Tag: Writing

From Each According to Ability (Part Two)

On By cherylmahoneyIn Fiction Friday2 Comments

This is the second installment of a story I wrote for my senior thesis at the University of San Francisco.  Set in the strange world of a women’s clothing store, the story follows Carin on a trying shift.  Part Two picks up just after an awkward interaction with a difficult customer.  Carin has tried and failed to graciously explain why the Sale signs say “Up to 70% off” and why the items may in fact be only 30% off.  Carin has finally told the customer that it’s just the evils of capitalism, and escaped by taking the woman’s clothes to the fitting room.

You can catch up with Part One here, and continue the story below.

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Back in the fitting room area, Joanne looked up from folding clothes when I came in.  She was stationed back here this shift and I envied her.  I usually enjoyed the fitting room more than other positions.  I liked it when it was busy.  Not insanely busy, but right on the edge.  I liked having six things to do and to bounce and whirl and twirl between all of them, not overwhelmed but dancing right on the edge of it.  I’d gone off the edge sometimes and that was no good, but I loved it when I could skirt the cliff, moving fast and getting everything done.  Those were the best days.  They went by much faster too.  I’ve had eight-hour shifts in the fitting room that were shorter than five-hour shifts spent sizing clothes. 

Continue reading “From Each According to Ability (Part Two)” →

From Each According to Ability (Part One)

On By cherylmahoneyIn Fiction FridayLeave a comment

This is a story I wrote for my Senior Thesis at the University of San Francisco.  I don’t think I was ever so profoundly glad that I had chosen to be a Writing Emphasis major as when they told us we could write fiction for our final project.  The Literature Emphasis English majors had to write analytical papers.

For my last semester, one of my classes was a Senior Writing Seminar, where we only met a few times but were supposed to be “living and breathing” our writing project the rest of our time.  Don’t tell my writing professor, but that semester, in between writing this 20-page final project for him, I also wrote the 250-page first draft of my novel.

I was already pretty sure that a story about fairies and dragons and glass slippers was not quite what the English department was looking for, so instead I gave them a story set in the sometimes no less bizarre world of retail.  This is one of the rare times in my life when I decided to “write what I know,” as I spent several summers working in a very similar store.  I do want to say, though, that while the store is modeled on the one I worked on, the characters are fictional, and Carin, my narrator, is not me.  We share a love of musicals, but not all of her experiences or personality traits are mine.  And the store I worked for (which I will leave nameless…) was actually pretty good to me.

I hope you enjoy Part One, and Part Two will follow next week.

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            Bad things happen when customers aren’t greeted as soon as they enter our store.  I was submerged in medium-size jackets and tangled in tags when a new customer strode in the door.  All I registered was that she was wearing a sweater with too much embroidery; it looked silly but probably cost a fortune.  She went past me, coming through the front entrance at a steady pace and heading directly for the sale section in the back corner.  I hurriedly abandoned the clothes rack I was sorting by size and followed her at something between a walk and a trot.  You can’t run in a high-end women’s clothing store; sometimes I sorely regretted that.  It would make catching customers easier, and that was something management firmly expected me to do. 

            Once I was within range I fired off my usual greeting.  My line for this situation was, “Hello, my name’s Carin.  Looking for anything in particular today?”

            “Fine, thank you,” she responded and kept walking.

            I watched her continue her straight line to the back corner. 

Continue reading “From Each According to Ability (Part One)” →

Meditations on Stones

On By cherylmahoneyIn Fiction Friday2 Comments

This is a little more reflection than narrative…and I suppose the “I” in this case really is me (which it usually isn’t, in my writing).  But this has more of a story quality than an essay quality, so I’m going to put it in for Fiction Friday anyway.

On some level, this may be one of the most valuable things I’ve written.  I submitted it as my writing sample when I applied for an internship at UniversalGiving, where I’m now working…and while I couldn’t say how big a factor it played, one never knows…

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I swear Stonehenge was laughing at us.

            Not literally, of course, I don’t mean it like that.  But in a metaphorical, immense, stony kind of way, Stonehenge was definitely laughing.

            I think Stonehenge is maybe about an hour or two bus ride outside of London.  I say “bus ride” because I think tour buses are all that go there; tour buses and druids, maybe.  I was on a tour bus when I went there.  Tour buses usually make me sleepy, which is why I’m not so sure about the time length to get there.  I woke up quick when we got there though.  Stonehenge is not something to be slept through.

