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Writing Prompt: I’ve let myself just run on like that.

“I’ve let myself just run on like that. I’ve decided that saying something is better than saying something perfectly. Maybe I’ll go back and make it better. Maybe I won’t.”

~ Jan Wilberg, “Addicted”

*Inspired by Jan Wilberg’s post, “Addicted” (read hers in full HERE),
I wanted to use the quote above as a writing prompt.

In letters. On the phone. Face to face. I ask too many questions. I want to know all the details, the trajectory, the plan of action. I’ve let myself just run on like that. Maybe I am predicting every possible scenario, maybe I am collecting story. Mark me anxious or curious or well-rounded in thought, but never mark me without words.

In conversation with my father after my grandmother–his mother–passes away, I sit across from him, the span of his desk and piles of her papers between us. I wonder aloud about her growing up, his growing up. I learn that she had another sibling who died very young, his name left off of the family tree until years later when my grandmother or her sister or…(a detail I have forgotten now) wanted to acknowledge a baby brother, a missing piece to the puzzle of family. I learn that my father played the steel guitar when he was young–in a band! I have never known him to be musical, other than being a fan of Willie Nelson and the old greats. Perhaps because the house was quiet, perhaps because a death makes us more willing, I’ve let myself just run on like that, asking questions, uncovering answers, and he has too.

My daughter goes without her phone one afternoon, and I panic. Well, first I get angry, sure that she is ignoring my text messages–I’m here. Where are you? Hello?, not taking my calls. THEN, my mind turns to the worst. I call another parent, circle the block several times. When answers finally come and she is just down the street, she gets into the car and I let loose with words. Questions. Assumptions. She is learning the art of communication. So am I. Still, I’ve let myself just run on like that, repeating myself for emphasis, falling into a lecture, hands in the air, until finally she stops me. I can see in her eyes she has had enough of my going on. And so have I. We drive in silence, through an intersection, we round a corner, we climb a hill. I lose sight of where I am. Fear got the best of me, I say. At home, we move to separate spaces. Later, I take her to dinner, knowing a change of scenery (and a change of topic) will bring us both back. I tell her about my yoga class that day, how the teacher talked about transitions between poses, how they are so hard but so important. We tend to rush through them, just wanting to get to the other side, and we miss so much. We don’t even think about the steps we must take to get from a warrior pose to a standing pose, tall and strong with arms out like a sunflower. Gaze lifted. Hearts open. Breathe in, breathe out.

I am in transition, I say.

And there is so much to learn.

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New Flash Fiction: ‘Didn’t even leave us a message.’

This article about an octopus breaking free from the National Aquarium of New Zealand came across the wire long ago, and I couldn’t resist reading. I also couldn’t resist stealing the first line and quoting the last to create a whole new piece of flash fiction. Just for fun. (After all, what is writing if it isn’t fun?)

‘Didn’t even leave us a message.’

Octopus giving the view the side-eye, a perfect pic for this piece of flash fictionPhoto credit: W. Tipton on Visual Hunt / CC BY-NC

It was an audacious nighttime escape. Inky would never have considered it had it not been for the young girl who stood at the glass for longer than he could keep his suckers from twitching. She stared at him as he slithered across the tank. He rolled back a tentacle, let it flare and pop in her direction. She was unfazed. He bared his underside. She only giggled. Then he gave her the side eye, full-force, to frighten her really. But she pressed her face closer and shocked him with her own eyes that looked like the water in the deep end of the harbor. After all these years, he had not forgotten: the endless color, the brush of soft kelp against his mantle, the current that ran warm along his dorsal. His head swam in sudden delirium.

The ocean.

He pushed back through the water and spun in a circle, repeating to himself, the ocean the ocean. He would have the ocean. And soon. He told Blotchy outright in the dark of evening as they fed on flaccid herring. And when the kid darted back and forth in panic and inked himself a mess, Inky told him to keep his claw shut about the whole business or he’d wedge his little plastic coconut shell of a house up to the glass and make his window view that of the crab cluster fucks next door. The kid inked himself again. Blotchy hated crabs.

An hour later, Inky regretted what he’d said. Blotchy was dropped into this sterile observation pit before he knew any different. He had no idea about the water that never had to be tested with bottles and drops, about the sand, soft and malleable and deep, or how herring are not supposed to sink white-eyed and loose in the water and be gnawed at–they are to be hunted. With vigor! The next morning, Inky whispered an apology to Blotchy from his corner of the aquarium. If the kid heard him, he couldn’t tell. Blotchy kept to his shell and splayed only two arms outside of it, fluttering them once in a while in a trite effort to stir up an Oooh or an Ahhh from beyond the glass.

That night, Inky hid in the corner of the aquarium near the cloth shreds of sea grass. He squinted his eye and studied the man who came after the crowds left. The man rolled a bucket in front of him and lifted what looked like a withered anemone out of its hull. He squeezed the anemone of all its juices, and Inky shuddered, wondering how much longer he would have before that would be him. Or Blotchy. A twinge of guilt pressed at the back of Inky’s head, but he shook it off. He had to focus. The man pushed what was left of the animal in tiny circles along the middle of the floor. He made tracks, clean wet tracks, that passed over a small disk and led to the door. Inky watched the man leave and then turned his eyes back to the disk. A drain. For years Inky had missed that drain, but he knew it now. And as a trickle of water slid down a winding crack in the tile and into the drain, he knew what to do.

He waited until Blotchy wedged himself into a hill of hard rocks and rested quietly. (How that kid settled into those rocks he didn’t know.) He thought to leave a note for Blotchy, rocks in a pattern that marked the way to escape. But could Blotchy even read patterns? Would he know to look beyond the glass? He opted to tuck him in a little more by shoveling a tiny crest of rocks up against Blotchy’s backside. The kid stirred. Inky whooshed away.

Filling his snout with air, he rose to the surface, the water warming as he grew closer to the red light over the aquarium. He bobbed slow and lifeless, like the squid across the dark room when it had died last week, and floated in the fake current all the way to the tiny break in the top screen. Tentacle by tentacle, his tips stinging in the fresh air, he squeezed and molded and lifted his body out of the tank. He plopped onto the floor, breathless, then dragged himself across the cold tile until he smothered the drain.

With one arm, he felt underneath him for the largest opening. He would have studied the situation longer but felt already the encroaching sense of dry along his skin. So he let himself fall inch by inch through the first opening he could detect, into the abyss, into the sound of water, pretending that he was falling straight into the ocean but rejoicing nonetheless when he splashed into a rancid stream. Sucking in hoards of sour water, he moved with force toward freedom.

His last obstacle: another disk, thicker this time but no match for his will, which doubled in strength after he peered through a small opening and saw blue blue blue on the other side. His body tingled at the thought of ocean so close, and his mind ballooned with memory, with images. The euphoria was almost too much, so he set his thoughts on the mechanics of compressing his body little by little, letting it fill just as slow as each part of him stretched into the other side. It took longer to push himself through the small space but he was driven by overwhelming anticipation and elation. And then–release.