Dear One Night Stand in Philadelphia Whose Name I have now Long Forgotten,

So… what’s up?

I know it’s been awhile since we last spoke.  Twenty years this October to be exact. Not real sure if you remember me or not. That kid from the nightclub tripping his balls off on two hits of acid he bought from some skinhead he met down on South Street. You found me somehow in the crowded dark, shivering and sweating and preternaturally grinning over on the corner of the dance floor. Apparently I was making quite the scene as a one-man mosh pit. Security was ready to bounce me from the club to let me take my chances with cold hard reality. Then you appeared out of nowhere. Interjected upon my behalf to the powers that be. Vouchsafed my presence and swore to reign me in under the aegis of your attention. All smiles and night life diplomacy you bought me safe passage for those next crucial hours that passed.

Remember?

How you took my arm and whisked me off to a quiet, well quiet-ish, section of the club. Found us an old beaten up couch to sink into. Bought me round after round of orange juice. Proceeded to talking me down from the vertiginous peaks of my trip. You guided me gently through ontological fireworks and navigated me skillfully through an existential mine field. I told you everything. How this was my last night in the Navy. How I got kicked out of the service, stripped of my G.I. Bill and ended up shaming the family name. How I was attempting now to atone by ritualistically sacrificing my ego on a ceremonial pyre of LSD.

Do you remember what you said then?

“Yeah…  how’s that working out for you?”

And because you were immaculately woven in black, your moon white face seemed to float disembodied beside mine and I looked over into your bright eyes and without a word you allowed me to kiss you. The longest kiss of my life. For when we pulled back out the lights to the club were on, the crowd had thinned to a few strays taking final sipping off their last call rounds and the frantic hustle of the staff  trying to shepherd them out. Laughing, we made our way to your car. We drove til dawn around the city listening to Clock DVA on your car stereo. You pulled over into a deserted parking lot a mile away from the base. I began to shiver again and you pressed a finger to my lips before I could say something stupid and simply said – ‘yes’.

Later, you gave me your name and your number. Both of which, to my enduring shame and regret, I must confess to having lost. In hindsight it was one of the greatest mistakes I had ever made, though time would certainly prove it to not be my last. I won’t bore you with what happened next. The drugs and broken hearts. The hungry adventures and close brushes with happy endings. The drinks and the drudgery and the miracle of the friends you meet in between. The truth is my life was probably just like yours, just like anyone’s really. Maybe not on the surface, maybe not in the details where the devil dwells. But there in the collective depths we all share. In the end I believe that over the years, we both did our best to make the most of the chances we had blown and the hopes we had betrayed for new ones.

Or so I like to think when I’m getting nostalgic at three in the morning.

Anyway, I really hope this letter finds you just as kind, just as beautiful and just as funny as you were when we departed from that final and only night we shared together. But to be honest, I’d be grateful enough if it ever found you at all.

Yours Sincerely,

That Kid Tripping His Balls Off at the Night Club

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Rob Mosca is the author of High Midnight.

There was laughter, but it was barking and humorless.  She hadn’t opened her eyes.  She had lost that ability a while ago.  Her breath was slowing even though she was fighting it as much as she could.  The voices were helping to keep her conscious. She could feel her mind wanting to just let go and give in.  It kept trying to wander over her memories, but she would be damned before she let it.

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Ann-Ruffin Minarik makes money by keeping track of mundane objects and providing places to sit for rich, important people.  This is worth it because occasionally she witnesses car wrecks and explosions.

This was a response to the 100 Word Prompt.

An Open Letter to the Man who Ruined it for all Mankind

Dear tenth grade English teacher,

Yes, I admit that I had a huge crush on you when I was 15. Sure, I used to arrive late to class just to receive detention. Alright, what turned me on the most wasn’t your bald head, your beer belly, or your average height; it was your knowledge and love for all things literature. You had me at Clockwork Orange.

But that is where the fantasy ended. I enjoyed talking book porn with someone who read more than just the Cliff Notes version of all the greats. The attention and perfect grades you gave were flattering. I enjoyed the jealousy laid upon me by other students and basked in your acceptance.

Maybe I flipped my hair just a few too many times or giggled just a little too long at your silly jokes. What I do know for sure is that after graduation, I never saw you again. I left the town where I grew up; planning never to return and you became a punch line to all my Mrs. Robinson styled jokes.

