Illustrated fiction the cake stand i smashed!!

Here is another beautiful illustrated fiction post by the wonderful Julia Green. It's a response to the image I recently sent her of a great cake stand I was really pleased with, it had been ordered by a shop and then I smashed it to smithereens while attempting to move from a shelf to my packing table i literally just dropped it form the highest shelf onto brick floor, it didn't have a chance in hell!

But here's a great piece if fiction to make up for its loss!

Esther




I was on my fifth salad plate, a tumbler of gin in my other hand, an angry young woman yelling on the stereo, when I realized I no longer existed. Still I wound up and frisbeed the plate across the room, where it momentarily drowned out the music when it crashed against the wall, broke into pieces and crashed to the floor. Admittedly, the plates did not shatter into the million satisfying pieces that I had wanted, that the cartoons and movies had promised me. I didn’t know if this meant we had registered for very good china or very bad china, but I discovered later it was an easy cleanup job—all those big and chunky pieces went right into the dustpan and then doubled trash bags. Even this was a crucial part of my disappearance—I had become a woman who, upon discovering her husband was having an affair, an affair that had begun many many months ago, immediately began drinking and breaking dishes, only to clean them up herself afterward. I slipped into a cliché, a square peg in a square hole, and in becoming a stereotype of a woman scorned, I watched my actual identity—I was a great dancer, but a bad singer, I liked artichokes and beagles and biking, couldn’t stand coconut or musicals—the infinite idiosyncrasies that defined me had dissolved, and I was nobody. I flung another plate at the wall—we never used the china, only bought it because my mother insisted that people register for china—and marveled at how the only thing left that I could control was the trajectory of the plate, the angle and its velocity. The rest was up to man and God.

Illustrated Fiction Post - Coffee

Another cracking little story from the misstess of fiction Ms julia F Green..

As she walked along Maiden Lane from the subway to her office building, Nell had to jab the fingernails of her right hand into the palm of her left, just to have something to concentrate on besides the cups of coffee that were glued to everyone’s hand, and the dense, lush smell of those brewed beans that sat like a thick blanket atop everything in lower Manhattan. The coffee—its smell, its presence, its phantom taste on the tongue—was everywhere, and Nell thought she could almost feel the dried ends of her hair trembling with the desire for it.

It had been four days since she’d consumed caffeine, and in the panicked haze that had settled in during that time, Nell could barely recall what her original motivation had been. The words clarity and purity and health flitted around her mind in animated thought bubbles, like in a children’s TV show. As she passed yet another coffee cart, Nell closed her eyes halfway and visualized the herbal tea she’d been drinking since Sunday. It tasted vaguely like dishwater.

Nell clung to the hope that soon the fog would break, and she would emerge renewed from the depths of her being, each cell revived and remade, ensuring a long, long life and none of the wrinkles that usually go with it. Until then, she would stumble through her days, protected by the image of her future self, a clean, efficient machine that ran itself on water and air and sunlight, like a big green plant on a fire escape, its healthy vines creeping along and embracing the ironwork whose years of rust softened under the green lattice.

Stewardesses Illustrated fiction post by Julia F Green.

She never said anything when she flew, just put her tray table in the upright and locked position as instructed and closed her eyes during takeoff, which she’d done even when she was a stewardess, back when they were still called stewardesses. She smirked to herself. It was nicer now—they didn’t make the women wear four-inch heels or put their hair up, and they hired men, though most of them, it turned out, were fruits. It was good, she told herself, that the world had undergone these sorts of changes, but there were days when she missed the ruby red lipstick, the hairsprayed beehives, the icy cocktails in the left hand of a man who reached for her with his right.

Her granddaughter says “that’s ----ed up” but her granddaughter also doesn’t brush her hair or own a pair of pantyhose. It wasn’t that she was against equality, she just argued that life held more mystery and charm in those days. Her granddaughter argued that all that mystery and charm was fake, and prevented people from pursuing their true goals and dreams. She took this to mean that she was supposed to have wanted something besides her career in the air, but she never did. She earned her own money, she married a pilot, they had beautiful children, who brought her grandchildren, some grateful, some not.

The plane sped up, preparing to nose its way into the stratosphere. She reached for her granddaughter’s hand and pressed it between her own as they shot into the sky.

Illustrated fiction: Fisherman, Part II

Ray told me he'd planned a special evening for Valentine's Day and told me to come to his place at seven. I put on a black dress and heels and took a cab, feeling excited and uncertain as we zoomed through the darkness of Central Park.

