Shiny Stones

A piece of long-ish flash fiction which can also be read as a prologue to a more developed story…

Open car door. 

Sit behind wheel. 

Close car door. 

And, then, only then, pull on the gloves. 

Judith Ableton thanks God for these gloves - the gloves and her little afternoon ritual, Monday through Friday, 1:30 PM, sharp.

Pre-ritual, she hooks her purse and hugs it to her body. Gliding down the hallway, that’s when she starts counting the minutes, the time in-between each errand, each minute she’s out of the house, calculated and free. The practice is familiar, comforting even, in its tic-like way: the minutes until the school pick up, until the supermarket swells with other mothers, the minutes until she’s back home. She lets myelinated tumblers turn, adding and subtracting the moments. 

She does this all the while skipping down the stairs of her suburban split-level, stocking feet sinking into the mottled gray-green carpet. She pads her way to the garage in flesh-toned peds and slips into sensible heels. The garage smells of sheetrock and concrete, of oil dripped into misshapen splotches. Here and there. His and hers oil spots like his and hers bathroom sinks, black instead of powder baby blue. Her feet scrape against a thin layer of grit (scritch scritch scratch). “Nuh, nah, nah, nah …”, she intones as she step-ball-chains to the car, her skirt swinging out and in like a rung bell.  That soft-shoeing Shirley Temple has nothing on her. Not today.

Open car door. 

Sit behind wheel. 

Close car door. 

Pull on the gloves. 

“These are the gloves. The driving gloves I’d told you about…”, she said, kicking the front door shut with her foot with an irritated push. It was the tail end of November and it was a windy day. Wintery gusts kept blowing in brown, desiccated Sycamore leaves from the tree out front into the living room. A few crunch underfoot as she made her way back to the kitchen table. She’d hoped that Richard wouldn’t be around when the gloves arrived. But it hadn’t worked out that way in the end. So here she was having to explain it all to him. Her lips pulled back in a smile as she placed the package on the table between them. She unwound the brown paper once breaking the cellotape. It came off in one long continuous strip �" she didn’t expect this and stashed the paper off to the side. For the stamps, she said to no one in particular. She wanted the paper for the stamps.

“See…”, she said, lifting the gloves from a nest of tissue paper. 

They hung limp, deflated, like spent squash blossoms between her thumb and forefinger. Small holes dotted along the gloves’ fingers as if ravaged by some strange leather-eating caterpillars. These were hers, these Italian leather driving gloves, calf skin, smooth like the inside of her cheek and dyed a burnt butter brown. Ordered weeks ago, they were finally here, traveling half way across the globe. Oddly, this made all the sense in the world to her - the time, the distance and the waiting. She was always accustomed to counting time and waiting. Now, she was ready for distance.

When they’d met, the year after college (he, Columbia; she, Sarah Lawrence), Manhattan still held its glittery sparkle for them. Everything fresh and new, like Central Park after a soft spring rain. They wandered about the Met on their lunch breaks, weaving through the shadowy halls of the Egyptian wing, first holding hands, and then letting go, parting around murmurating v-shaped flocks of school children, linking hands once again. 

Their whispered conversations were like fevered dreams, heavy-lidded and swollen. They revolved around the future, but years later she realized they were about hope. Hope, that slippery thing you gripped with both hands, all the while swearing to anyone one who’d listen that you grasped nothing at all. They had so much of it, that stupid, youthful hope. So much that it ended up either tossed into the bin, or pressed, glacially-packed year after year, toward the back of their marital fridge. Emotional left-overs. In the end, she supposed, everything bows to time and pressure.

They wound their way to the sarcophagi and the backlit glowing glass cubes of artifacts with their mosaic necklaces of chipped stone, pendulous gold earrings, and bejeweled neck rests. She felt Richard’s fingers curl around her hand as they stood side-by-side. Each item had its own slender white card outlining the details of time and place in crisp Times New Roman. All this was entombed with them for their travels into eternity. Unbidden, the thought crept up her back and sat on her shoulders, slowly kneading its paws. Off to the right was a display of canopic jars. Each animal-headed jar was filled with the organs of some dead royal like a grotesque housewarming gift. Judith admired their completeness, the ancient Egyptians. Nothing was ever forgotten. Nothing was ever wasted. If they didn’t travel light - at the very least - they travelled prepared.

Judith peers through the windshield. So much stuff - the garden hose, the racks of tools, the bikes with their wobbly, rusting wheels. Her eyes drift over to the upended jars where Richard keeps the spare screws, nails and plugs, trapped and unmoving like long-dead houseflies. All this were the artifacts of her life. 

