#coffeebreak: ellen’s kitchen
You know the deal. 10 minutes of writing against the image below. Post an excerpt of what you come up with in the comments at the bottom.
Ellen’s Kitchen, originally uploaded by laydee_sara.
No related posts.
You know the deal. 10 minutes of writing against the image below. Post an excerpt of what you come up with in the comments at the bottom.
Ellen’s Kitchen, originally uploaded by laydee_sara.
No related posts.
6 Comments
My mind went completely blank at this one, so I didn’t write as much as usual, and it’s a bit average.
sketch:
this has the kind of thoughts that i did with the strawberries prompt running through my brain, so id like to disconnet tfrom that, toherwies it’s going to end up being urban thingy agani. im thinking that i can displace this from what it might obviously be–a very depressing view of a darkeneed house and therefore something that a vet retireee or widow or both might have.
displace it into something different. a house found. a view found. assumed by some intruder. an intruder. no fuckit that’s the same as strawberries again. hrm. a sink, dishes complete the photograph is a moment. a contemplation. zen. not many dishes. a sink unused? a house unlived in. absence. curtains as veils.
write:
She has always hated doing the dishes. It is a childish hate, nurtured and touched with a faint obsessiveness now that she has grown into adulthood. He had always laughed at her descriptions of soapy water; like an oil slick, mucus, butter. She scrubs the imagined filth off her hands with a crumpled tea-towel and stands, paused, in a loop of memory. Him laughing at her even as he stuffed his hands into pink nylon gloves.
The window is open and the wind comes through, moving the threadbare curtain in waves against her cheek. She leans forward into its embrace; veiled against the world as she mourns.
This inspired today’s NaPoWriMo poem, so thanks!
Crystal Tips
when the last smear of ketchup is absorbed by the heel of the loaf, up he jumps
to do the dishes. he may only be eleven, but his parents raised him to know about
Chernobyl and Ethiopia and Rwanda, so they are not surprised by his willingness.
they know he knows about unfortunate children. they retire to the tv news.
he stacks the plates and rinses out the glasses, being sure to rattle them around
so his parents can hear. he’s a little early and needs to kill time so he rinses forks.
when he’s moves onto knives, she has appeared in next door’s window: sliver
of nut-pale belly, fingers wet with suds, nails painted bright as glitterballs.
she sways as she scrubs, moving to music he cannot hear through the double walls
between them. the gap between sill and blind is shoebox-sized, every wiggle
showing an inch more skin. if her midriff is nude then so must above and below,
he knows. rhinestones are glued along her cuticle, and he prays for reflections.
he crouches by the sink, hands immersed, to get a better angle. a breast’s curve,
smooth as a pool ball, dips below the blind. he drains the sink, throws crockery
onto the draining board, and pounds up the stairs. ‘he’s such a good boy,’
says his mother to his father. they kiss, soundtracked by headlines.
Hi Kirsty, thanks for taking part. I love your poem, particularly the images:
“sliver of nut-pale belly…” and “a breast’s curve,
smooth as a pool ball…”
Magnificent.
Mark.
Mrs Mason peered through her window, holding the lace curtain gingerly in her index finger and squinting a little, as though her snooping habits somehow less dubious by doing so.
Jared the gardener was bending over, head deep within the lavender bushes, tail end sticking up, offering Mrs Mason a view of a good half of his backside. Despite the closed window, Mrs Mason could hear the faint, breathy tune of Kate Bush’s Babooshka. He hadn’t struck her as a Kate Bush fan.
Mrs Mason carefully inched the window open so she could hear him a little better. She swore to herself as it got stuck, and pulled a little harder. With a jolt, it slid wide open with a bang, her arm gave way, knocking over the half-empty bottle of dishwashing liquid.
“Yikes!”
Yes, Mrs Mason was one of those rare creatures whose personalvocabulary included words such as ‘yikes’, ‘oh dear’ and ‘kerfuffle’. She threw herself down, and crouched behind the kitchen sink, holding her breath. The singing had stopped and outside was quiet, except for the wind pushing forcefully against the trees.
Heaven poured through the window. Yates, who had only begrudgingly shifted his corpulent body to the sink at the behest of his wife June, didn’t notice it. He was thinking about Survivor, which would be returning soon from an ad break. He could hear the television, but the words were not clear. He would never hear who was voted off the tribe.
He sighed.
Heaven pushed through the thin lace of the curtain straining through into infinitesimal spots of eternal goodness. Yates squirted more detergent into the water, then stuck a fat hand into the boiling water and swished it around. The heat struggled to filter through his skin. Yates pulled his hand out of the water, looked at its lobster-steamed appearance. Surely it should be hurting?
Heaven fell into the soapy water, cleaning dishes as it went. Yates picked up one of the heavenly plates, completely ignoring its pristine porcelain finish. The dirty dish rag only made marginal contact with the plate’s surface area. He placed it in the dish rack without looking.
Heaven creeped up Yates’ arm. Beneath his sagging skin his wasted muscle pushed up until his arm filled out like it had been when he was twenty years old. Heaven got into his blood stream. Warmth spread throughout his body and Yates smiled. He could hear Survivor.
Heaven ran through his heart.
June got up, switched the television off. She walked through the dining room and into the kitchen. Yates was lying on the floor, eyes open and crinkled at the edges. His grin was lopsided like a six year old with a bag of lollies.
The dishes were very clean.
Ellen’s Kitchen
Dishes stacked laboriously against the shadowed bleak backdrop. Murderous thoughts ravaged her logic stripped mind. Over and over like some kind of perverse groundhog day. The images of her lover so cruelly torn from her cycled through her head punctuated with images or blood, everywhere. These frozen moments gripped her in her state of darkness. They could not be shed, they could not be washed away like so many remnants of food clinging tenaciously to cracked and worn crockery.
Here in the throes of anger, the faces wear thin. Like coins passed between too many users, like the rattle of keys jangling into oblivion, the profile wears like the chasms of fingerprints, which reciprocate the entire process. Sometimes the soft wears down the hard, like water overcoming mountains, raking away pebbles, molecules, stripping just atoms away at a time, assiduously winning the war…
Have you been to Ellenback? This was her twisted mind, this was her kitchen, in constant need for maintenance, endless tirades of cleaning, an open wound that would never properly scar. She would not, and could never forget those screeching moments which changed her life and had worn it thin…
Author: Benjamin Sawon
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