In the week since he'd shown me the pants, revealed the secret, not much had changed, except that I was seeing fish everywhere: two-dimensional guppies drawn on the walls of the subway, cheesy edible goldfish in the hands of children on the bus, starfish and sea anemones on socks and cosmetic cases and umbrellas.

He cooked me dinner, which he had done before, but this was the nicest dinner he had ever cooked me: tuna tartar, seviche, broiled calamari, fresh sole in a lemon butter sauce. The tuna came out in the shape of a heart, and on either side, he’d done our initials in ginger vinagrette.

Over dessert -- a classic chocolate souffle, airy, potent, a return to the basics he knew I loved and and relied on -- Ray explained that he’d simply wanted to devote an entire evening to the realm of things he loved, so that I could be more a part of it. I was delightfully full and lazy with wine and attention and wasn’t lying when I said I was enjoying myself.

After dinner, we settled into the couch to watch what Ray said was one of his favorite films. It was about a group of men who tended a lighthouse in northern Maine in the late 60s. They worked on a rotating basis, and apparently when one was doing his stint in the lighthouse, the others would take a fishing boat out and return a couple of days later to unload their haul and have briny intercourse with their wives. Then one of them began cuckolding another, and there were betrayals and fistfights, and then a town fight about doing away with lighthouse keepers entirely, as technology had rendered them unnecessary.

To Ray’s dismay, I dozed through some of the movie. To my dismay, I had waking dreams of orgies involving all of the characters, plus what they’d fished from the depths of the sea. When it was over, Ray poured me another cup of coffee and I stared at his backside while he did the dishes, wondering what it is that draws us together and keeps us there, what it is that makes one man love a fish, one woman love a steak.

In the middle of making love, Ray sucked his cheeks in and made a fish face at me. I laughed so hard I nearly fell off of him.

"What does that mean?" I asked him.

"I guess I’m trying to get you to admit that you think I’m insane."

"And why do you think I think that?"

He sucked in his cheeks once more and moved his lips up and down, fish bobbing for bait. "Aren’t I?"

"Aren’t we all?" I responded before closing my eyes and riding a white wave into an elysian oblivion.

Illustrated fiction post: Fisherman.

Hey it's Wednesday...
Here's the illustrated fiction post all around a piece of my new work on fishermen!
This is a cracker!























"He wants you to dress up as what?"

Like a bored child dragged out shopping by her mother, I stood idly behind Chase as she flipped through the dresses. I considered crawling into the middle of the rack and playing hide and seek with myself.

"A fisherman?" I said, more of a question than a statement.

"So what you’re telling me is Ray -- cooks-dinner, cleans-the-bathtub, wants-three-kids Ray -- gets off on fishermen?"

"I guess he’s not as boring and predictable as you’re painting him to be," I said, though I wasn’t mad at Chase. I had been a little surprised when Ray had brought out the slick yellow jumpsuit, but he was sheepishly ecstatic and turned on, which, like everything else about him, I found adorable. I would have dressed up like a school bus if he’d asked me to.

"Does he want to lick fish oil off your belly? Or do you have to reel him in?"

I smiled. "I really don’t know. All I saw were the pants." This was true. He was too afraid to go into details, which was the only thing still making me reluctant about this new development. It had taken him six months to even tell me about this, and I wondered why, when it was so obvious I was gaga for him, he was so afraid to share these things with me and if he was hiding anything else.

"So what are you going to do?"

I shrugged. "I’ll try anything once." I wasn’t sure why I was being so circumspect with Chase; I was ready for anything with Ray. I’d bought my ticket, sold the house, signed my name -- or whatever it is that they say. I was in it to win it with Ray, but it seemed more delicious if I kept that between me and him.

Chase held a dress against her body and squinted at herself in the mirror for a second. Then she looked up and caught my blank expression in the mirror. "Thar she blows."

We erupted into giggles, our faces flashing maniacally in the mirror.

Wednesday's Illustrated fiction post, "Postcards"

When I feel sad, I go to the junk store and leaf through the postcards. They have highly contrasted color photos of state capitals or big block letters that say "Greetings from the Grand Canyon!" with slivers of cacti and Indian jewelry within each letter. On the back, wives have written in loopy script: "The weather in St. Louis has been great. Only one day of rain and tomorrow we’re going to visit the Arch!" Or: "Hello from Idaho! Hope you’re well." They were always addressed to Mrs. Harold Mathers or Mrs. Ronald Kline or Mrs. Lawrence Bennett. Most date to the early 60s, when the stamps cost four cents. I picture tan women in big sunglasses and big hairdos writing the postcards to their friends, licking the stamps and affixing them carefully, while their husbands check under the hood or buy soft drinks. They wear lipstick and polyester and when I think of those ladies, and when I think of their vacations, seeing the U.S.A. from the passenger seats of their Chevrolets, I don’t feel so sad anymore.

