New writing post up!

I found a group of knitters who write.  We focus on a little assignment every week.  It's loads of fun.

Here's what I wrote this week.  And also this.

Sidenote: Moving day

I'm condensing my various weblogs into one, finally, and will be posting any new stuff at jinnikins.wordpress.com.  Eventually it may become my website and you can still subscribe to the posts there, if you like.
I'll put the links to those posts here for a while, before I stop using this one completely.

Carlotta

Carlotta had gone missing.
"How long has she been absent?"
The sisters looked at their fingers. They weren't counting; they were admiring their delicate skin.
Vella finally looked at Sabine. "Two days?"
"I don't know. I was distracted by father's ball which he insists on holding in spite of my birthday and I want to go to the seashore..."

The sisters were not much help in a crisis. Carlotta could count on them for a few things, but not an overabundance of concern for things outside their sphere. Vella's sphere extended as far as her reach, and Sabine's was smaller than that. They had their generous moments, let it be said. This wasn't one of them. Not yet. After Carlotta had been gone say, a week, they would begin to worry. As it was, the task of worrying fell to their governess, Miss Hengepen.
Miss Hengepen stood at the front of the long school room before the sisters. She pushed at her forehead and her freckles sank into pasty skin ridges. She kneaded with two fingers, her fine eyes closed in consternation. When she lowered her hand, two oval smudges remained, the ink signature of her prints riding prominently above the rest of her features. Carlotta had watched her do this more than five times in the past month. She had provided a cloth dampened with rubbing alcohol for the young governess, placing it in plain view beside the inkwell on her walnut desk. Alas, to no avail. Miss Hengepen, offended by the sanitary smell, threw it away. She seemed confused as to why it was there in the first place. Carlotta's gifts were often missed by those who needed them most.
"Has anyone notified your father?" Miss Hengepen asked.
Sabine shrugged.
Vella said, "I didn't."
A sigh from Miss Hengepen. "Continue to study. I will speak with him and return here shortly."
"No hurry," said Vella.
Sabine was already taking out her pictograph, which was not part of their curriculum.
Miss Hengepen opened her mouth, but closed it after only one consonant. Better not to waste time scolding the girl who was here when the girl who was not may be in trouble--or worse yet, down in the kitchen with the dregs. 
Carlotta's father (and Sabine and Vella's) was the Pomeroy of Posh. Carlotta was constantly embarrassed to admit her citizenship of this place to ordinary ladies and gents. Who named their burgh Posh? It was a ghastly pretension. She would never understand.
Her father and Miss Hengepen (and the rest of the Poshites) didn't seem to mind it.
The school room was in the east wing of the Pomeroy's great house. His study was in the west wing. There was a moment, when Hengepen was crossing the sunroom that joined east to west, and noticed the door to the kitchen, that she considered first checking there. But "there" had dregs, those mannerless cooks and cleaning staff. They spent this part of the morning, between brunch and luncheon, sitting around the long plank table, jawing away about things of rumor and vice. If Carlotta wasn't there, Hengepen would be alone with them. She spurned the idea of this experience and continued to the west side of the sunroom. She went through open double doors as high as the ceiling, then through the gallery to the study.
The Pomeroy of Posh, who called himself Admiral before he was made Pomeroy and overseer of the burgh, was hard at work painting a model of a Vicarys steamship. Carlotta had found it at the bazaar put on by Ladies of Posh last month and presented it to her father by way of parcel post. He enjoyed gifts most when he didn't know who sent them.
"No way to offend by thanking one family in front of another if I don't know which to thank in the first place," he would say, pulling on one side of his mustache as if it were a foxtail. If he ever snipped it off and bound the fat end, he could probably sell it as just that. Carlotta could not think of a way to convince him to cut off his mustache and make a profit from the novelty, but she was confident that one day the opportunity would arise. There was always a right time for something...

