Miss Smoking

Create art in the style of another artist.

Excerpt from Practice, Practice, Practice, in the style of Vladimir Nabokov

Years later, I would hover over him as he sat at the slightly out-of-tune piano in my living room. A staple in every home of families striving to be considered part of the intelligentsia, it has since been rarely touched. His pallid hands and long fingers airily played over the aged ivories, which were then an old pearl color. Vershinin’s hands were slender and painfully fragile; I always felt that if I were to grab one of them too hard, it would break apart in my equally as small but stronger hand. They were patrician and skeletal passing over the keys as he would play Debussy and, his favorite composer, Bach. There was an antiquity about his hands, and I could visualize them move from the piano to a quill angled over yellowing parchment. Vershinin studied ugliness and conducted silent anthropological studies on man’s malevolence. He was fascinated by his own darkness and sought its origins in his surroundings. There was nothing of him beautiful except for his hands. I remember the first time I watched him play. I was wearing a long black dress.
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© FMK 2008

Grown up

My daughter tugged on my shirt hem as I was washing the dishes the other day. I peered down and saw her big brown eyes looking up at me. She seemed so interested. 

"Daddy?", she asks. 
"What it is, sweets?" 

She jestered for me to bend down so that she could whisper something into my ear. And I did. She placed her tiny hand on my left cheek and cooed her words into my left ear. I heard a deep breath of concentration.

Then she said softly, "Um, Daddy?"
"Yeah, honey."
"Um, I love you!"

I knelt down beside her and smiled greatly. she's taken to saying that to me a lot now. Not because I tell her often that I love her. It's not because she has too, either. It's because she wants too. And as each day passes, she gets just a bit older. She's growing up, but she'll forever be that little girl that asked be to bend over so she could whisper I love you in my ear.

Eeyore

Grown Up

When I grow up I'll have everything
All of my dreams will come true!
I will be rich, just watch me, you'll see!
Flying, exploring the stars
Happy, successful, and popular, too
Changing the course of the world

But the years go by and the dreams all die
And oh, what a fool I've been
I'm all grown up and I've nothing to show
No money or glory or fame
Just the tears I've shed as a small voice cries
For the tarnished old dream might-have-beens