Feel free to pull any element from this—the colour, mood, place…some utterly random thought that pops into your head as the result of looking at this image! Write and post!
Feb 3, 2022·edited Feb 4, 2022Liked by Alison Acheson
"Sun is shining, the weather is sweet, yeah. Make you wanna move your dancing feet now", sing it, Uncle Bob!
Let me tame my terrible falsetto. We don't want passengers shooting complaints to this already vexed fare attendant, do we? She can't stand my lush voice. Pardon me for being a little joyous this noonday, ahem!
Sunny to my mind's eye, paying no attention to the hail and fluffy drops of the snow outside. Nonetheless, it is one's duty to get the passengers safely to Franz Josef.
Franz Josef is where I live. This tram driver is nearing the close of his day and will be retiring into his habitat.
Cook up a storm for wifey Sujata and our twins, Armah and Amaah. Let's see, grilled salmon with pepper soup, some baby potatoes, ah, I can't wait.
Hang on, let me stop daydreaming, and turn up this track "pon de" radio.
Hums in the background, the passengers join in the chorus with Uncle Bob, "Sun is shining, the weather is sweet, yeah."
Days like these, suns our beings like the spot of light shining the tracks.
A sweet chunk of marshmallow melts into foamy clouds in my mouth as the thick chocolate juice trickles down my throat. A black cat is sitting on the windowpane of a grey building where perhaps, a family of four or five would be waiting for their holiday visitors. The still image soon gets drained into my memory lane as I take the final sip of fire from the cup.
My body may be buried today in the last sands of July, but my mind shivers with the frigid winds whistling their way to the depths of the kettle that January eve. My legs were listless, flinching only during intermittent intervals as the baseboard coils clicked in the night, the temperature outside dropping every half hour.
Tomorrow I would be on the tram into town, the mere thought of which made me fill the kettle again and place the spoon back inside the blue and brown mug on the bedside table. These excursions always required a week’s worth of solitude in the work shed afterward, sometimes two.
Magnus and Lucas are the only reason I endure the trip along number 8’s winding road; taking this twice a year journey, I earn myself the bargaining power to hole myself away again until after the winter’s thaw.
Feb 10, 2022·edited Mar 4, 2022Liked by Alison Acheson
This was not Sergei Purzelbaum's little car.
He just stole it from The Winifreds.
There were three of them, and they were all named Winifred. When Sergei moved in with them in 2002, the Winifreds told him their theory about how they were distant relatives of Boudica, the Queen of the Iceni people who made her own little army and attacked the invading Romans.
One of the walls of the dining room was covered in a floor-to-ceiling family tree that dated back to AD 61, that some scribbly ninety-four year old hand had drawn with a black fine liner Sharpie. Before they showed him the rest of the house, Winifred the Twelfth pointed her cane at the family tree and said in a scratchy sort of way, "in three weeks, we will have an epic game of Trivia where Winifred the Eleventh and Winifred the Eighth and I will sit around on the three-seater rocking chair and find out if you have learned our family tree by heart or not."
Sergei did not know if Winifred the Twelfth was serious about that or not, but he spent the next month hiding in the upstairs crawl space. The upstairs crawl space was the only part of the house where he was safe from the Winifreds, because they didn't like climbing up ladders.
* * *
Strapped into the back seat of the little trolley car was the JELL-O. Winifred the Eighth finally found the packet of 1793-dated JELL-O that the Winifreds had been saving since they inherited the house in 1941. They were always eating JELL-O, because they didn't have any actual teeth, but Sergei Purzelbaum had a sickening feeling in his rib cage that they had finally uncovered THE JELL-O. "THE JELL-O --1793" was scribbled on the family tree, somewhere in between AD 62 and AD 68, with a question mark and a big, thick arrow pointing to it. You could always tell if things were important if there were big, serious looking arrows pointing at them, and if the word "JELL-O" had been underlined four times.
On Wednesday night the Winifreds made the ancient strawberry JELL-O. They made it in a mold that was shaped like the most obnoxious Valentine in the world, with swirls of dead mayonnaise and 21 of those horrid little green maraschino cherries suspended in it.
Sergei Purzelbaum was hiding underneath a winter hat that looked like an oversized sock, with just his pointy nose peeking out for safety. Snow flicked against the window shield. The evil JELL-O pulsed in the back seat, like it was some living cell that he would never, ever escape.
Sergei was taking the back roads through this little town because he was pretty certain he wasn't allowed to drive this thing on the highway. He was going to take THE JELL-O as far away from the Winifreds as possible, even if it meant throwing it into a volcano or the grand canyon. Sergei Purzelbaum did not get the Winifreds at all, but he was convinced that if they kept the JELL-O, then something terrible would probably happen to civilization.
