entry of the month
Hey, creative peoples-- for some reason this community hasn't been having the kind of activity I like to see in a group. So, I'm here with the entry of the month. I'd be none the more happy to be proven wrong and see other entries in here, of course!
Anyway, a beginning of a chapter of Doughgirl:
No Blue Sea
The sight of the doughy flesh of her abdomen apalled her, as if it were an occurrence outside her body-as apalling to her as finding garbage strewn around the kitchen floor thanks to their oversized mutt who’d gotten into the trash can once again. And yet with the apalled feeling came also the feeling of resignation-- that this had happened again while she was looking away, that while she was in another room, her stomach had been gorging itself all on its own, never politely satiated.
Regardless, the seams of her jeans would not stretch another fraction of a millimeter and the zipper of her jeans gaped open resolutely.
Off came the jeans, on went the nylon spandexy underthing, today’s answer to the girdle. Back on went the jeans, and this time, with the dough punched down for the moment, the zipper complied. She pulled the waistband by the beltloops, shifted the material toward her hips a bit, and then barely noticed the discomfort.
Out of her pjs finally, some scant housework done, she felt she could boot up the computer now. It waited dutifully, incapable of anything without her keystrokes and plugins. It didn’t work late without letting her know. It didn’t dig into garbage cans when no one was looking. It didn't make insincere invitations or voice false concerns or fabricate excuses.
She looked up a book on Amazon.com… A bargain at $8.95! Her exuberance shifted to disappointment quickly. Don had become unbearably jealous watching her read "The Long Avenue". He got the same way when she was reading Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying", which had been procured from her old college friend Mike Sabress. It was excruciatingly annoying to her to be expected to live under the assumption that all her friends from now on must be girls. Or maybe he also wanted her to only read books written by females?
But she had quite a list she’d compiled recently of what books she should order next:
Carrie Fisher: The Best Awful
Margaret Atwood: Oryx and Crake
Yukio Mishima: The Sailor Who Fell from Grace from the Sea
Douglas Adams: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (well, now that the book was going to be a movie, she couldn’t very well put off reading it any longer... How would she be able to say: 'ohh, but the book was so much better!' )
Jonathan Ames: Wake Up Sir
Jeff Baum: To the Blue Sea (?)
Question mark because Don wouldn't be any more tolerant of her reading another book of Jeff’s just because she’d waited a few weeks.
In fact, the name Mike Sabress was still banished from their house. Was it worth it? Well, not that she'd been longing to fling the names of Mike Sabress, Matthew Prix, Ken Clancy, Jeff Baum, Jared Green, and Walter Hall in his face to rub his nose in something... It was like facing a territoriality she didn’t really understand. She could kind of grasp it from an outsider's perspective, like a sociologist reading about gangs, but it still wasn’t something she could subscribe to. Not that said opinion really mattered, because there it was in her house anyway, part of the foundation like poured cement.
Anyway, a beginning of a chapter of Doughgirl:
No Blue Sea
The sight of the doughy flesh of her abdomen apalled her, as if it were an occurrence outside her body-as apalling to her as finding garbage strewn around the kitchen floor thanks to their oversized mutt who’d gotten into the trash can once again. And yet with the apalled feeling came also the feeling of resignation-- that this had happened again while she was looking away, that while she was in another room, her stomach had been gorging itself all on its own, never politely satiated.
Regardless, the seams of her jeans would not stretch another fraction of a millimeter and the zipper of her jeans gaped open resolutely.
Off came the jeans, on went the nylon spandexy underthing, today’s answer to the girdle. Back on went the jeans, and this time, with the dough punched down for the moment, the zipper complied. She pulled the waistband by the beltloops, shifted the material toward her hips a bit, and then barely noticed the discomfort.
Out of her pjs finally, some scant housework done, she felt she could boot up the computer now. It waited dutifully, incapable of anything without her keystrokes and plugins. It didn’t work late without letting her know. It didn’t dig into garbage cans when no one was looking. It didn't make insincere invitations or voice false concerns or fabricate excuses.
She looked up a book on Amazon.com… A bargain at $8.95! Her exuberance shifted to disappointment quickly. Don had become unbearably jealous watching her read "The Long Avenue". He got the same way when she was reading Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying", which had been procured from her old college friend Mike Sabress. It was excruciatingly annoying to her to be expected to live under the assumption that all her friends from now on must be girls. Or maybe he also wanted her to only read books written by females?
But she had quite a list she’d compiled recently of what books she should order next:
Carrie Fisher: The Best Awful
Margaret Atwood: Oryx and Crake
Yukio Mishima: The Sailor Who Fell from Grace from the Sea
Douglas Adams: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (well, now that the book was going to be a movie, she couldn’t very well put off reading it any longer... How would she be able to say: 'ohh, but the book was so much better!' )
Jonathan Ames: Wake Up Sir
Jeff Baum: To the Blue Sea (?)
Question mark because Don wouldn't be any more tolerant of her reading another book of Jeff’s just because she’d waited a few weeks.
In fact, the name Mike Sabress was still banished from their house. Was it worth it? Well, not that she'd been longing to fling the names of Mike Sabress, Matthew Prix, Ken Clancy, Jeff Baum, Jared Green, and Walter Hall in his face to rub his nose in something... It was like facing a territoriality she didn’t really understand. She could kind of grasp it from an outsider's perspective, like a sociologist reading about gangs, but it still wasn’t something she could subscribe to. Not that said opinion really mattered, because there it was in her house anyway, part of the foundation like poured cement.