Something about the coziness of a sleeping cat is sacred
And must not be disturbed.
They get miffed if you have the gall to wake them up,
Because they know the natural order of things.
I can wake a human with cold conscience
But a cat?
Curled into a warm ball,
Melted into my lap,
With an upturned happy little cat smile.
Impossible.
I’ll just have to stay here forever.
Nothing is as important
As letting the cat sleep.
I don’t like romance novels. It’s the one genre I despise. I like a good romance, but not the formula Harlequin stuff. Boring. Easy.
I thought, well, if I’m so cocky, if love stories are so easy, then write one. So… I tried.
Enjoy the failure.
Daymond looked through the slats of his blinds at the neighbor across the street. She was walking around without a shirt again. Didn’t she think anyone could see her? He turned away. But even after he went to sleep, the image of her followed him into his dreams.
The doorbell rang. Ugh, it was early. He dragged himself from bed, bleary-eyed, pathetic, and answered the door in just his tattered pajama pants.
It was her.
He scooched his lower half behind the door to hide his shameful attire. He always took care in how he dressed, doubly so around her. The pants were an embarrassment.
“Good morning,” he said.
“Good morning, and merry Christmas!” she said, her bright morning energy entering his brain through his eyeballs and burning a channel straight to the back of his skull.
She handed him a bag of cookies tied off with a bow. Cute. Distressingly colorful. Dear God what time was it. He stared at the bag and tried to remember what the etiquette was, was it even Christmas? What planet was this again?
“Ah, I’m sorry,” she said, her face falling. “Did I wake you up?”
“Huh? Oh, y…yes… no. It’s fine, I was just getting up anyway.”
“I’ll let you get dressed then. Sorry!”
She gave him another blinding smile and trotted back to her house.
Get dressed?
She thought he’d answered the door nude? She had the gall to treat him like HE was the nudist? He would burn those pants as soon as possible. They were ten times more mortifying than he’d originally thought.
He shut the door and put the cookies on the kitchen table. Cinnamon and ginger fragrance eked through the cellophane. They were so cute.
He reran the conversation in his mind… he’d forgotten to thank her. How rude he’d been!
He cleaned himself up properly, took his time. Showered, shaved, brushed, put on one of his nicer shirts. She wouldn’t think him a scruffy nudist after this.
Knocking on her door was scarier than he’d expected.
“Just a minute!” She called through the door.
When she did answer, she was dripping wet, in a towel. Just out of the shower. She smelled like coconut and jasmine. The towel was only barely big enough to cover her generous assets.
“I, uh… sorry, was this a bad time?”
“Not at all!” She replied. She looked genuinely happy to see him.
Her breasts were smashed into perfect cleavage under the weight of her arm. Her legs were so long, so long, and they ran all the way up to the edge of the towel… oh dear God. He was getting a little too happy to see her, as well. Why was she always parading like this? Wasn’t she cold? Didn’t she realize what she was doing??
“Thank you. For the cookies! I realized I’d forgotten to say thank you.”
Don’t look down, don’t draw attention to it, hold her gaze. He had to get out of here quick before she noticed. At least his pants were the loose kind. But what was that draft?
She noticed. Her jaw dropped.
The draft… he looked down. He’d neglected to zip his fly. All that care in dressing and he’d left his zipper open. Or maybe it’d come down as he walked?
But that wasn’t the worst of it. Mr. Happy had poked his head out and wanted to thank her, too.
His face bright red, he hastily tucked it all back in and down and zipped everything into place. But the damage had been done.
“That was an accident, I swear! I didn’t know…” what? That his fly was open? That she’d answer the door in full sex kitten mode?
He choked on his words. Never again could he talk to her. He couldn’t even look her in the eye. He was going to be her #MeToo story forever.
In shame he fled her front porch and hurried back to his house.
“Wait!” She called.
To his horror, she ran out of the door after him in her towel. Everything bounced.
“Wait!” She caught up to him in the middle of the street. “It’s not a big deal, really.”
She got off on it. The sexual power. What else could explain her behavior?
He still couldn’t look at her.
“Did you try the cookies?” She asked. Was she actually trying to start a new conversation?
“Um, not yet… they smelled good. Listen, you’re not dressed, don’t you want to go inside?”
She looked confused. “Oh, I have a towel on, it’s fine. I just didn’t want you to leave like that.”
“You don’t think I’m some kind of pervert?”
She beamed another one of her smiles at him. “I haven’t decided yet.”
“Oookay. I’m going home now. Nice knowing you.”
“Wait?”
“What FOR?” That came out harsher than he’d intended, but this was torture.
“Come back into my house. Try a cookie.”
“Wait… you are the pervert here? You’ve been trying to seduce me all along!”