Due to unusual circumstances, years and many states lived in later, I returned to the scene of the never happened crime. When I saw you at the bar and politely came up to say hello, the nice thing would have been to say, “Oh hey Caroline, I’ve been good, and you?” This is how adults speak in public. We do not make confessions of things that should stay secret. So since you didn’t follow this etiquette, you felt the need to blurt out, “If I knew I was going to see you again, I would have never gotten married.”

This is a very heavy thing to put on a girl. I was expecting a few awkward pleasantries, not a look on your face that mirrored Scrooges reaction to his ghost of Christmas past. What scared me the most wasn’t that I was your torch song, but that you, in one hasty sentence, ruined it for all mankind. I had still held onto the hopes that all men were like my father: kind, honest, a little corny, but faithful.

And then you came along with your lofty proclamations and your presumptions. I don’t think your wife would appreciate you forcing your mouth upon mine in the dark hallway that lead to the restrooms. Okay, maybe I let it linger a little too long, but after a couple tequila shots reactions are slow. And I still stand by my own statement of the night, “I will not be your Lolita!”

Against my better judgment, I resisted the urge to find a way to contact your wife and tell her to run as fast as she could. Maybe your inappropriate advances didn’t affect your life but they forced me to question every man I date. Does he have a child bride that he can’t get out of his delusional mind? Is he constantly thinking of the one that got away when he is with me? Will he get drunk and facially assault a cute vulnerable blonde when all she wants to do is tinkle? These are all things that ring through my mind on first dates and beyond. Because of you, I have now become just another girl with trust issues. Thanks a lot. Not only did you teach me to read voraciously but you also taught me to be leery of men looking for an interesting tale of their very own.

Now when boyfriends complain about my jealousy issues, I have a legitimate excuse for my behavior. I can confidently say, “I’m very sorry, it’s part of my post traumatic confession syndrome.”

Definitely not sincerely yours,

Caroline Huftalen

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Caroline Huftalen, a writing M.F.A. candidate at SCAD Atlanta, holds a B.A. in English and theater performance and understands that she is spending lots of money on yet another degree that won’t return any favors. Please, pity her parents for producing a dreamer. Her weekly column can be read atwww.scadconnector.com. 

I am holding his hand, four months pregnant with his second daughter.  And they are explaining to me why they couldn’t revive his heart.  They are trying to tell me that chemotherapy drugs, or more aptly, the toxin that cancer cells spit while they are dying, turns the heart tissues into jelly.

Rewind six weeks to Christmas 2010.  He offers me a gift.  A small box.  We were never married you see.  Too hip to be square.  Too forward thinking to be tethered.  Our stand was to tell the world that our love was enough to keep us loyal, to keep us “US”. And it was.  But tell that to social security.  It’s a check you can’t cash.  It bounces all the way to the grave, where I was stood up.  With a promise ring on my finger.

What a gift it was.  A Turkish puzzle ring that he had dropped on its way to me, and disassembled.  It was in a small box, with a big, long letter, telling me with certainty that we are IT for him.  Telling me how if anyone can put the ring together, like I put our family together, he knows I can.  He was right.  Just as I plucked him up out of his “it isn’t going to happen for me” celibacy and named him head of household, head of my heart and my bed, I had that ring woven poetically around my finger within the first hour of Christmas night.  Four independent bands of silver that fit together just so.  Like our family of four… with another one growing in my belly.

Botched promise?  Yes.  But anyone who promises a person forever is promising into the illusory void that forever is something we skin bags can ever sidle up next to and call our pal.  We carry “temporary” in our carbon footprints. Every promise shared between lovers is a puff of sunshine up the tailpipe of the inevitable.  Every relationship ends in death.  It might be a death of emotion, of commitment, or of the skin bag itself.  But it is finite.

What to do with that conundrum.  What to do.  My heart, bursts with love for people every day.  My little giggling chaos agents, I lovingly call offspring, prod me to give up the good hearty gooey mommy love, even when the stink of death is on the other side of every bedtime hug.  A woman stoops to pick up her scarf, blown free by the rushing wind, and I catch a glimpse of the back of her knee, where the pink creases show. I LOVE that square inch of skin. Some granola eating clerk calls me beautiful in the health food store, as I am singing a song with a three year old who has the sniffles, and my heart turns to jelly.  It cannot be saved from the LOVE… gurgling up out of my belly like the persistent spring that never runs dry.  And just like water, it cleanses me, enlivens me, and buoys me away from the gravel bottom of this human existence, carries me down down down to the source, where I remember what INFINITE actually is.

