Prompt: Write a still life of a scene where something just happened. Describe either before or after the scene:

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The crash of glass on glass. A mirror, spiderwebbed. Chrysanthemums splayed across the rug. Rain pelting in through the open window. She could smell the electricity.

She used to love that – the way a storm could make the hair on her arms rise, the lightning splintering the desert sky. But that was before. Now she wished the storm away. Envisioned white sands and turquoise waters. Some sort of sparkly drink tasting of cucumber and garnished with lemon slices.

Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. She shuddered despite efforts to still herself. Broken glass kaleidoscoped the lights outside. Taxis honked. She waited for the trembling to pass. The vein in her forehead throbbed, throbbed again, stopped. A slow inhale… one… two.. three… four… hold… two… three… four… exhale. She looked around at her apartment assessing the damage. Her grandmother’s floor-length mirror, destroyed. The rug, soaking, but cleanable. The vase she’d lovingly packed home from a trip to Italy, history. The flowers, well, they were doomed to die anyway.

The broken glass and the increasingly dumping rain concerned her. The rest could wait. She lifted herself from the couch, stepped to the window, held her breath against the storm, inched the window down until the frame tapped the sill, eased the latch into place.

The shards that once served as a lovely container for the fresh flowers she insisted on glistened. Fetching the broom seemed too ambitious, so she lifted the rug edge with her foot, flipped it over top the broken glass. She might trip on the rug later, but at least nothing would slice her open during a midnight trip to the bathroom. Her bedroom stood all the way on the other side of the apartment, so she sunk back down on the couch, tugged the afghan from the couch’s back over her body. She closed her eyes.

A trick for insomnia, she had learned, was to rewind her day. To think backwards over each thing that happened, the idea being a person would fall asleep before reaching, “I woke up this morning.” Reliving the events of the past hour didn’t appeal to her, but if she could get through them to a more peaceful place, perhaps sleep would allow her entry.

I pulled the blanket over me, she thought.

I laid down on the couch, she thought.

I kicked the rug over the broken glass, she thought.

I closed the window, she thought.

I breathed slowly, she thought.

I thought about a beautiful island, she thought.

I could smell the storm, she thought.

I came back to myself, she thought.

I was sobbing, she thought.

I threw the vase at the mirror, she thought.

I screamed into the phone, she thought.

He mocked me, she thought.

I told him, I hate this game, she thought.

He asked me to name 10 women who would have him, she thought.

I answered the phone, she thought.

I shouldn’t answer the phone, I thought.

I saw his name light up my screen, she thought.

My phone rang, she thought.

I wrote about how stupid this relationship has been, she thought.

I thought about how stupid this relationship has been, she thought.

He hung up on me, she thought.

I told him to fuck off, she thought.

He told me he’d been invited to Puerto Rico by another woman, she thought. A petite, sporty woman.

I told him I loved him, she thought.

He told me he was sad, that no one loved him, she thought.

I asked how he was, she thought.

He said hello in that way he says hello when he feels life has defeated his best attempts to be amazing, she thought.

I saw his name light up my screen, she thought.

My phone rang, she thought.

I thought about how stupid this relationship has been, she thought.

Can’t make it, she remembered.

I had a new text, she thought.

My phone dinged, she thought.

I came home from the store, she thought, dumped out the groceries on the counter: noodles, peanuts, cilantro. I was going to make him dinner, she thought.

I stopped at the grocer’s, she thought. I wanted to make him dinner. I wanted to break up with him. I wanted him to love me. I thought if I made him dinner, things would be easier. That was stupid. Breakups should take place in neutral territory. Declarations of love shouldn’t be contrived. What I wanted didn’t relate to the reality of what I had. Which was a lousy boyfriend.

I exited the subway, she thought.

I stumbled when that excessively tall German crashed into me, she thought.

Someone was eating curry on the train, she thought. The smell pervaded the train. Normally aloof faces screwed into expressions of annoyance. No one wants to smell anything on the train, she thought. We have a tacit understanding: engage no senses other than sight and sound and only those when necessary.

I left work and entered the subway and got on the train, she thought, bored with how long this was taking.

I worked on TPS reports all day, she giggled.

Be serious, she thought.

You’ll be awake all night, she thought.

She hated him, she thought.

She loved him, she thought.

She didn’t care either way, she thought.

Fuck, she’d blown the exercise, she thought.

Where was I?

Left work.

Before that?

Worked.

Lunch at the Greek place. It had a name, a long, hard-to-pronounce name and even though they all liked to think they were clever and worldly, they all defaulted to calling it “the Greek place.”

She’d had an imaginary conversation with him, she thought, one in which she asked the questions and he’d answered them.

They’d argued about politics. She was pro gun-control. He was pro-gun.

They’d gone to breakfast.

“Let’s get breakfast,” he’d said.

I saw his name light up my screen.

My phone rang.

I’d been

A combination of holidays, travel and illness had prevented our writers’ group from meeting for weeks. Three-quarters of us finally reconnected Thursday night. The assignment was to have a first line and a last line, then write the story in between. We each wrote two lines, shuffled the papers, then drew ones not our own. Here’s what I began with:

First line: “The shrink leaned back on his padded chair and tried not to grimace.”

