So my creative writing class also has the policy of writing little snippets of whatever for at least like 20 minutes five days a week. Just gonna share what I've written. Hooray for writing all the time!
9/22
The netting on the tea bag is so fine it disappears in the tea-color water. I worry that fannings have made their escape through heat tears or stem punctures, but when the tea bag sways they sway with it. This is my second time brewing this bag. It's not that I'm thrifty or lazy or even grateful for the tea's flavor-life. It's just fun to watch the leaves breathe and curl, flutter in their little cage, lilt across each other. When they sink and give up, I know it's time to relieve them of their service and toss them out. I know when to let the useless sleep. They want to be working as much as I do.
I stop writing and bounce the bag.
I start writing again, tugging the string and lifting the bag out of the water with my free hand. It spins around and slouches like a marionette. When I drop the bag back in, not ready to remove it, it eases itself into the hot water, floating at first, and then slipping away before it presses up against the bottom. The boiling water is still hot, and the steam licks my palm as I hover it over the lip of the cup.
And now it's time. The netting holds some of the water for a moment as it suspends in the air, and then it releases it all.
9/24
My grandfather had a Buick Park Avenue phase for about thirty years. I was born in the middle of it, his third reincarnation, as he called it, for he loved referencing time with his sedan armada. Somewhere around the time of this model, a champagne 1991 with a leather faux hatchback, we were driving into town, like the big city Minneapolis was supposed to be. The next car he would buy would be the one I drive now, but that hadn't happened yet.
My grandfather was a two-foot driver, one on the gas pedal, the other slowly eroding the brakes. This is how he drove; it was like a washing machine, and it knotted my insides up too. I would puke, but that hadn't happened yet.
And my grandfather still smoked, his breath and teeth pushing bits of tar and ash when he spoke loudly, because he believed a World War Two veteran was too exalted for a hearing aid. This smell, incubated and recycled by the rolled-up windows, sent my stomach over the edge.
I had lied down in the back seat on the blue leather, and so when I projectile-vomited it all rained back down on me.
Some bits of tomato and rice soup still clung to the tan felt ceiling, which had speckles of cigarette ash well patterned in it.
After I had erupted, my grandfather pulled over on the side of the road. I had cupped my hands over my mouth to prevent further spewage, and yet my hands had reeked of sunfish slime from fishing earlier that day, and made me more nauseous.
He sprayed some windex over the seat and on my hands, scrubbing the vomit lodged in between my fingers. That damn car always smelled of windex, if not cigarette smoke, and sometimes it smelled of baked leather. When the vomit was all cleaned up, the hot leather scent crinkled through the seams in the seat.
I think my grandfather stopped smoking after that because none of the Buicks afterwards had had that scent. But that hadn't happened yet.
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