Illustrated fiction

Here’s Wednesdays illustrated fiction story post--the highlight of my week created in partnership with Julia Green fiction writer extraodinare:
This one is brilliant!

Lovebirds

It's a funny thing, being married to someone for 50 years. Every once in a while we end up at the mall, and while Earl is marveling over the appliances you can buy all in one place on the cheap, I go over to the bookstore and watch the people watching the books. There are these young things with teased up hair and rocks on their hands, scurrying around like field mice, can't get their hands on those books fast enough. The ones they want, they're all called things like Thin Enough and Happy Enough and Cook Your Way to a Perfect Marriage. I usually go to the cafeteria part, get myself a small cup of coffee, and park at a table where I can see 'em well. Every once in a while, after I put two sugars in my coffee and start over to that table, somebody as old as my grandkid rushes over and calls me 'ma'am' while offering to help me along. I started getting ma'amed as soon as I was married, even though I was 25 going on 12. Today, even with my rickety hip and silver hair and funny smells where there didn't used to be any, honest to God I don't think of myself as a ma'am. A ma'am's got a beehive and handbags that match her shoes. All I know is whenever I hear ma'am, I think of Earl's daddy and his big old Studebaker that he let Earl take me out in on a Friday night and we'd park up on any old hill where we knew we wouldn't be bothered and we'd fog up those windows till there was no air left in there to breathe. These girls reading the magazines looking for the tips, clipping out the secret formulas, the ten signs of whatever, they think it wasn't like that back then, treat me like some celibate grandma who never had a day of fun. Sure, I remember the ration cards and the victory gardens, but the past ain't a history book. We raised four kids and between all those babies crying and doors slamming and pots of whatever cookin' on the stove, we still found time for plenty of hanky panky. Drove the kids crazy sometimes, especially when they were teenagers and started getting wise, realizing there was a reason their old parents were so happy all the time. I don't want to ruin nobody's fun, but those girls with the stacks of books under their arms, well if they spent fifty dollars on something nice, instead of those boring books, you know? My favorite part is when Earl comes back, some kinda new tool in a big old plastic bag in his hand. I'm still staring away at people in a way that really makes them think I've got the forgetting disease and I wandered out of some place and pretty soon I'm going to start taking all my clothes off and yelling and they won't know what to do with me. When he sees me see him, his face lights up, and he hustles over and kisses me on the mouth in a way that makes everybody uncomfortable. Can't figure it out myself; I always thought two old people not in love was worse than two who were.

Wednesdays Illustrated Fiction post.. enjoy!

Lila tried to lean against the iron fence that kept tourists away from the walls of Notre Dame de Paris and read the guidebook her father had bought her, but the posts dug into her body so much she couldn't concentrate, so instead she watched Parisians trickle past. Since it was the middle of August, most of the city was on vacation, and the morning traffic was sparse. Despite the season, women wore long pants, elegant scarves, and makeup. Their satchels matched their shoes. Even the old women, the retired grandmothers who trudged slowly toward the market for their daily bread, wore sophistication in their wrinkled cheeks. Lila looked down, frowning at her own outfit and physique. She wasn't wearing a fanny pack, or white sneakers, or a t-shirt emblazoned with the name of a sports team or university, or any of the other ugly emblems of tourists, but still, in her wrinkled linen pants and sandals with too many straps, she felt subpar, old even, and noticed the French women had smooth skin in even colors while her own flesh was spotted and unfirm. There were many times in the last week she'd wanted not to be in Paris, and here, again, was another.

As she sunk back into the guidebook, hoping the time would pass quickly until the bell tower would open, a couple bounded towards her, exhibiting a kind of excitement that reminded Lila of puppies.

"Is this the line? To climb the belltower?" The husband spoke breathlessly, as if they'd rushed here, fearing that they'd miss their chance to get in if they weren't first in line.

Lila nodded.

The husband and wife traded a glance. Then from the wife: "Ess-ke voo..."

Lila turned the book over, displaying its title, An Insider's Guide to Paris. In case that wasn't clear enough, she added, "I'm American."

The husband and wife jostled each other in another moment of animalistic happiness and then answered in chorus, "We are too!"

