Author: Desmond White
Blog: www.desmondwrite.com
Twitter: @desmondwrite
Instagram: @desmondwrite
Prose Partner
Since Christmas, I’ve been posting my works (some of the same ones on this blog) to Prose, a social media app that takes what’s best about Facebook and Twitter and Instagram – having followers (“friends”) and getting your posts liked or reposted – and applies those networking techniques to the profession of writing. Recently I’ve become a Partner, a promotion that allows me to create Prose-wide challenges, boost others’ work to the Spotlight (the front-page), and monetize my books on the site. Mostly, however, it prints the word “Partner” beneath my username, which is kind of cool.
Fiction — “The Kolache Kid”
He was back, wagging his pasty pastry butt.
“You can’t catch me!” he shouted from the hill up ahead. The little tart did a cartwheel, then a back handspring, and then a series of side to side feints to make it harder for opponents to track his centerline. Mesa ignored all this. Well, at least she tried. She had pulled out a book on goblin kings while she rested, but her attention was less on Emperor Rikrak the Instigator and more on the dancing dough.
There was something in that pipsqueak falsetto that thwacked the nerves. And the tart had some tasty morsels, too. “Come on, smelly face, why don’t you pick up the pace!” was almost his catchphrase, and his litany included such classics as “Catch me if you can, pimple pan,” and “See you in a while, bile pile.”
Writ in Water Issue 1
HBU’s premiere student literary journal is going to drop May 8th, 2017, and I’ll be posting it here after it’s available. As editor-in-chief, I didn’t think it proper to publish my own work in the journal, but I will admit to a little nepotism; my brother’s short story somehow made it in, although that’s more because it has actual merit as an absurdist dark comedy and less because he happens to be related to the guy in charge.
"MAN"
My buddy Phil Kiner (the same guy who designed this blog’s mascot) crafted this for my wedding.
I’ve never been more accurately depicted.
Please help by donating any amount to this great cause.
The Open Arms Charity was created in 2010 by the National Rifle Association as a way to reach out to communities in need. The goal of Open Arms is to provide as many handguns as possible to homeless American citizens who otherwise would have no means of armament.
In its first five years, Open Arms provided more than 2,000 Americans with 100,000 nights of restful sleep by providing them military-grade weapons. Today, Open Arm continues to help the homeless by offering refurbished automatic and semi-automatic arms in 40 locations across the Sunbelt of the United States. In addition to guns, Open Arms provides utilities including ammunition, holsters, speed loaders, earmuffs, cleaning kits, and matte green pistol safe-boxes with fingerprint locks.
Open Arms is looking for donations in cash, check, or caliber. Give a helping handgun to those in need and donate today! As Abraham Lincoln once said, “Give a man a dollar, he’ll spend it on beer. Give a man a gun, he’ll have nothing to fear.”
Please help us provide the only shelter the homeless can take with them on the streets, seeing as they don’t have homes and all.
“Occupy Hurricane Matthew”
Activists plan to protest the devastating power of a tropical cyclone which has been targeting disadvantaged communities in Haiti and Jacksonville, Florida, by occupying the storm until it wreaks havoc on the rich and poor equally.
Nonfiction — “Snakes and Spiders”
When I wake, the cats are at the door—they want to slip into bed and lie in my warm vacancy. One is black with a teacup on her chest, the other gray as elephant’s breath with muted stripes. In the darkness, I fumble against their fur, locating rump, scruff, finally head, and I pet what I can find until they roll over and expose their tummies—a trap.
Under the bluing shade of early morning they are furry dead spiders.
Cats aren’t the only parasite squirming in the bedwaters. My wife, snorting like the Union Pacific, snakes her cold fingers and toes toward me, seeking flickers of heat like sausages over a campfire.
Shower. Toothpaste. Size 40 pants instead of last year’s 38. An XLT button-down that’s starting to hug. The cats follow me to the living room as I pick up a satchel and keys. Jenny lets me pet her back. She has a funny habit of bursting forward when my hand reaches her tail, to circle around for another run.
Remy sits on the couch, feet tucked under his chest like a chicken in a coop. I think of saying goodbye to the snoring pile of hair in the other room, but my wife doesn’t work until 9.
Still, what if I never see her again?
I open the door and step into a world devoid of Julie and Jenny and Remy and the little routines of morning before the light.
Nonfiction — “Starry White”
I open the year with a joke. “My name is Mr. White, like the color of my [the students look expectantly toward my skin] walls.” Cue enough laughter to sustain the joke next period. But now it’s noticeable, the harsh white of the room, a combination of paint and the clinical spray of ceiling bulbs. We are as illuminated and shadowless as models in a photoshoot, sans forgiveness.
There is one window: a square portal on the door. When I sit at my desk, I can see “Starry Night” through it, one of the Van Gogh prints distributed through the school. There’s an apocryphal story of how he painted that landscape in a sanatorium. Unable to see the city from his window, he imagined it in his hand. It gets me wishing they’d let us paint our madness on the canvas of our walls. Why let filth color us? Scuffs, gum, “fuck school” in blue pen, a poster of an iguana saying “character is who you are when no one is watching.” Let swirling blacks, blues, and yellows, stars and cities and black towers roil down the hall, drowning disquiet and sterility of asepsis.
Desmond, Write 