But back to the ritual. Some days, the car remains quiet. She just inserts the car key and listens to the keychain click, click, click against the plastic steering column. But on other days, she turns over the ignition. Today - it’s ignition on and the car rumbles into life. 

She glances over at her handbag and mutters a litany of its contents. Notebook, miserere mei. Wallet, miserere mei. Lipstick, multi-tool, miserere mei. 

That multi-tool, now that was hard to get. She’d practically begged, for it. And for more than a few Mother’s Days and assorted birthday always being fobbed off as silly. 

“Now, what if I got stuck in an elevator and I needed to pop open the hatch or something,” she’d said one evening, her eyes half-joking/half-flirting with Rich from behind a lipstick-rimmed wine glass. After that night, he had no excuse not to buy her one, he joked. And that year, the year she turned thirty-five, he pushed a pink ribboned gift box across the dining room table with his index finger. A flush of embarrassment spread across the starched whiteness of his cheeks like a splash of wine. The small gift card read in neat, measured script, “Happy birthday, Judy, the only woman I know who doesn’t want gold, or silk or shiny stones. I hope you enjoy this - I know you’ve been wanting one for a while. Love, Rich.” Warmth filled her belly as she pulled open the blade. 

But today is today and next to the handbag, a bundle of rope nests in a tight coil, its one frayed end probing the air with a forked nylon tongue, black and almost twitching. The garage door opener lays inside the coil like a guarded egg. 

Car exhaust swirls around the car, undulating in small, lazy eddies above the hood. She coughs and something cool and wet rolls over her right cheekbone stiffening the hairs on her neck. She flops the visor down and flips open the mirror, angling her head into its frame. A bright red droplet traces the ridge, oxidizing into a burnt ochre. She rubs it, spreading it into an obscene streak. She rubs over and over, before giving up altogether, and massaging it in like rouge. She does the other cheek to match. Her tongue rolls over her front teeth as she concentrates. Something tastes like cheap nickel-plated jewelry. 

Judith leans over and whacks the garage door remote with her fist. The gears grind and the door leaps up with a sudden jerk. Flicking on the headlights, she eases the car out of the garage. 

If some neighbor had been up early on April 18, 1987, a pre-dawn kind of early, coffee cup in hand, absentmindedly staring that sleepy, early morning stare out of his front picture window, he’d have seen Mrs. Richard Ableton of 218 Newman Street drift out of the garage in her Pontiac like some bleary-eyed dragon floating on a drift of smoke.

But no one did. So no one had. 

She idles the car down the driveway and onto the street. It rolls to the Stop sign at Newman and Maple, signals left, and then turns, disappearing into early morning stillness, swallowed up by history for the next twenty years. Swallowed up by history until the day Judith Ableton returned to 218 Newman. But as for me, no one ever hears from Mr. Richard Ableton ever again. 

Author's Note

I welcome constructive criticism...

Reviews

[Delmar Cooper]

I played with the discover feature and filtered for short story - any genre,no genre just a short story. So hello we meet. It is my great misfortune to read this after JayG has commented. His three hundred words over power my three, "I like this" pitiful Jay makes me feel pitiful.
I found the story to be compelling and orderly , to be symmetrical and to use the writerly tools of a short story writer. Crafty but not sneaky. Could it be shorter, pithier, punched up? Yeah it isn't strictly lean meat,but so what?
I am glad I discovered it and thank you for it.

[JayG]

Well...you did ask.

I have to give you credit for trying to be evocative and vivid. So, you’re using the writing tools you have to best effect. Unfortunately, they’re not the tools needed for fiction.

Step back and think about the writing skills you presently own, given you and refined by years of practice in school. What KIND of writing skills are we given there? Those of the Commercial Fiction Writing profession? Or, were they the nonfiction writing skills needed to write the reports, letters, and, other nonfiction applications that employers need from us?

Professions, universally, are acquired In ADDITION to the general skills of school.

One thing that’s getting in your way of seeing the problems is that you’re writing, and reading from the seat of someone who knows where we are in time and space, what’s going on, and whose skin we wear BEFORE they read, or type, the first word. So you know the exact tone and cadence to use as YOU read. You know the backstory that led to the opening scene. And you know the situation as the scene opens. The reader? Not a clue.

And because you know all that, you'll leave out things that seem obvious as you write, and never notice their lack as you edit. But...look at the opening as a reader must, knowing only what the words suggest, based on the reader’s life-experience.

