Story #10

Seed: "A library is the location, fear is the theme. A mirror is an object that plays a part in the story."

This story is due on 12/03/2012 at 11:59PM.

The Path of the Pebble

"And what is this?" asked the old man, holding up a small glass bead.

The youth paused for a long few heartbeats, thinking. "Is it a glass bead?"

"If you do not know," replied the old man, "You may simply say so."

"I know it is a glass bead," said the youth, "But I think that if I say so outright you will tell me why this is not true."

The old man shook his head. "You have focused too much on the teaching at the expense of what is taught. That is not the way of the Path."

"Yes master," replied the youth. To say more was to invite rebuke, though a thousand rebuttals lept to his tongue and died behind his teeth.

The old man sighed, and stretched out. "The lesson for today was to take a meandering path, but it seems that in my age I have gotten too predictable. Instead of my normal instruction then, which you are too clever for, I will give you the lesson outright.

"The bead is not a bead; it is a thing which shapes the world around it, as all things are. When I touch the bead, it shapes my finger to it. It shapes the light around us, which allows us to see it. The bead is not centered on our senses, it is centered in the world, and the bead affects all things around it. This is true not only for the bead, but for all things. I see you because of how you affect the light, and when I rap your knuckles with my walking stick I feel the impact of it on your flesh. You have heard the koan of the tree which falls in the forest?" The youth nodded cautiously. "Sound is the tree touching the ground and spreading the air. The gem within the koan is whether things still exist when we turn our back on them. The Path teaches that they do. A thing is defined by how it is impacted by other things, and how it in turn impacts them, for there is no other way for them to be known, just as there is no other way for us to know ourselves."

The youth frowned, opened his mouth, and then closed it again. "That was too much at once," he said slowly.

"Then go meditate for the next hour upon the far rock," replied the old man. "You are clever, and the truths that I have revealed will be understood by you in time."

The youth inwardly groaned. The far rock could only be gotten to by two leaps over the mists of the mountains, and it had no comfortable place to sit. When he had first come to the mountain seven weeks ago, expelled from his home by a father who had no use for him, his time meditating on the far rock was terrifying, full of constant terror of falling. Now, it was simply an annoyance. Today would be even more annoying, as the normally stunning vista would be ruined by heavy fog, and worse than that the fog would leave him cold and wet when it licked up past the rocks like slow, thin waves.

Half an hour later, trying to find some clever insight in the words of his master, the youth heard muffled footsteps through the fog. They were not the soft steps of his master, but harder sounds from further down the mountain, what must have been a half dozen men. In the time he'd been there, the youth had seen only two visitors come to visit his master, and both had come alone. His instinct was to leave the far rock and investigate, but that would surely earn a sharp rap of the master's walking stick.

Time passed, and the footsteps made their way up the winding mountain path. The boy sat still in the lotus position, closing his eyes and trying to breath calmy. So far the many visitors hadn't said anything to each other, but the boy had a secret hope. His father had sent him away, but there was nothing to say that his father could not call him back.

Finally the men arrived and called out to the old man, who would be sitting in the modest house, drinking his tea. Still the youth stayed in his position, willing himself to keep calm and steady like the rock beneath him, and somehow, despite his roil of emotion, he managed it. When the old man called his name though, he came running, bounding over the rocks and towards the house, where the old man stood with six men in front of him. Their colors were that of the boy's house, and the boy recognized Shai-fen, one of the house guard.

"Tan-fi, you are called back to the house," said Shai-fen.

The old master held up a hand. "I am afraid that he was given over to me for education," her replied. "The boy is certainly not educated yet, and thus he should not leave."

The house guard frowned. "On whose authority do you think we arrived? Wan-fi can send his son out for education, and Wan-fi can bring his son back." He looked to his other guards. "You cannot refuse us in this, and though we do not wish it, we will simply remove him by force."

The master nodded. His footing shifted subtly, and from within his robes he pulled a glass bead. "Do you know what this is?" he asked. "It is impact, as all things are the change they make in the world. I impact the boy, and the boy impacts me, and together we improve each other and the world. Do you maintain that the world would see positive change for the boy being removed from my care and training?"

