Tag: #cnf #amwriting

Catch a Tiger

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It is when I am about to leave to take our daughter to school, a little earlier this morning as she needs to be dropped off at the freshman building, and we don’t want to be caught behind the 66 bus or we will sit through two cycles at the stoplight, that Bobo, her pandemic kitten who is no longer a kitten but who has never properly used the cat box, decides to take a shit on the carpet in the foyer and as she is crouching, tail lifted like a defiant middle finger in my face, I grab the horrid little beast, holding her aloft like Simba in The Lion King, running toward the cat box in the sunroom, practically stepping on the flatulent 14 year old incontinent Boston Terrier, who has left yet another puddle of piddle in the dining room, and screaming at Bobo as she is dropping turds through the living room, I am also thinking that while I am so happy Catee’s best friend Delia was accepted to Tufts, and God knows I am because Delia is a great kid and a hard worker like Catee, but even so I have to acknowledge, damn it, as I also notice that Micky, the once feral cat we rescued two years ago, has picked, picked, picked at the new carpet in the living room, the same one Bobo has just bombed with a wet shit, I have to admit that, sweet Christ, can Catee just catch a damn break and get admitted to one of these top notch schools that she has worked her ass off to gain entry into because the last four years, and especially, especially these god awful isolating years of this pandemic, have cost us all so dearly, robbed us basically of happiness, left my poor girl crippled with anxiety, and especially now that U**, that same stupid school that accepted her last summer into its elite Senior Scholar Project, has rejected her, that I realize I am in the sunroom, holding this bloody cat we adopted to lessen our daughter’s depression and loneliness, over a goddamn empty cat box because I already have shit all over me.

I am electing to publish this CNF here instead of shopping it around literary magazines. This was written in a very Of The Moment vein for a workshop with Retreat West. I like it; I don’t love it but I think it accurately portrays the frustration, anxiety and utter craziness that families who are going through the college application process (in the U.S.) feel. The workshop challenge was to craft a one sentence story. RW is an amazing resource for writers. As always, thank you for reading!

Shenandoah

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            A southwest corner of Virginia, surrounded by the Blue Ridge Mountains, is the home to a military college and an elite university. Around the erudite little town, farmland undulates and dense woods are a hunter’s delight.

We grew up there. We were every girl in the 1980s. We watched Oprah and listened to The Talking Heads on our Walkmans. We complained how our youth yawned in those baby-oil days, as we sunbathed, bikini-clad on a tin roof, drinking diet cokes and spritzing Sun-In. We lamented our sheltered lives as we lathered each other’s backs, impervious to the country boys honking the horns of their dirty pickup trucks or the frat boys calling “Townie girls” from their BMWs. We barely glanced over the pages of our V.C. Andrews and Danielle Steeles as the cadets, awkward, profusely sweating in their summer pants and winter jackets, shyly saluted us as they marched past.

We left those days, not as quickly as I should have, and that town, mired in its strange duality, a little bastion of liberalism isolated in a conservative county.

You went your way, the way we all knew you would, up north, to a fine Ivy League institution. I meandered. Sometimes, I marvel how we started from the same point. Of course, it was never really the same. Our collective experience, the crushes, the dances, the Saturday night Trivial Pursuit marathons – somehow, I never perceived there was more. You knew differently. You left on a raft of accolades and expectations. I barely escaped.

The roads we took were never on the same map again. You were undeterred, cruising through undergrad, first tier medical school. I struggled to find footing, a few hours only from home. I bounced from one ridiculous vocation to another. Curiously, as you moved through your structured paces, I too eventually found the right path. Mine just doesn’t bring me “home” much. Just as well, I suppose; I can’t abide the confederate flags and the ghosts of my indiscretions. How funny that I am in the north now and you are further south than where we began.

And yet, on humid nights, when my potted gardenia is blooming and the fireflies wink in the soupy air, I stand in my backyard, staring at stars in a sky that will look the same to you, and I run my hands over my arms, remembering the slick, oil tickle of your fingers upon my skin.

Again, I am grateful to Sky Island Journal for picking up this CNF Flash of mine. Thank you for reading. Recently, I have started to tackle my struggle with being (American) southern, what that means and my moral obligation, as someone who writes, to accurately represent the South.