“There are cookies at my house…”
She grabbed him by his shirt front and led him back into her house. He was never heard from again.
Well, I don’t know much but I know that’s not love. A distinct lack of sweetness, haha. Awkward boners tend to overwhelm a romance. Well, I’ll just have to keep trying until I get one right. Let that be a lesson to me.
I still don’t like dime romance novels though.
Double up on armloads of toilet paper,
It’s time for the post Christmas toilet ceremony!
We’ll all rush to our separate homes
Get naked
Sit on our toilets
And void our regrets.
Some kind of a weird noir parody. Best read with a sleazy saxophone solo playing in the background, because that’s how it got written.
I can feel this seedy bar etching itself into the backs of my eyelids. Once you’ve been in a bar like this, you can never really leave. Smoke from the lungs of a hundred scumbags saturates your soul, and then it seeps out of your pores for the rest of your life. It doesn’t matter how clean you get or how freshly pressed your suit; good honest folks can still smell it, and wrinkle their noses when you walk by.
She knew I was looking her way. Animals like her have a sixth sense for these things.
Well, I tried not to think about it. But then she sidles on over to me and starts purring like a kitten.
“Buy me a drink,” she says.
“Baby,” I says, “I’ll buy a dame like you a whole bottle.”
So we get to talking. Turns out she’s from Maine. Land of the lobsters, I say. She says nobody talks like that and I don’t know jack shit about Maine.
As we talk I get to studying her face. You can read some faces just like a book. Where they’ve been, what they’ve seen. Behind those velvet eyes lay a Pandora’s box of trouble. She’d seen more than most, lost more. She had a low speaking voice, the kind you had to really listen to hear. And a slow motion walk, like she carried in her hips the watery swells of the great lakes. Maine. Nobody ever leaves Maine. It’s too good there.
She tells me she’s been shopping, that she bought a new purse. That the strap broke today. She looks at me with those deep black eyes and my heart split into twenty pieces of silver.
“I’ll fix your purse, sweetheart,” I says to her. And I stretch out my hand.
She hands me the purse. Charming the way she tied it together. A perfect square knot, not a loose strap of leather anywhere. An organized woman.
Yeah, I offered to fix her purse. But I wasn’t playing straight with her. I didn’t know the first thing about sewing. But I knew something about knots. I knew about tight places. Ah, she had a dress on so tight, it could strangle a python.
I sneak myself a peek into her purse and I see a shiny wallet, a set of keys, lipstick, eyeshadow, mascara, and $300 in cold hard cash.
Yeah, I’m a lousy guy, and I love a beautiful woman with sad eyes, but I ain’t a sucker. I tell you she had a contact list in her phone that was a mile long, all of them Johns.
“Sweetheart,” I says. “It’s been a pleasure. I’ll fix this for you in a jiffy, just gotta run to the car.”
She looked kinda troubled when I said that. “Wait,” she says.
I get up and I move fast. She’s got too much of the Great Lakes in her, those rolly hips balanced on high heels couldn’t get any speed. She says something at my back, I think it was, “he’s got my purse! You son of a bitch!”
A couple of heroes try to stop me but I hit em right where their weight settled and knock em down.
Yeah. I am a son of a bitch. I’m a fast son of a bitch. And no one will ever catch up to me.
I made a choice that night. Sometimes, when I’m in bed, my thoughts come sneaking in through the crack of light under the door. I close my eyes and I see the bar again, and I see the girl from Maine with the velvet eyes. And when I look at the tattoo those three hundred dollars got me, I wonder if it was all worth it. A Woody Woodpecker caricature lasts a long time in ink. But a kiss from a woman like that, maybe that’s what forever tastes like.
At 5:30 Sunday morning, I awoke to the sound of Satan himself breaking into the bedroom. Kato kitty had seen another cat outside the window, which lent him evil feelings, put a crack in his pure soul, and allowed the devil to possess him.
I’m not sure what exactly I heard but I actually woke up screaming. I’m not an easy girl to scare but oh my god he got me good, and whatever I felt, Don felt it times three. Needless to say, he wasn’t allowed to haunt the bedroom anymore; he was liable to eat any one of us in this state. I got him in the kitty equivalent of a full Nelson put him in the garage until the possession had passed.
What is it about a kitchen.
Warm and cozy
Oven on
Skillet toasting
The smell of butter and onions
Or homemade bread
Or chocolate chip cookies
Puts its arm around your shoulders
And plants a warm kiss on your cheek.
The kitchen chairs are rarely the most comfortable
But it doesn’t matter
Everyone is too happy to care.
Talking, tasting, drinking, joking
Home is where the hostess is.
Sarah D. Silvey 