Lila smiled thinly and nodded. They were almost the same height, both with dirty blond hair and light eyes, and if not for the fact that they couldn't stop touching each other, Lila might have taken them for close siblings--they had that air of doting about them but it lacked the desperate devotion present in new couples, who tended to be proud of the extremeness of their feelings and actions, utterly sure of their ability to do better than any couple had ever done before. Perhaps not every new couple was like that, but the ones that ended up in Lila's office, sitting apart on the sofa across from her, imploring her to decide who was right so they could get on with their marriage already, were. She told every couple the same thing at their first session: "If you want to know who's right and who's wrong, call a referee. I'm a marriage counselor, and what I do is different and more expensive."

"I'm Jed, and this is my wife Sheila." The wife tittered slightly at hearing her new title.

"Lila." She shook their hands. Lila was bad with names but good with faces--hers was long and horsey; she had big gums and he was big and square, the jawline of a homecoming king--and if she were walking across an airport terminal, she'd be able to pick them from a crowd. But she would never know their names. If she happened to be treating these people, Lila would employ her usual learning device--asking them to address one another by name, which she silently repeating in her head. But for once she was off the clock, and delighted in knowing they'd remain nameless to her.

"Any chance you speak a little French?" The husband asked.

"Some," Lila said.

"Because we both took a little in college and we're completely stuck on something."

Lila remained silent, waiting for Jed to continue.

"When you say 'parlez-vous anglais', is there a liaison between the 'vous' and the 'anglais'? I mean, is it par-lay voo zahng-lay? Or just par-lay voo ahng-lay?"

Lila paused for a moment and weighed the possibility that they may not be serious, that this was a joke of some sort. But their faces were creased with expectation, and so Lila recited the phrases over in her head. She came to Paris every few years (mostly for the food, though she loved the museums, and simply wandering the streets for a few days, careless, anonymous), and the French she'd acquired in college had become passable, though by no means elegant or even frequently correct. She mulled over the phrase, running each pronunciation through several times, waiting for one of them to sound correct. But she'd never quite understood when French people connected the sounds between words, and in fact, hadn't cared. The point was to make yourself understood, in whatever ramshackle fashion was available. As Lila watched a petite young woman with voluptuous black hair whiz by on her bicycle, amazingly able to ride discreetly in a skirt, she tried once more to unravel the question, but could not. Her father wouldn't have known either, but she still wished he was with her.

"You know, I'm not really sure. Let me think on it a bit, and I'll let you know if I come up with anything." Lila turned to face the door that would open in a few more minutes, allowing them to creep up the slippery, stone stairs in the half-dark, till they emerged a few hundred feet higher and could take in the view of the city that the gargoyles enjoyed all the time. Each time Lila visited Paris, she climbed the bell tower at Notre Dame.

"Our French is kind of rusty, but this isn't our first time in Paris," Sheila said to Lila's back.

Lila didn't want to talk to these people anymore but out of habit she turned and let the wife say what she wanted to say.

The husband stroked the wife's hair. "I came to visit Sheila when she was studying abroad here, 15 years ago! We'd been on and off since the beginning of college and I thought if I flew to Paris, she'd finally get it. You know, that I was the one."

Sheila jumped in without hesitation to continue the story, as if this were a pre-rehearsed two-man show that many before Lila had heard. "But I was too naive to see Jed's point, his true feelings, and after a week of pure bliss, I told him I was too young to commit."

"We lost touch after college, but then, years later..."

Lila let the scintillating narrative unfurl, feigning involvement by mimicking their facial movements, unleashing grins when they did, knitting suspense in her eyebrows when they did. Even without concentrating, she picked up the storyline of drifting apart, reuniting, a whirlwind courtship, knowing after all these years, she or he had been the one. Lila could listen in her sleep. And yet, although she could fully absorb these people and the needs they had in that moment, Lila thought only of her father, with whom she would have enjoyed privately mocking these folks later. It was only in his later years that her father had even entertained the possibility of traveling with Lila. He finally agreed to short trips--a few days in Chicago, a long winter weekend in Orlando--but this would have been his first trip abroad. She wasn't sure if he'd have been able to climb the bell tower, but she had decided they would give it a shot.

"Isn't that a great story?"

"It is a great story," Lila replied.

"So is this your first time in Paris?"

Lila shook her head, but was unable to say anything. She'd developed an unhealthy habit of being unable to talk about herself, not because she was uncomfortable with disclosure, but because she knew that the world had problems, problems that she could help with. Her own could be postponed. Also, it seemed unfair to dampen the couple's idiotic joy by explaining that her father had had a crippling stroke before she could show him the loveliness of Paris. Lila had been by his side for the last three weeks, and even when Dorothy flew in from the coast and urged her to take the vacation she always looked forward to, Lila refused. In keeping with the generosity he'd shown them all his life, her father died a week before they had been scheduled to leave. There was a funeral, a reception, and then her sister dragging her to the airport. Lila couldn't say it to her sister, but she was glad for Dorothy's presence, and glad that Dorothy knew when to leave her alone, like this morning, when she said she'd rather sleep in and have a walk around the Tuileries on her own. They'd planned to meet up near the Louvre later that morning.

