writer

I’m looking forward to making a conscious effort to keeping this blog better maintained! Ta for now, Alex

My dad drove a 1967 Chevy Impala. I hated that car. I told this to a friend once – her name was Marianne and she had a smattering of freckles across her cheeks and nose that she hated. I never understood why: they were like constellations, little galaxies of stars on her face that crinkled around her eyes when she smiled. I liked to look at the stars; I liked the stories that they told. “Why do you hate your freckles?” I asked her one afternoon as we sprawled across her deep purple bed spread, our school notebooks open in front of us being largely ignored. Marianne only shrugged, and then turned to me and asked, “Why do you hate your dad’s car?” I wasn’t sure what to say to her. I drummed the eraser of my pencil a few times against the striped page of my notebook. It wasn’t because I was claustrophobic; it wasn’t because I got carsick. Maybe I should have told her one of those things as a reason anyway – the real reason felt deep and dark and secretive, and I was never really able to put my finger on why. “That’s where we stay.” I said, reaching up and scratching the back of my neck, feeling flakes of dry skin come up beneath my stubby, bitten fingernails. Marianne stared at me for a moment, her thick dark eyebrows furrowing over her hazy green eyes as she processed what I had said. “What do you mean?” She asked. It was my turn to shrug, “That’s where we spend most of our time. We’re not really ever in one place for very long.” It stung to say out loud, and I realized that it was the first time I had ever done so, at least to anyone that wasn’t my dad or my brother, Archie. I stopped trying to talk to my dad about it a long time ago; he went selectively deaf when the subject was brought up. Marianne sat up, tucking the number-two pencil that she had been holding behind her left ear. She frowned. “You live in your dad’s car?” “No!” I protested immediately, my voice sharp like the perforated edge of a holly berry leaf or a plastic knife one might find in a school cafeteria. I hadn’t meant to snap. “We stay in motels and stuff… Motel 8’s and things like that. Never anything classy or expensive. We skip around from town to town.” “And that’s why you said that you didn’t want me to come over to your house?” Marianne had an expression on her face that I wasn’t sure how to decipher – relief? Pity? Embarrassment? I couldn’t blame her one bit if it were that last one. “That’s why you said you’ve been to so many schools, why you don’t have a lot of friends?” I only shrugged my shoulders in response, so Marianne continued. “Are you like… poor?” “I dunno. Probably. Otherwise wouldn’t we have a house, or like… an apartment or something?” I said, asking the question but not really expecting a response. It was a question that I’d been asking myself for a long time, but I never expected to get an answer – apart from what I already knew. I knew that owning a vintage car was not cheap. I knew that my dad could pay for the gas it took to ferry us around from place to place. I knew that he’d had a new stereo system put into the car at some point. I knew that the leather seats inside were in pristine condition and received a rub down every now and again. That car smelled like cigarette smoke and stale pine air freshener that hung over the rearview mirror. I knew that even though my brother and I wore second-hand clothes and lived off of a diet of cheap junk food that my dad scrounged up from gas station food houses, that my dad could also afford to keep the paint job on that stupid impala in top-notch condition. What I didn’t know was why – and I had long since given up on trying to figure it out. I must have gone quiet then, because Marianne reached out with one hand and touched my shoulder – I jumped. “Do you know how long you’re going to be in Tulsa?” I shook my head. I never knew how long I was going to be anywhere. I’d been roused in the middle of the night before, and told to pack up and get in the car. So instead, Marianne asked something else. “Do you want to call your dad and ask if you can spend the night here?” “I don’t have a cellphone.” I said. But Marianne only offered a little smile, fishing in her pocket for a moment before pulling out a small, pink flip phone. It was years out of date, I knew from TV commercials, but it was still more than I’d ever had. My dad had some sort of pre-paid phone, but all the same I dialed the number. I didn’t know what the answer would be, but at least I had a new question – and a new friend with constellations on her face that crinkled when she smiled. -- Alexandra Wimberley

The poppies excreted their ornate scent, and she laid down on her tree branch with a yawn. If I can succumb to Sleep, why not Death? -- Alexandra Wimberley

Those vague images leave you in favor of light, gold like honey and warm like skin. No more red flowers, not for now. Day stands you up and sends you on your way. You’re unsteady on your feet, but you walk anyway. The Day is long, her light seems to stretch for miles and miles — but you walk all the same. She holds your hand even when you stumble or trip, and when your knees give way she picks you up again. -- Alexandra Wimberley

She spoke, once. It was a long time ago, wrinkles and age spots and a magnificent oak tree that was significantly shorter than it is today. There was a tire swing there, once. She loved to talk, once. About the weather, or the news, what she had for breakfast on that morning (bacon and eggs). Breakfast was huge. She’d talk about everything, once. But then her face went a bit slack, and her mouth began to droop, and all her words were stuck to the roof of her mouth. She tried to swallow them and choked. She couldn’t talk anymore. Not about the weather or the news, or what she had for breakfast today (a quarter of grapefruit). Breakfast wasn’t much. And it always makes me sad. -- Alexandra Wimberley

My foot lives in my mouth. Or maybe it vacations there, I really couldn’t say. All I know for sure is that it sure gets in the way. It fills up the whole space and makes it hard to speak, until my words are cotton balls and my teeth begin to creak. The words that dribble from my mouth put me in a dentists chair, with fluoride dripping down my chin and make me wish that I weren’t there. So I am sorry for my words and their clumsy tendencies, but my foot lives in my mouth and is not easy to please. If it plans on moving out? Well, I really couldn’t say. All I know for sure is that it sure gets in the way. -- Alexandra Wimberley

I swallowed the solar system. The whole thing, in one gulp. Nine planets, and not one of them tasted like any of the others. Saturn’s rings got stuck between my teeth; Neptune was like spearmint gum and a swallow of ice water. Pluto was a grape lollipop (But if they had it their way, he would not be here at all.) Venus was a five course meal with roses and chocolates. Mars was the coffee from the next day’s Walk-of-Shame. Mercury was the apple pie that hadn’t cooled down; I scorched my tongue on it. Jupiter got stuck on the way down — it gave me heartburn. Uranus was pure salt. But Earth? Earth was the taste of mud, petrichor: dust in the rain. -- Alexandra Wimberley

-- A.W.