"That is no matter either way, for my lord's will must be done, and I am an instrument of it." Again he looked to his guards. Then he looked to the boy. "Tan-fi, come with us and stop with this game."

The boy stood in the grass, which was still wet with dew. He could see his future stretching out before him. He wavered, then feeling his mind race, went through the calming exercises that he had been taught - and in doing so, made his choice.

"I will stay here," said the boy.

On the Edge

“I don’t wanna leave you.”

        “I don’t want you to leave me.”

“This is it.”

        “Is it? Would you stay?”

I want to stay. I want to stay more than you can imagine. But when it comes down to it, you leave or I disappear. We might not be on the edge of a cliff, but my fingers are reaching their limit and I know I can only hold on for so long. I’m clinging. I’m am gripping. I am struggling. You reach toward me with shallow breath; you reach into me. I have you in my hands, in my forearms and my shoulders. I know the things that terrorize you in your dreams and in my expectations. 

Your fear of this stems from your idea of life. You think that life is the end-all-be-all. You chose this. As did I. You picked it out as the experience you wanted to have; regardless of the sadness, and completeness, and the “IS”-ness that we got. You chose this. You are full of grace. You are full of beauty. You are full of awe.  You are full of shit.

You stand there, one hand gripping onto the tiny crevice that can keep you up for a short time, the other holding onto me. You look at me as though I am Nirvana; your saving grace, your complete emptiness and your savior. But this time I am convinced that it doesn’t matter. This time I will finally be able to release you without the guilt of knowing what letting go will do to you. I know that if I try to help you up again I won’t have the strength to get off of this cliff and I’ll wither here with you; exposed and shaking. 

Do you remember the time that you looked at me like I was nothing? Do you remember the time that I stopped mattering because I ceased to exist? When you felt it, I felt it too. Disappear. Escape. It’s always what you were good at. 

I look down at the kitchen table and rub my hand over the faded scar. It was etched the time you slammed down a glass in a fit of rage. The glass was cheap crystal; the kind my mother would send in for with cereal box tops when she was a kid. It hadn’t been sentimental in the way one would think. It was an object that had been a part of my life for as long as I had been alive, but I hadn’t ever paid too much attention to it. Every time we moved I would wrap it in old newspaper, protecting it from breaking on my way to a new life. It’s importance wasn’t in what it meant, but in its unwavering existence in my life. Its loss was felt more strongly than its presence ever was.

You have such rage that things shatter around you. I shatter around you. Over and over again I sweep myself up out of loyalty to you. You are the fragile one. You have broken wings and broken feet. You’ve always expected that I will place you on my back or carry you in my arms. I’ve carried you for so long; glued together just to make a move. The seams don’t fit right any more. I am weakening. Like the glue on a child’s macaroni art after twenty years, I am coming undone. Dry and brittle. Cracked and yellowed. 

I stop. I stop knowing how to worship the sacredness of your experience and understand the vitality and honor of my own. I begin to understand that the only thing that was worthy of worship, of sacredness, is myself. My loyalty shifts. Instead of sweeping up our pieces, I refuse to shatter.

“No. I won’t stay. You won’t be my end.”

        “You don’t love me.”

“Love is irrelevant.”

        “So, this is it.”

“This is it.”

To Her Door

It’s as if all hunger has subsided, and I am without home. It isn’t a place of permanence as I am not permanent. I feel this in my bones, settling slowly as my brain lets go and my body reacts. The keys rattle in the ignition as I brush past them and reach for the bag on the passenger seat. The bag is frayed and tattered and blends into the green upholstery of the old Chevy. I touch the edge, and sit quietly for a moment, rubbing the loose thread back and forth through my fingers. A sigh escapes through my pursed lips and the space between my eyebrows contracts in a wrinkle. I look up into the review mirror and see the reflection of someone I don’t recognize. Her hair is matted and greasy and cumulous clouds have formed under her eyes. I reach up to push a escaped strand of gray behind her right ear. It’s a thoughtless move void of intention and lacking grace.

