E.M. Duskova

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Michaeline: The Year of the Tiger Will be a Big Year for Cats

I think I got all the words for this year’s story challenge, including two bonus words that Elizabeth excluded because they didn’t seem very friendly: sharp and fang. Old 2021 was a big year for cats for me — I went from two to 15 in my house, and my husband’s aunt is now keeping house with six (they often come to visit, since she’s next door and lets them out). It’s a little scary to think of a 20-year commitment for all 13 babies, but there’s so much love and happiness in my house now. I was born to be a cat lady!

Here’s wishing you all a wonderful 2022, and may your goals achieved increase like my cats! Now, on to the story.

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Betty’s 2021 had been one of the worst years she could recall. She lost a good friend, not to COVID, but to overcrowded hospitals that had to tell one more patient to just wait at home a little longer. Turned out that Anne couldn’t wait at home, after all. She’d died before the sun came up.

She’d lost a favorite aunt not to COVID, but to annoying conspiracy theories and right wing propaganda. She still loved Aunt Karen, but the way Betty’s blood pressure kept spiking every time Aunt Karen let loose a careless confidence such as Bill Gates was promoting climate change theories to sell computers to fund biological weapons . . . well, she didn’t talk to Aunt Karen at all these days. Betty just wasn’t fluent in bullshit.

Betty’s work, at least, was steady – even better than before the pandemic. She’d met some wonderful pet owners this last year, and her veterinary practice was satisfying. All in all, 2022 looked like it was going to be a great year. She stretched in her new daisy pajamas, enjoying the warm feeling of being in bed on New Year’s Day with no hangovers, no romantic regrets about the night before, and nothing to do for the rest of the day except feed herself and the cats. Continue reading →

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Michaeline: A Christmas Dream

Image via Wikimedia Commons

As I lay by the fire reading,

Eartha Kitt on my cell-phone singing

Of Christmas treasures Santa’d be bringing,

An orange tomcat on my lap kneading,

I let my eyes close.

Before my eyes was a gorgeous man,

Tall and handsome, wide of chest,

Firelight highlighting his golden breast.

I had to use my book as a fan

As he struck a pose.

At that moment my brain stuttered.

I let my fingers trail along that man so fine.

My fingertips took on a scented shine.

I realized that man was buttered.

Oh, my spirits rose!

As for the rest of my Christmas dream,

You’ll have to imagine it, dear pervs.

Them’s as dreams it, it deserves.

May 2022 be a sparkling stream

Of delightful prose.

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Day 18: A Christmas Ghost Story

Welcome the 8LW 25 Days of Stories. Hard to believe we’re up to day 18 already. I hope you have been enjoying reading the stories as much as we enjoyed writing them.

Today we’ve got a Christmas ghost story. It features (some if not all) of the following words: angel, ambivalent, blaze, baffling, zipper, estate, fiasco, honeymoon, blurt, eruption, collision, diamond, mysterious, grizzly, naked, and drunk.

So without further ado here, courtesy of 8L Michaeline, is today’s story.

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Unbeliever

A grizzled ghost from an old magazine looks at a young woman in a bed, possibly.

Stronger than death. (Image via Wikimedia Commons)

The first thing you should know about me is that I was a nuclear physicist. I didn’t believe in woo-woo, and I didn’t believe in goddamn ghosts. I believe in the laws of nature and mathematics. And, yeah, sure, my girlfriend told me about that baffling Hamlet and his “more things in your philosophy” quote. But ghosts aren’t real. I never believed.

The second thing you should know about me is that I was supposed to get married last Christmas to the most beautiful woman on the planet. Kind, smart, super-sexy and she loves me too. But I was hanging lights on our house (our first house) after a freak rainstorm, and the law of gravity ruled against me. What a fiasco. No wedding, no honeymoon, and she still wears my diamond and gets drunk every night while I continue to not exist. Believe me, it’s the last thing I wanted. Continue reading →

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Michaeline: A Nebraska Ghost Story for Japanese Obon

Today is the middle day of Obon, a three-day Japanese holiday honoring the dead. Ghost stories are traditional, because this is often the hottest, stickiest time of year, and the chills you get from spooky thrills are said to feel cool and refreshing.

I live in Japan now, but I grew up in Nebraska, and went to school there. I lived in one of the oldest dorms of my university, but I was in the new wing, which was built in the 1950s. No ghosts there, but we heard about ghost stories in the halls right next door.

Black and white newspaper image of a three story dorm with basement.
The story goes that this was a going to be a haunted residence hall. (Image via NebNewspapers)

The one I remember in particular was told to me in a room that had been converted to a TV room. Every floor had a TV room, which seemed to be a regular room that had been converted to communal viewing.

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Michaeline: Wolves, Past and Present

A friend of mine recently got pregnant, and told me she’s been having nightmares about wolves eating her baby and making her buy another child. It made me stop and think about wolves, and the power they have over our imaginations . . . largely a power that results from story.

