#Fi50: Whenever

It’s #FictionIn50 time again!  Please consider sharing your own 50-word creations, and join the hop.

Fiction in 50 is a regular feature in the last week of every month and I invite any interested composers of mini-narrative to join in!

    

What is #Fi50? In the words of founder Bruce Gargoyle, "Fiction in 50: think of it as the anti-NaNoWriMo experience!" Pack a beginning, middle and end of story into 50 words or less (bonus points for hitting exactly 50 words).

The rules for participation are simple:

1. Create a piece of fictional writing in 50 words or less, ideally using the prompt as title or theme or inspiration.
That’s it!  But for those who wish to challenge themselves further, here’s an additional rule:

2. Post your piece of flash fiction on your blog or (for those poor blog-less souls) add it as a comment on the Ninja Librarian’s post for everyone to enjoy.  
And for those thrill-seekers who really like to go the extra mile (ie: perfectionists):

3. Add the nifty little picture above to your post (credit for which goes entirely to ideflex over at acrossthebored.com) or create your own Fi50 meme pic….
and 4. Link back here so others can jump on the mini-fic bandwagon.
At this time, I haven't been able to find a source for a free linky-list, so it's just comments. I recommend posting your basic blog link below, with the day you post your Fi50 story. You can also add a link on the #Fi50 page. Feel free to Tweet using the #Fi50, though I'll not lie: the Ninja Librarian is a lousy tweeter.

The prompt for March is “Whenever”.  Big thanks to Jemima Pett for the 2019 prompts.

My March offering turned out to be a sort of a poem. Or a wish. Probably mostly a wish, and a sigh, and not very original because we poor humans seem to keep making the wish necessary.

Whenever

Whenever there is hatred, let there be more love.

Whenever there is violence, let there be healing.

I look forward to the day when hatred and violence end 

And people love to accept one another as human

And beautiful

And worthwhile.

Whenever it may happen.

Whenever.

Maybe now?

I wish.

©️ Rebecca M. Douglass, 2019. Use only with permission. Link-backs appreciated.

Fiction in 50 is a regular feature in the last week of every month and I invite any interested composers of mini-narrative to join in!

    

What is #Fi50? In the words of founder Bruce Gargoyle, "Fiction in 50: think of it as the anti-NaNoWriMo experience!" Pack a beginning, middle and end of story into 50 words or less (bonus points for hitting exactly 50 words).

The rules for participation are simple:

1. Create a piece of fictional writing in 50 words or less, ideally using the prompt as title or theme or inspiration.
That’s it!  But for those who wish to challenge themselves further, here’s an additional rule:

2. Post your piece of flash fiction on your blog or (for those poor blog-less souls) add it as a comment on the Ninja Librarian’s post for everyone to enjoy.  
And for those thrill-seekers who really like to go the extra mile (ie: perfectionists):

3. Add on of the nifty little pictures above to your post (credit for which goes entirely to ideflex over at acrossthebored.com) or create your own Fi50 meme pic….
and 4. Link back here so others can jump on the mini-fic bandwagon.
At this time, I haven't been able to find a source for a free linky-list, so it's just comments. I recommend posting your basic blog link below, with the day you post your Fi50 story. You can also add a link in the comments on my story, posted the next-to-last Sunday of the month. Feel free to Tweet using the #Fi50, though I'll not lie: the Ninja Librarian is a lousy tweeter.

I will do my best to visit if you post, but the first half of 2019 I will be away from the computer a lot, so be patient! 

The February prompt is “No more hearts and flowers.” Make of it what you will!

And now for my Fi50 story.

No More Hearts and Flowers

I am so over him. He wasn’t that great anyway. I suppose I’ll miss the chocolates and the flowers, but I’d rather choose my own.

Admit it: you’re secretly glad.

Anyway, who gave the little snot permission to go around shooting arrows at people? All I did was shoot back.

©Rebecca M. Douglass, 2019
As always, please ask permission to use any photos or text. Link-backs appreciated!

WEP: 28 Days

Let me begin with an apology: I shouldn't even post this, because as I do so I'm heading out again for 9 days and will have limited chances to visit other posters. If you want to skip me because of that, I understand. If you comment anyway I WILL read your story--it will just take me a week or two.

998 words. FCA.

28 Days

Twenty-eight days isn’t very long. 

Twenty-eight days is an eternity. 

Sometimes it’s both at once. 

It was February 1st when I was given one month to meet the love of my life. To make it worse, I had to start from scratch, since I hadn’t had a date in longer than I wanted to admit.

I got lucky on the 3rd—I ran into my high school sweetheart at the Pac-N-Save (in the baking aisle, if you want to know. I was buying chocolate chips; I think he was lost). We chatted, and he was still single, so time being of the essence I set to work. Flirtation has never been my strong suit, but I made a point of exhibiting an unwarranted enthusiasm for his company.