Last line: “Two steps in and already turning, turning, to exit unnoticed.”

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The shrink leaned back on his padded chair and tried not to grimace. The screen above flashed, “64A, 14H, 29C.” He glanced at his own ticket, 42H, once again. At the pace they were progressing, it’d be Thursday before his number came up. Good thing he didn’t run his own office like this. And the filth! He glanced around at the other clientele. Not a one like him. Sweatpants and bad skin. He recrossed his legs, admired his perfectly cuffed pants. He found that cuffing the pants made them lay better, flatter in the front. No tacky bunching for him. He’d read the advice in a men’s magazine once – he really did read the articles. He wished he had something to read, anything, right now.

“65A, 16H, 33C.” The latest numbers came up. He’d left his phone in his car, deterred from bringing it in by the signs explicitly stating, “No cell phones.” Apparently, no one else had paid attention. Or maybe they couldn’t read, he thought. Without fail, all the sweat-panted, bad-haired people in the waiting area had phones in their hands. A teenage girl, pink sweats and skyscraper hair, jackhammered her thumbs without a pause. He waited for her to pause. Minutes passed. More numbers popped up on the screen. Perhaps she was writing a novel, he thought. Wouldn’t that be something, he thought. Maybe he had these people all wrong. Maybe they were all secret creatives, slack-jawed on the surface, burning underneath, about to step away from their jobs as janitors, temp agency receptionists, discount grocery clerks to be big time mystery authors or famous rappers.

He wondered if he could name any famous rappers. No, he thought, he could not.

The florescent light nearest him flickered, once. A beat. Again. A beat, again and now without stopping. He closed his eyes to ward off the madness. Breathed in through his nose, held it, counted to four in his head, exhaled, counted to four again, inhaled.

“Sir? Are you okay?” The teenager was looking at him, brown eyes clear in a face pitted with acne.

“Sure,” he said. He pulled himself more upright, recrossed his legs. “Why?”

“You looked like maybe you’d passed out.” She shrugged, turned her attention back to her phone.

“66A, 22H, 34C.” The numbers moved forward unevenly. The ticket holders shuffled forward. People entered, people left, but the sluggish turnover reminded him of eddies on the side of the river where too little movement turned the clear water to algae-ridden muck.

When was the last time he’d been to the river, he wondered. Last year? The year before? He’d loved the river once, the way it bent around the rocks, water seeking ever lower ground in an unstoppable quest to get to the ocean. An irresistible force. They would go to the river together, tromp to their favorite spot, just far enough away from everyone else, but not so far that they’d waste the day hiking. They’d pull each other’s clothes off, in love with the feel of skin on skin but unable to withstand the heat of the day, they’d pull away and jump in, the relief of the water a world away from the monotony of the office, the arguments about money, the threatening stagnation of their lives.

What he loved more than anything, almost anything, was to get back out, lie on the flat rock, so hot in the midday sun that he had to be dripping wet in order to place his skin upon it, to lay there until the sun had dried him and between the air and the rock he felt as if he was literally baking like bread in an oven, so near to passing out, and then he would rise, dizzy, and step off the rock, torpedo eight feet back into the river, bam, the cold shock reanimating every cell within his body, making him, as they say, in the moment, all else but the physical pleasure evaporating away. He could spend hours alternating between the heat of the rock and the cold of the river. Once. Now he only traveled between the air conditioned office and his air conditioned car and the air conditioned upscale food boutique, inconvenienced by the bursts of heats in between as if it were a bothersome fly.

“67A, 23H, 41C.” He slumped back into the padded chair, this time giving way to the grimace. He glanced at his watch. If he left now, he could be at the river in 40 minutes. What would happen if he left, he wondered. The clerks moved without buoyancy and the rent-a-cop security had more gut than awareness. He stood up, slipped his ticket, damp now from being clenched in his palm, into his pocket, which lay flat against his thigh, the crease in his pants intact. He made for the door.

“Sir?” The “Start Here” clerk called out. “Sir, if you leave, we can’t guarantee your place. Sir?” The rent-a-cop shifted his weight, rolled his shoulders back.

“You might as well wait,” the guard said. “It doesn’t get any easier when you come back.” He put his hand on his belt, a belt above pants that bunched badly, but he didn’t make a move to stop him.

He pushed by the guard, leaned on the glass door handle, felt the grease from all the hands that had been there before and pushed out into the sunlight. The heat dizzied him, but he had purpose now and moved fast. Keys in hand, car, driving, open road, trees edged gold by the sunshine. Better to be in beauty, he thought. In beauty, we are alive, he thought. So much of living involved resisting the dullness and ugliness, he thought, rebelling against the inertia in which death was a matter of degree by minuscule degree so that by the time it arrived he would be too numb to notice.

Car parked, trail traversed, river reached, clothes stripped away. It was too early in the year, really. The air was hot like summer, but the water retained winter’s cold, ran high and powerful. He was reminded of the flip side of tranquility as he stepped to water’s edge. Two steps in and already turning, turning, to exit unnoticed.