Category: Other writings

Happy Valentine's Day!

Posted on by dlmarriott

In celebration of Valentine’s day, I share with you a short romantic comedy I wrote. I hope it makes you smile!

free vintage retro valentine_ice cream

For The Love of Ice Cream

by D.L. Marriott ©2009

 

Janie couldn’t believe it had come to this again. Here she was, drowning her sorrows, alone, in an ice cream parlor, the monstrosity in front of her bringing her comfort. Each time she dipped her spoon into the sundae and brought it to her lips she gently sucked the dessert off, savoring every moment of it.

She set the cherry aside, saving it for last. Swirling her spoon through the whipped cream, Janie sampled the light, fluffy topping with a flick of her tongue. Closing her eyes for a moment, the young woman imagined reaching into the sky and taking a scoop out of a billowy cloud. She held the sweetened cream in her mouth until it melted.

From then on, all the spoonfuls were the same. A piece of dark chocolate brownie from the bottom, a bit of banana, a healthy dollop of ice cream coated in hot fudge, toasted coconut, and pecans. She loved the contradiction in texture and flavors. The frosty ice cream mixed with the soothing warmth of the hot fudge. The crunchy coconut together with the chewy brownie. The salty taste of the pecans battling the sweetness of the banana. She didn’t just enjoy eating her sundae, this was more like a romantic rendezvous with food.

Despite her heavenly treat, she was still feeling frustrated that another guy she barely knew could drive her to this state of overindulgence. But then, maybe getting dumped was her excuse to feed her ice cream addiction. Maybe she was subconsciously sabotaging her relationships, giving herself a excuse to splurge. That thought was almost enough to make her laugh, until she remembered that she was eating a sundae large enough for four. I’m as pathetic as a drunk sitting alone in a bar, she thought to herself. Keeping her gaze down, the dejected girl avoided looking at anyone else. She was convinced they could tell how pitiful she was. If only she wasn’t a slave to her emotions. If only she didn’t let her heart rule her. Her head knew better.

It’d happened after only two dates with Jeremy. She barely knew him really. They were set up by some friends who were, no doubt, tired of her being the third wheel on all their outings. All of her friends were couples, but Janie found herself to be perpetually single. Not that she didn’t date. Her boyfriends just never stuck around long. She wondered if there was something fundamentally wrong with her. Maybe she was too desperate. No, she was just a hopeless romantic. Unfortunately the speed in which she fell head over heels, generally scared any potential boyfriends away. She attacked love like she attacked ice cream and chocolate.

Janie couldn’t help but wonder if there were other people like her. Was she really all that different? Maybe it’s a therapist she needed, or a dietitian, instead of another boyfriend. Maybe she just needed to swear off guys for a while, take a break, stop trying so hard. That’s it. She would chill out and avoid men. Maybe then this obsession she had with finding Mr. Right would dissipate. Eventually she would try to date casually. Try not to put so much pressure on any potential relationship. Yep, it was a plan. Janie sighed with relief now that she had a solution.

Feeling more self assured, Janie sat up straight. She purposely looked around at the other patrons around her. Not all of them were in groups or pairs. There were a few other lonely souls out there. Maybe they were here to find comfort in their frozen concoctions too. But not anymore for Janie. She was determined. She could rise above it all. No more wallowing for her. Her eyes scanned the room, as she dug her spoon back into her sundae. No sense letting all the creamy goodness go to waste, after all.

Before Janie could take another bite she paused. There, across the room from her sat a vision of beauty, if a man can be called beautiful. He was all by himself, eating a sundae just as large as hers. She wondered what his story was. Was he getting over someone too? No, no, she had to stop this, this wasn’t the plan. Janie let out a strangled gasp as he looked up and his eyes fell on hers. He had the most intense blue eyes she’d ever seen. They were like tidal pools in a tropical sea. His dark hair was slightly mussed, like he had just come in out of the wind. How she would love to run her hands through that hair. There was just a bit of stubble on his chin. She always loved her guys a little scruffy.

He smiled. Could he really be smiling at her? Janie was finding it difficult to draw in air. Her heart felt like it was going to gallop right out of her chest. She followed his gaze. He wasn’t looking at her face, he was looking lower. She slowly looked down and noticed that she had been holding her spoon halfway to her mouth for quite a while now. The hot fudge had melted the ice cream and the resulting mess was dripping into a puddle on the table. She set her spoon down, and tried to wipe up her mess as gracefully as she could. She used all her napkins to soak up the melted ice cream. The result was a mountain of sticky wet napkins sitting in front of her. How embarrassing! It was evident that she really needed to take a break from dating or anything having to do with guys. She needed to rein in her emotions.

