These two pieces are from the "One Minute Ding" exercise we did at Pizota Beach. The rules of this exercise were that every 60 seconds one person would randomly pick a word. Then, we had to incorporate that word into the piece we were writing. We went around the table with one person announcing a word as each minute passed. After the last person chose a word, we took a few minutes to finish up. Here are two of the pieces that came out of that exercise. The words that were chosen each minute are in bold.
Hot It's Snot
by Kathleen P.
Remember that movie "Streetcar named Desire?" It's one of my husband's favorites. Well I don't. It's supposed to be steamy and romantic.
I'm all for romantic and lusty, but not in the morning. Not with the old cock-a- doodle-do. You know a lady really likes the candle light and all the rest of the stuff after the dog has been let out. Not just a quickie while the beast is panting outside the door waiting to answer nature's call.
Now he could turn it around by taking pouch out, fixing a tray with some choice caffeine, some exotic fruit, maybe a mango. Just none of this groping in the morning; and smooching with bad breath; and rolling around whatever happens to have landed on the bed the night before. I remember one time the guy, even though it was his big idea; grabbing the camera case and flinging it across the room. Later though he headed out to the living room and kicked around a beach ball until he felt better and cooked up some snails for lunch. God, how I hate snails, as if his breath wasn't bad enough already!
"Hey! Why don't we have a bottle of wine with those?" I asked. He needed a little lift after the unsuccessful morning. Men! They move like tortoises when their egos have been crushed. I'd be spending the whole afternoon repairing his memembia and this our only four day weekend without the kids for six months. It's not like we're not crazy about each other, it's just that women are made for the evening and men are made for the morning, another one of nature's cruel jokes.
When you're twenty sex is a cornucopia of delight anything goes, anytime. Then you find your true love if you're lucky. You get married. Maybe you have to fish around a bit, once or twice maybe three times to find him or her. Then, then you have this dance of trying to make the thing work. It's like a sailboat. You have to catch the wind, select the sails, set them and constantly tweak them. When all that is done you head off in what seems like the wrong direction.
Out of Control
by "Southern California Dave"
The streetcar's cable broke and it gained speed as it continued down the hill. At first only the conductor knew that anything was wrong but soon the passengers noticed that the speed was increasing. In a shop window a toy rooster proclaimed its cock-a-doodle-do cry as if in warning.
Two passengers looked at each other and then at the dog which scurried across the street in front of the streetcar now increasingly gathering speed. Passengers were now looking at each other in alarm. One woman tried to move toward the exit thinking to jump off when she lost her grip on her shopping bag and a mango rolled out onto the floor. A tourist, clearly alarmed, began moving in several directions at once bumping others with his camera case. "Watch out!" exclaimed another passenger. People were milling about looking worriedly at one another. A child dropper her beach ball sensing that something was wrong.
Now approaching a speed of 35 mph a man at the exit jumped off in desperation, fell and rolled out of control, scraping his arm and landing in a flower bed, his nose inches from a snail. A broken bottle lay next to his foot in the street gutter. He moaned in pain.
Inside the garden he could see a low fence with a tortoise inside. In his agony he yelled, "Help, I think my leg is broken." He recalled how he had broken his leg on a photo safari to Namibia one time. This felt the same.
He winced, tears flowed, and snot ran down his nose onto his upper lip. I don't think I can move, he thought. He turned his head and looked into a window of the house in whose garden he was sprawled. He thought he could see a calendar with a picture of a cornucopia. He tried to see if anyone was at home but he couldn't see anybody through the window. He thought he could smell fish being barbecued. Maybe that's where the people were—on the back porch.
He groaned and turned and looked over his shoulder across the San Francisco Bay where sailboats were racing. He thought to himself, "That's where I was supposed to be later today," his last thought before passing out.
Behind the Door
by Alida T. & Diana G.
I had always known behind that door
The antique desk, the papers and the books.
The smell of tobacco behind that door
Mother kept closed to keep the chaos in.
Father sat in rumpled pink linen
Plaid and meerschaum pipe. How did he breathe?
How did he have ideas in a such a crowded
Place? How did he find his numbers, grades, or lunch?
