Writing Spaces

Remembered from less wintery days . . .






image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Table in the Garden

Mind Games

“Mind your Ps and Qs,” Aunt Verna often lectured Virginia.

Virginia reasonably assumed that meant green peas, pool cues.

By nature suggestible, she studied horticulture, cultivated peas.

Without a green thumb, her efforts failed.

She then espoused a pool shark.

Who ran off to Missoula.

Vera snorted upon learning.

“Ps, idiot—Qs!”

Virginia did.

Mind.

—Christie

Publication News

Please visit Literal Latté, to read and comment on my two short-short stories (Swallows and Moss) which have won their 2011 award.

I'm pleased to be championing a new genre, which I think I'd like to christen the amuse-bouche of fiction.  Enough darkness, already!  Time to lift the gloom and doom.

—Christie

 

Writing Spaces

Writing on Windows 

Eggs

You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, Maman decreed.  But fastidious Marie couldn’t abide egg slime, egg goo.  She despaired of finding love in omelette-loving Saint-Yrieix-la-Perche. 

She moved to England; hard-boiled her eggs.

But it was cold there, unfriendly.  She pined; moved home again. 

Made pilgrimage to Lourdes. 

And met Benoit.

Another outcast.

Vegan.




—Christie

Writing Spaces

image:  Nabokov's butterflies 

Natural History

Four-year-old Todd espies the uncaged dinosaur looming suddenly over him.  The massive jaws swing open just beyond his head.  He screams and screams, petrified in his tracks.

He feels a massive desolation overcome him.  Then sobs, intuiting a mother’s grief.  Too awful, being torn apart.
  

But whose loss—hers?

She swoops down. 

Nuzzles him. 

Sweetly.

—Christie

(after a day at the Field Museum)