You probably wonder how I ended up in such a mess. It was, as usual, thanks to my fairy godmother. She has a wee drinking problem, to use her slurred words. When she heard me lament that I hadn’t had a date in ages, she tried to bless me with a promise that I’d find the love of my life by the end of the month. Alas, she wasn’t quite sober, and what came out was more of a threat: “You must find your love,” etc. The “or else” wasn’t explicit, but it would be bad. That’s what she said when she sobered up and discovered what she’d done.

That’s why I was trolling for love in the Food4Less, and why I was prepared to be satisfied with my high school sweetheart, even though he was kind of a conceited idiot back then.

He still was, but I tried not to notice. Love conquers all, right?

I had my work cut out for me. In addition to my own inner resistance, I had to overcome whatever it was that made him dump me the night before our Senior Prom.

Over the next few days I contrived to bump into Brad just about everywhere except the men’s room. I knew I was making progress when, the second time I ran into him on the 6th, he asked me to go out for coffee with him. 

Unfortunately, once we were seated with our lattes, he asked me if I was stalking him. I don’t think he completely accepted my explanation about a new job that seemed to be sending me to all the same places he went. But he did agree to see me again, so I counted it as progress. It might have simply been his ego—it was so easy for him to believe a woman was chasing him.

The hard part for the next week was coming up with reasons why we should go out. Every. Single. Day. That, and keeping my smile pasted into place while he talked on and on about himself. I must have succeeded, because Brad began to come around to my place without me even asking.

It looked like I’d dodged my Fairy Godmother’s drunken bullet. I still had ten days left and Brad was eating out of my hand, even starting to drop hints about a ring.

There was only one problem. I didn’t really like him. In fact, I really didn’t like him (there’s a big difference). Would it break the curse if I married someone I didn’t love?

I asked my FG, but all she said was, “Hand me another beer, dearie.” My uncouth Fairy Godsot drinks Bud Light.

I was left with a dilemma: I’d not found anyone better than Brad, and while I didn’t exactly consider him my ideal man, he seemed to be getting genuinely fond of me. Anyway, he was my best option. My only option, actually.

Brad had to go out of town for work, and I spent the next three days debating if I should lure him on to the proposal I needed. When he got home and called me, I told him I had a migraine and couldn’t go out. I agonized all night over that decision.

I spent the morning of the 20th with Brad, who bored me to death. He assumed I was pale and listless because of the migraine I’d not had the night before.

That evening I cruised singles bars with my BFF, flirting with everything male. She kept asking, “What about Brad?” She knew all about him, but I couldn’t tell her about my Fairy Godsot. 

On the 22nd I turned down Brad’s proposal. He was justifiably furious at the way I’d led him on. I didn’t try to explain, not that he gave me the chance. 

I spent the 23rd to the 26th imitating the FG: I bought a few of boxes of cardboardeaux and stayed drunk the whole time. 

I called in sick to work, planning to drink until the sky fell March 1st.

My boss showed up on the 27th, worried because I’m never sick. Nor do I get drunk, so when he saw the wine boxes, he knew something was very wrong.

I was drunk enough to explain. He listened without comment, then said, “You have 15 minutes to shower and dress for work. Make the most of it, because I need to you to train the new guy.”

I groaned and rolled my eyes and cussed some, but he didn’t budge. I could see it all: he was going to try to set me up, and it would be another Les, the sexist pig from Accounting with wandering hands.

“It’s my nephew, Donal,” my boss added. Why would he set up his own nephew with a doomed drunk? The kid must be odious.

I wasn’t going to get myself hooked up with a Les, or a pimply youngster either, but I pulled myself together and the boss drove me to the office. He didn’t say anything more about his nephew, and I guessed he’d be a mess.

Donal was no Les, and he wasn’t a mess. 

I made the deadline. 

©Rebecca M. Douglass, 2019
As always, please ask permission to use any photos or text. Link-backs appreciated!

Audio-Book Review: The Japanese Lover

Title: The Japanese Lover
Author: Isabel Allende; read by Joanna Gleason. Translated by Nick Caistor and Amanda Hopkinson
Publisher: Audio: Simon and Schuster Audio, 2015. Hardback 2015, Atria Books. Originally published in 2015 in Spain by Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, S.A.U.
Source: Library digital sesrvices

Publisher's Blurb:
In 1939, as Poland falls under the shadow of the Nazis, young Alma Belasco’s parents send her away to live in safety with an aunt and uncle in their opulent mansion in San Francisco. There, as the rest of the world goes to war, she encounters Ichimei Fukuda, the quiet and gentle son of the family’s Japanese gardener. Unnoticed by those around them, a tender love affair begins to blossom. Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the two are cruelly pulled apart as Ichimei and his family—like thousands of other Japanese Americans—are declared enemies and forcibly relocated to internment camps run by the United States government. Throughout their lifetimes, Alma and Ichimei reunite again and again, but theirs is a love that they are forever forced to hide from the world.

