GG, A Treadle Sewing Machine, and Barges -- Flash Fiction

1903 Singer Treadle Sewing Machine

image from Quilting Board

"Why'd she die?" the child asked from her perch on the treadle below her great grandmother's sewing machine.

Her mother laid a silky, white slip into a box marked donations. "She just did, Honey."

The child rocked back and forth on the treadle, singing softly to herself, "Out of my window, looking in the night." She stopped rocking. "Am I gonna die?"

"Of course not. GG was old. You're not quite four." The mother laid a fuzzy, pink robe on the bed. It smelled faintly of gardenias, her grandmother's favorite flowers. An early spring scent from the old woman's childhood home.

The mother remembered rocking on that same treadle when she was small. Her Granny hadn't sewn on it in years. Not since Pap bought her the electric sewing machine. She hadn't used that one for years either. Not since Pap died. She might as well sell the electric one. Nobody in the family sewed any more. But she'd keep the old treadle machine.

The child resumed her rocking and singing. "I could see the barges flickering light. Silently flows the river to the sea. And the barges, too, go silently." She stopped singing. "What's a barge?"

"It's a kind of boat. Your GG lived by a great big river when she was little like you. And she could see the barges from her front porch. She used to sing that song to me when I was little."

"Did GG go to heaven on a barge?"

"Go to heaven?"

"That's what Auntie Lily said. She said GG went to heaven and she's never coming back."

"On a barge?" The mother sat on the edge of the bed. "Come out from under there." She gathered the child into her lap, taking up the song herself, "Barges I would like to go with you. I would like to sail the ocean blue."

She kissed the top of the little girl's head. The child smelled fresh and clean, still damp from her bath. "Maybe your GG did go to heaven on a barge. That would be just like her."

The child leaned away from her mother to see her better. "Momma, you're old."

The mother laughed.

Still serious, the child searched her mother's face. "I don't want you to go on a barge."

The mother wrapped the pink robe around them both and hugged the child tight. "Not to worry. I won't be that old for a long time, and I promise not to ride on any barges."

#atozchallenge

Fences -- Movie Review

And you ain't gonna find him givin' nobody nothin' neither.

And that dear friends is exactly what's wrong with this movie.

Credit where credit is due. Denzel Washington does an excellent job of directing and acting. Viola Davis is a superb actress. The whole cast does very well. They are not the problem.

The story is the problem. We start out with the main character Troy Maxson (Washington) and his buddy Bono (played by Stephen McKinley Henderson.) They're were in prison together. The film starts years later with them coming home after their usual week working together on a garbage truck. We meet Rose Maxson (Davis.) And the relationships among these three seem healthy.

But then Troy's son by a woman before he married Rose, Lyons (played by Russell Hornsby) comes on the scene. And then we meet Cory (played by Jovan Adepo) Troy and Rose's son. That's when the story begins to fall apart for me.

Spoiler alert! Troy is an abusive spouse and parent. The film then skillfully tells us why Troy is abusive. Here was an opportunity for a story of redemption. But that ain't what we get.

Okay. I understand about abusive men. Why they're that way may be legitimate. But, quite frankly, somewhere along the way they gotta learn and change. They gotta make amends. Become human beings. What happened to them before may not have been their fault. Or maybe they hadn't learned any better. But somewhere along the way, they've gotta take responsibility for who they are now.

And the woman's character made me as mad as he did. I have no patience for a woman who does not protect her children especially from their father. She sees first hand what he does.

I know most of them don't change. But some do. Troy's friend Bono apparently did. But not Troy.

The simple fact is keeping a man is just like keeping a horse or a dog. There are too many good ones out there who need a home and someone who will love them, to waste yourself keeping a bad one.

#atozchallenge

Extreme Weather -- Movie Review

Trailer from National Geographic

I like weather. I like movies. I like 3D  IMAX movies. And I love the Denver Museum of Nature and Science where National Geographic's Extreme Weather is currently showing.

Upholding National Geographic's reputation for photographic excellence, Extreme Weather moves from one amazing visual to another and another. Calving glaciers in Alaska, tornadoes on the Oklahoma prairie, hurricanes as seen from the International Space Station, raging forest fires in California. Each terrifying in its own way.

There is discussion of the weather system that envelopes our Earth and how it is being affected by climate change, the warming of our Earth.

A seemingly slight change in our oceans' temperatures causes changes in precipitation patterns across the land portions of the Earth. Droughts can be more extensive and of longer duration increasing the risk of wild fires in forests and across the plains. Causing loss of life and property. Increasing ash in the atmosphere which settles on the glaciers darkening them so that they absorb more of the sun's heat causing more melting causing ocean rise causing flooding of low tidal lands.

Having grown up in Central Oklahoma, often referred to as Tornado Alley, and having lived in the piney woods of Southeast Arkansas, the scenes of tornadoes and forest fires were particularly heart-wrenching for me to watch.

This film's format not only puts us into the midst of catastrophic reality, it captures the heart-stopping intense beauty of Extreme Weather.

#atozchallenge

Dialog -- Flash Fiction

Image from Johns Hopkins University

Jacqueline Mitchard was the Guest of Honor at the 2014 Rose State Writing Short Course in Midwest City, Oklahoma. She wrote The Deep End of the Ocean, which was the first selection for Oprah's Book Club.

She's not only a good writer, but a good teacher, too. One of the exercises she gave us to do was to write twelve lines of dialogue. Dialogue only. We could not use attributions or other narrative. It was to be an argument between two people, one of whom has a secret. The secret could not be that they were pregnant or having an affair.

From the dialogue, the reader should be able to identify the relationship of the two people, their gender, their ages, and what the secret was. These people are not arguing but here goes....


