Backhand Stories: A Creative Writing Blog

What I always forget about long naps is that when I wake up, I feel disoriented, heavy, impatient, groggy, mean, and sick. I yawn, stretch my arms into a Village People “Y,” and I feel tired, except I just slept three hours. When I’m like that, the photo of me on the T.V. stand, the one where I’m wearing the oversized Florida sweatshirt, makes me look like an elephant. Or I hang up the phone on Jay because he’s singing into the receiver. I am impatient and heavy and groggy, mean, sick.

Today, I hate that I napped at all like I hate having taken that photograph of me swallowed up in faded blue and orange cotton. I should have been wide awake and energized because then I could have more quickly reached for the injured arm my next-door neighbor thrust forward when I answered the door. I could have been more gracious when he asked for peroxide and a band-aid. Instead, I cut my eyes, glaring at him before going into the bathroom to get the supplies.

“Can you do it for me?” he asks, and steps forward, holds the door open with his good arm. “I’m not crazy or nothing. I swear it.”

“Come on,” I sigh, wave him through the front door and to the bathroom, to the sink. “Put it here.”
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Tags: Fiction, neighbor
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I’ve had the pleasure of publishing a few pieces from members of Write Words, a great writing community based in the UK.

They asked me to tell them a little more about Backhand Stories, so they’ve published a short interview with me about the site. You can read it here.

Martin

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The retreat was high in the hills and hundreds of years away. Here they rose with the Sun and slept with its setting, under low eaves, on rows of futons head to toe, occasionally visited by field mice. They took tea, chanted mantras, shared the daily tasks with few words and drank from cold springs of water and wisdom. Clarity filled the air. Bai thought that if any place could do her good, this would. But after many days her heart was still heavy and her belly light.

The elderly priest, Hui noticed her absence from the morning meditation and crept from the hall silently to seek her. His deep saffron robes caught the rising Sun and turned his skin to alabaster white. Bai was sitting by the old well in the new courtyard. The young woman looked at him upward through down-cast eyes, pearled with tears. Ancient he seemed to her. What did he know of modern life? Hui read the thought in her face.
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Tags: flash fiction, peace, short story, zen
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“I walked her down the aisle today – happiest day of my life so far. It doesn’t seem so long ago that she was climbing up onto my knee to make a nest with her special blanket, ready for a bedtime story.

“Time flies – doesn’t it? You blink and twenty years have passed, like that. Just look at her now; she’s a beautiful young woman.

“Always was the apple of her Daddy’s eye.

“I said to my wife when we found out the news – I’ll do anything to be able to see her married. Well, you do - don’t you?

“And it’s been worth it. Oh yes! All the operations, and the tugging around; the waiting to hear if it was my turn. When I was on my last legs, and no sight of a donor, they put the idea of this new experimental op to me; it wasn’t what I wanted – far from it. Well you don’t want intimate contact with a pig – they’re unclean animals. Dirty. And there are all sorts of religious red lights. But these specially modified ones they grow nowadays are the best match for human tissue, they said. My best chance.

“So I signed the forms and went in for the op; 18 hours on the table, I was. Groundbreaking work I was told – made medical headlines around the world. But that’s not why I let them do it; I don’t care about being a footnote in history.

“I just wanted to see my girl on her big day.

“And it was worth it. I’ll sort out what’s what with the Almighty - later.”
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Tags: flash fiction, operation, parent, wedding
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The banquet room was dark and crowded. The walls stood dim and abyssal, wrapped in waves of glossy fabric cascading across the rippled periphery, ocean blue and glacial, like the walls of ice box covered in cold satin, glazed in indigo.

Maggie, noticing that her reception was enjoyable for all in attendance, and having just arrived from the ceremony, made herself look in the direction of Paul, who since the service had been sitting in the corner of the clubhouse’s dining room at a table draped in power blue tablecloth. He was talking to a girl with blonde hair, her breast welled-up tight and cleaved taut above a push-up bra, like twin canned hams, catching the errant attentions of several young men not bothered enough to look into her eyes. Paul’s posture was lax, shoulder blades pressed against the back rest of the chair in which he slouched, legs crossed beneath the smoke slowly streaming off the end of a cigarette he held away from his face like a dirty diaper. Maggie turned and inhaled as deeply as her tight corset would allow, and then, squinting her eyes, looked around the room at the lively swarm of guests she had invited to celebrate her marriage.

She paused for a moment, then instinctively, she turned to where Paul sat, puffing and chatting with the blonde, watching the guests on the shiny, lacquered dance floor in the middle of the room.

“Why hello,” Maggie said, grabbing Paul’s wrist. “Get up,” she said. “I want you to dance with me.”

“Hello there. And why is that?” he said, bashfully, having been caught off-guard.

“Oh, because – you look so handsome.” And Paul rose, offering no resistance as he followed her from the table to the dance floor across the room, at the same time managing to quickly milk the remaining embers from his smoke before stashing the butt on the tray of empty champagne glasses, all in stride.
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