He came out for dry martinis and church.
Behind the door at the end of life
He is lost in solitaire. Each day
He wanders to the road in his caftan,
Singing to the dogs and looking for the mailman.
As Far As My Ear Can Reach
by Diana G.
I’m sitting on a couch in the jungle.
This bamboo, this thatch, this jungle.
It is a noisy silent place for one who thrives on silence.
The roosters start before dawn,claiming the night from insect trills and the wild things. The crowings are cornfield deep, cries far as my ear can reach, distinct and indistinct. In less than an hour, they are joined by the wild birds who have waited not for the promise of light but light itself. None of them speak English. They are an enthusiastic band, more brass than woodwind. No one is tentative, lyrical or wistful, like birds in northern woods. They open up and opinionate in scores of squawks and honks, and the roosters are suddenly delicate. One bird says, “Mahi, mahi.” And the gobble of the wild turkeys, ivory bellied, half the size of the tall, awkward spinsters of New England, would hold its own to the rowdy parliament of my wild flock. They fret above my head, dropping pieces of fruit. The surf sounds almost subsonically. A cow lows.
Near, but invisible, a burro brays. It is not difficult to imagine this one trained in Italy, and having outgrown Mozart, then Verdi, he is ready for Wagner. It is impossible that such a sound comes from an animal related to horses. In the night, by sheer volume, his call becomes a freighter about to ram my swinging ship of a bed. One night after the bars closed, drunk on Margueritas, we went searching for this talent. Then he was silent, and nothing in the dark gave him away. It took more sensible day, and a small local guide, Ceasar, to find him. We were introduced to a shiny bay stallion, Canollo, who calls to keep his herd in tact, even though he lives alone and tied. Particularly because he lives alone and tied. He can smell the mares in each barbed wire garden, and tracks them as they strike stones, moving in the night.
Mornings he brays as if he wears a Swatch on his fetlock and reads it, jungle time. He bellows during the day too, but at night when he calls, all the dogs who hear--and they are countless,--answer with the keening of puppies on their first night alone. They never do this after sunrise. The sound is the sound of coyotes, but it is not sent away into the distance as coyotes do. The dogs cry inwardly. The sound hurts them, though I now depend on it, and will find it difficult to leave. All these sounds. I store them here, on this page. These roosters, these dogs, this burro.
A Fallen Petal
by Joyce M.
Yelapa, Mexico
March, 2005
When I entered the room, the sun through the window fell on a spot of soft purple, vivid against the polished cherry wood of the desk. It was a fallen petal from the orchid bloom that I had nurtured through the cold winter.
Though this room is the space where I work as a lawyer, it is full of plants, not the standard indoor plants like peace lilies and dracaena, but a colorful display of crotons, African violets and other tropical plants that bloom intermittently in unusual shapes and vibrant colors. The rope plant with its thick curled leaves produces mounds of tiny flowers with pink waxy petals and yellow centers. The lipstick plant blooms from a small red ball that elongates like a tube of lipstick, then opens into a mouth-like shape with red lips and a yellow tongue.
But the orchids are my favorites. The blossoms seem to come out of nowhere, opening almost overnight from a small round bud, hanging on a thin stem, floating in air against the white wall. The soft purple flower has a white center accented with deeper purple flecks. They are so perfect, so beautiful
that everyone who sees them thinks they are made of silk. To me they are a living miracle and the centerpiece of my work space.
I speak to my plants, and they speak back to me in a language that I can't live without. Each time I enter my office, they are the first things I look at, the first things I see. If I have been away for a week, I check my plants before I check my messages.
The orchids are the most amazing because they last for months. Last year, they bloomed from February to June. I thought I was witnessing a miracle on the order of loaves and fishes or the oil for the eternal flame - enough for one day - that burned in the temple for eight.
This February the blooms came back - even more than last season. I look at them at them and think about the years I have spent in this place, the ways I have made it my own, all it has given me and all it has cost. I acknowledge the fallen petal with gratitude but also recognition. There is a season for petals to fall and make room for new growth. As I look toward a future in another room, I think of orchids and having time to nurture more of them.
