Author: barbaramonier

Barbara Monier has been writing since the earliest days when she composed in crayon on paper with extremely wide lines. She studied writing at Yale University and the University of Michigan. While at Michigan, she received the Avery and Jule Hopwood Prize. It was the highest prize awarded that year, and the first in Michigan's history for a piece written directly for the screen. She has four published novels: YOU, IN YOUR GREEN SHIRT and A LITTLE BIRDIE TOLD ME, and with Amika Press, PUSHING THE RIVER and THE ROCKY ORCHARD. Her fifth novel, THE READING, will release in October 2022.
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Ice: A flash fiction homage to pneumonia and the unreliable narrator

yves trevedy

I’m not really sure if I’m here.

Every so often, someone comes into the room.  The person always says, “how are you doing, Mr. ______.”  I usually say, “I’m not really sure if I’m here.” Not once have I gotten a reasonable response to this.  Sometimes the other person seems to ignore the question altogether, so you can see where this would be extremely unhelpful in determining whether I’m really here, or not.  Sometimes the other person gives a faint, indecipherable smile while they go about their business.  They examine the machines that surround me.  They make notes – sometimes on a computer they roll in and out of the room with them, sometimes on a little scrap of paper, once in a while on their wrist or hand or some other part of their own body.

Frequently the other person says, “I’d say you’re getting better.”  I used to ask: “Better than what?”  I had no idea what standard of comparison the person was using, and the statement confused me a great deal.  Once again, I never got a response that I could make any use of, so I thought it best to stop asking.  The people seemed quite well-meaning, and very dedicated to their various tasks as they moved around my room.  Sometimes I wondered if it was the tasks themselves, or the movements associated with those tasks, that were supposed to be helpful to me.  Perhaps it was a carefully choreographed dance, an incantation, perhaps designed to allow for my return, if I was, in fact, gone somewhere in the first place.

laurits Tuxen

Before the person leaves my room, they invariably grab a device that looks like an exceptionally outdated remote control and place it directly in my hand.  “Press the button if you need anything.”  I nod.  I am pretty sure that I nod.  “The button,” the person says, pointing to a bright red circle in the middle of the outdated remote.  I lay the remote right next to my hand and contemplate what I might need, in the future, so I could push the button and summon the people.  I’m not sure if they’re disappointed in me for not thinking of something.  I’ll try to work on this.

I’m very high up.  In a bed.  I am so high up that the floor seems miles away.  I can have as many pillows as I want, and they are the fluffy but firm ones that are just the way I like them.  They blankets are laughably thin, but I can have as many of these as I want, also.  I think this is a memory: I was shaking with chills, shaking way up high in my bed miles above the floor, and some people brought me blankets that had been warmed up.  They wrapped one entire blanket around my feet, and a second one around my torso, and a third they used to wrap me all the way up to my chin, making me into a mummy.

There are always two pitchers of ice cold water within my reach.  They are always completely full to the top, and the ice never melts.  The ice is the very best part.  People come and go from the room.  I don’t know where they go, because I don’t know what’s on the other side of the door to my room.  I don’t know for sure that they continue to exist.  But there are always the perfectly-formed, small, rectangular ice cubes.  They are immensely satisfying to crunch.  My hand gets colder and colder with each handful of ice that I take from the pitcher, and my mouth gets colder and colder as I crunch.  It is at these times that I most believe that I may be real.

rembrandt

Paintings, top to bottom: Yves Trevedy, Laurits Tuxen, Rembrandt

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Little Burro – FLASH fiction*

66hotel

I was pretty sure my parents were tricksters.  From an early age, I was watching them out of the corners of my eyes.

Like when we took a road trip all the way across the country when I was four years old, driving west across old Route 66 from Pennsylvania to California, where my aunt and uncle lived.  Days and days of endless barren landscapes, our brand new station wagon throwing up a dust storm that followed in our wake.  No air conditioning.  The windows were wide open, making any kind of talking sort of impossible.  It was dry, and dusty, with a hot wind blowing in your face all day long.  My brother and I bounced and blew around in the back seat in a woozy stupor.  Every so often, one of us would come out of our haze long enough to let out a plaintive whine of “How much longer?” or, even more important, “Are you sure there’s a POOL?”

I got to eat pancakes every morning.

