It’s fraught. It’s frustrating. It’s all the F words. It’s waiting for inspiration to strike when you’re stalled on a project (or, in my case, multiple projects).
Sometimes I can just relax into these moments and sometimes I flail and whine. I’m sort of in-between those states at the moment.
Anyway, I came across two interesting things this week.
First is this contact sheet of a trip I took around ‘92 with my bestie Wilma to Nicodemus, Kansas. In case you’ve never heard of it, Nicodemus was founded by newly-freed enslaved Black people in 1877. It was our idea to write a script, the story of which I’ve actually forgotten, though I think it had something to do with African-American cowboys. It seems like an important thing to come across at this moment of (for lack of a better word) “block” because it reminds me that even if a story doesn’t produce a finished product, it’s worth taking the trip.
The other thing is this piece I wrote some time in July, 2021 that seems to beg for further development. Hmm …
Call Me
In block letters, the note reads Call me and below a phone number. Her phone number.
She looks up quickly and drops the note from nerveless fingers.
Who is watching her? Two tables over sits an elderly woman in ratty mink stole, the kind with the head that grabs the tail in its jaws, reading the morning paper, her lips moving as she reads. Behind the circulation desk, is a tall man in short-sleeved shirt, beefy arms covered in dense black hair, his cheeks covered with thick black beard, beetled brows shadowing deep set eyes. He slowly turns his swivel chair side to side as he idly types into a computer that looks like it’s been there since the 80s.
No one is watching her.
She looks back at the note. It had fallen from between the pages of a ragged, yet beautifully bound first paperback edition of Jean Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles. Her eyes have not deceived her. That is her phone number. But the handwriting is somebody else’s. Her handwriting is spidery and tiny. This is bold. The letters and numbers slash at the torn slip of paper with faded ruling. She turns the paper over. The ink has bled through.
She picks up the book. The line drawing on the cover is of a man in a beret. He looks bereft. Bereft in a beret. She can’t speak French, but she was initially drawn to the book itself, its dark blue dust jacket, the deckled-edges of the pages and the incomprehensible words printed on them. Now she fans the book’s thick, yellowed pages, turns it upside down and shakes it. Is she expecting another note to fall out? Something that would explain why, of all the books in the library, this one would contain a note that says Call me and her very own phone number.
This is absurd. How could it be? She glances around again. The old woman is reading away, lips moving slowly, her finger following her eyes from word to word. The man at the counter is now turned away, his broad back hunched over the book cart that he appears to be arranging.
She folds the paper and gets up, tucking the book against her with her elbow, and slings her backpack over her other shoulder. Carefully and quietly pushing her chair back in place, she walks around the table and replaces the book on the shelf where she got it. As she walks past, the old woman looks up and even though she appears to be looking right at her, it’s almost like she’s looking through her. When she passes the circulation desk, the man is still arranging books. He doesn’t even look up when she coughs a little into her hand. She feels invisible.
Outside, the day is waning and the late afternoon autumn sun cold when it should be warm. She stands at the top of the steps, listening to the gentle sough of wind through the branches of the mostly-leafless trees. She unfolds the note and pulls her phone from her pocket. She dials her own number.
“Hello?”
