(Photo: Krisffer Aeviel Cabral on Unsplash)
He copied how his father walked.
He mimicked his older sister.
He laughed at jokes nobody heard.
He scared the babysitter.
He wouldn’t do a thing
That wasn’t done by others.
He was an endless mirror
And annoyance to his brothers.
He drove them all to near insane
Till finally came the time
When he left to get
Hired as a mime.
For Sammi’s Weekend Writing Prompt: Zany in 62 words
“One day my name will be up there,” Tommy declared.
Amy rolled her eyes, but he didn’t let her dismiss-your-sibling reflex offend him. She came with him, didn’t she?
“You’ll see,” he reiterated calmly.
He’s been practicing in front of the mirror ever since he’d seen the mime in the park two summers ago. And he’s been getting good. So much so he’d sometimes crack himself up mid-sequence. He was ready!
The talent show was in three hours. He’d used all his holiday and birthday money for the entrance fees. He had $10 left to his name.
“Hey, Sis, want pizza?”
For Rochelle’s Friday Fictioneers
Photo: Daniel Foy
She is deliberate. She takes her time.
Each line is drawn with distinct goal. Each color chosen with remarkable concentration. Each curve labored on in exact determination.
After all, the letters aren’t ‘just’ a prelude to a word expressed. It is none of it ‘just’ idle practice …
It is her name she’s working on, a profound soul-expression.
For The Daily Post
He has stage fright. The real deal.
Social phobia with all the trimmings.
Speaking in front of anyone renders him paralyzed with irrational but no less numbing terror.
Talking to a store clerk makes him sweat.
Let alone giving a speech in front of assembly.
The whole school. Faculty, too.
He trembles at the thought.
“You don’t have to do this.” His mother. She is distressed by his distress. Protective.
“But I do,” he says.
He’s scared.
Determined, too.
He asks me to teach him how “to speak even when my throat gets stuck.”
We work on it. On breath, on visualizing, on rhythm and on parsing and on tone and pitch and breath again. He practices. With me, at the mirror, with family, with a good friend.
He knows the words by heart. He wrote them. A speech about things that oh-so-matter and are so very needing-to-be-said.
“The words come into my dreams,” he tells me. “Is that weird?”
I shrug. I don’t think so. “What do you think?”
He smiles shyly. “I think they want me not to be afraid. The words. Like we are friends now, words and me.”
The day comes.
He calls me in the evening.
“I threw up twice and I trembled like crazy,” he says, but his voice is giddy. “Then I thought about the words. My words … like friends. The beads on the necklace like we practiced … and I could breathe … I was still scared but I did it anyway!”
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