I slowly reach toward the bag again, and grappled with the strap. It’s canvas edges form to my hand as I heft it onto my lap. For a moment, I’m reminded that this is a trip I’ve made before. I’ve sat outside of this house waiting to gather what I need before opening the truck door; my luggage, my courage, my husband. Now my luggage consists of this one bag with a few pairs of jeans, some clean underwear, and a boxy old laptop. My husband is gone, and with him my courage. Courage doesn’t exist any more; it’s something that only exists when there is fear to overcome. Resignation is the default when you have nowhere left to go and no one left to be.

I take the rusty pliers, repurposed for years until they are synonymous with the door handle they replaced, and pull open the truck door. Gingerly, I heft my body out the the truck and place my tattered shoes on the wet ground. I look at the house reluctantly. Where it was once a place I feared to go, now it is my only home; my sole refuge. The light blue paint is peeling off the old bricks and the tin roof rusts and sags under the weight of passing years. As I start up the short walk, the screen door begins to bang rhythmically, giving a beat to the silence in my head. 

A crumbing stoop has given birth to the gray concrete dust that settles over the dried weeds of summers past. My footprints become washed away by the gentle rain as I arrive at the door. Almost apologetically, I knock. The sound is quiet enough that she will not hear it if she is not in the front room. It is as if I am a reluctant solicitor and not the widowed wife of her beloved son. 

Story #9

Seed: "A mountain is the location, loyalty is the theme. A glass is an object that plays a part in the story."

This story is due on 11/25/2012 at 11:59PM.

