
He kept looking at the water. After the mention of his dead wife I wasn’t sure what to say. She had died not long after we moved in. Loretta from across the street had come over with the news.
The first time I met Loretta, she brought a pitcher of martinis. When I opened the door, she shook the glistening pitcher at me.
“Drink time,” she said, a broad smile on her chubby face. With her silver hairdo framing her face in a ruffled halo she reminded me of a chow. I wondered if her tongue was purple.
“Why don’t we sit out here?” I suggested, pointing to the Adirondack chairs on the front porch. “It’s such a lovely evening.”
We sat there and sweated, downing the drinks. Loretta called out to neighbors by name as they passed by. My next-door neighbor Betty barreled down her driveway on her motorized scooter toward the main road, holding onto her Dachshund’s leash.
“She’s the resident Gestapo,” Loretta whispered around her drink. “You’ve got to watch her.”
I giggled.
“The only job she’s ever had was a military nurse, so she runs her life – and everyone else’s that way. But you have to be nice to her because she knows everything that goes on around her. And she listens to the police scanner.”
“I didn’t think we had a police force on the island.” I swirled the last of my drink, feeling the gin wash over my teeth.
“We don’t. She listens to the one on the mainland.”
The next time she came over, Loretta wiped a layer of sweat away from her broad forehead and panted before she could say anything.
“These steep steps are gonna do me in,” she said. All of the other homes in the neighborhood were older and built closer to the ground. Ours alone rose above the rest of the houses because of newer zoning laws.
“Cecil’s wife passed away,” Loretta said. “You must’ve known she was sick, right?”
I shook my head.
“She had stomach cancer. Poor Cecil. I wonder what he’s
going to do now.”
I had taken a casserole over later that day, a mixture of cream of chicken, shredded cheese and Ritz crackers – what Walter called my specialty. The front door was open, as if the neighborhood was invited into Cecil’s pain. I walked in the front door, calling out a hello over the din of the TV that was switched on somewhere in the house. Cecil appeared wearing a frayed cotton sweater and pants that drooped from his slight frame.
“I’m sorry,” I said, thrusting the casserole toward him.
He had accepted it, then asked, “How are those webworms?”
I had avoided him after that, made uneasy by the way he moved effortlessly from death to lawn maintenance.
“I’ve had insomnia for years now,” Cecil remarked, stretching his arms out over the sides of the lounge chair. “The building crew left a couple of chairs out here, probably so they could sit out here and smoke, so Muriel and I would sit here watching the marsh.”
We sat in silence. I heard a fish splash somewhere out among the spartina creating a ripple.
“Most of these women in the neighborhood see me as an eligible bachelor now.”
“Really?” I asked, turning toward him.
“Don’t sound so surprised. I’ve got a pulse. That’s about all they’re looking for along with a pension.” He grinned.
“Has anyone asked you out?”
Cecil laughed.
“Oh no. That’s not the way it works. They just show up with food and expect me to invite them in for supper. One time Doris was already there, and then Betty showed up with some terrible jell-o pretzel salad.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Betty?”
“Yeah. That old gal would kill me for sure.”
That gave me an idea.
“Want to know the secret of the house?” I asked.
“Yes, I think I would.”
“It’s upstairs,” I said, leading the way. He followed along behind me, his slippers slapping up the stairs. I opened the door on the left. Moonlight cast a silvery glow over the unmade bed, pictures, and boxes of books left to unpack on the floor. This is where I had carted up the items I didn’t know what to do with, most of them belonging to Walter. I rationalized it was because I wanted him help set up the house, but knew it was simply passive aggression that he had spent more time on business trips than in the house with me.
“Can you see okay?” I asked.
“Yep.”
I walked over to the window and knelt down. Cecil crouched next to me. I lifted the curtain tacked over the window and we looked down into the house next door. A set of floral pillows ringed the bed. My neighbor slept with her arms above her head in an arc, mouth open in a slight snore.
“Well that’s Betty’s room,” he said.
“Yeah. Sometimes when I can’t sleep at night, I come up here and watch her.”
Cecil laughed. “That must be the only time that woman is quiet. Do you know why that dinky little fence is there?” He pointed to the ineffective three-foot fence in the yard between our houses.
“Why?”
“Because she wanted to pretend your house wasn’t there,” he said, laughing, a raspy sound.
I moved back from the window and sat on the bed. “Yeah, I had gotten the feeling she wasn’t thrilled when we moved in.”
“Honey, no one was. We thought you were going to have loud parties and park your cars in the yard.”
I laughed.
Cecil watched her sleeping for a few minutes and then stood up. “I need to move around some,” he said. “These joints act up on me.”
We headed back downstairs and stood by the back porch door.
“How long have you lived here?” I asked, realizing I didn’t know anything about any of my neighbors. In Chicago that was just how things were, but here it was different, or it was supposed to be, anyway.
“Nearly 40 years.”
“That’s a long time to be in one place.”
“That’s the way we old folks do. We move in and settle down and then retire. You young ones are always on the move.”
“You’re welcome to keep us on your list of places to visit during the night,” I told him, leaning against the doorframe.
“Really? You wouldn’t mind?”
I shook my head. “As long as you try not to talk too loudly.”
He held up three fingers in a scout’s salute.
“
Promise. I had been scaring off a raccoon earlier. I guess that’s what you heard. So you don’t care if I sit out here for a few more minutes before I go home?”
I opened the door for him.
“Go ahead. I’m just going to lock up behind you.”
I waited until he was settled back onto the chair.
“Good night,” I said.
“Night, Iris.”
Back in bed, I thought about Cecil looking back over the years and watching over me.