At one of the pancake places, I got a little stuffed burro with a bell in his ear for my souvenir of the trip.  Except I wasn’t allowed to make the bell ring because it drove everyone nuts, so mostly I just held him in my lap and stared at him.

My aunt and uncle had a new baby.  I’d pretty much never seen a baby before, and I wasn’t at all sure she was real.  She just sat there doing absolutely nothing most of the time.  Every so often I would pinch her, to see if she was real after all.  She would scream or cry or something, but somehow I still wasn’t entirely convinced.

I was pretty sure the people next store were really, really bad and would snatch me up or hurt me if I got too close to them.  They were always trying to get me to come over to their gate to talk to them, or to show me something.  They didn’t speak English, and they wore clothes that covered them all up from head to toe, and they were older than even my grandparents.  I made sure never to get too close to that gate, even if I didn’t see them in their yard.  But that meant that I had to stay in my aunt and uncle’s garage, and that was terrifying, too, as my aunt had shown me a bottle that she swore had a genie inside.  It was hard to find a place that was far enough from the gate and from the bottle, both.  But at least I could stand there and shake my burro’s bell.

My parents seemed to think that everything was funny.  They laughed all the time in California, and I was pretty sure they were laughing at me.  But I was watching them.  They just seemed like people with a lot of secrets.  Mean people.  With secrets.

roadtrip

 

*The blog has been silent for a spell, while I have labored over the re-re-re-writes of my upcoming novel Pushing the River.  In the interim, I have become fascinated with the concept of the unreliable narrator. And I continue to be taken with the idea of flash fiction.  Hence, a little piece that utilizes both.

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hands

Waiting, with eagerness and anxiousness in equal measure, for the final round of changes my editor suggests for upcoming novel PUSHING THE RIVER.

In the meantime, I completely surprised myself by writing the first poem I have written in, oh, I think about forty years.

 

Untitled

 

These are not the stories

Not the ones I want to tell you

Your skin, the perfect roughness of your taut hands

It is these things that make me need different stories to tell you

Ones that will match your hands

 

My stories, the ones that are really mine

Are for aching skin, crumbling skin

The tales that are me

fit with hands that have held

Neither newness, nor wonder

 

 

 

 

photo by Michelle Cardozo

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Pushing the River: FLASH flash

It was not her first foray into the parallel universe of online dating. Madeline had been divorced for more than ten years. She had braved a string of relationships that progressed from interest, to the first tingle of excitement, to the exhilaration of genuine possibility, to the frightening, heady, joyful moment when the roller coaster passed the peak of its climb and in that split second, there was no going back: momentum had taken over; it was utterly and completely out of anyone’s control, because at that moment, there was love. There was real love.

And then there wasn’t.

Madeline took time to lick the wounds of disappointment. She allowed the lesions of dashed hopes to scab over. She understood that persevering was an ongoing matter of keeping one’s optimism just enough ahead of the injury of experience to keep going.

After a time, she would go back online, pouring over profiles, scrutinizing descriptions, gathering courage. As crazy a universe as online dating was – she recalled a friend aptly calling it The Wild West – it was essentially the only path to meet people. Since Madeline worked alone, had never buddied up to a man in a bar, and didn’t attend church, she reconciled herself to the necessary methodology.

Madeline worked hard to extinguish the flame she had carried for Jeff. But the feeling of being part of something larger than herself – everything from the ongoing sense that life was bigger and mattered more, to the immeasurable joy of small, everyday moments – was a living spirit inside of her.

cropped-winogrand-mirror.jpg

I am up to my eyeballs in re-writing/editing my novel Pushing the River.  The above snippet is excerpted from an early chapter. The first paragraph remains from the original draft; the remainder was written yesterday.  It struck me that it could stand on its own as a Flash.  It also struck me as being remarkably similar to the Flash I wrote entitled “January 2,” which suggests that I still endeavor to get it right.  WATCH FOR THE RELEASE OF PUSHING THE RIVER THIS SUMMER!!!

photo by Garry Winogrand

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Smoke: Flash Fiction

It was the way she held her cigarette that I would remember. Her hands were always so small, the fingers so thin. You could not see from one end of the kitchen to the other , the density of smoke from cigarette after cigarette had nowhere to go. It choked the room. It obscured the cabinets, the floor of the room she had waited so long to redo.

It was very nearly the hand of a child.

I don’t want you to come anymore, she said. I want this to be the last time.

