Crow-spying through the fence

Exercise based on a photo: point of view

“You’ve changed,” said the television, though the supersonic whine of his voice was all but lost on Margaret, surrounded as she was by her thoughts currently in the form of a dozen nervous goats.

Click-click-click of the knitting needles, and no matter, she’d begun to go deaf some time ago. Her mind had gone too, at least partially, likely hand in hand with her hearing. Knit-knit-knit, and the thought-goats clambered over furniture, displacing dishes and papers and cushions. The poor television too, lying neglected on his side.

Fantasy and escapism had been his realm, his gift, but since the advent of the goats, his programming had gone by the wayside, lost its technicolor appeal. He was stuck in an ON position but with nowhere to broadcast except into the right side of a gnarled magazine rack filled with old issues of Home & Garden.

He could not adjust his volume himself, only aspire to induce some sort of volume-changing response by fuzzing his signal intentionally, a technique physically not unlike a cat purring, though the motivation in this case would be frustration rather than contentment.

Alas, Margaret’s head was too filled with delusion, as evidenced by the room crowded with incorporeal goats whose material mischief was of course merely the product of a singular dementia: Margaret herself. For the goats in the room were like the newscaster and the horse race on the television’s screen, a distraction, a fantasy.

The television flickered on the floor, despairing. He loved her, sweet Margaret, but he no longer knew how to reach her …

CREATIVE WRITING: Lesson 3

Garden meows

Hack

Exercise based on a photo: setting

Trees like hands with fingers splayed jetted from a concrete barrier overlooking what could have been a once-upon-a-time canal. Where could the roots of those trees go except under the walkways, the cold concrete overlay. Stones worn too smooth by caress of food and finger, stains and oils, an almost waxy residue left behind on the guardrails. The curves of stone seemed to imply warmth, while the angular pieces, cold.

Empty eyes in the skeletal facade of onlooking apartment buildings made of wood paneling. They felt too young, too temporary, too indecisive to endure. Not like the heavy granite of the guard-wall with its naked and shivering pet trees.

A solitary street lamp attempted lumination, not flickering, as would seem too feeble or overwrought, but simply glowing a quiet brown in the murky air. Beneath the street lamp, or rather a short distance behind, stood a figure, gender and identity smudged by industrial haze except the slight contrast of hair and skin tone to darkish drapery. He or she, they stood and didn’t matter, because they weren’t going anywhere, not in this place.

CREATIVE WRITING: Lesson 1

First day: new job