Janie took a deep breath and tried to banish any thoughts of handsome men from her mind. That’s it, she needed to just concentrate on finishing her sundae. It wouldn’t take long, she was almost done. Janie picked up the cherry she had set aside and swirled it through the remnants of melted ice cream and fudge. She lifted the dripping fruit to her lips and popped it in whole. As she bit into the overly sweet confection it burst, flooding her mouth with sugary fluid. A drip escaped her lips and dribbled down her chin. She reached for a napkin but then realized she had used them all. She looked around hoping for a spare on a neighboring table. There were none.

She closed her eyes in frustration for just a moment. As soon as her eyes flickered open, there was an outstretched hand holding a napkin right in front of her. Janie looked up. She couldn’t believe it. Of all the people who might have noticed the juice dripping down her face, it had to be him. As she accepted the napkin, the corners of his mouth turned up in a sweet smile.

One single thought crossed her mind. “Oh God, I’m in love!”

 

Flame

Posted on by dlmarriott

What better day than  Valentine’s Day to share a bit of poetry.  I don’t write a lot of poetry, and certainly don’t consider myself a poet, but every once in  a while, words come to me in a pattern.   I hope you enjoy!

 

Flame

tended well
it brings comfort
provides fortification
sustenance

it can hypnotize
mesmerize with brilliance
embrace with warmth
excite with heat

but it demands respect
must be treated with care


its tendrils can reach up
singe
bring pain
burn until one cannot draw breath

its intensity
searing
bringing unimaginable agony
complete destruction

but doused
its loss leaves us chilled
cold
hungry


dangerous yet necessary


love

Fiction of Fright…or not…fiction that is.

Posted on by dlmarriott

I’m thrilled to have my story “Spirits of the Corn” featured in the October Issue of eFiction Magazine. If you like a good fright, I highly recommend you read this issue, It’s chock-full of Halloween horror. I enjoy scary stories, and LOVE Halloween. I admit, I have a bit of a dark side.

As much as a fictional tale of terror can inspire nightmares, I have a ghost story to share that is absolutely non-fiction.
When my husband and I bought our first home, there was no history of horrible crime, death, or unexplained noises. Other than us being the tenth occupants in its forty years, there was nothing special about the house.
At the time Duffy, our border collie mix, was in his later years and quite sedate. Sometimes, our neighbors had to step over his sleeping body on the porch to get to the door; not much of a watch dog. So I was quite surprised one afternoon, when he refused to come in the house. Not as in, I’m-napping-in-the-warm-sun-bug-off, don’t want to come in; but tail-tucked-hackles-raised-feet-firmly-planted-not-a-chance-in-heck-I’m-coming-in-there, don’t want to come in.

When I finally dragged the struggling animal in the door, he took one look down the basement stairs, snarled, then turned tail and ran. I finally found the terrified pooch hiding under a table, and when I bent down to talk to him, my normally lethargic dog snapped at me. This was the worst episode, but there were others when our dog seemed nervous, and had a problem with the basement in particular.

A side note, purely for effect, but absolutely factual: our house was a Dutch colonial – the Amityville Horror house, was a Dutch colonial. And in our basement there was a funky little storage room tucked under the concrete front porch. To enter it, you had to climb through a small opening in the basement wall. The opening was covered with a thick wooden door complete with wrought iron latch. The room’s craggy walls and ceiling were covered in cobwebs, and floor was nothing more than dirt. Other than peeking in when we bought the house, we never went in there or used it for anything. It was just too creepy. Only in the movies would someone ACTUALLY go in there, despite the audience screaming not to.
There was also the sound of running footsteps, always late in the evening. It’s a two-story house and the footsteps were always heard from the living room on the first floor, so we knew it wasn’t just a squirrel on the roof. Our son was a year and a half old, so when we heard the foot steps racing above our heads, we naturally assumed that he had climbed out of his crib and was sprinting around his room. Every time we’d hear the thump, thump, thump, of running feet, we’d race upstairs to find our son sound asleep. We found this occurrence curious and intriguing, but not frightening.
The event that hammered home that something other-worldly might be going on happened many months later. I’d laid down next to our son, who was now in a big bed and had trouble settling for the night. My back was starting to ache from lying so still. He had been quiet for a while, but I wasn’t brave enough to move yet.
I was longing to go back down to the living room, so I turned my gaze from the darkened room out into the brightly lit hallway. There, in the doorway, stood the silhouette of a man. I assumed my husband had come up to check on us. I held a finger to my lips to warn him not to say anything, lest our son wake up. I turned my head, for just a moment, to check if our son was truly asleep. When I turned back, the man was gone.
Although my original assumption had been that the figure had been that of my husband, the way he seemed to appear and disappear without so much as a creak of the stairs bothered me. The whole episode was so brief, I questioned whether or not it had been real. Had I imagined it? Maybe, I had unknowingly dozed off and dreamt it. But it felt real.
When I was sure it was safe for me to leave, I went downstairs to find my husband sitting on the sofa reading the newspaper. I sat down next to him. “Did you come up to check on us?”
My husband lowered the paper, his eyebrows drawn together. “Why do you ask?”
“I thought I saw you outside the door,” I answered.
Dropping the paper into his lap, my husband shook his head. “Wow, that’s weird.”
“What’s weird?” I questioned.
He paused. “Have you ever had one of those times, when you see something moving out of the corner of your eye, but when you look, there’s nothing there, so you just write it off as your imagination?”
I nodded.
“Well,” he said, “I was sitting down here reading the paper while you were upstairs and I could have sworn someone went up the stairs.”
My flesh tightened into goosebumps so hard it was almost painful.
Now I can hear some of you screaming in your head, “Run away! Get out of the house!” It’s never that easy. Maybe we really just had a senile dog, funky thumping floorboards, and overactive imaginations. We also considered the fact that if there really was a ghost involved, he certainly didn’t seem mean-spirited, rather he seemed friendly, checking in on us, keeping an eye on our child.
Was it a ghost, or did my husband and I have some kind of simultaneous imaginary event, each of us on a different floor of the house? I leave that up to you. But I have to admit, I really like the ghost theory better.
Did I mention how much I love Halloween?

