Today I Met a Champion

We parked maybe half a mile away, so I held my phone, camera, and keys in either hand as I sprinted towards the Aquatic Center. I effortlessly slid between cars, clumsily darting in front of those moving in the parking lot, my breath catching on the January air. I opened the first door triumphantly, sighing in excitement. I opened the second one and took two steps in, looking side to side.

And there he was; My red-headed, goggle-faced champion. There were hugs.

RM

Plot twist: I hadn't actually seen him face-to-face before. He and I had been friends online for two years and he slowly became one of my best friends. Chin up, my Champion.

Red Fireman Boots, Yellow Fireman Jacket

"I still have them, you know." 

It was nine years following the boots and the jacket, a choice six minutes still remembered from fast-fading kindergarten days. I hadn't really talked to Jean* that much in kindergarten except for the last day on the "little" swings before he transferred to a Montessori school. I saw him once in the fifth grade and we were just as good friends as we had been on that one morning. Middle school arrived shortly, and he and I remained very close friends, sharing lunch money and jokes.

As it happened, my best friend became his loving girlfriend.

"She's got her firefighting jacket on," my dad chuckled, watching me swing back and forth, hunched in retaliation to the spring nip in the air.
"Ha! He's got his fireman boots!" Jean's mother exclaimed, her voice thick with a French accent. I looked to Jean and giggled, as did he. We exchanged a few lines of conversation that I've long forgotten.

"Hey!" I called out in my cracking seventh-grade voice, "Jean!" Today, he admitted that he didn't know who I was for some time and I appeared as just some overly friendly person. It soon became obvious that we had been friends. Seventh grade English was spent through grammar wars. 

"I still have them." I sleepily glared up from my computer. "I found them while looking for my tie in the closet." Lily scoffs beside him, laughing and leaning in closer. My mouth drops, and she is confused.

"You...still have them," I repeat, then collecting myself. "Of course you do."

Clayton

(Sorry for the long absence - schoolwork and other things have really been a pain. I'll try to get back to work with shorter but more frequent posts.)

He ties his shoelaces, sitting on the hard floor and leaning forward to reach his sneakered feet. Two people are ahead of him in line, and two behind. A badminton racket is dropped beside him. He's fined with pushups. Standing, he's fairly tall, towering over me. His hands are massive; no wonder he plays basketball. In his presence, Canadian jokes are thrown back and forth, a few of the more clever ones coming from him. Angela sighs, smiling while shaking her head.

"Clayton, Clayton," she snickers, watching him refuse the pushups from the other side of the court. I'm standing behind Jacqueline, who is in turn behind Angela with a faulty badminton racket. I think back half an hour. I once more feel the tension of English class swerving around me in search of their closest, leaving me standing in the middle of the room. The teacher stares me down like a hawk, and I glance upon a yellow slip stating permitted tardiness. Boys laugh; something about hockey is sputtered. I collect myself.

"Clayton?" I mumbled, looking to my feet - it isn't considered "like me" to ask such a troublemaker of such a favor, "Do you have a p-partner yet?" he shakes his head, finding that everyone else sat down.

"D'ya...d'ya want to work t-together?" My voice is hushed; the growing silence is overwhelming.

"Sure."

A Photo From Kirkland (Gaia Visits)

With my mom, she

peels potatoes downstairs. 

And we're in Kirkland, fingers locked

from peach smoothies

because the Book Thief wasn't showing. 

Above her natural

scarf and jacket, she dons white

Beats. Talking to my Tante

and laughing nearby

Gaia is here

for a few weeks. 

I find myself today

rainbow and glass

aside from khaki.

Just like Tante, Gaia 

doesn't mind her ecology professor

and because of that, I 

don't either, like my mom's biochem nutcase. 

Mom and Gaia are

twins and a Virgo

with Rick and

I, the Aries one of us. 

She kneels before the

tree

(wall)

On her jeans

(prayer rug)

She takes a picture. 

RM

Omen by Sekiu

Wrote this a few days ago; It's going places.

For thirty miles, the hills were bare. The highway, laden with remnants of a Friday morning snow, maintained twenty-foot visibility through the thick fog.
Thirty miles ago, there had been trees. They were smashed together, a yellowish moss leaking out of the only divide. Along the stretch, the cedars had been assimilated into rows, growing smaller and smaller until there was only brushland speckled with green. And then none. The barren ex-beauty slapped me in the face, hard.
As I got farther from civilization, the barrenness was greeted by static silence from the radio and the slapping of the wind through the open window. I didn't care how my nose stung from the winter temperature; I needed noise.
Luckily, there was a single scream ahead. A gasp. The subtle quieting of my engine. A single home stood, supports half-exposed in the torn-up nothing. Its shutters had been hastily put down, the door (having fallen) leaning on the front porch like a person would if *their* forest was to be decimated.
The scream was half-covered by a black tarp, the wind having pushed it aside to reveal the shrill cry of protest. It was in white spray-paint, carefully written on the wet board. I stopped and stared, putting together what little of the letters were at my disposal. A single word was written, creating a streak of fire within the nothing.
OMEN

Taking the Jump - Story 1

I had a story starter a little while ago that I had made up. I'm currently trying to write as many flash-fictions as I can to this prompt until I come up with something grand. Here's my first attempt.
-
"I don't know you," Valentin laughed, scratching his stubbly chin. On his shirt, he had pinned a folded map covered in red dots. Upon closer inspection, Daniel realized that the dots followed several cross-country highways starting somewhere near Chicago, totaling to two thousand miles. He smelled of days and days. Then came the question, "You wanna jump?" He stood a little taller than Daniel, hair that could have been combed sticking out from under his helmet.

"You have breakfast yet, primo?" Daniel laughed. The guard's expression was pained; Daniel snatched Valentin's sleeve and used him as leverage to get over the edge of the Needle. The two were sent spinning, and were far enough away from one another in time to release both parachutes. Daniel glanced forward, glaring wind-slapped into Valentin's Kodak camera. The ground hugged his soles.

We Were Kids

"Think it'll snow today, Kyle?" My mother picks my friend and I up from school as it gets colder. We climb into the car - I in the front, and Kyle in the back - and he sighs.

"I dunno," he says, "Either way, heard the Pass was great." There is a juice box-sized carton in the cup holder. It's chilled tea, but Kyle never liked it. I plunge in right away, not caring whether or not I'd get sick from drinking too fast. The air grew colder.

"Would you guys like hot chocolate tomorrow?" My mother asks, "I know this one place on the way." I smirk.

-

Kyle and I were eight. Then we were nine, ten, and eleven. Dylan, his little brother, grew from four to seven. When it would first snow, we'd all meet in Derek's backyard, a place covered in patches of snow and bits of dry, forested land only a few square feet large. The three of us would run about, establishing good places for hiding out and stashing snowballs. We'd then set time limits on Kyle's iPod, probably just five or six minutes, and "share" Dylan's extra help as we hid and threw snowballs at one another. The first year, I climbed over the fence myself, getting in trouble and grounded for a week.

The next year, Dylan and I teamed up for a whole ten minutes, beaning Kyle with the snowballs quite efficiently. That was followed by the dog in the following year. The last year that we had played in the snow, we had all gotten too cold. That was the day that Kyle had taught me to play video games.

Then - BAM! - middle school happened. Kyle's family got a divorce, and Dylan started to get more of his own friends. I'm now thirteen, and I watched the fence last year for several hours.

-

"I'd love some," Kyle laughed. I swear I saw snow.