IWSG: NaNoWriMo & the WEP Encouragement Award

Hello and Happy November!!  Today is the day for the monthly meeting of The Insecure Writer's Support Group, founded by our Ninja Captain Alex J. Cavanaugh. To view list members and this month's co-hosts, visit the IWSG page here.

Each month the IWSG team asks a question for participants to answer if desired. This month's question is: Win or not, do you usually finish your NaNo project? Have any of them gone on to be published?

I've only participated in NaNo twice and I finished once and didn't even make it through the first week the second time. The novel I finished went on to be published as The Ghosts of Aquinnah. Last year I signed up determined to work on my story inspired by my trip to France called A Window Box in Paris. That went nowhere, to say the least. 

Now I'm participating a third time and I'm once again planning to write A Window Box in Paris. But I think I will have very different results this year as the story is totally different! Only the title and two characters remain from last year's ideas. I was never totally sold on the story I was trying to write last year but this one feels like it wants to be written. 

And, I got a wonderful surprise and a burst of inspiration when I won the Encouragement Award for the October WEP challenge!! 🙌😃 My story, The Apartment, was connected to A Window Box in Paris and featured one of the main characters as a child. I never intended to write anything about the character's childhood until I started trying to think of ideas for the October hop. The way the piece came together makes me think the full story is meant to be told. 

So I'm excited for NaNo and feeling confident that I'll have a repeat of my first experience instead of my second one. 

Best of luck to everyone else who is participating! 😃😄

Write...Edit...Publish: Dark Places

The Apartment

Although only ten years old, Pierre had known for a long time that he was different. For as long as he could remember, he’d heard things others didn’t seem to hear. Voices, screams, laughter. Cries of pain. When he entered a new place, he could hear those who had been there before him. He heard their joy. Their pain. Their terror.

At first he’d assumed everyone could hear the past. He’d learned quickly that his parents couldn’t. When he’d mentioned the voices to them he’d been frightened of the looks they’d given him. They’d chalked his experiences up to a vivid imagination and a desire for playmates, imaginary or otherwise. He’d wondered why anyone would want a man screaming in pain or a woman gasping for air as hands tightened around her neck as playmates, but he’d kept quiet. From then on, he’d never mentioned the things he heard again. He’d merely listened.

But now he realized that just listening was no longer going to be an option. Soon after he and his parents had moved into the loft apartment in Paris’ Montmartre neighborhood for the summer for his father’s work, Pierre knew that something was different in this place.

The apartment was old and spacious, and his mother had declared her love for it the day they had moved in. She’d visited a woman who ran a flower stall on the corner and purchased white rose bushes for the front window box. His mother told him a white rose symbolized innocence. She loved flowers and their meanings. Pierre remembered that at one point she had told him that dried white roses symbolized sorrow.

That would be more appropriate, as the apartment was a place of sorrow. Of grief and fear and death. Pierre heard a woman crying for her lover, a World War I soldier lost forever to the trenches. He heard a Jewish family frantically trying to plan an escape from Paris now that the Nazis had taken over. He heard a man sobbing at his wife’s bed as she lay dead following the birth of a stillborn child.

Pierre was used to these sorts of voices. Tragedies from the past. But this apartment held something new for him. Voices of those whose stories had not yet ended.

He’d first heard the women’s cries when he’d gone to bed on their third night in the apartment. His room was small, with a strange extra closet built into one wall. The landlady had explained that the previous tenant, an architect, had built the closet himself and added a padlock to its door. When he moved out, he didn’t leave her the key to the lock. She was defensive when questioned about the locked door, saying she’d meant to get a locksmith to unlock the closet but we all know how busy life is, don’t we? Not wanting a fight, Pierre’s mother had dropped the issue.

Pierre wasn’t totally sure why the padlock had been left on the door, but he knew it wasn’t for anything good. He’d known that as soon as he’d heard the women’s voices that third night. So many different voices. Pierre couldn’t keep track of them all.

“Help find us, please.”

“Our families don’t know what happened to us. Won’t you help?”

“He killed us. But no one knows. Please, please help.”

Pierre heard the pleas, and he was unable to shake these voices off like he had all the others. Because their stories weren’t over. They needed him to help. But what could he do?

He was determined to find out. Unfortunately, he knew he couldn’t pressure his mother to make the landlady hire a locksmith. If he told her why he needed it to be done, she’d fly off the handle. His parents both thought Pierre's "imaginary" voices were a thing of the past.

He ventured to the library and checked out books on how to pick locks. He’d open the closet door himself. How hard could it be? Pierre had always been a smart boy, and good with his hands. He was sure he’d have no trouble.

He stopped at the hardware store to buy a small lock picking kit. Now he was ready to solve the mystery. As he returned home, he noticed that in spite of his mother’s best care, the white roses were drying out and dying.

