Back in my office again, I stare down at my fingers on the keyboard. Those fingers poised over the home keys, stiff and posed like a mannequin’s. No words, no thoughts, no nothing.
I spin in my chair. There is clean laundry to be sorted on my futon, and that nearly finished baby blanket for Joan’s kid. Dirty laundry waits for me in the hall. Old scratched hardwood floors, stuffed bookshelves with books and magazines, paint thinner, brushes and spools of brightly colored ribbon scream out at me every inch of the overladen wooden shelves. Small family photos and large movie posters jostle each other on walls. The large Victorian windows look down on me pityingly. I love my office.
I remember after college I went to Paris with a notepad. And every street was a picture postcard. And I wrote all day in cafés. And I went to a bookstore once crammed with overstuffed bookshelves and book carts and the elderly shop owner asked, “You must be a writer. Would you join me for tea?” I remember that cellophane-wrapped day.
I return to my motionless fingers. Maybe I should try to a write in the backyard.
twisted short short fiction & poetry
circularstaircase 