Early Morning Revelations

Posted on by dlmarriott

I present to you, the third place winning essay of the 2011 Bo Carter Memorial Writing Contest.

Early Morning Revelations
by D.L. Marriott

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I dip my foot into the water. I expect it to be chilly this early in the morning. I’m surprised by its warmth. I turn the canoe over, put a book encased in a plastic zip-top bag, a travel mug full of coffee, and a life-preserver in the bottom. I paddle my way through the channel and onto the lake. The sun has just begun its rise over the horizon. The sky is painted with hues of pink and orange. There is no one else out here. I expected to run into a fisherman or two, it seems impossible that this morning they are absent.
Once I’m in a place where I have the most room to drift, I slide down into the bottom of the canoe, and take out my book. There is nothing to interrupt me from my story. There is a highway not too far away, but at five A.M. on a Sunday morning there is little traffic. The muffled sound of the occasional car only barely gets my notice.
But then I hear a rumble that gets louder and louder, disturbing my peace. It’s a train on a not too distant set of tracks. On such a quiet morning, its clattering is intrusive, disturbing. I stop reading and cringe at how it dispels my ideal of relaxing, drifting aimlessly on the water. Before long the rumbling fades away; my solitude returns.
Now that my attention has been torn away from the book in my hand, I take notice of what’s around me. The lake is still, not a ripple on it other than those created by a family of ducks swimming by. My ears pick up the serenade of frogs, early morning birds, and the occasional splash of a jumping fish. There is a heron standing on the shore. His profile is majestic. At first he is so still that I’m not sure if he is real or a garden ornament. Just when I have convinced myself he cannot be real, he moves his head, turning it towards me.
I start thinking about how I would have missed him had the train not caused me to look up from my book. How sometimes we don’t realize what’s around us because we’re too busy doing something else. How much sitting in this boat, floating along, is so much like life.
It starts out with the trip up the channel. Paddling is work. It’s not horrible work. In a way, I enjoyed the challenge of working to get where I wanted to go. It’s very much like when we were young, working hard to raise a family. It was work, sometimes hard work. But we were heading in the direction we wanted to go. It didn’t all go smoothly. We occasionally had to shake the weeds from our paddles.
But then as our children grew up, we got to a place where we thought we could relax and enjoy life. Drift along, instead of working so hard. We thought we were coming to our perfect destination. We knew and accepted the mild disturbance of the car whizzing by, but it was so fleeting it barely registered. It isn’t until something really shatters our silence that we take notice. Something big and intrusive like a freight train comes barreling into our world. Momentarily we wonder why. Why, when we finally have what we were dreaming of, does something big and ugly have to ruin it?
Like the train that disrupts my peaceful morning in my canoe, the things that disrupt our lives eventually pass. They rumble off into the distance. In their wake, we realize that there was beauty and peace all around us. It had been there all along, but we had been too preoccupied to appreciate it. Now in the deafening silence of the train’s absence, it is wondrous. It’s a lesson in appreciating all we have and realizing that bad things will come along, but they will pass, and we will still be here drifting on an unseen current. If by chance we are not happy with where the current is taking us, all we have to do is work up some muscle and paddle in another direction, and remember to take stock in the beauty around us.
We can’t banish the weeds, the cars and the freight trains of life. We can just close our eyes and wait for them to pass, then keep on paddling to our destination, never forgetting that there are always ducks and frogs, sunrises and herons, if we just take the time to recognize them.

 

Borrowing

Posted on by dlmarriott

As promised here’s the story that was published one year ago. It may have been my first, but I’m hoping and planning on many others.