"Sun is shining, the weather is sweet, yeah. Make you wanna move your dancing feet now", sing it, Uncle Bob!
Let me tame my terrible falsetto. We don't want passengers shooting complaints to this already vexed fare attendant, do we? She can't stand my lush voice. Pardon me for being a little joyous this noonday, ahem!
Sunny to my mind's eye, paying no attention to the hail and fluffy drops of the snow outside. Nonetheless, it is one's duty to get the passengers safely to Franz Josef.
Franz Josef is where I live. This tram driver is nearing the close of his day and will be retiring into his habitat.
Cook up a storm for wifey Sujata and our twins, Armah and Amaah. Let's see, grilled salmon with pepper soup, some baby potatoes, ah, I can't wait.
Hang on, let me stop daydreaming, and turn up this track "pon de" radio.
Hums in the background, the passengers join in the chorus with Uncle Bob, "Sun is shining, the weather is sweet, yeah."
Days like these, suns our beings like the spot of light shining the tracks.
A sweet chunk of marshmallow melts into foamy clouds in my mouth as the thick chocolate juice trickles down my throat. A black cat is sitting on the windowpane of a grey building where perhaps, a family of four or five would be waiting for their holiday visitors. The still image soon gets drained into my memory lane as I take the final sip of fire from the cup.
My body may be buried today in the last sands of July, but my mind shivers with the frigid winds whistling their way to the depths of the kettle that January eve. My legs were listless, flinching only during intermittent intervals as the baseboard coils clicked in the night, the temperature outside dropping every half hour.
Tomorrow I would be on the tram into town, the mere thought of which made me fill the kettle again and place the spoon back inside the blue and brown mug on the bedside table. These excursions always required a week’s worth of solitude in the work shed afterward, sometimes two.
Magnus and Lucas are the only reason I endure the trip along number 8’s winding road; taking this twice a year journey, I earn myself the bargaining power to hole myself away again until after the winter’s thaw.
This was not Sergei Purzelbaum's little car.
He just stole it from The Winifreds.
There were three of them, and they were all named Winifred. When Sergei moved in with them in 2002, the Winifreds told him their theory about how they were distant relatives of Boudica, the Queen of the Iceni people who made her own little army and attacked the invading Romans.
One of the walls of the dining room was covered in a floor-to-ceiling family tree that dated back to AD 61, that some scribbly ninety-four year old hand had drawn with a black fine liner Sharpie. Before they showed him the rest of the house, Winifred the Twelfth pointed her cane at the family tree and said in a scratchy sort of way, "in three weeks, we will have an epic game of Trivia where Winifred the Eleventh and Winifred the Eighth and I will sit around on the three-seater rocking chair and find out if you have learned our family tree by heart or not."
Sergei did not know if Winifred the Twelfth was serious about that or not, but he spent the next month hiding in the upstairs crawl space. The upstairs crawl space was the only part of the house where he was safe from the Winifreds, because they didn't like climbing up ladders.
* * *
Strapped into the back seat of the little trolley car was the JELL-O. Winifred the Eighth finally found the packet of 1793-dated JELL-O that the Winifreds had been saving since they inherited the house in 1941. They were always eating JELL-O, because they didn't have any actual teeth, but Sergei Purzelbaum had a sickening feeling in his rib cage that they had finally uncovered THE JELL-O. "THE JELL-O --1793" was scribbled on the family tree, somewhere in between AD 62 and AD 68, with a question mark and a big, thick arrow pointing to it. You could always tell if things were important if there were big, serious looking arrows pointing at them, and if the word "JELL-O" had been underlined four times.
On Wednesday night the Winifreds made the ancient strawberry JELL-O. They made it in a mold that was shaped like the most obnoxious Valentine in the world, with swirls of dead mayonnaise and 21 of those horrid little green maraschino cherries suspended in it.
Sergei Purzelbaum was hiding underneath a winter hat that looked like an oversized sock, with just his pointy nose peeking out for safety. Snow flicked against the window shield. The evil JELL-O pulsed in the back seat, like it was some living cell that he would never, ever escape.
Sergei was taking the back roads through this little town because he was pretty certain he wasn't allowed to drive this thing on the highway. He was going to take THE JELL-O as far away from the Winifreds as possible, even if it meant throwing it into a volcano or the grand canyon. Sergei Purzelbaum did not get the Winifreds at all, but he was convinced that if they kept the JELL-O, then something terrible would probably happen to civilization.