Epic Move: California to Wisconsin

(February 1st, 2008, was the day my husband and I moved from California to Wisconsin. Happy anniversary to us.)
  We drove.
  Not only did we drive, we did it in the dead of winter and we took three cats with us.  I wasn't nervous, much.  I think that made everyone who knew us and knew we were going even more nervous.  Somehow, when people are nervous, I get less nervous.  There was a time on the border of Russia when I was stuck on a bus with a lot of people who were very nervous.  I think that moment was the calmest I've ever been.
    We sent our things (some boxes, two desks, entertainment center, bed, dresser and a small round table) ahead with a moving company.  It's the type of moving company that lets you pack and unpack, and just drives it there and drops it off for you.  That left only us, the cats, some boxes of china and other sundry items like a suitcase, two sets of hand weights (8 and 20 lbs), cat food, the desktop computer, a little food and a couple audio books on CD packed into our Scion.  We left on a Friday.
   It was uneventful for the better part of the morning.  We left my parents’ house at 6 am, give or take, and drove east, making our way through the dense oak forests of Bangor and highway 20 until we came to interstate 80.  The cats were less than impressed with the whole idea of cars, but no one had eaten anyone else’s tail and so we kept on.
  Not far into the trip, we encountered first snow.  Oaks gave way to pines, which were covered with white.  It’s a beautiful stretch of road; the trees are so tall they make an aisle that stretches far overhead.  The sky was a pearl colored haze in between the trees that grew brighter as the sun rose until it glowed silver-white.
   Then we came to the worst road conditions of the entire trip, going on Interstate 80 over Donner pass to Reno.  The trip from Oroville to Reno usually takes about 2-1/2 hours if you go the speed limit, 4-1/2 hours if chains are required.  They were.  Thirty miles an hour through snowy mountains is dreadful, any way you look at it.  Chiefly, it was dreadful because of boredom.  We lost some time, but knew we could make it up through Nevada where there is virtually nothing to be seen save for the sky (which is magnificent in the desert).
  The sky is only entertaining for so long.
  Reno, Elko and the small ranch establishments between slid by with the landscape, while we listened to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe on audio book. The roads were clear in spite of snow on both sides of the freeway.  It was deep enough to cover the smaller sagebrushes, leaving just the dark, bushlike tops visible.
  We’d finished the first book by the time we reached Elko, and were halfway into The Magician’s Nephew when one of the cats escaped the carrier and began exploring the front passenger seat.  She wiggled her way between the passenger door and large Tupperware container (housing the desktop computer) which was sitting on the passenger seat.  I was aware of her, but there wasn’t much I could do while I was driving.
  The window beside her started to roll down by itself.
  She had stepped on the power window switch.  I glanced over and saw the wind tugging the hair on her back up into a miniature black mohawk.  I found then there was a lot I could do about her position.  I could realize we were going 75 miles an hour and take my foot off the gas.  I could reach across the car, over the Tupperware with the computer and the water bottles on top of the Tupperware with one arm.  I could remember to look where I was going.  I could think faster than the speed of time and depict a mental scenario in which we had already crossed the wide median into oncoming traffic before I’d even turned my head.  I could overcorrect.
  We hadn’t drifted far, but our back tires hit snow as the front tires swung back onto the road.  We lost traction and the car swung around so that I could glimpse through the windshield the cars behind us now heading toward us.  I heard some sort of terrible dragging, squealing noise and realized it was the tires.  How weird.  Jeremy later told someone that he still thought we’d be fine, we’d continue to slow and then come to a stop.  I thought we were going to die.  I didn’t say so, and my voice wouldn’t have carried anyway over that sound.
  We did not come to an immediate stop.
  Momentum carried us right to the median, a wide ditch between freeways. The wheels on the passenger side of the car sank into approximately four feet of snow.  I felt the car tipping before I turned to my right and saw the ground looming up through the passenger window.
  Crap.
  Over we went with a thump and a bang, and then another thump as we settled upside down in the snow.  Immediately my imagination called to attention all the movies I’d ever seen of cars rolling into water (we weren’t in water) and their inhabitants drowned because they couldn’t break the windows or undo their seatbelts.  The windshield, now beneath me, gave a glimpse of solid snow.  I couldn’t see out the driver’s side window.  It was not unlike being upside down in a tin can.  It was hard to breathe.  I couldn't undo my seatbelt.
  “Jeremy?”
  “I’m fine.  Are you okay?”
  “We’re upside down.”
  “Are you okay?”
  I didn’t know.  “Yes.  Are you?”
  “Yeah, I think I’m alright.  I see blood.”
  I tried the seatbelt again, pushing harder this time, and it came free, letting me fall into a cramped heap on the ceiling.  Claustrophobia set in immediately, and to escape it I found the fastest way out possible; through the lowered passenger-side window.  I was mildly surprised and pleased that it was; windows never worked in the movies when people were trapped inside.  I crawled out and sank thigh deep into the snow.  One of the rear windows was gone, shattered.
  A man with a dark moustache and a knit beanie rounded the rear end of our car.  I think he had been calling to us, but I didn't hear anything until I saw his mouth moving and my ears remembered to listen.  He looked short, but everyone looks shorter standing in snow.  He was asking me if I was okay.  I didn't know how to answer.  Alive equals okay?  I'm okay then.  An image of stretchers and ambulances bathed in flashing lights surfaced.
  I remembered Jeremy, who by then had gotten a back door open and came to stand beside me. He was bleeding from a cut on his forehead.  I wondered briefly how he was bleeding and not dying, but he said it was just a scratch.  I looked at it closely, and he was right: Just a scratch between his eyebrows, bleeding briskly down his face.  We began to look for the cats.  We both knew they were probably dead.   They weren't.  We were all okay.
  Much later, after cleaning out the car, we found that there had been casualties.  Some business cards Jeremy had ordered for free plus shipping were mangled beyond repair.  A roll of paper towels was swollen with more than its fair share of melted snow.  We'd forgotten to retrieve The Magician's Nephew from the CD player before the car was taken to a yard to be assessed for damages.  Everything else was none the worse for wear.  My china, in boxes, was unscathed.  The cat food hadn't even spilled.

