Val Muller

Welcome to the Spot Writers. This month’s prompt is to write a story where water plays a role. It can be a lake, a river, the sea, rain, or just some water to drink. It comes to us from Val Muller, author of the Corgi Capers mystery series.

Metamorphosis

By Val Muller

I still see her in my truck bed,
As she looked that dawn,
How she turned over in her sleep,
tucked her leg out of the blanket
and kicked through the fabric
almost like she was swimming.

I shake my head at myself
Picking up a hitchhiker
Like I don’t know any better,

Driving her to the diner in the middle of the night,
Paying for her fish n chips
Because when they brought the check,
She acted like she never heard of a dollar.
She gave me her seashell bracelet
and asked if I would drive her to the coast.
Her lips pouted like a siren’s.
I lied and said
I was headed that way myself,
Hundreds of miles to the west,
That there was plenty of room in the truck
Whose cab barely held me.

Her hair blew out the open window like it was tossed and turned in the tides,
And I drove through fields of corn that swayed as if under an ocean current.
Hours passed, eternities passed, and her scent filled my truck with the fragrance
Of all that was missing in my lonely, landlocked life.

Hundreds of miles washed over us, and I had to sIeep.
All my money gone to gas and food,
She didn’t blink when I said we would rough it.
I offered her the cab, but she insisted on the truck bed,
Said the stars speckled with clouds seemed like seafoam to her.
She hummed a song that flowed in through my open windows
And lulled me to sleep like the soft crash of waves.

When we reached the coast, she seemed brighter somehow,
stronger, shimmery, secret in the sunrise,
and although this farm town boy had seen the ocean only on screens,
I could not break my eyes from her as we walked the sand.
She grabbed my hand only once, the smoothest touch I had ever felt.
It was like, I later learned, a smoothed sea-glass,
made sleek with hundreds of years in the surf.
Her lips, the one time she kissed me,
Tasted of salty air.

She stepped in the water and turned to me once,
smiled, and let the waves lap her up.
She disappeared in a rush of foam.

I ran out to her, not even thinking,
this is the first time I’ve felt the ocean.
Instead, I searched with eyes and arms and hands,
Trying to find that smooth skin,
That sleek hair.

My eyes glimpsed only a glitter
that spoke of seashells’ iridescence
And of the mystery of saltwater—
A green glow of a fin.

Years later, I sit on the beach each sunrise,
Rain or shine, summer or chill,
Hoping for just a glimpse
Of she who transformed me,
Who picked me up on the shoulder of my life
And brought me here to the coast,
Where anything seems possible,
Where I wait for a glimpse of magic iridescence
In the place where
The sea air tastes
Like her.

The Spot Writers—Our Members:

Val Muller: https://valmuller.com/blog/

Catherine A. MacKenzie: https://writingwicket.wordpress.com/wicker-chitter/

Phil Yeats: https://alankemisterauthor.wordpress.com

Chiara De Giorgi: https://chiaradegiorgi.blogspot.ca/

Welcome to the Spot Writers. This month’s prompt is to write a story inspired by the phrase “back to normal.” It could be a pandemic-related story about getting back to normal, or one about not getting back to normal, or a story about something else entirely.

The Fairy Lady

By Val Muller

Life cleaning out my parents’ house was an introvert’s dream.

My dad had always been a hoarder, but after mom died, he really lost control. After he passed, I moved into the house. I was between jobs and between boyfriends, and I figured I could live rent-free in my childhood home while making money selling the massive collection my dad had accumulated over the years.

There was barely enough room to push the stuff from my old room into my parents’ bedroom to make room for me to sleep. I managed to cram most of my personal belongings from the apartment into the garage. Eventually, I would clear room for it all in the house.

Each day, I forced myself to fill three large bins of accumulation, sort through them, and trash/sell/keep. I figured, maybe I’d be done sorting through the house in six months or so at that rate—ha!

In the meantime, I returned to the room I grew up in. Besides my bed, I cleared my old student desk, and that’s where I set up my workshop. My dad had found a box of small glass bottles with corks. 84 of them. They were there on my desk, at the bottom of all the other things my dad had saved. They were so new and shiny that I decided to keep them.

That first day I found some miniature thimbles my dad had squirreled away. I thought—they’d be perfect to put in a jar. I added some colored thread around them, and I crocheted some yarn I found into a little mouse. I’ll admit it looked cute—a mousy little seamstress. It reminded me of myself, somehow. A shy little mouse. A little maker.

The next day, I found some rusty hardware—nails, gears, bolts. And a welding kit. I made them into steampunk flowers tiny enough to drop into the jar.

An old video game controller turned into a computer chip tree with wire branches glistening there in the jar.

