Micro Writing Class Series

The light that glowed through Lisa’s bedroom window was a radiant thing. So radiant, in fact, that Lisa’s mother disappeared within it. There was no sound, no physical indication that her mother was taken. Lisa simply recalls her mother there, and then not there. Another change, besides Lisa’s mother’s disappearance into brilliance, is Lisa’s vision. 

The girl can no longer see during the day.

Sometimes she’ll see a blur of some sort, and explains it as a sensation similar to when light flashes by when your eyelids are closed.

“It’s okay,” she tells her Aunt. “The aliens must have a good reason for this.”

They, Lisa and her mother, were watching alien and science fiction movies before the abduction. Lisa thinks they must have caught their attention somehow, perhaps shot out a misplaced brainwave. Lisa’s Aunt doesn’t argue, but Lisa knows she doesn’t like to talk about the aliens. Lisa thinks it scares her. When she’s in her room, she’ll hear her Aunt occasionally speaking to someone. She thinks it’s the police officer who came the day after the abduction, one of her Aunt’s friends. She overhears a man’s name come up often. “Her father.” She’s never met her father. Honestly, she believes the aliens most likely abducted him as well before all this.

“We can’t prove anything—”

Her Aunt drinks after the conversations with her friend, the police officer. When she does, she falls asleep deeply, in a way Lisa doesn’t like. But it keeps her from waking up and stopping Lisa from sneaking out at night to see.

At night, the world is truly split into two sections: light and dark. The rats that skirted by her feet as she passed an alley could see in both, she thinks. But she could only see in the dark.

Underneath a honeyed street lamp, she could see a couple on a bench intertwined like slugs. A man walking home slips into both realities with each step, carved by the streetlights he crosses beneath. A drunk passed out in the park is barely visible in the halo of frail garden lights surrounding him on the ground.

The world is diluted into the suggestion of shapes, harsh shadows blurring away the details and territories of an arm, a leg, a torso.

She wonders why the aliens took her vision during the day. That’s when she spends most of her time wondering. She wonders mostly about her vision rather than her mother. She assumes she’ll be taken eventually; perhaps her sight was their attempt, but they only had energy for her mother. She isn’t sure. Maybe it’s how they saw reality, too.

Her Aunt doesn’t allow her to watch alien movies anymore, so she only does rarely now, at night with the volume muted and closed captions littering the bottom of the screen.

            Horrible Mutilations—

            Invasive Experimentation—

But those felt wrong. The aliens, or at least, her aliens, were only a blinding light. There was no violence to them, no horror.

During her escapes, she always comes home early, stumbles quietly through her window, and locks it tight, just as it was before, but this time is different. She knows it the moment she sees her window from the outside.

The light is on.

She freezes, and before she can make a decision, the front door opens to reveal her Aunt, wrapped in a pink bathrobe. The flickering porch bug zapper attracts fat mosquitoes that sizzle and pop as they land.

“Titi—”

“Inside. Now.”

Her Aunt smells of alcohol as she yells. It makes Lisa scrunch her nose.

“I don’t know how many times I have to say this, but it isn’t aliens. You need to get over this, Lisa—”

“You don’t understand.”

Her Aunt walks around her, tugging at her bathrobe this way and that, as Lisa sits on a kitchen chair, hands squeezing the sides until her knuckles turn white.

“That stupid, stupid bastard took her, I just know it—”

Lisa watches her Aunt pacing, then glances towards the living room window. She imagines the blinding light, her aliens, shining through, coming to get her. We didn’t forget you, they’ll say as she’s finally taken. I’ve missed you, her mother will say, once she’s part of the light. She blinks. She starts to cry.

“Why are you crying?”

“I want to be with her,” Lisa cracks. “Let me go be with her.”

“Who?” her Aunt asks, mean. “Your mother? Where is she? Do you know where she is?”

“I do—”

She shakes her head, the loose hair frantically framing her face swaying.

“If you say those aliens again, Lisa, I swear.”

“You don’t understand!”