Someone is walking in my woods. Who? Death on a pale horse. Does hell follow with him? (Would I know if it did?) Does he leave any trace? Hoof prints burned upon the ground. The Earth is singed and scarred. (As it has always been by death.) Is it a wolf, perhaps? Volchitsa, blood on her maw flecks of snow on her coat (Gold eyes, predators eyes.) Maybe spirits lurk here; Dante, Virgil, Orpheus, Eurydice. Or maybe I am the spirit (Would I know if I was?) -- Alexandra Wimberley

My parents’ bedroom was a jumble of half-unpacked luggage, dirty laundry hanging from unlikely places, and shiny green plastic bags labeled Harrods. It was 1998, I was five years old, and my mother had just come back from London that morning, where she had been on vacation with my Uncle Bill. Jet lag had not been kind. All day, she had been dozing off in the armchair, repeatedly admonishing my three-year-old brother, Zach, and me with a drowsy, “I’m not sleeping!” whenever we would nudge her to wake her up. When evening came around, I’m sure that there was nothing that my mother wanted to do more than crawl into bed and go to sleep. But it had been two weeks since Zach and I had heard a proper bedtime story; my dad read to us, but he wasn’t Mom. He didn’t do the silly voices like she did. So my brother and I opened my parents bedroom door a portion of the way, peeking our noses in through the sliver and surreptitiously (or at least, as surreptitiously as a five-year-old and a three-year-old can manage) spied upon my mother. She wasn’t asleep yet. Now that the time had come that it was appropriate for bed, her sleepiness seemed to have abandoned her: Mom was sitting on her side of the great mahogany king sized bed, the deep vermillion duvet cover pulled over her legs as she sipped from a glass of red wine. My parents’ bedroom was never particularly tidy, but today it looked as if a suitcase had birthed some sort of great clothing monster… or perhaps, it had exploded, and the clothes that were all over the room were the leftover viscera. My mother took a moment to notice the two of us in the doorway, owing to a billowy blue dress hanging over the bedpost at the foot of her side of the bed - the opposite bedpost housed similar clothing items, but the post itself had broken cleanly in half from where my brother and I liked to swing around on it. My brother, for his part, was not at all patient. On chubby legs, he went toddling toward the bed, looking up at my mother with a goofy grin on his face. His eyes were big and brown, and his ears were even bigger. Mom started to chuckle, and sat her glass of wine down on her nightstand amongst bottles of various crimson nail polishes and tissues blotted with assorted shades of lipstick. I, too, gave up any pretense of lurking at the door, and followed after my brother into the room. At five, I was bigger, and perfectly able to hoist myself up onto my mother’s bed in a way similar to how one might climb out of a swimming pool. Once I was up, I turned around on my hands and knees so that I could lean down and pull Zach up as well. He had been trying in vain to mimic the movement that I had just so easily accomplished. In the midst of all of this, my mother had leaned over to reach between the bed and her nightstand, pulling up one of the green Harrods bags. She reached inside, and with a flourish pulled out a chapter book that I would never be able to forget: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, by J.K. Rowling. It was the UK edition of the book, philosopher, not sorcerer, and the cover art was one of the most beautiful things I’d seen: the title was emblazoned in golden letters on a crimson header, and beneath of it was that not-quite-yet famous scarlet steam engine, the Hogwarts Express. Harry stood just in front of it, an expression on his face somewhere between surprise and confusion. My brother settled onto my mother’s left side, and I on her right, and she opened the book and began to read to us. That book sang. If music were something tangible, something that I could run my fingers along the spine of, it would feel like the pages of that book every time I thumbed through it. I wish I thought there were adequate words enough to really describe the feeling. The closest word, ironically, is magic. And the thing is? That feeling never really goes away. I was part of the generation that grew up as Harry grew up: we went to school together, so to speak, and we never really grew apart with time the way that some friends do. The thought wasn’t conscious at the time, or if it was, I couldn’t make a great deal of sense of it. But I can pin point that night as the exact moment that I decided I wanted to become a writer. I wanted to be able to evoke that kind of feeling in people, the feeling that anything is possible, even something as far fetched as a half-giant breaking down your front door on your eleventh birthday to summarily inform you that you’re a wizard. I still want people to feel that way. I want them to be able to escape into a fantasy that is, perhaps in some ways, kinder than our reality. Or at the very least, more interesting. I wanted to write and make characters of my own, characters that I would love and that other people would relate to. I even wanted to write characters that other people loved to hate; I wanted to write the Lord Voldemorts, the Bellatrix Lestranges, and the Dolores Umbridges. That first desire emerged in my mother’s bedroom that evening, sunk into her feather down pillows and breathing in the scent of sandalwood perfume. -- Alexandra Wimberley

-- Alexandra Wimberley

pisces you’re the whisper of a stream as it trickles over stones; you flow, you twist, you curve, but you make it from one end to the other, unbroken and in one piece. -- Alexandra Wimberley