It was therapeutic, really. My mind stopped racing about the breakup with Robby, and I was pulled into the lull of crafting. I could finally stop replaying my last weeks at the bank in my mind, how I could never make enough sales, was never pushy enough with customers. I put the jars on my bookshelf and looked at them before falling asleep each night.

After that, I made several jars each week. During the days I kept an eye out for little treasures dad had tucked away. Beads, moss, tiny pinecones, trinkets. I felt that I was preserving a little piece of dad and his legacy—while still decluttering. The jars were a shield from the emotional wreck of tossing dad’s stuff, his lifetime of collection. They were a shield from a world of demanding boyfriends and demanding bosses.

The drive to make the jars pushed me to go through the house faster than my goal, and before three months were up, the place was clean. I’d made more money selling his things through local marketplaces than I did at the bank, and I put up an Etsy store for my jars.

Soon all 84 were filled, and many were sold. And the house was clean.

I had no boyfriend and no health insurance. It was coming. I painted each room as a way to procrastinate. I used some of my earnings to purchase new furniture and dishes, to make the home my own.

But after I’d done every improvement I could afford, after I cleared out even the garage, I couldn’t escape reality. I’d run out of things to sell. I’d run out of trinkets to place in jars. I had to go back to work.

I hurried out the door to my new job. Working in the craft store was not the best money, but at the interview they said there was a chance I could lead some classes in the studio. And if nothing else, I would get lots of ideas for future fairy jars.

*

The Spot Writers—Our Members:

Val Muller: https://valmuller.com/blog/

Catherine A. MacKenzie: https://writingwicket.wordpress.com/wicker-chitter/

Phil Yeats: https://alankemisterauthor.wordpress.com

Chiara De Giorgi: https://chiaradegiorgi.blogspot.ca/

Welcome to The Spot Writers. This month’s prompt is to write about something “summery.”

Today’s post is written by Phil Yeats. In December, 2019, Phil (using his Alan Kemister pen name) published his most recent novel. Tilting at Windmills, the second in the Barrettsport Mysteries series of soft-boiled police detective stories set in an imaginary Nova Scotia coastal community is available on Amazon.

He’s currently working on a Cli-Fi novel. Information on that project is available on his website.

 Warm Summer Evenings

 Phil Yeats

Years ago, we lived at the end of a cul-de-sac next to a small section of urban forest. On warm summer evenings, bimmers and other fancy sedans would arrive. They’d disgorge teenagers burdened with boomboxes, twofers, and packages of snack food. The drivers would depart, presumably to return their parents’ cars, and reappear on foot with others joining the party in the woods.

From early evening, the raucous music punctuated by occasional noisy outbursts from the participants overwhelmed the usual nighttime forest sounds. Near midnight, the teens, with boomboxes blaring, would emerge from the forest and disperse into suburban city streets.

Screeching owls, and cats expressing differences of opinion, would reassert ownership of their forest. In the morning, scavengers with their grocery store carts would collect the empty beer cans.

We lived in that house for twenty years and observed many teenage gatherings. They consumed prodigious amounts of beer, but we only witnessed one altercation. On that occasion, a sidewalk fight erupted as they left. A neighbour called the cops, and the men in blue defused the situation.

Altercations we didn’t witness presumably occurred in the woods. And pot—illegal in those less-enlightened days—must have been consumed.

Our neighbours complained about immoral behaviour and environmental damage. I refused to get involved in discussions of the morality of teenage behaviour but noted they left their trash in a city-maintained garbage bin near the entry path. And the scavengers appreciated the beer cans they left behind.

They were being teens on warm summer evenings, and I envied them as they trooped into the woods. Perhaps if I’d had opportunities for similar teenage social interaction when I was their age, I would have grown into a more sociable adult. Or perhaps not.

More years than I care to remember have passed, and I’m sitting outside another house enjoying another warm summery evening. Our province is recovering from its initial response to the recent coronavirus pandemic. The authorities recently eased lockdown conditions. Limited social gatherings are once again possible. Several members of our writing group organized an in-person meeting, our first in four months.

The risks were minor. Nova Scotia is nearly virus-free, and we’d be outside following the social distancing rules, but I didn’t participate. I fear my reluctance to take part was less about avoiding risk than about avoiding social interactions. Teenage lessons in sociability wouldn’t have altered this lifelong tendency.

The Spot Writers—Our Members:

Val Muller: https://valmuller.com/blog/

Catherine A. MacKenzie: https://writingwicket.wordpress.com/wicker-chitter/

Phil Yeats: https://alankemisterauthor.wordpress.com/

Chiara De Giorgi: https://chiaradegiorgi.blogspot.com/