Special Gifts

Luanne Castle

 

 

Luanne Castle opens her high school graduation gift: a new typewriter

 

How I Became a Poet and Flash Fiction Writer

By Luanne Castle

I was an only child until I was eight, so I spent a lot of time reading and listening to nursery rhymes, folk songs, and Broadway musical soundtracks as a kid. My mother gave me a copy of the children’s poetry anthology Sung Under the Silver Umbrella, and I was so excited to read poems that made more sense than nursery rhymes, but still were fun to read aloud. I started to write poems off and on. I was a little turned off in high school when an English teacher graded our poetry because the idea of writing to a grade seemed too random, especially since she wasn’t even teaching us creative writing.

I spent the next few years concentrating on shaping an adult life, but by the end of my twenties, with a new baby in the house, I went back to writing poems with enthusiasm. Somehow, I found out that the local university had a creative writing MFA and applied for it, not expecting anything. I still remember when I called the department from the public library to see if my application had gone anywhere. The chair got on the phone and welcomed me to the department. That was one of the most thrilling days of my life. I ended up getting my MFA in both poetry and fiction (which at my campus in those days meant traditional short stories) but ignored fiction for years afterward.

The poet Diane Wakoski judged a contest where one of my poems placed, and she asked to talk to me. She told me that only holding a master’s and not a PhD had been a mistake for her and urged me to go for my PhD. So I did, moving my husband and kids from Michigan to California so I could attend the University of California, Riverside. With two children to raise, teaching jobs, assisting my husband with his business, a long commute, and my PhD work, writing became a hobby I attended to every so often. After I graduated, I taught college English.

When I had to take an early medical retirement, I decided to get serious about writing. Since then, I’ve published two full poetry collections, two chapbooks, have written four blogs (only one is active on a regular basis—writersite.org), published a few essays and stories, and have written a flash hybrid memoir manuscript. My poetry inspirations have been the natural world, especially where I now live in Arizona and Michigan and the lakes of my childhood; art; animals; family; genealogy; and fairy tales. Last February I decided to figure out what makes flash and micro fiction tick and took my first Meg Pokrass workshop. I became hooked on flash!
 

The first two micros are about creativity. “Historia” is social commentary. “Incident at Shady Acres” is ecofiction, about the erosion of the land in Arizona. The next two micros are about marriage. Then I have a story about animal rescue. The last story is ekphrastic, one of a series I am writing based on the art of Remedios Varo 

 

This is Why She Never Gets Anything Accomplished

She deftly placed some curves in her sketchbook until the vague shape of an elephant sitting on an overturned classroom wastebasket appeared. She erased the back and redrew, adding skin folds. After she finished water coloring, she signed the piece. That’s when a foot lifted off the page. The other feet followed suit, and the trunk wrapped around her pencil, so she reluctantly released it. The elephant erased itself, letting the colors float out the window.

Published by Microfiction Monday Magazine, December 2023

 

 

  

Millie’s Last Creative Dream

Millie turned the paring knife once more, a soap shred falling to the bedsheet, then took the orangewood stick and etched whiskers on the kitty’s cheeks. She inhaled lavender, tucking the carving by her pillow, satisfied with her art. She smiled, thinking of her last gallery showing, how proud she had been.

Her daughter, watching the unconscious mother, removed the sweet-smelling gift sachet from under Millie’s pillow, wondering how long now.

Published by Paragraph Planet, August 2023

 

 

 

Historia de La Iglesia Católica del Sagrado Corazón (History of Sacred Heart Catholic Church)

The prosperous in their glittery plumage ascended the marble steps to the gilded portico, where the priest fawned over them. Around back, the poor in their best-mended entered through a planked door. After the rich moved to the city, the poor embalmed the priest’s heart, displaying it on the altar.

This story was nominated for Best Small Fictions 2024 by The Dribble Drabble Review where it was published in October 2023. 

 

 

Incident at Shady Acres

When the sun disappeared, he glanced up. The sky had been clear and blue as a freezer pop for weeks. Now a dark uneasiness moved overhead from the south. He flipped his beaten-up skateboard against the side of their trailer and leaned next to it. The trailer was at the back of the park, and he looked out over acres of vacant cotton fields. They had been burned to stubble last year but never replanted. He imagined it had something to do with money. Everything always did. The boy’s upper lip, still hair-free, held a mustache of beaded sweat and drops drooled down from his temples. No sun, but still hot as a habanero.

