Broken Box Spilling Insides Out

This "Fabricated for Delight" piece is called "Broken Box Spilling Insides Out." There is a phrase by Emily Dickinson embedded in the fabric design: dazzle gradually.

Here is the story I wrote to go with the piece:


Purely out of habit, Rennie plucked a plastic cup of carrot juice from the symmetrical display of juices chilling in crushed ice outside the corner store.

He crossed 71st Street and then neatly crossed Broadway toward the small brick cube. In step with decades and dozens, he clicked through a turnstile and descended to travel through windy tubes toward travail.

AT the center of his desk downtown was a literal textual tower. Every day, a new tower. Every day, the same texture.

At noon, Rennie split.

Out the door, spilling coins and cough drops from several pockets, he budded into commotion.

Zigzaggy thoughts burst him astray: a park, a portrait, a pita, a pal. Gliding diagonally across streets and sidewalks, Rennie felt loose and looser, and finally, lost.

The long longing and fast tether snapped as he darted through a parade and let the dazzling rainbow fish
GO.


“In-Visible Short Stories” Series
Fabricated for Delight. © jo.carubia 2014

Meaning Among the Stars

A crazy thing has happened recently; I have been writing short, short stories to accompany the small abstract fabric pieces coming off my sewing table! I've always said that I don't write fiction, that it isn't in me. I did discover, however, when I wrote Becoming the Blues for the Barber family that I enjoy composing a scene with dialog and character. It felt at times like dramatizing (and revealing more nuances of) real life. Anyway, after constructing these fabric set-pieces and having whimsical titles pop into my head, it occurred to me that I could write a story as another version of the visible image. The fictional narrative and the abstract fabrication are BOTH stories!

They are also both shorter than expected in their worlds. I recently received the orange brick of Lydia Davis's collected short (short) stories. I've known of her work before, but in this collection, I appreciated the form more fully. I might not write fiction in the traditional sense, but this I can do.

Here is one pair from my new and emerging "In-Visible Short Stories" Series. It is called "Meaning Among the Stars."

Meaning Among the Stars

On the surface of the earth, a woman named Será waited in uneasy comfort for a nearly indiscernible, yet quite inevitable disruption that was not unwelcome.

She was a beloved queen with all the accoutrements of entitlement: a royal flush of family, finance, and quotidian purpose.

Still, she wandered.

By day, she wandered through stories seasoned with piquant spices from the Far and the Flung. By night, she wandered the fields and woods, calling out pioneers from beyond the galaxy. (Her calls were answered only by a small and curious fox.) She slept lightly under the stars, forever aware of the nocturnal flurry and stir.

A mist of euphoria, night’s most intimate breath, drifted across the tips of fingers, fronds, and eyelashes.

At first light, Será rose from the tall grass, damp with mettle and consequence, to don her thousand-league boots; to plod; to tred lightly; and, finally,
to fly.


“In-Visible Short Stories” Series
Fabricated for Delight. © jo.carubia 2014