“No,” her Aunt says. “You don’t understand. My sister is gone. Gone—”

Lisa stands up from the chair, shoving her Aunt. She sprints for the door.

“Lisa!” her Aunt shouts. “Lisa!”

Shadows and light blur into streaks as Lisa runs. Her chest heaves as she pants, rushing through the city. The bench with the interlaced couple is empty. The streetlights the man walked under illuminate no one, and the drunk passed out in the garden left an imprint of flattened flowers and an empty bottle. Lisa sobs.

“Lisa,” her Aunt calls from somewhere behind her, distant. “Lisa, please—”

Above her, dawn starts to soften the night sky into slate, and her vision begins to darken to black.

Lotte sits on the edge of the bed in an ivory vest and pants, made from the same silk as her wedding dress. Her auburn hair is still pinned. It took almost half an hour to get right this morning and maybe she rolled it too tight because she’s had a headache all day that won’t quite shift. She splays her fingers, pushes them through the taut strands at the nape of her neck. There’s a little relief. Her husband – they were married six hours ago – is in the bathroom down the hall. She strokes the silk across her breasts, over her hips. Her figure is a little fuller a year after liberation. He seems a good man. He has good hair and good teeth. A good job. Abroad. Which means they’ll be leaving, leaving all this rubble and dust and utter devastation. Lotte gets up from the bed, walks around the small hotel room. Enjoys the feel of the carpet under her feet. Enjoys the feel of silk against her body. Such luxury. Such decadence. The ceremony was small: her aunt, her female cousins, her friend who introduced them. His mother, his two sisters, their three faces pale and pinched. Lotte used all her clothing coupons to buy the silk. When she unwrapped it, she found several grass stains and a streak of mud which she loosened delicately with soap and then hung the material in the warm spring sunshine to dry. Today, there was no sun. She made the dress herself. She measured and cut and spliced, sewed the pieces back together on her aunt’s sewing machine. Henk wore a silt-brown suit made of wool. She thought he’d had it made for the wedding but overheard his mother tell his sisters it was one of two he’d had made for the new job. In a single movement, their three heads turned and caught her eye, defiant. She almost laughed. They think she’s hurt, think she cares. Lotte knows as well as they do that he wouldn’t have been offered the ten-year contract abroad as an unmarried man. But she doesn’t care what Henk was wearing or which occasion it was made for. She doesn’t even particularly care why he married her, only that he did, and that as a married couple, they can leave this hellhole and start again. She hears footsteps, a gentle knock. He’s very polite. Respectful. Handsome, too. Wasn’t she pretty once? Didn’t Mama tell her that when she was a little girl? Henk could’ve married anyone, though. Unlike her. The door opens, closes. At twenty-seven she was old for a single woman. The war had gobbled six years of her life, spat her back out again after. And there were hardly any eligible men. What became of the man in the parachute? Dropped with little more than a balloon of silk to guide him. Is he now safely back in England? ‘Hello,’ her husband says. ‘Hello,’ she replies. He stands by the door, arms behind his back, clutching the door handle. She takes a step towards him and he takes a step towards her. He’s been a gentleman throughout their courtship. Not once has he overstepped the line. But they’re married now. He’ll have expectations. She knows a little of what awaits her, from before, but that’s not something she ever thinks about. Her friend and female cousins are unmarried. Only her aunt could’ve told her, but she said nothing. Now they are close enough to feel each other’s body warmth. He presses his thumb against her bottom lip. She wills herself not to flinch. Then, he kisses her. Gently, tentatively, but soon with a thirst and a hunger she’s certain she’ll never be able to sate. His hands grasp her hips, maneuvered her backwards, and he is falling onto her, they are falling together onto the bed and for a brief moment, in between standing and lying down, in between reality and dreaming, she allows herself to fall too. And it’s glorious. As they become a tangle of limbs and sheets, she forgets everything. But then she moves and there is the tug of the pins at her scalp and her headache rushes back. Henk’s body feels too heavy now, too urgent, too everything. She reaches over and turns out the light. In the morning, when she wakes there is a smear of red on her vest. A bullet wound? But how? Was the Englishman shot from the sky in Arnhem or Nijmegen or Eindhoven? Did he bleed onto the silk parachute? She thought she’d checked it so thoroughly. Then she remembers the lipstick. Henk’s thumb on her lips last night. He is still sleeping, his handsome face turned towards the light seeping through the thin curtains. Within the month, Lotte will be aboard a ship sailing to the Dutch East Indies, the vest in her trunk. Before she packed it, she tried to remove the red mark – with vinegar and bicarbonate of soda, soaking it in hot water and cold – but nothing worked. After a four-week journey at sea, she docks in Indonesia. The amahs unpack and it is months before she finds the vest again. By that point, she is too swollen with child to wear it. As she runs her hands over the silk, over the faint stain, she recalls her wedding day, her wedding night, but more so, the following morning when she woke before her husband and eased open the curtains; when she sat alone on the edge of the bed, on the edge of her future; and a fat slice of sunshine fell into the room, and filled it with light. 