Pierre shut his bedroom door and got to work at once on his new project. He tried every suggestion in his books and used all of the tools in his kit, yet nothing opened the padlock. Night after night Pierre heard the voices begging for help. And day after day he tried to pick the look. Nothing worked.

Before he knew it, the summer was drawing to a close and it was time for Pierre and his family to leave the apartment. The voices weighed heavily on his mind. He still heard them, and he knew that there was something they wanted him to see in the closet. Something that would tell their stories

On his last day in the apartment, Pierre sat at the closet door. Frantic, he tried one last time to open the lock.

“Pierre!” his mother called. “We’re leaving. Get down here!”

Pierre sighed and stood up from the floor, staring at the locked door.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I tried.”

He dropped his tools on the floor and let them roll away. There was nothing more he could do now. The mystery of the closet would be someone else’s to solve.

“Pierre!” His mother’s voice had turned shrill.

“Okay!”

He ran down the stairs of the loft and went outside with his parents to their waiting cab. As the cab driver pulled away from the curb, Pierre looked up at the empty apartment.

The voices were silent. The window box roses had turned black.

This story is a companion to my WIP called A Windowbox in Paris. It's not part of the book but the adult Pierre is one of the WIP's main characters, as is the apartment. I never intended to write anything about Pierre's childhood though until I started thinking about a story for the October hop.

Big thanks as always to Denise and Yolanda for hosting this great hop. 😊

Write...Edit....Publish: Reunions

The Last Reunion

Oscar opened the door to the party room at the Cincinnati senior center and prepared for one final reunion with his World War II buddies. They’d been infantry men, part of A Company of the 1st battalion, 116th regiment. They’d been among the first to land on Omaha Beach on D-Day, going ashore at Dog Green. Within 15 minutes of landing, most of the company had been shot, their bodies shredded to pieces. Oscar and his friends were among the few survivors.

When the war ended, the men had returned to their home towns of Milwaukee, New York, Houston, Sacramento, Savannah, and Bloomington, Indiana. Chicago, Minneapolis, Salt Lake City, and Windsor Lock, Connecticut. They’d found jobs, married, and had children. None spoke of Omaha and the horrors they had endured on that bloody June day. There was too much life to be lived to focus on so much death.

But as their children grew and their nests emptied, as retirement took them out of the daily grind of working life, as they began traveling with their wives and visiting places they’d never had time to see as young men, their minds started to drift back to the summer of 1944. They allowed themselves to talk about what they’d experienced on the coast of France.

When the 50th anniversary of the day so many young men had been slaughtered loomed, Oscar realized he wanted to return to Normandy. He wanted to see Omaha Beach as it was now. As it had no doubt been for thousands of years. A peaceful stretch of coastline, with the waves of the Atlantic lapping the shore. The tide coming in, the tide going out. No blood, no screams of the dying, no terror.

For the first time in decades, he allowed himself to remember the men he’d screamed with, cried with, and found shelter with as bullets whizzed past their heads. He heard the cries of those who’d been shot and slaughtered as clearly as if their deaths had been five minutes, not five decades, ago.  And he wanted to know if his fellow survivors were still here, like him. Surviving.

So Oscar had arranged the first Company A reunion, and the men had traveled across the sea once more to meet on the bluffs of Omaha Beach. They’d visited the graves of those who had never been able to return to their home towns. They’d shed tears as they paid their respects in the cemetery marked with an unearthly silence and a sense of young lives taken far too soon.

From then on, they’d met every two years, taking turns hosting the reunions. Randy was the first one to leave them, felled by a cancerous tumor at the age of 75 rather than German artillery at 18. Harold went next, then Roger, Charlie, and Mick.

Two years ago, only three had been left to attend the Omaha reunion. Now, as Oscar prepared the room, he knew he would not be here by the time two years came around again. He hadn’t needed the doctor to tell him he only had about six months left, if that. There are some things a man simply knows.

So he’d reserved the room one last time. He’d asked his daughter to set up the folding chairs in a circle, the way the men had always sat when they met up. Now, he took out a folder of photographs.

The photos were taken when the men had first been drafted into the Army. They were young and trying desperately to look older and more distinguished. Their faces were those of innocence. Of neighborhood baseball games, summer jobs, first dates, and first kisses. Faces that had no comprehension of Omaha Beach and the horrors that awaited them.

Oscar went around the circle and placed a photo on each chair. Randy, Roger, Harold, Charlie, Mick. Tony, Bobby, Hector, Steven. All gone now.

Oscar sat down on the last chair and took a bottle of beer from the cooler he’d carried in from his car. He opened it and raised the bottle in a toast.

“Here’s to us, boys.”