On the other side of the iron fence, a wooden door swung open and a man with a gray beard coughed deeply as unlocked the gate and waved them in. He alternated between "bonjour, el-lo, bonjour" and "billets, tee-ket, billets, tee-ket" as he pointed to the entry where there was a small desk, a cash box, and a sleepy old woman.

Lila always visited first thing in the morning because she liked to be the first person up the stairs that day. It was always clumsy coming down, crawling over those going up, clinging to the stone walls, which gave no traction, trying neither to slip nor come too close to a stranger, but going up Lila could be unfettered, ascending the dizzying spirals with each hand on the wall not for balance, but because she liked the feeling of the cold, hard stone.

That day, the couple behind her twittered between themselves as they all went up, and Lila couldn't help but listening to their incessant exchanges--"are you okay?" "isn't this exciting" "How could they ever build something so magnificent?" Somewhere along the way though, the wife became frightened, a little off-balance, and she could hear them agree to rest, pressing themselves against the outer wall to let those behind them pass. The silence carried Lila up and up, till it bore her out onto the first landing where sunlight and gargoyles awaited her. Paris appeared the way it always had to her--each time she came upon it from this angle, going high enough it seemed possible to meet the city at eye level, it looked both marvelously undiscovered, vibrant and pulsating, and also possibly a fabrication, nothing more than an image of a city projected onto a bedsheet someone had nailed to a wall.

She had her elbows up and was leaning against the wall, contemplating the Eiffel Tower (actual structure? or toothpick model?) when the husband and wife burst noisily out of the stairwell and onto the ramparts. They said hello to her as they shuffled past, heading towards the enormously heavy bell in the south tower.

Lila watched the people shuffle around in the courtyard in front of the cathedral, imagining, as she always did, spitting on their heads. She pulled out her guidebook again, and flipped to the back. It was not Lila's habit to read about the places she visited; unless she was keeping a file on something, writing it all down, facts didn't stay with her that long, so there wasn't much use in trying to learn the history. As she thumbed through the pages looking for the index, she came upon a section entitled "Useful Phrases," which, to Lila's surprise, had been highlighted and annotated by her father. And right at the top of the list, next to "Parlez-vous l'anglais? (par-lay voo lahn-glay)", her father had written, "Here's one I won't need to practice!"

They always say people somehow know when they're gonna go, which Lila had pretty much considered bullshit her whole life. The husband and wife, having seen what they'd come to see, having snapped all the appropriate pictures, casually called a goodbye to her as they bounded back along the path, toward the dim stairwell, a tricky descent, and the rest of their day's plans. Lila didn't respond. She just watched the little people below meander around like lost little ants searching for food, turning around and around, as if they didn't know which way was up.

A fiction drawing project.

Here’s Wednesdays story post: the highlight of my week created in partnership with Julia Green, fiction writer extraordinaire. We will be posting fiction and drawing together inspired by each others work, I draw, she writes, I draw in response so on and so forth. Enjoy.

While her grandmother slept, Martina stood out on the balcony and peered at the fruit stand below. Even from three floors up, she could see that the pears and apples were pockmarked and bruised. The melons were beginning to ooze and the bananas were the wrong shade of brown. She wondered who would pay for such things.

The man who ran the fruit stand always sat to its left, in a brown folding chair she saw him unfold very early in the morning when he arrived. Every day he left by mid-afternoon, so Martina, who was only able to get out for a few hours in the evening when Mrs. Dax, the next-door neighbor, could watch Nana, had never seen his face. She knew only the top of his head, the tawny circle of bare freckled scalp and the black and gray halo of hair surrounding it. And she saw his hands, also freckled, which held the newspaper at the beginning of the day and rested calmly in his lap afterward, their stasis interrupted occasionally, when some passerby pressed money into his hand in exchange for a bag of fruit.

When the fruit man sold nothing, did nothing, moved so little she wondered if he’d expired, Martina had to shift her gaze to the traffic light on the corner, staring at the green, yellow, red till her vision was splotchy and dizzying. But on the day that he looked up, searching the clouds for some definitive sign that the rain was on its way, Martina was staring right at him, right at the bald head she’d been secretly watching for three months. When he waved, she stared for a second, seeing from the corner of her eye that the light was red, and then ran back into the apartment where Nana was lightly snoring on the sofa, her nightgown bunched up, revealing her wrinkled knees.

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