"May I sit here?"

"Sure. It's pretty full."

"Are you all right? You seem nervous. A little harried."

"My first flight. Going to ask my high school sweetheart to marry me."

"First marriage?"

"God, no. My wife and I were married forty-three years. Mary passed away two years ago."

"I'm sorry about your wife. My Bill and I are coming up on fifty-one years next month. October third."

"It was hard at first. Living alone, I mean. Not the marriage. These seats are nice. A little tight, but .... Then in June was my high school's fifty-year reunion. The bathrooms in the airport are nice. They're clean. Mary would have liked that. Do you know where the bathroom on here is?"

"There's one in the very front and one in the very back. So do you think someone should say something to someone if her slip were showing? Or, say, she noticed that someone had spinach stuck between their teeth?"

"Sure."

"What about if she noticed that a man's fly was unzipped?"

"Oh, God."

#atozchallenge

Cat Toys -- Flash Nonfiction

Kočka

Kočka, that's my name. I've been told it's Czech for cat. 

I first came to live with these people in the hot time almost two years ago. I was very small and very sick. I don't remember much about it, but I've heard stories.

"Heat stroke," the man told the young woman who found me. He said to bathe me in cool water.

She asked him what she should do with me then. She said she couldn't keep me because they already had three cats.

He said, "Take him to the animal shelter." But his woman said to bring me by their house first.

They didn't have any pets and that woman wanted me to stay with them.

"Happy Father's Day, Dad," the young woman said, handing me to him.

                           

When I was little I'd let them hold me some. I never did like pettin'. Mostly I'd rather play. Not with fancy, store-bought toys. I don't know why humans bring those things home. Personally I prefer used drinking straws, or wine corks. I like twist ties. And I like those plastic packing straps.

Once I found a toy mouse. Nobody knows where it came from.

My favorite toy was always the little foil balls that the man made for me. Sometimes I could get him to play fetch. He usually got tired of throwing it down the stairs before I'd get tired of bringing it back to him. 

I also liked to bat those balls underneath the cook stove. Then if I sat and looked expectantly at the stove, eventually one of the humans would notice. Humans are so much fun to watch. They'd get a long stick, hunker down, and fish around under the stove until they retrieved the foil ball. And sometimes there's not even a foil ball under there!

I like the man's fish tank, too. I've never caught one but if I jump at the side of the tank they swim away really fast. I've checked that tank out from every angle. Haven't found a way in yet.

                           

One day the man said "Let's go to the pet store and get some fish."

I'd never heard of rescue dogs or adoption events, but that's apparently what they were having at the pet store. My humans brought home two puppies. They didn't get any new fish that day.

Lily's the one with feathers and Cooper's the smooth-coated one. They like to wrestle and play chase. They are the best cat toys ever.

#atozchallenge

Betrayal -- Book Review

Those of you who know me, know I like John Lescroart's police procedurals.

Goodreads calls this one a "thriller." And I suppose it is, but it's not the kind of thriller that will leave your stomach tied in knots or make you dread the morning's news. It may, however, just keep you up too late because you gotta see what happens next.

I do have the same complaint about it that I had the first time I read it. Uncharacteristically (pun intended) we don't really get Dismas Hardy or Abe Glitsky until Chapter 16. Of course, all that stuff that comes before is important to the plot.

Oh, his plots, his plots. Lescroart does really good plots. He doesn't spoon feed us readers, but if he puts it in the book, it is important to the plot. He definitely takes Chekhov's advice, "If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there."

Betrayal was published in February, 2008. So Lescroart wrote it during the fourth year of the Iraq war. As a writer, I can understand the attraction of using current news stories in your work. And war seems to be a lucrative field, shot through with second-hand adrenaline for both writers and readers. Lethal flashes in the night. Explosions. Bullets peppering the ground around the new characters. Life and death -- conflict, conflict, conflict.

For me, I don't like it so much. But, it is necessary to the plot of Betrayal.

I was so glad when we got through the war part of the book. But then it was necessary to get through a trial without Dismas Hardy, our canny defense lawyer. In a courtroom not in our familiar San Francisco Hall of Justice.

The epigraph is a part of the book, I think, would better have been left out. In my opinion, there are some bits of a mystery best left to the readers imagination.

To be honest, I'd rather spend time with Lescroart's Hardy and Abe Glitsky, the dour police lieutenant, than with Lescroart himself. He's probably a very nice man, but I know his characters much better than I know him. I have a history with them.

To develop your own relationship with them, it's best to start with the first book in the series, Dead Irish. Each book is complete in itself, but the characters continue through the series -- maturing, losing loved ones, marrying, having babies, dying. And all the while searching for the truth. What really happened.

Again. Again. And Yet Again.

C. Weber Wagner

This is me and this is my fourth year to participate in the A to Z Blogging Challenge. If you're reading this, you're probably participating in it, too.

Welcome.

Do read the other bloggers participating. You'll enjoy their work and probably make some good friends to boot.

My blog thebookwright.blogspot.com is about writing which is a wonderful subject, because it's completely unlimited. Anything and everything can be related to writing. There is fiction, nonfiction, poetry, screen writing, memoir, self-help, religion.... I could go on for hours. I don't write all those different things, but it's safe to say, I read them all.

On my blog, I do not include recipes, housekeeping tips, car repair how-to's, or hunting guides. What I do do are flash fiction; flash nonfiction; book, movie, and TV show reviews; grammar discussions; writing tips I've learned from others or discovered on my own; and rants and raves about the publishing business.

I'm glad you stopped by. Please leave a comment and include a link to your blog so I can visit you.

Write on!