The Confabulator Cafe

Author: rconway

  • Girl in a Mirror

    She looked in the mirror. Fifteen years old now, home from school, but needing to view what the others were seeing in her. They all claimed to see things she did not. So she looked.

    Mirror mirror?

    Sure enough, there was the dog. Cody Stineman told her she looked like a stupid dog almost daily; a dog stared back at her now. Stupid eyes peering out from a pale face, crooked teeth, white, but surely too crooked to be human. A stupid and ugly dog stared at her, its eyes somehow even more hurt than her own.

    Her vision clouded for a moment. She felt the wetness on her cheek before she saw them. A small drip of tears on a dog’s face. She clenched her eyes shut, hoping the dog would be gone when she opened them again.

    The dog was gone. She was now staring at an eagle. Wings spread wide and sharp eyes glaring in a most majestic way. This is what Coach Ainslow saw at practice just an hour ago. An eagle of a basketball player. She picked off two passes into the post and tipped a few more, resulting in Coach screaming that she was an eagle, sharp-eyed and ready to pounce. “Yeeeeeeahhhhhh,” he screamed in a very un-eaglelike way. “That’s you right there, an eagle. Yeeeaaaaahhhhh.”

    “More like a gorilla.” She heard Megan Winters mumble that to some freshman girl, and when she looked over, they were staring at her, laughing and rolling their eyes. (more…)

  • Fear, Rejection and Spring Traditions

    “We fear the wrong things you know.”
    “Why do you say that?”
    “We should be a afraid of not getting a job someday.” He nodded solemnly.
    “Economy is bad.”
    “Exactly.”
    “That is what we should fear.”
    “Agreed.”
    “Not this other stuff.”
    “Agree again.”
    “So are you going to ask someone?”
    “Doubt it.”

    Damon jumped down from the air conditioner he had decided would make a good chair. He was wrong. He hated these chats with Derek. Derek was, for lack of a better idea, Derek. Full of bravado and bluster, but had no depth to him at all. If he was a tree he would be cardboard. Yet he put up with Derek, and Derek put up with him. It worked, and in college they would either both grow up or drift apart. They accepted that by laughing about it sometimes.
    “You going to ask someone? Kristen Shaw?” Derek stared at him as if it was not just answered a moment ago. (more…)

  • Awkward Silences

    ‘I am so tired of disappointing you.”

    “Why do you think that?”

    “The way you look at me, I can tell.” He jingled the change in his hand. Nervous habit.

    She looked at him and laughed, a forced kind of laugh. “I didn’t know you were such an expert in body language.” Then she gave him the kind of look he feared.

    He debated commenting on it, but he knew the results of such chatter never turned out in his favor so he focused instead on the nickels and dimes in his hand.

    A long silence followed, made awkward by the worldly silence around them. The change became an uncomfortable distraction and he slipped the coins into his pocket. He wished he would have flipped on the television before he started this chat yet again.

    “Awkward.” He tried to smirk when he said it. He failed. (more…)

  • Jericho’s Note

    “What is life?” She asked the question then threw her hands up in the air. She hated dumb. Stupid. Idiocy. Needy. All of it.

    “What now?” Cameryn peered over the top of her phone and stared. “Jericho? What?”

    But Jericho was lost again, spinning her hands around and had no idea she was doing it.

    Its not that she was evil. Well, not totally. She felt great guilt if a heart was broken and it was her fault. Mark Stinson. Now she dumped him in a shameful manner – text message. Two years ago and she still felt very embarrassed about it. Cody Reese. She told him she loved him, then later that night found herself saying the same thing to another boy, the name slipping her mind right now and that is why she felt such shame. She did the right thing, and told Cody she was not ready for the commitment and that she was terrified of her own words. No, she did not mention the cheating aspect, but details are not needed when guilt is genuine.

    But the others, now they were not her fault. (more…)

  • Fall Interrupted

    Never start with the weather.  It is trite to use the fancy word, but it really is just that.  Trite.  Never start a story with the weather.  So let us ignore the obvious, the fact that as I sit here pathetic and pathetic and still pathetic, something inside me metaphorically dying, the world maybe dying as well.

    So, yes.  Fall.  The trees die, and yes, i know they do not actually die but they sure play the part well.  The leaves demand to be raked up, but that is a task for people that worry about such things, not people that pretend to write to justify shutting out all that is out.  But sometimes that does not help hide all that is in.

    “Feeling better?”  I claimed the flu.  It is always a good time to claim flu.  “It is going around,” someone will always say, no matter when you say it.  I should be grateful that they care.  I am not.

    (more…)

  • To Simplify Sadly

    I believe in the fugue.  Even though the fugue is not what I think it is.  But most things aren’t what we think they are.  That might be why they are things, but I digress into philosophy now and I fear to go there.  My thoughts are coming to me, fast but jumbled, the best way to get them.
    “Girls should be fearless.”  I hear the voice but I ignore it again.  Fear keeps us alive.  I heard that somewhere too.  When we cease to fear we die, even if only in metaphor.  Not sure if I heard that anywhere.
    “Girls should be fearless.”  I laughed at the voice, and marveled how the voice was my own and had a brief thought of how I can ignore myself.  But the thought tumbled away.

    (more…)

  • Morning Girl

    “Hey, did you see where – never mind, found it.”  He continued the bustle of the morning, each morning was the same.  Wake up just a bit later than he should and live in shame of her sad look down at him.  She was always awake in the mornings and reminded him too often that he should be up and doing more.

    “You sleep through the morning you miss half the day.”  She said that the very first time they had ever spent the night together.

    “Come on, the day is upon us.”  He wiped sleep from his eyes and jumped from the bed, eager to follow this glorious soul into the morning.  She was vibrant and alive, and she drew him in like the proverbial moth to the flame.  Sometimes people click together, and though he may not have put it to words, looking back, even now in the beginnings of middle age he could not help but to feel the same burst of love he felt even on that first morning. (more…)