Ivy

The ivy, eaten by nighttime, crowded around the lamp post.  In the bluish light of the single bulb, the ivy looked like waves frozen in motion, suspended in a desperate reach toward their last saving grace.  I too reached with my eyes, slouched on a park bench.  I stared until I couldn't see the moths fluttering around the bulb, or the scalloped outlines of the waxy leaves.  Once the light went out, me and the ivy and the moths would lose each other, because only one thing connected us.  Night air pressed against my back.  I could feel its cold creeping along my shoulders and on my jeans through the bench slats.  I wanted to run up to the lamp and bury myself in the ivy, right smack in the whitewash of light.  But Alex was right.  I was just a prisoner, watching.

Hundred word stories - Sister

"We could've been friends if she weren't so darn pretty.  Everything she does is pretty."
"Bet surgery isn't pretty.  She does that."
"Probably turning people to butterflies." 
"I'd sign up." 
"I wish you were a man so I could ridicule you just now."  We stepped into the lunch queue, a line of blue collars. 
"Hot dogs.  Yum."  She handed me a tray.
"Smelled them from the parking lot."
"Maybe your sister could turn them into candy." 
"Or something edible. Like salad."
We took our food to a table by a window; a sheet of gray rain.
"Did she ever..do anything for you?" 
"Nothing cool.  Once she painted my room."
"Without touching anything?"
"Thought she was giving me a motorcycle mural.  No.  I got pink and purple butterflies."
"She painted those?  They look real."
"I can't believe I paid her for it."

Hundred word stories - Street

It was dawn but not morning. Everything in front of me was new and everything behind me was over. The air was damp and cool. There was no smell of food, no hot bread to share. No aftersmell of eggs. I could smell them anyway, as if we'd just had breakfast in his bright yellow kitchen.
Full green trees crowded along the street and obscured the sky. I passed parked cars in front of brick houses. My shoes, quiet rubber soles, made two lonely sounds against the blacktop.
This time of day made me feel like flying instead of walking, but I was heavy. My reflection moved against black windows. Every house was suspended in stillness as I went between them on the road, down the center where the rising sun through the branches cast a jagged river of light.