the tomb, the ex-lover, the lack of

I turned in my first short story to be workshopped this morning. Inevitably, you feel good about it until the moment you send it, and then you hate it. Which is pretty much how I feel right now, and will continue to feel until Thursday afternoon, when it's all over. 


Maybe I'll be able to distract myself with feeling nervous and mind-racking about my playwriting intensive, which starts tonight and is four hours long and our topic is "the ex-lover." (Oh, what shall I write about!?) 


Or maybe I'll be lulled away from it by the landscapes of Bamff, in Perthshire, where I am going to stay with Sophie and her family tomorrow. 


In any case, I may feel a hatred for what I've just written, and even what I might write later tonight, but I also feel a certain sense of "Ah well" about. Which is to say, I don't feel stressed out about it. The one pervasive thing that dominates my life here is the lack of stress. I don't have it. Not everything goes my way. I don't always feel great or pretty or brilliant or even funny (normally my fall back). But I don't feel stressed out. And that is worth the price of admission, folks. 


I suppose since I brought it up, and since it's been awhile since I posted any fiction of mine on here, I'll give you snippet of 'The Tomb' after the jump. It's sort of an ancillary section of the story. Maybe I'll post the whole thing once my classmates have gotten their teeth into it.

One time in the city, Andrea had seen a man die. She was walking home from the subway late one afternoon in the summer, but the sun was still high overhead. As she crossed over First Avenue, towards Avenue A on 4th Street, this man seemed to just materialize from behind a chain link fence surrounding the high rise low income housing buildings that anchored the Northeast and Southeast corners of the block.

            His face was terribly bloated, either from booze or drugs or maybe he was having a heart attack-- she couldn’t be sure if he was homeless, an addict, or just a construction worker. But he stared longingly at the sky, threw his arms up into the air, in praise of glowing sun above, shook his head in what looked like wonderment, and then sat down against the chain link fence to die. It was as if, having received the message, he needed nothing else.

            But for a moment, all the other New Yorkers on their way to their destinations didn’t quite know the proper protocol. New Yorkers can barrel past most things, but this seemed too rare, too legal to just ignore.

            A young couple—in leather and black denim, even in the summer-- probably on their way to the L train back to Williamsburg--- looked at each other for reassurance that they had both just seen the same thing.

            An elderly black lady, in her skirt suit, hoes and tennis shoes, nudged the man once, then twice before saying, “Mister, you can’t sleep here!”

            “Can we just go? Are we allowed to just leave?” asked the woman in the young couple.

            “Well, I live here,” said the older woman. “And I’m going inside whether anybody here likes it or not.” Then, more muttering to herself, “And that had better be gone when I come back down, damn this building.”

            “I suppose someone should call the cops,” said the man in the couple. Then he waited for someone to volunteer while he hung a bit on his girlfriend. 

            And Andrea and the rest of those who had seen the man die just stood there for a while-- looking at their feet, their cell phones-- as other New Yorkers filed past, minding their own business. 

            Eventually, the man in the couple agreed to wait with the body until the police arrived, since he and his girlfriend could stay together. The girlfriend rolled her eyes, and sort of leaned/pouted against the chain link fence at this decision, but made no move to go.

            Looking back, Andrea can’t remember herself at the scene. She can remember the scene—the man’s dingy but not stained t-shirt and painters pants, the thick calves of the woman in the suit, the soft squeaky sound of the his-and-hers fake leather jackets, as they brushed against each other while the couple cuddled and waited-- but none of her in it. Had she even said anything, spoken up about anything? Certainly, she hadn’t volunteered to stay. Though, she had stayed long enough to be dismissed. That counted for something, didn’t it?

            But as she crossed over Ave A, towards Ave B, she kept turning around looking for glimpses of her prophet on 4^th Street, and hoping what he had seen, what he might have to tell her, wasn’t something that she didn’t want to hear.