Oh, and for my winnings?  I don’t want a break up song.  I want a pick up song for a 36 year old widow with three children under the age of seven.  Gauntlet thrown.

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After 36 years in the playing field of life, Dawn Rush arrives on the Atlanta writers scene with volumes of work yet to be released. An uncommonly blithe widow with three children under age 7, she is a farmer, potter and entrepreneur, and in her free time she writes and sleeps… sometimes simultaneously.

Rogue writing. Nervy journalism. The silver screen. Rawk and !@#$ing roll. Do you dare go to the place these worlds collide?

Sure you do. See ya April 20th at Kavarna.

The night’s readers-!

Susan Rebecca WHITE
Jason MALLORY
Myke JOHNS

See you there.

Want more? Go here:
http://truestoryga.blogspot.com/

Write:
truestoryga@gmail.com

Tuesday, March 27, Viceroy visited Overlord Ian Belknap and the Original WRITE CLUB crew at the Hideout in Chicago, IL. He took to the stage that night against the Overlord, who triumphed (albeit by a razor-thin margin.) The crowd was lively, the bartender pleasantly surly, and the weather was unusually warm for that time of year. There was booze. After two intimidating bouts, Viceroy and Overlord took to the stage, exchanged words, and played rock, paper, scissors to see who would go first. It was Viceroy. 

The following are the fruits of his labor.

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Part One: Mr. Kramer’s Neighborhood.

Mr. Kramer kept to himself.

His grass was impeccably trimmed. Every Saturday morning and wednesday evening, from late March through early October he was out there, trimming and hauling. And in slacks! So fancy.

I went inside of his home once, when his grandson was in town, and invited me over for dinner: Chicken, rice, broccoli. A large glass of cold milk. There was not a speck of dust in his home. His couches were covered in plastic. A relic, I’d guessed, of the long and dearly departed Mrs. Kramer.  It smelled vaguely of ammonium cleaners, and everything had an unnatural sparkle. At the age of nine, I was awed by Mr. Kramer’s obsessive nature.

Everything like clockwork. He left for work at exactly 8 a.m. Every tuesday, his garbage was on the curb at 7:53a.m. Exactly. I know, because I paid attention. Close enough attention that I alone noticed when his Rubbermaid 9W27 Brute Rollout Container with Lid (and a 50-gallon capacity!) leaked a strange red liquid onto his pressure washed driveway one morning.

And so I was the only resident of Rock Shadow Court who was unsuprised when the news of Mr. Kramer’s transgressions rocked the world. Mr. Kramer, you see, had murdered eight college-aged girls across six Georgia counties, destroying the lives of countless friends and family in the process. Insane from sorrow, the father of one of the victims snuck into Kramer’s empty house in the middle of the night and burned it down. The man was found naked in the once-manicured front yard, weeping, watching the inferno. No charges were pressed.

When the news media flocked into the neighborhood, our lives too were thrown into chaos. When I was cornered by a particularly unscrupulous reporter and asked what I knew about Mr. Kramer, all I could initially think to say was: “He sort of kept to himself,” but then, as an afterthought, I added, “and he was so tidy.”

Part Two: Ghosts of the Abyss.

In a world devoid of destruction, every song is a love song. Every text a description of sunlight. Every film a twee indie darling.

The following are excerpts from chapter sixteen of the fifth edition of Roger Ebert’s Big Book of Film (2011), chronicling the films of the lesser-known American auteur, one James Cameron:

Ebert writes: “Of all of Cameron’s meditative masterpieces, three stand out:

“1. THE INITIATOR (1984): Sarah Connor waits tables. She floats through life, never connecting with the myriad of faceless strangers that populate her diner. At night, she reads travel books, yearning for the far-off adventures that she knows she cannot have. Finally, at the age of 35, she decides that it’s time for a change. Life, she decides, is elsewhere, and so she embarks on her own journey: She goes back to school, and in two years, becomes a paralegal. On August 29, 1997, at 2:14 a.m., Sarah Connor rises from the couch, and makes a sandwich.

