amanda is an aspiring independent filmmaker from spokane, washington who was kicked out of her home when she turned eighteen. her father left her when she was relatively young but her mother soon remarried a rancher. the rancher was a good man, strict and fair, but let her mother have the most say in her upbringing.
the little one chokes
the little starts to cough that turns into a choke. playing poker i am frozen looking for the color of her face. someone says, do the heimlich and i get cross the room looking for color and see a face full of panic. i wrap behind her and tilt her forward, two fingers just below her sternum and wonder if the placement is right but i push anyway. once, twice, i don’t see anything come out but she starts to cry. can’t cry without air, she starts to cry and i am relieved. i pick her up and hold her tight and she bawls that she can’t breathe. i laugh a nervous tension and whisper in her ear, if you couldn’t breathe, you wouldn’t be able to tell me.
merry x-mas
merry christmas to my extended family, scattered across the city, without collared button down shirts, without slacks, without fine stockings, without a home to call their own. merry christmas to the fools and the war mongers, the drunks and the diseased, the addicts and the lost. merry christmas to the childless couples and the children without love, to the stray dogs sniffing through dumpsters, to the whores huddled together over a bottle of wine. merry christmas to the abused whose bones never seem to mend right and the thieves who can never seem to have enough. merry christmas to all the wretched, all those without hope, to those that are mired in despair, to those that remain sleepless, to all of us that have the faintest memory of dreaming and what any of it means.
merry christmas
presents torn open and mouth agape, the little one says, over and over, i wanted this, i wanted this. and she goes through the pile, a wasteland of wrapping paper. my sister-in-law announces her pregnancy, eyes welling up, the family grows. outside my brother-in-law says, it’s nice today but i wish there was snow. and i wouldn’t have minded a snow storm either, something to cover up the lawn, the sidewalk, the limbs of trees, one big push before the new year and have winter move on its way.
randomness
somewhere there’s a hotel of santa’s imported from around the country belligerent & snapping towels at each other.
there’s a woman utterly convinced that the priest & tv crew of a paranormal-based reality show are exorcising her grandmother.
my cousin, who is thirty five and divorced takes it upon himself to give his two younger cousins, both sixteen, “the talk” about boys and girls.
and why is it every year feels less and less like christmas?
beneath my station
a house full of children yelling like banshees while adults mill about in their clicks. the hosts meander from site to site, checking up, filling glasses, offering cigars. santa gently handles each child on his lap while people of a better class than mine snap photos of them little realizing that jolly old nick has a full sleeve of tattoos down each arm. but he shows incredible kindness with my son who sleeps in his arm as if he was the real thing. we sit on the patio and talk of the politics of the world and the economics of our children’s future. i say little but am filled with anxiety. i ask him, your father owned a business, you are a partner in a law firm, what do you hope for your daughters? he says, i want them to find out what they like and get good at it and we’ll be well off enough that hopefully the money will come one way or the other. i think of my daughter’s fine hand and her penchant for photography and how she rambles prose that sounds almost right and i think of all the wrong turns i’ve made that the other is not an option for her.
snowflake project: 3.storylines: harry
amanda met harry at an atm machine he was fixing while she waited to withdraw some cash, a little over year after she had married tom. he is, on the surface, a brute but with a self deprecating sense of humor. well read and seemingly knowledgeable, they both felt easy and also uneasy with each other. harry ultimately is an odd mixture of anger and kindness, coldly analytical but also impulsive. for the most part he cannot be reasoned with, resolute in his opinions and even more so if argued with or contested.
out of the three, amanda had the most chemistry with him although neither of them could specifically point out as to why. his job confused her, it seemed out of place for him, particularly when he often wrote pieces that had, as amanda would say, “an attention to mundane details that leave you haunted.” she would often trawl through them for material, never finding anything suitable for her films. he had no interest in publishing, claiming it was just something he did to pass the time, just something he felt compelled to do.
he often chided amanda for “not thinking things through” which she thought ridiculous considering the plethora of details involved in filmmaking (cinematography, sound, editing,) that harry, as technically minded as he was, barely had a grasp on. for harry i’m debating whether or not to shoot his story through with straight minimalist prose (i.e. carver, a little beckett-but not too much), poetic/elliptical prose (i.e. “without the inherent sickness of blanchot” -don byrd) or something along the lines of a technical manual (since he is an atm technician); it depends how far out there i want to be.
snowflake project: 3. storylines: tom
tom is amanda’s second husband, a native new yorker in his early thirties who fashions himself a real estate developer and often points out how he is already a millionaire. he owns a bar in the lower east side handed down to him from his father who also owned the building, near where amanda’s corpse was found. he met amanda during her last year at film school, when she asked him if she could film her final project in his bar. taken by her and intrigued by the idea of his father’s bar showing up in a film that, who knows, might end up on tv one day, he’d agree if she went out to dinner with him. they were married in a civil ceremony a little over a year later, tom becoming her patron and often funding a great portion of her projects.
however, with his financial support came a degree of paranoia and an overwhelming desire to control her. he often accused her lying when she wasn’t, even though he had never even asked her if she was involved with anyone else when they had met, let alone if she was already married. the idea just never occurred to him but he doubted her fidelity and honesty at every turn. they often fought about the subject matter of her movies, accusing her of the same sort of promiscuous behavior some of her early work depicted. he would talk while they watched classics, offering opinions that were not only uncalled for but drove amanda completely up the wall. but he could also be kind and incredibly patient with her, particularly when she felt an overwhelming anxiety that left her powerless.
while touching upon some of their early moments together, tom’s storyline will be one of him piecing together his accusations with her absences into the lives of her other husbands. he will be wrong most of the time, as he’d often been, but will never know it. for tom, there will be a mixture of regret and betrayal, an overwhelming sense that he had done more than enough for her but it wasn’t enough competing with the feeling that he could have done more to keep her, that he was guilty in not only keeping her faithful in their marriage, but also in not preventing her death. given his possessive and controlling nature, the police believe he might have had a hand in her death.
and when and then
and when i say ‘no,’ she says ‘yes,’ and when i say ‘yes,’ she suddenly says ‘no,’ and when i put my arm around her she says ‘you’re disappearing again,’ and i say ‘leave me,’ and she says ‘don’t you dare, you come back here right this second,’ and when i breathe she says ‘you’ve ruined my mascara,’ and kisses me hard on the mouth until her gums bleed and when i say ‘i taste his laughter,’ she says ‘but you’ve already left me,’ and when i say ‘i’m here but i’m lost,’ she says ‘can’t you see me?’ and i say ‘i can barely even hear you through all this shouting,’ and then she says ‘i’m already gone,’ and i can’t say nothing at all
snowflake project: 3. storylines: ian
ian is unbelievably handsome, amanda has told him time & again he has “a certain kind of quality that makes you immediately fuckable, almost impossible to resist if you weren’t so not there.” he is amanda’s first husband, having moved with her to new york when she started film school there, modeling underwear for one of the department store chains.
he has no ambition, avoids confrontation, usually stares off into the distance during heated arguments with amanda. he never initiates contact, affection or conversation. he watches the occasional football or baseball game but doesn’t root for any particular team. he doesn’t even have a preference for any specific beer, taking whatever is offered to him. since arriving in new york, he’s had multiple flings with photographers’ assistants, none of which ever amounting to a full blown affair.
his storyline will consist of these sort of scenes, starting from their first fight but jumping back and forth throughout the course of their lives. from his perspective, amanda will appear passionate and often times apparently jealous, clearly yearning for something more from him other than his constant neutrality and inertia. out of the three husbands, however, ian will be the most heart broken with amanda’s death, his reflections on her being the most poignant.