The woman waters the plants in her garden before she leaves for her morning walk. The man sits at his easel, painting, before he leaves for his morning walk. Once outside, both glance at their watches and quicken their pace to avoid being late. When they arrive at their intersection—the one where they first crossed paths organically but now carefully choreograph the serendipitous timing—they pretend to be surprised, but their joy is genuine. He asks how her hydrangeas and tomatoes are faring in this dry weather. She asks if he’s broken through the mental block that has been stalling completion of his current portrait. She shows him photos of the garden, and he shows her photos of the painting’s progress.

Before they’d both undergone the partial memory removal procedure, their marriage had been happy and then deteriorated—as so many marriages do—and their divorce had been bitter. Electing to have the surgery that could make them forget was not a quick decision. It took time, tears, arguments, last-minute cold feet, cancellations and rescheduling, and the harrowing guilt of letting go of everything that had once tied them together—the beloved along with the regrets. With all memories of their shared history erased and their slate clean, they unwittingly moved to houses only a few streets away from each other. Now they are strangers who have, over time, become friendly neighbors and maybe something more. When alone, they wonder if the other feels the same way they do. But since they leave their longing unspoken and wait for a grand mutual revelation, they treasure their daily intersection meetings. It’s much easier and more pleasant to look forward rather than back.

Ahead is meaningful eye contact, the gentle uncertain touch of a hand on an arm, welcoming and knowing smiles, first embraces and passionate kisses, and long intimate conversations in bed where both pay close attention to each other’s mouths, skin, and bodies without reaching for any screens. Behind them is a love they can no longer remember, old resentments, no infidelity but a gaping frigid distance, and the death of their only child in a fraternity hazing gone wrong.

By the end of their marriage, she couldn’t look at him when she opened her eyes every morning without smelling the hospital, hearing the words stomach pumped and nothing else we can do, and seeing the detested alcohol that killed their boy in her husband’s glass night after night. They had coped with the unyielding grief in their own ways, but she couldn’t fathom or forgive his preferred liquid escape. He felt himself losing her along with their son, but he was just trying to erase his agony the old-fashioned way. Now when she looks at him on her morning walks, she sees kind eyes, hears a gruff voice full of laughter, and smells oil paint mixed with cedar and vanilla. In their past life, he used to be bothered and hurt by how much time she spent in her garden away from him—he saw it as her place of avoidance rather than refuge—but now he is charmed and beguiled by her green thumb and the hours she spends there.

She brings him startlingly red plump tomatoes sometimes, and he tells her later about the delicious soups, sandwiches, salads, and quiches he’s made with them. She doesn’t know his current oil painting, the one he’s been struggling with, is an abstract rendering of her and that he plans to give it to her one day. He wonders if she will understand it’s his way of saying, “I love you, I think I always have, and I know I always will.” But how can she be expected to when he still hasn’t yet realized the similar significance of the tomatoes?

Today they remain at their intersection slightly longer than usual. But after the tiny yellow bird they’ve been watching and admiring together abruptly takes flight, they too exchange fond farewells and go their separate ways.