“2. THE BALLAD OF JACK DAWSON (1997): On Wednesday, the 17th of April, 1912, the Titanic arrives in New York Harbor. Looking over the cityscape, our heroine, Rose, realizes that she must gently tell Jack Dawson that she can no longer see him. Nothing is lost forever, she says, and she goes on to to marry Billy Zane. She thinks back on Jack fondly in the coming years, frequently staring off into the middle distance as only the fabulously wealthy can. She fingers her giant blue diamond and chuckles to herself. He’s probably dead in a coal mine somewhere. Luck of the Irish!

“3. THE HEIGHTS OF PANDORA (2009): Another world has been discovered! And what’s more, a precious, difficult-to-mine fuel source, cleverly named “Unobtainium,” has been found on the surface of this beautiful, wild place. And so mankind decides to lay down a colony, and begin strip mining. That is, until the Na’vi, a species of tall, blue supermodels, asks them politely not to. “Oh, shit, our bad,” say the humans, “we didn’t know you were here. Sorry to intrude!” And they get on their ships, and head back home, content to know that they didn’t burden that lovely race. For better or worse, no human ever rides a tiger-dragon, or has follicle intercourse with those sexy, sexy bastards.”

Ebert goes on to write: “It is a shame that Cameron cannot break into the mainstream of American cinema! I have been loyally following his career since his heartwarming buddy-comedy, Aliens.”

Part Three: “Appetite for Destruction.”

In the basest sense, we are all made from the matter of things long destroyed: our dust is the dust of ancient stars, and though our minds feebly cling to the false stasis of the present, the atoms that make us vibrate with the deep desire for constant change, and await the time that they are set free to float across the universe to their next destination.

What gives our lives inherent value is the fact that one day, these corporeal forms will be no more. It creates an immediacy to life; love means more, because we know- on an atomic level- that it is fleeting.

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The charred remains of Mr. Kramer’s home were bulldozed the winter after his conviction. The neighborhood association, the bank, the families of the victims held countless meetings about how to best utilize the lot. The idea of a marker memorializing the eight lost girls was voted against, the majority finding it tone-deaf. The reclamation of the land as a public recreation space was deemed equally distasteful.

In the end, nobody would make a decision, and so nature made the decision for us. Over the following years, the weeds overtook Kramer’s property. And Kramer died in prison in 1996, aged 80. There was no funeral.

And, as old denizens of the neighborhood moved away, the meaning of that cursed space was destroyed, for better or worse, relegated to the history books, to the tell-all true crime novels, to the dust bin.

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Nicholas Tecosky is the Host and Viceroy of WRITE CLUB Atlanta. If you’re so inclined, you can follow His Grand Bitchiness on Twitter: @nikotrosky.

“Why are you so shy?” I asked her, my hands in my face.
“I’m not,” she said, “I just can never read you.”
“That’s silly.” I stopped and started again, after my initial alarm. “Maybe we’re just slightly off from each other.”
“Maybe so.”
“Watch.” I said. And I placed my hands on top of hers, and I could feel her pulsing; steady, loyally. I looked into her face as if to say, “There you are.”
But then she wasn’t. She was in another zone, some distance further than I could reach, and I would only come in second, this time.

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The entity known as The Official Write Club Time Keeper of Time likes time, timing, seconds, minutes, and hours. Though he takes part in every show, it can safely be said that he does not actually work for WRITE CLUB Atlanta. He is his own clock.

Nice. Gotta love a loophole. Wait… that didn’t really say anything
at all. Crap, I’ve already started? These words count? Fuck!

Okay, think, McClain, think. You can do this. You’re a writer. Sorta.
Okay, not really. You haven’t written since college. Why? What made
you take the easier path?

Was it her?

Newspapers called you away. A steady paycheck. “Safe.” “Stable”. Ten
years you’ve edited other people’s mistakes, but you are terrified to
make your own. So you just stopped trying. Stopped trying to create.
To expose yourself.

Why are you so scared?

Four words left. But I’m not ready-

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Ian McClain Shelton is a newspaper designer and copy editor — for
now. He’s not at all sure what he wants to be when he grows up.