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Curse Details and Burnt Spindles

On By cherylmahoneyIn Fiction FridayLeave a comment

This week’s Fiction Friday features another excerpt from my novel, The People the Fairies Forget.  You can read the first chapter here.  This excerpt is partway into chapter two.

The story so far: Tarragon is a unusual fairy.  Besides disliking sparkles, he prefers ordinary people to royalty.  The story opens when Tarry attends a christening where Echinacea curses the Princess Rosaline to prick her finger and die, and Tarry’s cousin Marjoram (a certified Good Fairy) changes the death into sleep.  Tarry suggests a bet with Marj on whether a non-royal couple can have True Love.  The details of the bet haven’t been explained yet, but sixteen years after the christening (give or take), Tarry is back at Rosaline’s castle looking for a couple who can prove his point.

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            I wandered out of the stable and into the courtyard, where a flock of kitchen girls were gathered in the sunshine.  They were pretty girls, and I drifted that way.  I might have anyway, but right now it served my business too.  Some of them had to be romantically involved with someone.  Maybe even with the goatherd who was sitting on the stoop in their midst.  I knew he was a goatherd because there was a baby goat sitting next to him, and because I’m magical.  Magic also told me his name was Jack.

            I sat down near the fringe of the group, to listen in on the conversation.  No one knew me, but none of them noticed anything odd in that.  That’s an easy piece of magic.  Not an invisibility spell, just a don’t-take-much-notice-or-think-about-it spell.  That’s a useful one when I really want to go at a banquet table without attracting stares.  Keeps people from reacting to the pointed ears too, if the hair isn’t enough to hide them.  Or a good hat works.

            The kitchen girls, and goatherd, were having an animated conversation about the princess and her curse.  It would’ve been more useful to me if they had been talking about their romances, but I stayed anyway, thinking I still might be able to pick up something.

            The head cook, a woman clearly fond of her own cooking, had been at the christening and was relating the story now in thrilling tones.  It had grown more dramatic over the years.  Echinacea was uglier, the smoke was darker, the general horror was greater, you know how it goes.  Though to give the cook credit, she wasn’t entirely silly.

            “There’s some who say that it has to be a prince that wakes the sleeping princess,” the cook said, “or that it has to be true love’s kiss to break the spell, but I was there, and all that fairy said was a kiss.  Could be anyone.”

Continue reading “Curse Details and Burnt Spindles” →

The Boy on the Corner

On By cherylmahoneyIn Fiction Friday2 Comments

Unlike last week’s Fiction Friday, this is a stand-alone piece.  Which isn’t to say that it couldn’t have some connection to something larger…anyone care to guess what brought my muse to Paris in the early 1880s?  But no context is necessary to read this story.

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           When he shut his eyes, he could almost forget he was cold.  February 1882 in Paris, and in all his long experience of nine years the boy couldn’t remember a colder winter.  The wind howled down the street, past the shabby buildings and across the boy’s thin cheek.  He kept his eyes shut and concentrated on the music.

            The violin played in counterpoint to the wind, neither quite strong enough to defeat the other.  The boy ignored the constant trudge of footsteps, the mutter of voices, the whistle of the wind, and tried very, very hard to hear only the music.  He opened his eyes only at the sound of coins clinking together.  He looked down at the violin case open on the ground at his feet, and easily identified the one that had been added.  There weren’t very many coins there.  He looked up to see a tall man wrapped in a long black cloak, hat pulled low over his forehead, casting his face in shadows.

            “Merci, monsieur,” the boy murmured.  His eyes dropped and he continued playing his violin.

            The man didn’t move, and as the moments passed the boy became perplexed.  People stood and listened, once in a while, in warm weather.  In the cold and the dim of a winter twilight people wrapped their coats tight around them and hurried on, heads down, intent on whatever warm fireside was waiting before them.  If they dropped a coin at all it was without stopping, often without even looking, certainly without waiting for the boy’s whispered “merci.”

            The moments slipped past.  The violin music didn’t falter but neither did the man move and finally the boy’s eyes stole up to his face again.

Continue reading “The Boy on the Corner” →