Decades later, Alma is nearing the end of her long and eventful life. Irina Bazili, a care worker struggling to come to terms with her own troubled past, meets the elderly woman and her grandson, Seth, at San Francisco’s charmingly eccentric Lark House nursing home. As Irina and Seth forge a friendship, they become intrigued by a series of mysterious gifts and letters sent to Alma, eventually learning about Ichimei and this extraordinary secret passion that has endured for nearly seventy years.

Sweeping through time and spanning generations and continents, The Japanese Lover explores questions of identity, abandonment, redemption, and the unknowable impact of fate on our lives. Written with the same attention to historical detail and keen understanding of her characters that Isabel Allende has been known for since her landmark first novel The House of the Spirits, The Japanese Lover is a profoundly moving tribute to the constancy of the human heart in a world of unceasing change. 

My Review:
Isabel Allende's reputation as a writer is deserved, and this book definitely wormed its way into my mind and stayed there while I was listening to it. It covers familiar ground in so many ways--I regularly bike through the Sea Cliff area of San Francisco where the Belasco mansion is set, and I have long known about the Japanese internment in WWII. Part of what attracted me to the book was the familiar geography it covers. What kept me reading was my desire to know and understand the characters.


I felt like I was getting to know the characters as one does in life--a little at a time, with constant revisions of my understanding. The initial view of most of them sets up assumptions about the kinds of people they were, assumptions that are gradually eroded, developed, and sometimes overturned. A big part of the reading experience ended up being me trying to decide if Alma is a good person or not. That sounds harsh, and I'm not sure if that was Allende's intention, but she is certainly complex and that led to my ambivalence about her.

My biggest complaint about the book is that it takes on too much, and tries to make too many characters central. We see the internment camp through Ichimei's eyes, but that is the only part of the book where he is central, and feels a little gratuitous. We are given more and more glimpses of Irina's life and issues, until I concluded that this is really her story, disguised as Alma's. Maybe it is, but if so, the balance feels off, and in the end she gets short shrift.

On reflection, the one thing that maybe runs as a theme through all the stories is love. What it is, how you find it, and what it means. In that way, the book works--but I'd still rather know more about Irina and what she is like inside, rather than Alma, who in the end I find a bit too self-centered and self-absorbed. Maybe that's part of the understanding we are meant to achieve.

My Recommendation:
This is (no surprise) a book well worth reading. It deals not only with the nature of love, but also of age, illness, racism, and suffering. I'm not convinced it's a great book, but there is a lot in there to think about for a long time after you finish, and that may be the definition of a good book.


FTC Disclosure: I checked The Japanese Lover out of my (digital) library, and received nothing from the writer or publisher for my honest review.  The opinions expressed are my own and those of no one else.  I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission's 16 CFR, Part 255: "Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising." 

Flash Fiction Friday: Twisted Love

NOTE: THIS WEEK'S STORY IS NOT FOR CHILDREN

Chuck Wendig gave us a skimpy prompt this week, just the title, or plot (however you chose to look on it), "Twisted Love."  I chose to use it for both and then decided to write this as an homage to L.M. Montgomery.  For any who know Montgomery only as the author of Anne of Green Gables, Montgomery wrote a great many short stories, and many of them were gothic in nature.  A startling number dealt in greater and lesser depth (as did her novels) with the ways in which love can be twisted and poisoned.  So here, in a story I think Montgomery would recognize, is

Twisted Love

When she was very small, Lena had wondered why she alone among the children at the little school in Seaside lived in darkness.  Not just physical darkness, though she envied the other children the candles and lamps that allowed them to read after nightfall.  But Lena felt from an early age that she lived in a sort of spiritual darkness, not as the preacher would see it, but one which left her feeling as though all light had been shut out of her life.

Even as a child, Lena knew no one loved her, knew it in her soul and thought about it in that odd way of children who are much alone.  When she was small, she dreamed of telling her mother that she knew she wasn’t loved, and of running away.  She would go deep into the woods, and find a beautiful little cottage of stone and a mother who did love her, and no stepfather.  For while Lena saw that her mother did not love her, she saw even more clearly that her stepfather hated her.

It was only slowly, as she grew, that Lena learned, piece by piece from things overheard and things said in anger, why she was unloved.

Once, a girl named Hannah Stewart had been the belle of her small town, happy, pretty and young, and given to flirting with all the boys.  She took nothing seriously, and didn’t need to, for her older sister Madeleine, who stood in the place of her own dead mother, did the thinking and worrying for her.  They had no mother, and their father was too caught up in his work to bother about them, so they were everything to each other, and loved one another dearly, despite Hannah’s feeling that Madeleine was too serious, and Madeleine’s sure knowledge that Hannah’s lightness would lead to trouble.

