Lipogram!

Introduction

I can’t take credit for this writing prompt. My teacher at my MFA program has us studying Oulipo, which is a movement of writers that prefer to work with constraints around their writing. If you’d like to know more about it you can find information here:

Grave Unseriousness: Experimenting with Oulipo Constraints

The Prompt:

The task today is easy enough to understand.

Simply write a story, a poem, an essay, whatever your heart desires, but exclude one word, or a group of letters from the aforementioned piece of writing.

You could also get creative with how you choose the letters. Some people write poems with only the letters in their names. Some people decide to leave out five consonants. There’s lots of ways to do this so have some fun with it.

Here’s Mine

****For this story I decided to cut the letter M****

I call the tree outside the house, Nellie. Why? Don’t bother yourself with such questions. I suppose she just looks like a Nellie. Her long branches speckled with lichen, her twisted appendages branching outward and ending in leafy fronds. The shiny, latex covered leaves falling back like hands and fingers outstretched, only to reveal a large, white flower at the center. A present, a gift, a boon. Scented like the fragrance of the lady I used to love. Before everything was steel and iron.

It’s on the days I watch Nellie that I also watch the neighbors, though I try not to be obvious. I roll onto the porch—or perhaps Jennie will push—to spot Adrianna Calk, and her three kids, as they pile into the station wagon with backpacks and lunchboxes, prattling away like there’s nothing or no one around to hear. There isn’t, except yours truly, and I have no interest in listening to Kate talk about her first grade teacher or Zachary, babbling in the way children do when they have ideas but not quite the words to pair alongside.

Isaiah Shalsa and his wife in the house on the corner to the right, Irene she’s called—the wife not the house—have been fighting. Every so often that fight takes place on the front porch of their bungalow, the posted veranda outside their only coverage against the wind and hail of their shrinking affections.

I wonder how long until the divorce papers are filed.

I would hate to see it happen, truly I would. Then there would only be one person to watch, and watching is the only thing I’ve done enthusiastically since the accident. But, if they do file, the entertaining nature of their quarrels would be lost to electronics. The subtlety of their insults would find itself lost in one sided conversation. No one in our neighborhood talks on the phone outside, at least not often, and not when they have anything of value to say. It’s as if the closeness of the voice to the ear, the distance at which they know the other party to be reserved, the line itself even, requires a secretiveness on their part. Or perhaps it’s, rather, detachedness. No faces, no angry eyes. The variances in conversation, the subtleties lost to wire and current.

There would be no way to judge, no way to think about what they’ve done wrong, and what I’ve done wrong by extension. I look away.

The neighbor directly next door is a person, I hate to confess, I know nothing about. He doesn’t sit on his front porch as I do, and even if he did, I wouldn’t see anything of his life. His house’s face is angled away, towards the corner that is nothing but a question. A riddle. All I know is that he cuts his grass on a cycle I can’t understand, letting it grow long and weedy throughout the weeks, then cropping it over and over again within a three day cycle, until the brown deadness shows through the pockets of green. He walks with hunched shoulders, his hair white as Nellie’s flowers. As he plods along in those ever-perfect lines, I can’t help thinking that he is like I, or perhaps I like he, though perhaps he is an older version.

Today is not a day for slicing of blades. The ticks of the grandfather clock in the living space, which filter through the window I sit in front of, flow past as I envision the grass chopped, the fine pointed heads clipped in straight lines.

And then it happens, as it so often does. Nellie bends down, reaching out, reaching in, swaying her big branches toward where I sit idly watching.

Where we both used to sit idly watching. Before Adrianna Calk was alone with three children, before Isaiah and Irene started screeching, before I felt the iron box around the heart slowly shrinking, before legs stopped working and the chair kept a prisoner clapped in irons. In those seconds, and those seconds only, Nellie’s a big leafy giant, but the kindest kind, with pronged hands reaching out to invite, to beckon toward her loving shade.

And I’d say, with a tear wilting through the eye, “Nellie.”

Conclusion

Thanks so much for reading. I hope you enjoyed this prompt as much as I did and feel free to post whatever you come up with! I always love reading other people’s work

As always, happy writing!