Humainologie creative dialogue Writing Short Stories Wednesday June 9

“You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.”

- Mark Twain

“Alice laughed. ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said. ‘One can’t believe impossible things.’

‘I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’”

– Lewis Carroll

Writing stories can empower your imagination and inventing a game to serve the purpose of anything you have to do can make the whole process more fun. So why not invent a game the purpose of which is to generate ideas for stories? Anyway, for our creative dialogue on Wednesday June 9, please turn your creative powers toward ideas for generating stories, whether you decide to invent a game or not.

I have appended herewith a flash fiction piece I wrote last year.

And here is the Zoom link for our idea-generating dialogue this coming Wednesday June 9.

Topic: Humainologie creative dialogue Time: June 2, 2021 06:30 PM Mountain Time (US and Canada) Every week on Wed, until Jun 30, 2021, 9 occurrences Join Zoom Meeting https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86972034113?pwd=M2g3MzEvMWs5dXhHcFVCbVNkVG1idz09 Meeting ID: 869 7203 4113 Passcode: 12345

Here’s looking at you, kid.

Arthur

Chess at the Vendome

Years later, Vendome would be well known the way Les Deux Magots in Paris had been well known in its day, for the writers and artists that gathered there. That would come after Vincent had retired and was elderly and scarcely went to the café anymore. When he walked into Vendome on this particular December afternoon, a Wednesday, it was a popular place but not renowned.

He stood in line to order a coffee and thought about the mistake he had made six months ago. You couldn’t make more than one mistake like that in a lifetime. A chance to change everything and he hadn’t seen it. Once the door closes, you realize what you’ve lost and you look for another chance but it’s never the same.

“Just a large cup of black coffee,” he said. “Dark roast if you have it.”

The light coming in through the west window was too bright with the late afternoon sun. He found a table in the larger room on the east side and sat down on the long bench against the wall and took off his coat. The table to his right wasn’t taken but a young couple sat at the next one. At another table, near the window that looked out on Second Avenue, two young men were absorbed in a game of chess.

Emptiness. That was what he felt. He placed his hands around the ceramic mug of black coffee and thought about what he was going to do.

“So what are we going to do?” the young man at the second table to his right asked. There was tension in his voice. The young woman was very pretty. She was lifting a spoonful of soup to her lips and at first she didn’t respond. “What are we going to do?” the young man repeated.

She answered in a voice so soft that Vincent only heard the word “closure.”

“But now I’m asking you to marry me,” the young man said. He wasn’t eating. His hands were folded in front of him, very tight as if he were trying to control them.

“David, you know I would have married you,” the young woman said. “Things are different now.” She had raised her voice enough that Vincent had heard what she said.

“Has he asked you?”

Again the young woman’s voice was almost inaudible.

The young man looked down at his hands, then away, toward the window. Suddenly he stood up, very deliberately, and took the coat from the back of his chair and walked out. One of the patrons who had been sitting across the narrow room from the young couple looked up from her laptop as he left, but no one else seemed to notice. It was, Vincent thought, as if Icarus had fallen from the sky into the sea and there were people on the shore who saw it but did not think it was important.

He avoided looking directly at the young woman but glanced toward the window where the two young men were playing chess. Then he looked back at his coffee. He wanted to finish it now and go home.

Years ago, he remembered, he had been a good chess player. The game had rescued him from the shadows that passed across that time of his life. It had been years since he’d thought about it. At this moment, just for a moment, the chessboard again seemed a playing field. Momentarily his mind took flight. The emptiness filled up with the knights, the bishops, the queen, the pleasures of strategy on the sixty-four squares. Control the center. Bring the knights out before the bishops. Don’t bring your queen out early in the game. In the endgame, a pawn can become a queen. You advance the pawn to the eighth rank and it becomes a queen.

He stood up and took his coat from the bench. The young woman had finished eating and sat quietly. He walked back into the west room and toward the door and stopped long enough to put on his coat.

He would drive home, first north and then west. The sun would be below the horizon when he turned west. It wouldn’t be hard to see where he was heading. Beyond the horizon there was that emptiness. Perhaps it would always be there. And yet he might find his game again. He just had to keep moving. In the endgame, a pawn can become a queen.