And it did.  Pretty, flighty Hannah found when she was but eighteen that she had gone too far, and when pressed could not even say which of several boys might be the baby’s father.  Madeleine despaired over Hannah’s depravity; Lena, learning of it as she entered her teens, knew in her heart that Hannah had refused confession, rather than been unsure of the father.  She had chosen to protect someone, and Lena hoped that it was she, but greatly feared it was the unknown father of whom her mother had been thinking.

Madeleine took her little sister away so that none should know her disgrace.  She found a remote cottage, and there nursed and scolded and loved the girl, and stayed by her through a pregnancy that took more from her than it should have.  And when the baby was born, Madeleine knew at once who the father must be.

Saying nothing to her sister, she wrote to Justin Carter and told him he was a father, and must come and marry the baby’s mother.  Hannah knew nothing of this.  She named the baby after her sister, held her for a day, and died.

When Justin arrived, eager to marry the girl he loved, Hannah was dead, and Madeleine had a plan.  In his grief at Hannah’s death—for if he had not been her first choice, she had been his—he agreed to everything.  The child would be his, and would have the best of everything.

Justin and Madeleine were married that very week, and moved to the distant town of Seaside, where no one knew them and all assumed the baby was theirs.  Justin had trained as a lawyer, and took up his work there and, as his new wife had expected, made a good living for the family.

Lena never knew them in the year or two when they had been almost happy, in a mild, dispassionate sort of way.  By the time Lena was two, Justin could no longer deny what he had suspected from the first: that he was not the girl’s father, and that, in fact, her father was the one man he hated.  He had hated Albert Hawkins as a ne’er-do-well and a scoundrel, as well as a rival.  Now that he knew what he had done to his beautiful Hannah, Justin hated him with a deeper passion that poisoned his soul. 

And love betrayed became hatred all around.  Justin could no longer abide the sight of the child, and Madeleine, who blamed Lena for her mother’s death, had never liked her.  Now Justin turned his hate as well on the woman who had tricked him into a loveless marriage, and he could no longer bear either.  All the love that he had borne for Hannah turned to hatred of these two creatures who between them had robbed him of her, and trapped him until death.

He ceased to pretend the child was his, though he said he had married Madeleine in pity when her husband was killed while she was with child.  He never said so, but made it clear to all that he neither loved nor respected her.

So Lena had grown up in an atmosphere of hatred and resentment, and her own impulses to love, spurned at every turn, turned inward.  Gradually she, too, learned to love and trust none but herself.

By the time Lena was fourteen she was in possession of most of the facts of her own life, for Justin was wont to fling them at her as weapons when she displeased him.

She returned from school one spring day to find both Madeleine and Justin stuck down with some kind of fierce fever and cough, too weak to rise.  When they called out to her to help them, she stood in the doorway and looked on them with a hard face.

“Why?”

“For the love of God and your parents,” cried Madeleine, forgetting that Lena had never known love.

“What parents?” Lena asked.  She felt strange, and knowledge of what she was about to do washed over her.

“Why, we are your parents, child,” said Justin.  “Under the law.” 

Lena gave a short, harsh laugh, for it was like him to be both honest and brutal.  “Oh, under the law.”  Her face grew still harder.  “I have no parents.”  She looked at Madeleine.  “I tried to love you, and you cast my love back into my face.  You never forgave me for my mother’s death.  Yes,” she said, seeing by Madeleine’s face that she had not known how much Lena knew, “I know who my mother was.  You may have loved her, but you never loved me, even for her sake.  And you,” she turned to Justin, “you were never any kin at all, as you have made clear all these years.  I have neither mother nor father,” for though she had heard the name of Albert Hawkins, she could not feel him to be a parent, though Justin blamed him for her every fault.

Lena looked from one to another of the fever victims.  “I tried to love you, to be what a daughter should, and you flung it back in my face.  I was a little child who only wanted to be loved, and you gave me only your hatred.”

Her face wore a mask now of hatred and fury far beyond her years.  “Now you dare to call on my love to help you?  Well, I know nothing of love, nor family.”  She moved to the bureau and found the stash of money Justin kept there, pocketing it with a final malediction.  “I will take my inheritance and leave you to your bitterness.”

Justin tried to get up, to follow the money as she left the room, but he sank back, unable to rise, overcome by a fit of coughing.

Lena did not weep as she left the house, the only home she had known, and left behind her the two bitter souls to live or die as they would.  She had long since wept out all her tears for the mother-love she had never known.  They had left only a bitter residue, and a pocket full of bank-notes.

 

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©Rebecca M. Douglass 2014