Was there gray in her hair when we first met? I was trying to recall. But always the pale, slender hands , the plain gold wedding band, the narrow silver watch whose face she could no longer read without her glasses, which she detested and never wore.

But I want to come, I said.

She could no longer see the cabinets, nor even the beloved built-in breakfast nook where the two of us sat. It was not the smoke. She had not seen much of anything around her for a number of years. Not since Jeff jumped.

I mean it, she said. Please don’t.

 

giphy

As I work on the final draft of my novel, I have been playing with several new ideas, and it’s possible that one has taken hold! I have long been intrigued by writing a full-length work that takes place within a time frame that is less than 24 hours (think Mrs. Dalloway, Ulysses, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, etc.). I have recently become intrigued by the possibility of telling the entire story in separate pieces of flash fiction — each of which would be entirely free standing, but all of which together would tell the tale. The piece above is the latest flash.

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January 2nd: Flash Fiction

whiteout

Being single is January 2nd.

Yesterday’s twinkling lights quit working and now fill garbage cans. The festive flourishes that merry-makers painstakingly hung in windows and yards and around doors have been ravaged by time and weather. My Christmas tree has become so dry that every time my dog brushes it with her wagging tail, needles rain forth in a downpour of fire hazard.

The season of cheer, of good will, of hopefulness, is past. Not even the brain-scrambling, body-slamming, wretched but familiar hangover of the New Year remains to keep us company.

January 2nd. Nothing ahead but bleak, relentless winter, as far as the soul can see. A landscape of emotional white out.

I have wandered around this landscape for too many years – this relentless tundra of January 2nd status.  But it is a New Year.  And with whatever mixture of revelry and reflection we rang in 2018, here we stand.  We renew our vow to begin again.

Nuclear-Winter

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Heads Up

The first time I saw How the Grinch Stole Christmas was 1969, the same year that Tim was my first boyfriend. We watched it together, Tim and I, along with my brother’s other best friend Doug. My brother wasn’t there somehow, even though we were at my house.

We watched Grinch in a lightless room, something my family never did. It was believed that watching a bright screen with no other light in the room was reckless and hazardous, and could have tragic consequences, which remained vague and therefore almost mystical. Doug sat at one far end of sofa, Tim at the other. I curled up with my feet resting against Doug and my head in Tim’s lap. Every so often, he reached down and touched my hair.

The magnificently long-suffering, but loyal and philosophical dog Max. The clenched-hearted Grinch. The village of Who’s whose joy at their mutual sense of belonging transcends all evils. Snuggled between two Nice Boys, I felt safe and warm and protected and loved in a way that was precious and rare.

When the boys left and my parents said that They Had To Talk With Me, I was certain that I was gonna get clobbered for watching the television set in the dangerously dark room. A terrible wave of guilt shot through me, a pang at having been so lulled, so incautious.

“Never, ever put your head in a boy’s lap.”

This was so entirely unexpected, it took me a minute to even decipher the words. The meaning. And when I did, I was even more bewildered. “What?” I said.

“Your head was in Tim’s lap. That’s not something you can do. Ever.” One of them said while the other stood there in a rare display of rock-solid alliance.

“What?” I said again, looking from one to the other.

“It’s not fair. To the boy,” my mother said. “It’s too stimulating.”

My father bit his lip.

confusion

As I work on getting my third completed novel Out There, I have been playing around with several new ideas, and it’s possible that one has taken hold! I have long been intrigued by writing a full-length work that takes place within a time frame that is less than 24 hours (think Mrs. Dalloway, Ulysses, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, etc.). I have recently become intrigued by the possibility of telling the entire story in separate pieces of flash fiction — each of which would be entirely free standing, but all of which together would tell the tale. The piece above is the latest flash.

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We [wee microfiction]

When we got off the highway, the kids asked me if they could open the windows. When they were in their 20’s, and I was in my 50’s, I wondered if there would come a time when I would no longer think of them as The Kids. Now that they are both over thirty and have children of their own, I realize that they will always by my kids. Like they say in the song at the end of The Grinch Who Stole Christmas (the animated one, narrated by the unparalled Boris Karloff; not that live action trash): “just as long as we have we.” That’s how long.

Wyeth-5

 

painting by Andrew Wyeth

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A Whirl of Snow, A Glint in the Moonlight

“How could this evening have taken such an ugly turn,” Madeline thought to herself. She loved Christmas, and even though she was not terribly religious and thought it kind of cheesy, caroling with her old church youth group struck her as a giant hoot.