Red Riding Hood comes closer to the Wolf disguised as Grandmother
When wolves were a common neighborhood terror. (Image via Wikimedia Commons)

I don’t think I’ve ever lived in an area where there were wolves; they were never an actual problem, but still, wolves loom large. They are themselves, but they are also a human-made metaphor for things that worry us greatly.

In “Little Red Riding Hood,” the wolf was a predator who ate little girls, as well as grandmothers. There was a moral to the story: don’t talk to strangers, or if you are sick in bed, don’t forget to lock the door.

The wolf as sexual predator was common in pop culture during the first half of the 20th century. Young women would call a problem male a “wolf.” Whistles at attractive young women were called “wolf whistles.” In cartoons, a male character when catching sight of a pretty girl would transform into a wolf . . . eyes bulging, two fingers in the mouth whistling.

Wolves didn’t have to be sexual predators, though. In “The Three Little Pigs,” the wolf was a force of nature . . . huffing and puffing houses down in an attempt to eat the pigs. In this story, the motive is spelled out: the wolf is hungry. So, it’s almost easy to sympathize with the wolf, but the moral of this story is that there are right ways and wrong ways to get a meal, and sliding down the chimney will land a wolf in hot water, not in front of the dining table.

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Michaeline: Saturday, Caturday

Sorry, my writing news is very boring, but the cat news continues to be quite exciting! We saw Millie’s kittens this week!

For regulars of the blog, you may remember that Mama Tabitha (aka Tabby Kate) had four kittens in Auntie Milk’s bathroom on April 16. Three tabbies, one black kitty. Don’t ask me about the sex of any of them; I can’t tell until puberty.

Mama Tabitha had three kittens in 2020 – Large Lars, Medium Millie and Chibi Momoko.

Mama Tabitha next to the screen, Daughter Chibi next to the reed curtain on the porch. In the window is a wind chime greeting card ringing gently in the wind. (E.M. Duskova)

Chibi suddenly got skinny in May, and then showed up at Auntie Milk’s house next door with one baby, an adorable striped thing on May 25. They took up residence in the upstairs landing. The kitten was quite stable on its feet and its eyes were open, so I’m guessing it was about one week old. (Mama Tabitha’s babies also opened their eyes early.)

I kept notes on Millie. She disappeared June first, and then showed up the next day very svelte. But we hadn’t seen her babies . . . the big question for six weeks was: Where are the babies?

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Michaeline: “Cat Person” and Identifying Details

This week, Twitter’s been a-flutter about this Slate article, where a woman realized she’s in a not-very-flattering short story published by the New Yorker. Alexis Nowicki details the facts and feelings of when people she knew texted her to say, “Is this you? Is this your boyfriend?” Read the whole article; there are nuances in there that can’t be captured in a headline or a few tweets.

Cats dressed as humans in an illustration, enjoying a musical evening. Viola, piano, singers, bass violin.
No, not that kind of Cat Persons. (Image via Wikimedia Commons, H..J. Overbeek, 1877)

It’s a running joke in the writing community: “Don’t piss me off, or you’ll wind up in my next novel.” It’s also a truism. Pissed or not, bits and pieces of people we know (and even people we’ve only heard about, as in the Nowicki case) show up in our work.

And they have to! We can’t make nothing from nothing. We need to incorporate little pieces of real life into our stories to make them feel real, even if they are outlandish fiction.

I don’t know about other writers, but I have very little control over what my subconscious throws up. The Girls in the Basement can take a very nice woman with a few quirks, and twist her around to an evil villainess with plans to take over the world. “The quirks make her human and relatable, not pure evil,” my editing mind reasons.

It’s got to feel awkward for the person who is reading a work by a friend, and stumbles upon their own doppleganger. It may even cause lasting discomfort that crosses the border into harm.

“Am I really like that?”

“No, it’s just fiction.”

“But I twiddle my hair just like that, and sometimes eat a sundae instead of lunch. But not every day! Not like that!”

“Yeah, no, but . . . .”

“And I certainly don’t program robots to sabotage people’s mental health! I teach Roombas to clean more efficiently! That’s all I do!”

“It’s fiction . . . .” The writer has no excuses except that she’s a writer, and it seemed like a hilarious idea at the time.

It’s been part of the writing game forever. I read somewhere (I think in one of Jane Austen’s biographies) that Austen would take the details and motivations of a person, then flip their gender, and allow that to change the details radically enough that people didn’t recognize themselves (maybe). It also helped that she wrote anonymously in her lifetime, and she wrote characters that many people can recognize in their own lives (even in the 21st century! I know a Mr. Collins, even though he’s a boring English teacher, not a churchman).

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Michaeline: How I Got Through Saturday

First, remember this: I got through Saturday morning more cheerful than I started, so look forward to a happy ending.