Fallen Petal
by Joyce M.
The room
was as I left it
but for
a fallen petal
pale mauve
against dark
polished wood.
Above it
the orchid plant
hanging blossoms
all intact
but for
one bereft
asymmetrical
but holding on.
On the mantel
the clock ticks.
Through the window
a sky streaked
with salmon-colored clouds.
What Came Up Overnight
by Janie B.
You ask what came up overnight, and all I can think of is vomit. The purging kind, where one is left drained, wrung out, hung over, Mack truck flat, pancaked, schmeised, whammed, smashed, laid out. Wrecked, racked and ruined. And somehow feeling better.
But no. Write about vomit? How can anyone write about vomit? And why would you? After all, what is there, past the rotting fruit smell, to write about vomit?
How the janitors - now maintenance staff - in the elementary schools, sprinkle the pool in the hall with pink stuff that's supposed to smell like cherry popsicles, but that just ends up making cherry popsicles smell like puke?
Or how it feels to have your mom or your grandma or your best friend hold your hair back during and soothe your forehead after?
Or how, for a pregnant woman with a chronic disease, morning sickness brings with it the threat of throwing up one's meds?
Or how it becomes competitive among the freshmen, trying to figure out how to become men in a world where there are no clear rites of passage from boyhood to manhood - not driving, not voting, not selective service, not leaving for college, not sex, not work, perhaps fatherhood unless it comes too early or too little or too late? Competitive. Like ballistic barfing. Random ralphing. Wild woofing. Sometimes thin and stringy, yellow with bile, ropy threads drooling from the mouth after. Sometimes nothing but beer, down and then up again. Sometimes it feels like the heart turning inside out, burning the throat, as undigested chunks of everyday life, wolfed down without being tasted, unchewed, return the way they came. Competitive. Varsity vomiting.
Or how it feels in the middle of the flu, where the only thing worse than throwing up is not throwing up. Even when there's nothing left.
Or how it feels in the ER, full of charcoal and self-loathing and disgust and not even being able to get this right, too few pills and not enough time.
Or how it feels in the ER after the injection of adrenaline or inhalation of atropine and the lungs open up but so do the shakes, and you have to decide whether to let it go or hold it down.
Or how it feels in the ER after the saline IV to rehydrate after throwing up all day and not wanting to lose the baby, and in the next bed is a fifteen-year-old with her wrists restrained, who rattles the bedrails and howls because she has not, quite yet, learned to purge on command.
Or how it feels to have the dry heaves over the side of a boat in sixteen foot seas in the middle of the night, with the rudder gone and dawn and rescue still hours off, and you wonder will it ever, ever, ever be over or might it be better to drown.
A Wonderful Terrible Thing
by Lara J
I am a stone.
What happens around and outside of me is a mystery of discord. But I am a stone. Impermeable. Over time, my edges soften. Not by my own choice, but they do take on a smooth, lovely shape.
I was the grandchild of a large piece of Granite that became exposed as Pangea was pulled apart. The great ocean flooded her newly exposed cracks. The water smoothed her craggy ravines. The earthquakes shook the ravines apart and granite Boulders tumbled out. The force split me from my mother Boulder along with a few stronger, larger siblings. I never saw them again. For I was the smallest - I was carried away more quickly from my mother source and her hard bosom. I tumbled through the new red sea. There was little there, but plankton and a now extinct form of algae that had a lovely blue hue. It was simple. No fish had yet picked at my sides. No crabs rested under my hip. There was the great force of an unbalanced earth, but little else to contemplate.
I am a stone. My purpose back then was to sit and observe and be.
Many years went by and the great Tsunami came….much bigger than the others. I was moved thousands of miles. I somersaulted thoughtlessly. The unbalanced earth moved me.
I finally landed in what they now call the Yucatan Peninsula. I had no purpose but myself for nearly an eternity. There was little to observe beyond the growing algae, the slow transformations of creatures of the deep, and the changes from light to dark.