Through the window of the senior center, Oscar could hear a dog barking and a cat mewling in response. A bus stopped, let its passengers off, and drove away again. The footsteps of a runner pounded the pavement of the sidewalk, fading as the runner moved along. A horn honked and a man shouted obscenities. A police siren wailed. Two women talked and laughed.

The time was coming when there would be no one left who could remember Omaha Beach. No one who would think of D-Day, or the war itself, as anything more than a chapter in a history book.

But that time was not here yet.

Oscar sipped his beer and looked around the room at the photos of his friends. “Here’s to us.”

My story was inspired by this photo of my Dad, a World War II vet who reconnected with his war buddies in the 1990s.

I'm excited to be participating in the WEP hop for the first time. Thanks to Denise Covey and Yolanda Renee for hosting!

Flash Fiction Friday: "Miss Mary's House"

I learned about Flash Fiction Friday thanks to Cherie Reich and her #flashfiction tweets. I have to admit, I'm still learning about the ins and outs of Twitter and the use of hashtags, but I'm finding the whole Twitter world more and more addicting. :)

Anyway, I decided to join the party myself, and give Friday Flash a shot. I wrote this story a few months ago, using a first sentence prompt from The Writer's Toolbox, one of my favorite toys. The prompt caught my interest as I found the line so dark and chilling, and I ended up with this story as a result. Hope you like it!

Miss Mary’s House

I put gardenias under her pillow, and then I set fire to her house.

I figured Miss Mary would want to be surrounded by her gardenias. It only seemed right. Nothing in this world meant more to her.

She planted her gardenias every spring and fall, making sure they got just the right amount of sun. She lovingly coaxed the bushes into bloom, and tended to the flowers with the devotion of a mother caring for her newborn. Miss Mary cut the most fragrant blossoms and placed them in glass bowls around her house. Her visitors were always greeted by the sweet scent of gardenias.

Everyone said Miss Mary had the most beautiful gardenias in six counties. Hell, they'd put her garden up against any in the country. Just driving past those flowers could brighten your day. 

Miss Mary played the organ every Sunday at church. She organized the hospitality guild, and she always had a smile for newcomers. She ran the flower guild. The pastor said he was sure the church wouldn't be able to function without Mary. Indeed, they said. We're so lucky to have her.

They rarely talked about me.

When they did, they spoke in hushed tones in the church hall or the grocery store or the teacher's lounge.

“I don't know how Mary puts up with that foster child.”

“Incorrigible, that's what he is.”

“You'd think he'd be grateful she took him in.”

 “A saint, that's what she is.”

I tried to tell the teachers and the social workers about the beatings with a belt. About the cigarette burns, and Miss Mary's laughter as the tip of her cigarette singed my skin. I tried to tell them about the pitch black closet she locked me in for days on end while she drank bourbon until she passed out.  I tried to tell them.

“There you go, making up lies again.” That's what they told me.

Miss Mary always kept me out of school when the bruises were at their worst. She sought guidance from the pastor and the school counselors on what to do about a child who harms himself with cigarettes. She fretted with the church ladies over lunch.

“You're doing all you can,” they said. “The child is lucky to have you.”

Miss Mary sighed and lit a cigarette, her hands trembling from the stress of it all. The church ladies shook their heads and patted Mary's hand.

“There, there. We're all here for you.”

Miss Mary loved her cigarettes. And not just for burning me. As the townspeople put it, smoking was Mary’s only bad habit. They wished she'd stop, for her own good, but surely she deserved this one vice.

When the fire marshal came to our school and talked about fire safety, I didn’t pay him much mind. Until he talked about the leading cause of house fire fatalities. Do you know what that is? Cigarettes.

I walked home after school and looked around at the upholstered furniture in Miss Mary's living room. The fire marshal had said that a lit cigarette can set a couch on fire in the blink of an eye. I glanced at the silk curtains covering the windows behind the couch, and I heard the fire marshal's voice in my mind.

“Silk, cotton... natural fabrics like these are highly flammable.”

That night, I stayed out of Miss Mary's way as she drank herself into a stupor and stumbled upstairs to her bed. I waited until I heard her snoring.

I went outside, and I cut every last one of her beloved gardenias. I scattered them around the first floor before I headed for Miss Mary's bedroom.

I took Miss Mary’s bourbon glass from her hand and placed it on her nightstand.  I arranged the gardenias, making sure to put a few extra under her pillow. My stomach lurched and I nearly vomited as the cloying smell of the flowers mixed with the stench of the alcohol.

I lit one of Miss Mary’s cigarettes, and took a long drag to steady myself. I breathed out the smoke, and dropped the burning cigarette onto the carpet.

I ran back downstairs, cigarettes in hand. I lit another, and tossed it onto the couch cushion. I waited until the upholstery ignited, and I watched as the flames shot up the curtains and spread along the wall to the ceiling.

And then I walked out of that house.