• Her gloved hands encircle the steering wheel, fingers slipping into familiar grooves like a constrictor, knuckles aching as they push against the leather at ten and two o’clock.

You’re thinking visually in a medium that doesn't present pictures. Why would the reader care where an unknown female placed her hands on the steering wheel of an unknown car? Why waste words telling the reader what a steering wheel is held? Anything that doesn’t move the plot, develop character, or meaningfully set the scene, needs to be chopped, because it does nothing but slow the narrative.

• But before, everything before that, is immaterial.

It’s also unknown. And since we don’t know it, it’s already immaterial. In any case, it’s history. Always begin with story, not history.

• Judith is always lost.

I give up. Who’s Judith? And why doesn’t she have a map or cellphone?

Think about how is someone who has not even the assurance that this takes place on Planet Earth is to make an educated guess as to what lost means when applied to a female who could be 16 or 61, who lives in an unknown place, and is in the car for unknown reasons? You know. She knows. Others in the story know. Shouldn’t the one you wrote it for be in on the secret?

See the problem? You’re trying to TELL the reader a story. You, the storyteller, are alone on stage, talking TO the reader about things for which you supply no context, in a voice whos emotional content is unknown

And because that's true, the reader has a storyteller’s script, but no background, and no performance notes. In other words, you’ve fallen into the single most common trap for the hopeful writer — a trap invisible to you because for you, who begin reading with full context, it works. And since you’ll not address the problem you don’t see as being one, I thought you might want to know.

We leave school knowing we’re not ready to write a screenplay or work as a journalist, but the pros make fiction seem so easy and natural that we never apply that knowledge to fiction. But we must, because like any other profession, the skills and techniques of the Commercial Fiction Writing profession must be acquired.

Not good news, I know, but you have a LOT of company, and, it’s the reason the rejection rate is close to 99%. Of more importance, it's fixable. Add those missing skills to your toolbox, make them as intuitive and automatic to use as the skills you now use, and there you are.

And while that’s not an overnight fix or a simple list of “do this not that,” the learning is fun, and will answer the questions you didn’t know you should be asking. Added to that, you work when you have time, and at your own pace. There’s no pressure, and, no tests. And, the practice is doing exactly what you want to do: write. So, what’s not to love?

I’m vain enough to think that my articles and YouTube videos can provide an orientation, if that would help

But for the skills you’ll need, grab a copy of Dwight Swain’s, techniques of the Selling Writer, from the site linked to below. It's the best I've found to date at imparting and clarifying the "nuts-and-bolts" issues of creating a scene that will sing to the reader. And, it's free to read or download on the Internet Archive site linked to below.

https://archive.org/details/TechniquesOfTheSellingWriterCUsersvenkatmGoogleDrive4FilmMakingBsc_ChennaiFilmSchoolPractice_Others

I know this is pretty far from what you hoped to hear, but don’t let it throw you. Every successful writer once stood where you do. So hang in there, and keep on writing.

Jay Greenstein
Articles: https://jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/category/the-craft-of-writing/the-grumpy-old-writing-coach/
Videos: https://www.youtube.com/@jaygreenstein3334

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“Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader. Not the fact that it’s raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.”
~ E. L. Doctorow

[Davidgeo]

Don't listen this guy. He's been role playing as a unlicensed "writing coach" for years. He's not a real writer, all his work is self published and it's really bad. Taking advice from this a*****e is like taking advice on real estate investment from a homeless person.

[JayG]

I'm sorry about the troll. He's angry because I gave one of his sock-puppet accounts a critique, and he can't handle it.

He tried attacking me, and my writing, but I don't take him seriously.

Apparantly he's not smart enough to see that all you need do is click on his name to look at his account, and his writing. That will tell you how accurate his advice is.

And to get rid of his comments, you can click on the small x at the right, under his comments. But it's best to just go to his account and hit the Block Writer button on the top right.

Again, sorry. Unfortunately, the site is unmoderated, so it's vulnerable to the trolls..

[JayG]

Personally, I find I sleep better knowing that somewhere out there, a fool is obsessing over me. 😆

[Davidgeo]

For it's all about that pathetic online fantasy of yours. Tell yourself whatever you need to I guess. I hope you realize you are mostly talking to yourself with this BS... no one else cares. Enjoy that main charachter fantasy Jay. It's not pathetic at all.

[AG]

Thank you for your comments...I am revising the piece.