{defeating feeling}

|* another attempt at short story drafting, if only for my biggest fan. the music this time comes from owl/eyes another old friend with a new cd. I quite like 'during a maiden speech' which is up on her myspace*|










A three is written into the the final available box, but it comes without the usual satisfaction. The puzzle was solved too easily. She had saved it for his moment: sitting in this folding chair in this damp Sunday night in August heat of the screened-in porch of her father's old house. She had moved through all other sections of the paper saving- anticipating- this final challenge sitting on the last page of the paper. Her pen scribbles stars underneath the filled grid. She looks out the porch window to see that the sky is clouded over; she cannot see these clouds, but she also cannot see the moon or any stars and so she knows that those dark clouds are hanging.

Her eyes return to the paper and take in all of the squares as a whole. Her system, her approach to the logic of the puzzle had worked too well. One number had led to the next and it had ended just when she felt like it might be getting interesting. Her eyes move over her scribbles and down to the bottom of the page: The Horoscopes. She had never noticed them there before, since she always threw out the paper right after finishing her puzzle. Yet there they are, sitting right along the bottom. Her finger scan along the signs and stops on Cancer, tucked in the bottom corner. She laughs, a short breath out her nose. She reads out loud to her self: "Today your life will spin out of control".

A soft thunder ripples in the clouds outside. She scans over all the other horoscopes: they are all the usual 5-7 sentences long filled with those vague specifics that have always annoyed her. Her once sentence sits at the end of these as the last things written in the paper. They clearly hadn't run out of space though: following her horoscope is a small block of empty space down to the bottom edges of the grey paper. Her hand taps on the small brown lamp beside her whose light falls out the little squares of the screens in her porch windows. The sound and feeling of the taps remind her that she had done this the last time she was here, the last time she had talked to her father.

She rereads her line again. None of the rest of the newspaper had seemed out of place to her. In fact, it had been in fine form. She preferred it to other papers because of its lightness: it seemed as if the writers knew that not many people read their Sunday edition. What resulted was the sense, at least to her, that the writers were simply writing for themselves. This disregard for the reader was clear in the puzzle section at the end of the paper, which was always filled with laughably hard puzzles.

The soft thunder rattles again outside of the window. Her pen tip is bouncing on that last line. It stops and moves to the empty space below. Slowly, she draws out a circle in this space, connecting one end with other. She smiles and sips from her herbal tea.

She tries to imagine what, at this point, could happen to make this horrible horoscope come true.

She comes up with nothing. The day is over, and the black night has long settled in. She is going to bed soon.

So she goes through her day in her mind: She woke up early, had some breakfast. She does not remember her life spinning out of control at that point. The majority of her day had been spent hiking up the mountain not far from this porch. Her and her father has done the same nearly every morning together before the family had moved away. She didn't know what to expect coming back to this mountain. She had been too young to have any real memories of it. She had seen many pictures of them climbing and at the summit together but through the rain and clouds on the hillside she couldn't even find these spots. For the whole length of the hike the mountain simply remained a steep path crunching underneath her feet. It never felt like the mountain in those pictures, so old and peaceful; or the mountain of her father's stories, 'the great challenge', 'the big fight'.


She looks back at her line, and the circle she had sketched underneath. The circle does not fill up the empty space at all but instead is quite wide and open. To her it looks as if it is just a frame around a blank picture. She feels a drop of rain fall through her screen window.

She moves to close the window over the screen, deciding as it shut that she would sleep here tonight. Curled in her blanket she would watch the sky lighting up, and feel the gentle shake of the thunder. That and she does not want to risk things spinning out of control between the porch and her bedroom; who knows what she could trip on in the dark? She smiles and reaches for her tea, but the cup is empty.

She turns the brown lamp off and sits in the dark. She looks up. Her father had put in a plastic sky-light in the porch, and it holds one of the few moments she can remember from this house: sitting in the dark looking at constellations. Tonight it is just black space. She closes her eyes.

She wonders why no one has ever used the cracks of thunder as percussion before. She tries to imagine a song to go with the thunder and rain rolling over her. She falls asleep sitting still on the lawn chair, breathing through her nose. She moves through dreams that she wont remember when she wakes up.