Dawn’s Playground

As the long, hot days of summer wore on, something new began to churn and build inside me. It had been there for a long time, but now it made itself impossible to ignore. I lost interest in characters with singular purpose in favor of those with multifaceted needs and desires. I moved on instinct, and importantly, found I was becoming better able to trust my instincts.

The last time we met she told me she could feel pain in my characters as their bodies twisted and fell to the ground. She liked how they crawled through mud to arrive at some kind of resolution. With this new knowledge, and gasping for air, they stood and looked out from my pages at the reader, at her. Something was changed forever in the process. She said I was turning the corner and heading in the right direction toward something meaningful.

Something meaningful, I thought. Everything was meaningful.

“You’re getting there,” she said.

But it came at a price.

Everything else in my life became secondary as I diverted my time and focus to get there. It all fell away but this, my singular priority.

Something meaningful.

“Don’t we need to transfer money today into the kids’ college funds?”

“Not now, dear,” I said, shutting my eyes tight to shield me from the distraction. I continued typing out the final scene before the resolution. I was so close.

Like the natural evolution of seeds pushing through moist soil after an early spring rainstorm, this new style emerged and spread through my pages, rooted itself there, and in my mind. Before sitting down to write, I would step outside to watch the sun rise and dawn’s playground come alive. Robins and squirrels twitched and leaped as they scoured the earth to satisfy their hunger.

I’d close my eyes and inhale the sweet morning air until her eyes and body appeared. My imagination felt to me to have the accuracy of a photograph, capturing every line and crevice and dark space as it set the image into the accessible and well-traveled lenses of my mind.

Today the composition was filled with magnolia trees and hungry pollinators as a gentle wind danced over my skin, awakening my senses. Wearing a yellow cotton sundress, she looked down in approval on her garden as the first spear shaped leaves of a tulip bulb emerged from the dirt after a cold winter. I set my coffee on the desk and rolled my fingers over the smooth plastic keys. I closed my eyes for a moment, willing forward whatever needed to emerge from the moment.

As precisely as if I’d pushed the button of a camera, a vision sailed from the back of my mind to the front, through the open pores of my skin, before arriving through the tips of my fingers. The screen slowly filled with mass, with particularity, in the form of a garden gate and a watering can. The woman lifted the bright copper vessel and began watering the beds. She appeared like a shadow at first, but as I went deeper, the enigmatic figure changed, acquiring sharper definition. I decide to illuminate her just enough to give the reader a hint of her form. She was tall and lean, with auburn hair that fell around her bare shoulders. When she bent down to remove a twig, her bright yellow dress spread across the dark soil of the earth.

Her hair spilled forward to reveal bare shoulders slightly burned by the sun.

With the ticking sounds of the wall clock counting off cadence, I wrote until I was overwhelmed by hunger. I pushed away from my desk, stretched my arms and back, and read my closing lines one more time.

The front door slams shut, shuddering the house’s foundation and loosening the pinned train schedule that hangs from a corkboard on the wall. It falls behind the desk into a deep crevice. I quickly print the pages and run out for the train. I know I’ve forgotten to close the gate but I don’t want to make her wait.

I arrive on time and unpack my story. I wait.

“Sorry I’m late,” she says once she arrives, unhurried, before reaching for my pages.

“Everything alright?”

She gave me no response, as usual. I ordered two coffees and watched her eyes move across the pages.

“What d’you think?”

She appeared to be lost in thought and not present with me.

“I have to go.”

“Wait, what? We just sat down.”

And just like that she was gone.

I thought about running after her, but decided against it. She stepped briskly, decisively away, as if trying to get somewhere on time, despite the fact that the time had been prearranged as ours, that she’d arrived to be there, had the intention to be there, albeit late. Albeit unhurried.

As she crossed Grand Street, she slipped one strap of the canvas bag from her shoulder and looked inside. Like a person without sight, she dug her hand deep inside trying to find something. I turned away from the scene, sipped my coffee and noticed her wire rim glasses on the pavement under the chair where she sat. The wire had come undone and the lens had fallen out. When I looked up, she had disappeared. I wondered then if I’d been giving her too much credit for seeing, for vision. I wondered if her compass had faltered.

I don’t know if I would have followed her even if she hadn’t. I don’t believe that should have been part of the story, my care in the face of her strange dismissal.

I dropped her glasses into my backpack and took out my writing pad. As I sipped my coffee I jotted down ideas for a novel, new ideas, deeply my own. I brought them forth onto the page. Knowing she would not return today to retrieve her glasses, I ordered pastries to fill my stomach and prepared an outline for the chapters to come.

I can’t say how I knew she wouldn’t return, but I was right. She didn’t.

I wrote through the afternoon.

©2023 Paul Rabinowitz

Heat Index

I emerged from the L Train Station as the late morning sun bore down on the sidewalk. My internal compass orientated me south along Bedford Avenue toward Grand Street to the cafe where we’d planned to meet. As I moved quickly to arrive on time, I noticed my new cotton t-shirt was already soaked from sweat.

“Morning.”

“Yep, it is,” she said, hesitating before looking up from her book.

“You sure sitting outside is a good idea? The heat index says another 100 degree day.”

“I’m fine with it. Are you?”

I removed my latest draft from my backpack and laid it on the table.

“Totally fine. Look, I finished early this morning.”