It was much colder than usual for mid-December, and a snowstorm that had been predicted for later that night began hours before expected. Houses were decorated, lights twinkled everywhere, it was blustery and freezing and snowing furiously hard — to her mind, a picture-perfect backdrop. The cold and the fact that she didn’t sing very often made her light-headed and giddy.

Other than the fact that the hot chocolate was essentially lukewarm brown water, and that, as usual, a couple of the kids had poured a flask full of vodka into their cocoa and were using an inordinate amount of effort to not fall down, she was having a wildly good time. Singing. Christmas! A boyfriend!! They had been going together for nearly three months.

“Don’t fuck with me.” There was an edge in his voice she had not heard before.

“Of course I was talking to him. I’ve known him since I was, like, six years old.” The party. Deja vu. All over again.

“What were you saying to him?” Tim asked.

“What was I saying?”

“Yeah.”

“What was I saying? I don’t remember! I’ve been talking to everyone!” Madeline’s voice was taut with frustration.

And despite what she knew to be true, she was overtaken with the sense that she had done something very, very wrong. She must have. This was her boyfriend – her crazy-curly-haired, insanely-blue-eyed boyfriend –and he was clearly angry.

“Tim, I’m sorry. I can’t even remember what we were talking about. It wasn’t important.”

“Well, you sure looked fucking happy.”

“What?”

All of the other kids had trickled back into the church, leaving the two of them alone in the driving snow.

“Shit, I don’t have boots on,” she said. “Can we go in?”

“You don’t give a shit about me.”

He reached one hand into an inside coat pocket, and pulled something out she strained to see. The moon — or maybe it was one of the streetlights that flooded the church parking lot and lit up the whirling snowflakes — glinted off the object in Tim’s right hand. It was a razor blade, a very old, very rusty razor blade.

Before she could react, before she had time to consider being afraid, Tim had spun on his heels and was loping through the shin-deep snow, the long fringe of his buckskin jacket flying everywhere.  A final flash of metal and moon. His arm fully outstretched. The silhouette of his back quickly vanishing against the mad snowflakes and the black winter sky. She ran after him, ten or twelve steps perhaps, before her feet were thoroughly soaked and freezing, and there was no sign of him at all.

She gripped the edges of the stainless steel sink in her kitchen, not sure whether she would vomit. But when her mother asked her how the evening had been, she said, “Fine. Fun.”

That was as much of an answer as her parents would expect from their fourteen-year-old daughter, and they beamed widely at her as she brushed past them, not noticing that she clutched her stomach with white-knuckled fingers as she climbed the stairs to her bed.

ygritte

Jon-Snow-in-snow-345198

As I work on getting my third completed novel Out There, I have been playing around with several new ideas, and it’s possible that one has taken hold! I have long been intrigued by writing a full-length work that takes place within a time frame that is less than 24 hours (think Mrs. Dalloway, Ulysses, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, etc.). I have recently become intrigued by the possibility of telling the entire story in separate pieces of flash fiction — each of which would be entirely free standing, but all of which together would tell the tale. The piece above is the latest flash.

hope you get a kick out of the photos…

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Flash Fiction 2

Suicide was just a word, a vague concept. Something whispered, read about in books. Nothing that had ever come near my own world, but rather a specter keeping itself hidden and far away. I had not even read The Bell Jar, hadn’t thought of Sylvia Plath turning on the stove in the apartment where she lived every day. Had not been stuck with the picture of her putting her head into the oven with the gas jet running, her two young children sleeping in their beds on the other side of the wall.

Daddy Daddy, I said. Daddy, I don’t know what Tim is going to do. I’m scared. I think he’s going to do something to himself. Help me, Daddy. I need your help, Daddy. I said.

-sylvia-plath-book-authors

o-SYLVIA-PLATH-PHOTOS-facebook

As I work on getting my third completed novel Out There, I have been playing around with several new ideas, and it’s possible that one has taken hold!  I have long been intrigued by writing a full-length work that takes place within a time frame that is less than 24 hours (think Mrs. Dalloway, Ulysses, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, etc.).  I have become intrigued by the possibility of telling the entire story in separate pieces of flash fiction — each of which would be entirely free standing, but all of which together would tell the tale.  Stay tuned!

photos of Sylvia Plath