Secret Keeper

This is late mostly because I had to finish it up while on the plane to San Francisco, and I've been without internet until just now. ~Ben
I sat in the den, staring at the words on the computer screen.
Coming over to the in-laws always meant that I had to help them with their computer. I worked for a software company as a marketer, and had made the classic mistake of saying that I was a computer guy. The combination of those two things meant that I was constantly being asked for help with the hundreds of small problems that crop up when technically inept people attempt to access the internet. I wasn't particularly good at it, nor was it really in my wheelhouse, but once you've fixed a single problem with someone's computer, you start getting held in higher regard, and that causes a ripple of recommendations and stories about your prowess that never really stop.
In this case, my mother-in-law Maude had been having problems connecting to her e-mail. She ran a small business selling dried-apple dolls over the internet, and so was quite frantic to get it working again - this was, in fact, nearly the entire reason we'd made the one hour drive to their house for dinner. It worked out well for me though, because fixing a computer problem was preferable to spending several hours talking to the in-laws. They were decent enough, but not people I would ever have chosen to spend more than a handful of minutes with if I weren't married to their daughter.
The fix was simple enough; Maude's Outlook settings were screwed up, and just needed to be set back to the defaults. It was the kind of problem that was utterly mystifying to me, because those settings don't just change themselves, but every time something like that happened I got adamant denials of wrongdoing from whoever's settings I had put right. It annoyed me to no end. After I fixed her e-mail, and saw it reconnect to the servers, and then my lack of morals get the better of me.
I've never been a particularly moral person. Most people think that I am, but that's just because I'm a low-risk kind of guy. I wouldn't ever steal one of the laptops my employer keeps in an unsecured cabinet, because if I got caught I would lose far more than the value of a laptop. I would never cheat on my wife for the pretty receptionist who makes conversation with me every day, because if I did my wife would divorce me. It's not a matter of being compelled not to do things, it's a matter of properly weighing the choices available to me and coming to the conclusion that being good is the correct strategy given the fundamentals. The problem was when I was presented with situations where the fundamentals dictated that I behave badly. If there is no chance of getting caught, and the immoral choice pays out better than the moral one, then I took the immoral choice. In this case, that meant snooping.
I'm an unrepentant snooper, mostly because no one has ever caught me at it. I love to look through things that I'm not supposed to see. My wife doesn't know it, but I have the password to her webmail account, and I check it at least once a week to see what she's been saying and to who. It's always totally innocuous, and if she'd given me ready access it would be boring, but there's a certain thrill that comes from reading something private, and for me that was reason enough to do it. Of course, I initially began snooping because of my deep-seated belief that everyone else is roughly as immoral as I am, which has created some trust issues in what I'm self-aware enough to recognize is a classic case of projection. But I've read her e-mails; either my wife is very good at hiding her tracks, and far smarter than me, or she really is just a much better person.
I had expected the same to be true of my mother-in-law. Maude was a boring person to talk to, and a boring person to be around. Her dried-apple doll business was what I would consider the pinnacle of things that are mildly interesting on the surface and then intensely boring as they get expanded on. I thought perhaps I would find some back and forths about bad reviews, or some details on how poorly the "business" was doing. I felt sure it was a money-sink funded by my father-in-law, but didn't want to be rude by asking outright. What I found instead were dozens of graphic e-mails to and from a secret lover.
It would be nice to be able to say that they were just sitting in the inbox, that they assaulted my eyes when I fixed things, but that would be a lie. Instead, I did my usual snooping method, which was to search through the archives looking for salacious words. I got a hit on my first try, which was "sex", found in the sentence "I wish I had my lips on your sex right now."
From there, I searched for the e-mail address of the sender, and was rewarded with a treasure-trove of correspondence  I read a few of them - incredibly graphic in detail, full of incriminating information - then quickly downloaded them all, e-mailed a copy to myself, and erased any trace that I'd done so. My heart was beating rapidly, and I nearly jumped when my wife called to see if I was ready for dinner.
Dinner would have been a nightmare if I were a more outgoing person, because then I would have had to keep up appearances. Instead, I stayed mostly quiet while my wife talked to her parents, save for a brief sit-rep that I gave on the computer problem. I watched with perked up ears while trying not to seem at all interested, but the air wasn't thick with double entendres or hidden meanings that would previously have escaped notice.
We got in our car and left soon after dinner was over, and I tried to roll my muscles and relax. While I listened to my wife talk about family news I'd missed while playing computer medic, a different part of me was running scenarios.
I like having secrets, especially secrets that I'm not supposed to have. However, I'm not a terribly good liar. It wouldn't be hard to pretend that I didn't know if no one ever brought it up, but the nightmare scenario went something like this: Maude gets found out, my wife's parents get a divorce, and she would ask me, "Can you believe that my mother would be cheat on my father?" And then I would have to pretend that I hadn't known. My wife would see right through me, and she would ask why I wasn't actually surprised, and then I would be faced with either escalating the lie and depending on my non-existent skill as an actor, or telling her that I had known about the affair for years.
"I think your mother is having an affair," I said softly, in order to save myself the possibility of hurting my marriage some years down the line.
"Oh?" asked my wife impassively, "What makes you think that?" I glanced away from the road and looked at her face, but it betrayed no emotion. I silently cursed myself for offering to drive, which meant that I couldn't study her closely.
"After I fixed her e-mail, I saw a message that sort of hinted at it," I could feel my hands sweating. As I've said, I'm not good at lying, so it was important to stick as close to the truth as possible. "It was asking when she would be alone again for a weekend."
My wife said nothing for a long time, so long that I wanted to fill the silence. I resisted - this was a well-known interrogation technique. Finally she let out a sigh and slammed her head back against the head rest.
"It's true," she said, speaking more to the air than to me. "He's a middle school teacher. It started a couple years back when dad was recovering from his surgery. She thinks she's being sneaky about it, but dad knows. He just doesn't say anything." I glanced over at my wife and saw a single tear racing down her cheek. "You must think I'm awful," she said.
"Why?" I asked, not having to fake my surprise.
"I've known for more than a year, and I kept it from you. I guess I just thought that if I didn't talk about it, then maybe it would't be happening. And I didn't want you to hate my mom like I do." I heard a sad sniffle from her. "I'm sorry, I should have said, should have talked about it with you."
"I know how you hate secrets," she said.
I drove on, trying not to laugh.

Story #8

Seed: "The mother in laws house is the location, honesty is the theme. A computer is an object that plays a part in the story."

This story is due November 15th at 11:59PM.