But now I have discovered a creature had made my underbelly his shelter. The bottom dwellers could not find him under my guardian cover. I had found a flash of purpose. I had a responsibility and I began to worry about my small charge. When he wandered off to filter richer spots of plankton I looked on anxiously. I had never much cared before about the creatures, but my little charge had chosen me. And I was helpless once he ventured from my protective shield.
But that feeling was a fleeting moment in my eternity of nothing. I can't remember where the creature went. What is my purpose now?
I sit on a mountain. I am not sure how I got here. I think it was a gentle roll over thousands of years that kept me moving. Occasionally, a horse will stomp on my impervious back. I don't mind.
And then, those men, who beat the horses, set up camp. They sit around the fire and finger my sides softly and thoughtfully. What are they thinking? The ocean has more power than all the men on earth and the quakes could alter the look of the land forever. But these are mere elements responding to physical variability.
This man who fingers my back softly… He has the power to throw me far into the river or lay me softly on the pebbled ground. I have never encountered this power of choice before.
He sings in a way that sounds like a creek I once knew. And sometimes this man sounds like a deep throated bird who scoured the skies before humans dwelled the earth. His singing is not with a purpose I understand. It is not meant to frighten anyone, to warn his mates of danger, or to cry out as death overcomes him. He simply sings.
Men finger my smooth back to reflect. They get up from the ground with more serenity than when they sat down. It is a wonder to me. This reflection on a mosaic of experiences that engender…feeling.
For I am a stone. Save for a few flashes in eternity, I do not feel. I have no control over where I go. I merely am here to observe. And sometimes, I provide a prop for reflection this newly arrived creature…called man.
Does this man know that he stepped on a mutated caterpillar up here on the mountain? The red tipped butterfly will never be known.
Does man know that the hyacinth he picked for the ancient maiden, caused her thighs to swell and her bosom to warm? Then she gave birth to the Aztec called El Rey del Sol.
I am only a stone and I have no control over my destiny, or that of most others.
I can only observe the wonder of this world and postulate that man was born with blessings and curses. For his choices bring him great joy and great sorrow. I do not know these feelings in my humble, purposeless existence.
A man who thinks he is a victim should remember the caterpillar he unwittingly stepped on. He might consider the way the child's face falls when man ignores the boy's cartwheel. Man might remember how the woman's cheeks color when he offers her a hycinth.
The purpose of each man might be great or perhaps quite small. But what he has - that I do not- is the power of choice. Because choice is a wonderful terrible thing.
A History of Clouds
by "Motorcycle" Dave S.
It was not the hillside, not the actual shape or the surface defined—
whatever a hillside might be in itself. No, it was rather everything else
the hillside pointed to; or said another way, everything not the hillside itself
but what was contained on it, or under it, or above.
This could include all of nature, he realizes—down here
a tropical more luxuriant nature, dense and varied in these climes.
It could include a village, the villagers, the donkeys, mules, chickens,
and dogs. It could include a history of all these things as well—a history
of things on the particular hillside he is looking at, of the rocks beneath it;
a history of the movement of clouds in the sky above the hillside
this particular day, or of all days since the hillside began.
He is thinking then of how it did begin—
thinking the hillside not yet there, the non-existent but potential
hillside: the potential of it there in that space waiting for the things
which would build it. The stones: how they would get there, where
they would come from, the gradual turning of rock to dirt; a level space
coming to be where a house would be built.
And then he is thinking something far past the hillside, beyond
the nouns he has written down for this exercise, though perhaps not so far:
after all each noun resonated in its own way, as this one was.
He is feeling the distance beyond the hillside—feeling the negative space
of its contours, the contours of its neighbors behind it and on the other side
of the valley, the place he'd hiked yesterday.
It was the open space of sky between hills, a sky containing clouds
that yesterday—early when he'd started out near Jarrett's and looked up-river—
were a faint cream-grey color, a layering of clouds with a hint of sun behind,
hinting a sunny day that never came.
It was that space-caught here between the hillsides of a valley
containing this river named 'El Tuito', in this state of Jalisco, Mexico—
bringing the desire to go; to go and wander and know the things there;
and once there,to look beyond. 'Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances…' a poet wrote somewhere.
That was the distance he wanted.