An old truck raced up, spinning dust from the wheels, and stopped in the dirt that met with their concrete pad. A stocky man, clothes greasy with labor, flew out the door. “See that sky, boy? Thunderstorm or haboob, I’m not sure which, but help me cover the back windows.” Nobody had put new glass in the windows after the stepfather had taken potshots at them when he was too drunk to give up his gun. The man and boy worked together to fasten a tarp over the windows to keep out the elements. “I think it’ll be a storm. Looks like rain.” The boy knew that meant that the rain would clean the dust off everything, the rickety front porch, the webbed lawn chair that sat out there, old toys and tools, even the geranium he was trying to keep alive. He wouldn’t wake up coughing at night, at least for a while.

The light gray above deepened to a darker shade, and the truck, even the lawn chair, took on an eerie glow. The man called to the boy to come inside, and the boy brought his skateboard with him. They stood at the kitchen window looking out at the sky and waited, wondering. The man made up his mind. “Get the super soakers. I think we’ve got us a haboob on the way.” Each of them filled up their huge water gun in the shower. The trailer went black inside, and the boy had to feel for the bathroom light switch.

As the massive wall of dust and debris moved in, outside turned blacker than any night. Even the mercury vapor light over the park had been blotted out as the dirt blew in with all the power of the devil. The boy heard fierce blowing and the terrifying rattling of trailer siding and porch. His eyes stung, and dust coated his tongue. He struggled to swallow. His stepfather lightly touched the boy’s shoulder and said, “Don’t drink any water yet. It’ll turn to mud.” Then he coughed as if his lungs would rattle out of his chest. “It’s okay. As soon as it stops, we’ll clean everything with the super soakers.” The boy tried to sound as if he were sure. But it seemed that the dust cloud would never move from over the trailer park, which might be an illusion because the haboob was over fifty miles long. The boy knew this. The stepfather knew this. The wind hooked a corner of the tarp and whipped it off the windows, and dirt poured into the trailer, covering the table and bottle of Cholula on top, then over the ratty carpet. The man and boy had no choice but to run outside into the dark cloud and invisibility.

First runner-up of the Julia Peterkin Literary Award for Flash Fiction 2023, published by South 85 Journal, December 2023

 

 

 

Bed of Roses

He plated the lobster thermidor, poured the Chardonnay, and called to his wife. As she raised her glass, he stared at the garden soil ground into the skin around her nails. She shrugged. “Sorry, I did scrub.” During dinner she addressed how to handle blight and listed the new wildflower seeds she had planted. “You should come and see the roses!” she said. He explained how to select a lobster. He kept glancing at her nails, waiting for her to tell him how he had outdone himself with this meal. Late that night he crept outside and beheaded her roses.
 

 

 

Small Battles

Those first months, we watched Doris Day movies together, holding hands. But once he moved in, I discovered that he thought the remote belonged to him.

If he got home from work before me, the TV was on, clicker in his hand.

If I arrived home first, he would lurk nearby, waiting until my show was over. When the ending credits started, the remote was already nestled in his fingers.

After the kids started school, I skipped my office hours to get home early and use the dang thing alone without having to fight.

How long have the batteries been dead?

Published by 101 Words, December 2023

 

 

 

I Got Sick of Making Excuses for Dog #586 at Paws Perfect No-Kill Shelter

“He’s not picky—he’ll eat anything. We have 24/7 proof he has great vocal cords. He loves to provide birds and cars with lots of exercise. He does his business with perfect aim” (not on cue, I thought). He’d been there 344 days so far, so when the last ones rolled their eyes and turned away, I brought him home. You couldn’t ask for a more perfect dog.

Published by Six Sentences in October 2023

 

 

 

Priest and his Scriveners

after the Remedios Varo painting, “Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle”
 
In a tower that rose so high above the earth that it penetrated the clouds, the man who called himself Priest dominated the girls with his authority. A humorless type, he understood basic symbolism and allegory. In other words, he reveled in what a tower represented. His assistant, a shrouded nameless poetess, kissed his feet when he demanded. She pressed the girls’ rebellious faces to his calfskin boots. In their uniforms of anonymity, the girls sat at desks, backs to each other, from sunrise until sunset, although the windows were placed far above their heads to provide light but not distraction. Priest always read from his own Collected Poems, never poetry by other poets. When one naïve girl questioned him about Alice and her tumble into a strange land, he insisted there was no such story and gave her three poems to memorize before morning. Priest continued to read in his booming, self-pleased cadence. He beamed at his metaphors and images; even the verb tenses brought an orgasmic sheen to his face. He might have seen one girl occasionally turning and winking at another if he had paid attention. Priest attached strings from his pages to the girls’ pens. The scrolls they wrote on flowed from the tower. The copy work of these girls was intended to produce massive amounts of Priest manuscript, enough—in time—to cover the earth. By the time Priest checked on their work, it was too late. He thought to himself that he should have hired boys as scriveners. Girls were unreliable.

Published with four other stories by The Ekphrastic Review, August 2023