Today’s writing warm up prompt is
Like Sludge at the bottom of my coffee mug…
Set your timer for 15 minutes and just write the first story that comes to mind. Mine is below. Totally rough draft. I admittedly went over the time because I couldn’t think of an ending for a minute and liked where it was going enough to want it to have an ending. But many days I just stop without an ending when the timer goes off. It isn’t about being good, it’s about warming up our story telling muscles.
Sludge and Silt
Like sludge at the bottom of my coffee, black and silty, from the barista not knowing quite how to grind it in the first place. Or perhaps because their grinder needs to be balanced so it grinds evenly.
That’s what the muddy sand reminded me of as I stepped my bare, hardened, aching feet into the cold water. I stood stock still, waiting, not even bringing my hoodie closer to my chest when the wind blew the warn sunshine away. That’s how summer was in Northern Wisconsin, never quite warm enough. And after only a few days there on that lake I still wasn’t used to the weak rays that didn’t seem to know their job was not just to light the earth but to keep its inhabitants warm.
My feet, big as they were, sunk instantly into that strange mixture of sand and mud and fish excrement. Maybe even the remains of an animal or two. The neighbor did say that two moose and a deer has been seen halfway sunk in the lake this winter, frozen alive. He described their wild eyes staring at him as he tried to ice fish and he had wondered aloud how it must have felt to be in that moment right before death knowing there was no way out.
I shivered now as I had shivered then, my movement disturbing the water slightly, sending out ripples. Taking the opportunity to zip up my hoodie and wiggle my toes before standing still again, I focused on the movement of soft sludge between my phalanges. And of course that thought reminded me of Friends, which reminded me of high school, which reminded me of being seventeen at this very spot where the best and the worst night of my life had happened. Twenty years later, here I was again, searching for tiny minnows to come and discover my bare toes.
The first few came in a tiny school and I wondered if there was a number limit to a group of fish being called a school. Did it have to have at least five or ten or twenty? There was so much I didn’t know about the world and I was almost halfway done with life, a thought that weighed on my chest heavier than I wished for it to. When my big toes shivered and lifted from the mud, the bottom of the lake sucking and grabbing it as though to claim it as it had the moose and deer, one minnow swam quickly to my ankle, then peeked out as though to investigate the measure of danger. With the sand settling again more minnows came and the game I used to love as a child, which I had dubbed ‘Catch a minnow’ began. If memory served me correctly, and I wasn’t sure it did, my younger self played the game for hours on end. Long enough for even the pale, weak sun of Wisconsin to burn my shoulders and redden my nose. But the problem with growing older and having grown an unseemly attraction to a small computer called a phone, the game could no longer hold my attention as it once had. Even when I moved on to feeling the sensation of mud sucking at my feet, refusing to let go of them until my muscle might overcame the might of the river, my attention couldn’t be held for very long. Pulling out my notebook I wrote down the wrods that came velvet, stretch, pull, suckle, snap, sludge, ownership.
Looking out to the middle of the lake where I imagined the moose and deer had met their fate I wrote one last word: death.
My temporary neighbor assured me that most men in these parts no longer met their maker from the bottom of a frozen lake. Ice fishing was a sport of the past for the most part. Most human deaths here were caused by speed boat accidents or mixing booze and water.
His brown eyes paused from gazing at the water and turned to me. With his heavy brown covering much of his eyeballs my mind was caught up with wondering how well he could see until his steady gaze continued longer than what was comfortable. Then I wondered if he knew, if he recognized me. Booze. Water Death. Me.
“How many people die on the lake every year?” I managed to ask, taking the opportunity to take out my small suitcase as an excuse to hide my face. The immediate intimacy typical of the northern Midwest had become foreign and uncomfortable to me. He had come to offer help with starting the gas fire and ended up warning me about animals freezing to death on the lake.
“Bout 3-4 every year.”
Carefully placing my notebook back into my pocket and zipping it up, I tried to place the exactly spot she had found her last resting place. The girl who had chase after my boyfriend that weekend, drank more and more and more just to show that she could, who had danced at the bow of the boat while it was racing across the lake and how no one had noticed she wasn’t there until the boat was already parked for two hours and a bonfire was going.
Rescue boats, accusations, yelling, crying, police sirens, parents, responsibility, fear.
I spotted the red house and the pier. Two houses over to the left was where the senior party was always hosted. Now dilapidated with a hole in the roof. Perhaps twenty years ago was the last time it was ever used. And just a few yards away was the giant tree, run down and sad now, where I had stood frozen to my spot, too scared to run after her. I had arrived from this side of the lake, the side I spent my summers at, where Micha and I had been secret friends for the last few summers, but where this time I arrived as his public girlfriend. Unprepared for battle in my ripped jean shorts and second-hand sunglasses, I had stood on the outside waiting for Micha to come back from the swimming competition, watching the mayhem around me.
The only sober one, I became more and more self-conscious the more the other drank. For the entire afternoon I had watched this girl try to get Micha’s attention to no avail and had dodged the fiery darts that had flamed from her eyes each time she caught me looking her way. But at that moment, standing near the tree, my heart fluttered at what she had declared: that she could stay on the bow while the boat whipped corners at top speed.
I was the only one who could see that this girl was going to fall and hit her head and drown and no one would care. I could see it all and yet I said nothing. When she passed me by I tried to tell her best friend with the long black hair who always looked like she belonged on the front of a magazine but she had brushed my hand away as though I carried disease on my fingers and that was what caused me to turn away.
Good riddance. Do as you please. Die for all I care.
My exact thoughts as I walked to the small sandy beach and slipped my head under Micha’s arm, forgetting the entire exchange until the panicked yelling and questioning and sirens began.
Suddenly the sludge holding my feet down in the present was in my lungs, sucking away the air from me. With no regard for the minnows or anything else around me I lunged out of the water and ran to my old childhood porch, fear chasing me from the other side of the lake. Had I killed her? Was it my fault? I had said nothing. No one had said anything, but everyone else was in an alcoholic, marijuana induced haze. I had been sober. Had I killed her or had the lake? Or had she done it herself?
The sludge of my conscious wouldn’t wash as I had wished it would coming here. Just like the lake silt it shivered and shook at the movement I caused and then settled back down just like the sludge at the bottom of my coffee mug.