Borrowing
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There are friends and then there are real friends. The kind of friends you can depend on to be there through all the highs and lows of your life. My husband and I are lucky enough to have friends such as these. To be honest they started out as my husband’s friends first, I was adopted later.
Jim’s been best buddies with John since they were both five years old. As children they shared in all those adventures that young boys have; building forts, walking the train tracks, riding their bikes. As they got older they got their first jobs together, worked on cars together, and got into trouble together. Over the years their friendship had it’s ups and downs. Their high school graduation night ended in fists, but in the end, they always came back to each other. When they got to adulthood they started dating and eventually found their future wives. In some relationships, that may have added a strain to the friendship, but in this case it didn’t. First John married Sue, and later Jim married me. Sue and I have been mistaken as sisters, which says something about how close our husbands are. There must be something special in a friendship that has lasted almost their entire lives. Instead of two best friends and their wives, we quickly became four best friends.
As close as we are, we’re always borrowing something from one another. There never seems to be a time in which one of us doesn’t have something that belongs to the other. If it’s not some borrowed item, it’s borrowed money. We often go out to dinner or shopping together and to make things easier, we trade off who pays for it. One time we will cover the bill, the next time they will. We’ve been doing this so long, we no longer keep track of what we owe each other, we just figure it all evens out in the end. Sometimes we get to the point of getting the check at a restaurant and say, “It’s our turn, we owe you for something.”
None of us will remember what we owe, or even what it was we owe for, just that it’s our turn. Over the years, we took notice of this habit of one always borrowing from the other. We asked ourselves why that was. In the end we decided it was our way of insuring we would get together again.
We’ve been there for each other as we got married, Jim was John’s Best Man, and John was Jim’s. John and Sue moved away for a time, but the long distance phone call was one of the first as each of our children were born. Once back in the same state, we were there to share the trials of moving and house building and the joys of our children growing, graduating, and getting married. We travel together, and jump in to help with any project. We were there to support them through the loss of a parent, grandparent, brother-in-law, and friend. They were there for us through the loss of a parent.
They played a most important role in our lives. They were always there for us when our disabled and medically fragile son was ill. They didn’t think twice about coming to wait with us in the middle of the night as he underwent emergency surgery. They forced us to go out for a bite to eat after we spent days in his hospital room. They kept us sane during the 16 years of medical crises. They were there to give us support in his final days, and helped to plan his memorial service. I can’t imagine a more heartbreaking time in our lives, and they were there for us. I know it was difficult for them. How hard must it be to sit with your friends as they wait for their son to take his last breath? It didn’t matter how hard it was, we weren’t just friends, we were family, we are family. I truly believe there is nothing we wouldn’t do for each other, barring the impossible. At a moment’s notice, we we’ll drop everything for each other. Our families have become each others families.
Recently my husband and I were affected by the poor economy. We were forced to sell our dream home. This house was one that my husband, an architect, designed just for us. We built this house ourselves. We didn’t just watch the contractors work, we put our sweat and backs into it as well. It took a year to build. John and Sue were there every step of the way, painting walls, laying tile, hauling rocks, whatever it took.
The process of selling this house has been an emotional one. The equity in that house was to be our nest egg. We were starting over. It’s hard enough to lose your home, another when that home is also one’s livelihood. It’s my husband’s business to design and build houses, now we would be living in someone else’s. First John and Sue were there as moral support. Then they were there to help us pack and move in a hurry as we scrambled to find a place to live. We even traded vehicles for weeks as theirs had a hitch to pull a trailer. They were with us when we looked at houses, and they gave up their weekends to help us transfer our belongings.
On the last day of moving we returned each others cars. But in typical fashion we found John’s sunglasses on our counter. Sometimes the “borrowing” was unintentional. It didn’t matter, as long as one of us had some belonging to the other.
The next morning my husband woke up to realize we had forgotten some large items that were stored outside our former home. Since we had already given John and Sue their van back, we were forced to call first thing in the morning to ask if they had the time to come back and help move the forgotten items. Sue answered the phone. John was in the garage, he had the tire off of the needed van, and was about to start a brake job on it. She stuck her head out the door and yelled “STOP!” No questions asked, John popped the tire back on and came right over.
When it was done and John was about to leave, he grabbed his sunglasses. As he took them Jim said, “I think we all have everything that belongs to each of us.” John said, “Oh no, does that mean we won’t get together anymore?”
We laughed, albeit a bit nervously. As if it really takes borrowing things from each other to make sure we would see each other again. As much as we have been through, it’s silly to think that it’s a simple borrowed item that keeps us together. Yet why did we feel uncomfortable?
After John left, I suddenly remembered something. I looked at Jim and said, “Don’t worry, we still have that DVD I borrowed from Sue.” With an unfounded sense of relief we knew all is as it should be. Our friendship is guaranteed to live another day.