She removed a fountain pen from her worn canvas bag and leaned over the pile.

“You want coffee?” I asked.

Her uncombed auburn hair fell unevenly across her burnt red shoulders. I wondered about this, about her inattention to the potential and continued harm she’d sustained from the sun even as she zeroed in like a hawk over the lines I’d written, the sharp point of her fountain pen hovering, ready to descend at any moment it detected the smallest weakness. I remained still as I watched for a change in her expression.

“What does this mean?” she said, dropping her pen to the paper and making a large circle around the paragraph.

I leaned over and settled my eyes within the mark she’d made.

“It’s a description of the character’s desires.”

Her eyes flashed from yellow to gold as sunlight bounced off the white table.

“And your desires?”

I thought before answering, and we sat there in the pause. I’d risen early, the new direction for the story penetrating my waking thoughts. The fading moon hung in the blue hour as the light from the rising sun caressed its lunar surface. New phrases flowed through me like a stream after torrential rains. Letters tumbled out fluidly through the smooth tips of my fingers. I tapped on the keys, transferring images of a ticking clock, chocolates, and the sparkling yellow transparency of Côtes du Rhône through a tulip shaped wine glass. It was true, I didn’t yet know what it all meant, only that it meant something.

The screen door of my summer cottage where I go to be alone and write flew open. Like a mother hugging her child, you clutched a worn canvas bag under your bright yellow summer dress. Your hair dripping wet from a fast moving storm. I watched you.

“I think you’ll like Hemingways’s prose in this one.”

I noticed a small stick and poke tattoo between your biceps. I wondered about the story of this.

“I think it’s kinda where you’re heading.”

I recalled the forecaster predicted unbearable humidity with a heat index rising above one hundred for the next few days. How the forecaster indicated it would feel even hotter than the actual temperature. I wondered, as I always wonder, how they calculate this discrepancy between reality and feeling with numbers.

“Let me know what you think.”

Glancing at your sunburnt shoulders, I drew images of a marble sculpture formed by the loving hands of an artist. I imagined this artist chiseling mass into void with a mallet on a hill somewhere in the woods, upstate, New York. The smooth curves glistened in the sun, triggering reactions from neighbors and passersby, expressing something true and universal about the human form. I inhale the summer fragrance from your body sending me to the tumbling creek that runs through my backyard. My head rests on your stomach. I turn the page. Hemingway’s words churn inside me.

Yes, I did like Hemingway’s prose in that one. But “like” wasn’t the word. I felt it. I felt his prose to my core.

“Can you stay for breakfast?”

Leaning up against the door jamb, you spread open wide your canvas bag and search through.

“I can’t find my glasses.”

As I recall, it was at that moment I knew I was at the beginning of something new. Like when I tried on the cotton t-shirt in a local store in the small village near my cottage. It hung over my faded jeans and hugged my body in just the right way. I kept looking at my reflection in the shop windows as I moved through the local farmer’s market to buy fresh bread and cheese to have with you as we sat together at my table in the sunroom facing the small creek, working on my new draft. My hope was you’d say something like, this is how Hemingway must have felt when he envisioned seeing Marita, the beautiful one, at Côte d’Azur the first time.

“I tried something new,” I said.

Her eyes stared into mine, as if trying to read words I hadn’t said.

“Really?”

She removed her glasses and dropped them inside her canvas bag.

“I changed it up a bit.”

I felt a bead of sweat drip down my bald head as the solid ground shifted under my feet.

“You mind if I bring my kid the next time we work together?”

“Of course. Uh, sure. I don’t mind. Whatever works for you.”

“Great. Babysitters are expensive.”

As she turned the page, I removed my sunglasses and looked down at my cell phone. A stream of new messages appeared on the screen.

“You read all the books I gave you?”

“Yep. I especially liked The Garden of Eden by Hemingway.”

“I know who it’s by.”

As the sun crept behind a building on Grand Street, it cast a long shadow like a sundial across her face. For the first time, our naked eyes met.

“This about me?”

The shadow penetrated into the creases alongside her eyes. This time I sensed she was reading me. I was shaken at her accuracy.

“I write fiction.”

“You write truth.”

As the shadows inched slowly across her face, I began to make some sense of why I had come. With the bright light temporarily dimmed and feeling a reprieve from the heat, I ordered two coffees with extra petite madeleine cakes in case she felt hungry.

I wasn’t sure what more I could say about the line between truth and fiction that she didn’t already know.

©2023 Paul Rabinowitz

Paul Rabinowitz is an author, poet, photographer and founder of ARTS By The People. His works appear in The Sun Magazine, New World Writing, Burningword, Evening Street Press, The Montreal Review and elsewhere. Rabinowitz was a featured artist in Nailed Magazine in 2020 and Mud Season Review in 2022. He is the author of The Clay Urn, Confluence and Limited Light, a book of prose and portrait photography, which stems from his Limited Light photo series, nominated for Best of the Net in 2021. His poems and fiction are the inspiration for 7 award winning experimental films, including Best Experimental Short at Cannes, Oregon Short Film Festival, Paris Film Festival. Rabinowitz has produced mixed media performances and poetry films that have appeared on stages and in theaters in New York City, New Jersey, Tel Aviv and Paris. His first book of poems called truth, love and the lines in between (Finishing Line Press) is due out in fall,  2023. These works will be included in the forthcoming book.