Girl in Hammock, exposing her shift and her calves. She's sleeping, and surrounded by shadowy green leafy shrubs. Her cheeks are flushed. Barefoot.
Keeping cool in the heat of things seems like a very healing idea. (Image via Wikimedia Commons)
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Michaeline: Pure indulgence

I’m having a very indulgent week. I made strawberry jam near the beginning of it, and every day since, I’ve had a big slice of buttered toast smeared with jam to go with my breakfast (brunch? lunch?) every day since. I feel so decadent!

Then, the day I had to go to the dentist, I spoiled myself rotten with shopping therapy, even though it was just a final fitting for my mouthguard (no drilling, no scraping, or digging, or prodding – I don’t know why I thought I needed to reward myself). Not one, not two, but three little boxes of plants and flowers from three different shops. I was proud of myself for avoiding shops four and five.

Left box: morning glories, blooming nemophila, blooming white snapdragons, green and white geranium leaves. Middle box: blooming Moody Blues 30 cm. tall phlox, blooming cotton candy pink petunias, button mums and a rose geranium. Right box: tall blooming hot pink snapdragons, shorter blooming light pink snap dragons. All in the trunk of a Toyota Aqua.
Trunk of flowers. Want to know the details? Ask in the comments. E.M. Duskova

And at the last stop of the day, I got ice cream. Loads of ice cream, not just for me but for the whole family. Spoiling myself is great, but spoiling others is also a simple pleasure and indulgence.

Visible: box of chocolate-covered ice creams on a a stick; two pints of Lady Borden ice cream (1 chocolate, 1 vanilla), three double packages of Papiko brand chocolate mini-smoothies, five packages of chocolate ice cream "berries" and two packages of pear ice sherbet "berries". Japanese ice cream.
A basket full of ice cream. I’ll take any questions in the comments below, but I do want to point out, there are five adults in the family, and I intend this to last two weeks. (Although, two adults in the family have no qualms about indulging in ice cream, so good intentions may be lost along the way.) E.M. Duskova
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Michaeline: Juneteenth — and don’t you forget it

Today is Juneteenth, America’s newest federal holiday. (NPR) From what I’ve read, the day is not so much about freedom, as it is about the long, terrible road that enslaved people had to walk to get to freedom, and the struggle to stay in a state of freedom.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Memorable words that helped found a nation, written by an enslaver.

I ran across this excerpt by Clint Smith on The Paris Review Twitter account this morning, and if you haven’t read it, you should. Beautiful writing, and it explains what exactly happened on Juneteenth, and illustrates how it can resonate with Black Americans today. Here’s his tweet. Clint’s excerpt from How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America is set on the Galveston, TX, plantation where enslaved people learned of their freedom in 1865.  

Greedy people who valued pretty dresses and a big house over the lives of fellow human beings stained US history with this atrocity, and too many people just went along with it and let it happen. Lest we forget . . . lest we let it happen again. Let’s remember Juneteenth.

PART TWO:

The contemporary white views in Galveston were pretty outrageous. Flake’s Weekly Bulletin of Galveston (Wednesday morning, July 19, 1865) complained on the front page of being accused of sucking up to the authorities in charge. It’s clear, though, that their sympathies are with the white people and the old system, although they take issue with the rebel leaders who they accuse of leading them into the mess of war and privation.

On page 2 (top of sixth column) of the newspaper, General Granger (who read General Order No. 3 to the enslaved people) is discussed. The paper is concerned that the cotton and corn is good, and the grapes are coming in . . . but if the planters stand firm and don’t hire people from other plantations, the formerly enslaved will have no choice but to work or starve.

“A few months delay would have saved some millions of dollars to the planters in the incoming crops, by securing the promising harvest; and some thousands of lives that the sudden change exposes to all the ills of the hot and sickly season.” Yeah, right. If only General Granger had delayed a few more months (never mind the years that had already passed since the enslaved were freed), I’m sure the planters would have sent the healthy Black people off with a nice percentage of the millions, and wished them well. (No, I do not think that for one moment.)

The parallels to the recent Jan. 6 sedition are striking. The paper cast legal doubt on the proclamation freeing the enslaved. They blame “false teachings of corrupt leaders” for people participating in the secession from the States. The heart (by which I think they mean the paper’s editorial staff and most white Galvestonians) “weeps over the stern necessity that dictates their (the warmongers) humiliation.” Oh, boo-effing-hoo.

But I suppose the editors of the newspaper had to tread that line between pleasing the federal authorities, and living with their neighbors. I’m not excusing them. It’s important to read these expressions of white supremacy. It made me realize just how much the arguments white supremacy puts forth really haven’t changed in all those years.

So when I say we shouldn’t forget, I mean not only what was done, but who was doing it and how. Juneteenth is a day to remember.

(I also recommend historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s excellent article, “What is Juneteenth?” for extra perspective.)