Audience Collaboration, 2016
(Each year, at the annual LA Lit Crawl event, What Books authors turn their reading into a writing event, asking members of the audience to collaborate with them in producing a partly guided but mostly spontaneous short story. This year's Lit Crawl theme was nature, so we borrowed images from L.A. artist Lisa Bloomfield's DeNatured series (some examples above) to use as prompts. Here is the result.)

    She told me I was mispronouncing her city, the place she’d always lived. She hadn’t even let me try the Latin, she said, for the birds she studied - a sort of crow, she said, but they all looked the same to me. I didn’t tell her that, of course that wouldn’t be great. But I watched the crows with her in a room of the museum, and I didn’t have to feign iterest. They were mesmerizing and a better prize than her in the end, such a pedant, but the crows so natural, so curious, non-judgmental, busy, smart, without telling me they were smart.
     There on the bluff overlooking the dandelion fields, I took a last glance toward home. That’s when she tapped me on the shoulder.
     The flickering started to hasten, the glowing, granulated red blossoms shrieked open, while the film’s aging body reel clack-clacked, as if the sound of their mechanics was the sounds of the flowers themselves dilating.
     Whenever the wind starts up the croaking stops, pausing briefly as if out of respect for the leaves rustling their own hushed voices over the still black water. The bullfrogs, ponderously at watch over their young who will soon sprout legs, resume their grating chorus when the wind grows still, the clamoring rustle lulled to yielding silence.
     At night my window fills with synthetic carbon carbuncles left over from the props from foliage section of a B-movie producer’s bathroom cabinet.
    She told me I had been mispronouncing her favorite bird family. Corvid, not crovid, for the crows. Corvid. Remember it this way, she said: Cor for corazon, for their corrosive hearts, and vid for vidente, psychic, since they see our species’ future, and couldn’t be more pleased.
    My memory has always been growing out of seeds, leaves slit open, like any woven body, we learn how to be succulent - we learn how to nourish in droughts. What do we need but water? What do we need but the hope of water? Haven’t we learned how to make new leaf from dead - haven’t we learned out to grow despite?
     It may be possible for two souls to unearth mauve hues.
    She told me I was mispronouncing her grandma’s maiden name before she fell and split and her skin upon the upturned root. For the briefest of seconds, I thought she was dead, lying there like a belly-up toad in the soil. And I thought there was some irony to be found in death, family trees, and generational conversation. But she got up, bleeding above her eye, and brushed the dirt from her jeans. “Ow,” she said. “I should look where I am going.”
    The flickering started to awaken the egrets, shimmering daylight and the magnetite pulling at them to remember that they must continue south to the land of volcanoes, the last place they could breed since the last of the last-humans left the planet that winter, left it and them, the only living land-creatures now on earth, left, once and for all, in their rickety space ship.
    It may be possible for two souls to dance in the mouth of a lion.  In fact, it’s a favorite pastime of souls who are between lives and therefore bodiless.  The lions, of course, must be stuffed, their mouths open, their tongues rolled out like red carpets and the theater of their maws lit from without by a janitor’s flashlight, after hours, at the Natural History Museum near you.
    There on a bluff overlooking the sea a red tailed hawk soared in dalliance.  Two ravens hovered above.  She was in their territory.  They cawed.  The first dropped down and, claws extended, swept by her, then the second.  The hawk swerved.  Then the first swept down again.  The hawk turned onto her back, brought out her claws.  There was an explosion of black feathers.
    At night my window fills with frost. At dawn, I link down from my bed and crawl, the carpet stinging my knees at the end of the path. When I peep through the window, between the crystals, I see rolling hills of grass and figure of a bird, making snow-angels in the leaves.
    My memory has always been like a feathered fan flaming, flickering and flying, flung fruitless, growing in the sky, making it black with attacking birds of prey trying to reap and tear at Tipi Hedren’s 1963 skin in Hitchcock’s The Birds while the observers are being plucked by their eye lashes, pointless pixilated puckering by a murder of people and crows.
   Our teachers told us not to share our fragility. “Be strong, assert your power, show the world you mean business and it will listen.” But I feel my weakness creeping up, as if I were prey and my insecurity an alligator submerged. What if I’m consumed? Perhaps my self will feed the monster, and through some strange transubstantiation I will become strong.
   The flickering started to agitate the lion. The people in the square tried to discern the origin, because a pissed off lion is often too much, so they checked loose windows and rearview mirrors of parked cars and not one glimmer or glare seemed out of order. With on roar, long and booming, the flickering ceased.
    Our teacher told us not to share our tater tots or put them in our ears. I did both cuz Timothy dared me. I claimed a fantastic garden which got plucked by a quack that didn’t believe in tater tot gardens growing out of one’s ears.
    The flickering started to falter, then in an explosive burst flooded the bedroom with light before immersing it in darkness. Her hand went to her throat before teaching tentatively out in the darkness.
    There on the bluff overlooking the pearly gray river, he slowly picked spines from the succulent’s succulent tendrils. 4,5,6... He placed them in a small pile beside him, careful not to disturb the small yellow blossoms. A few more plants, and he would have enough.
    Our teachers told us not to share our hearts, so that we could not fly away. A thousand beating hearts on a branch until one broke. Two birds flapped and almost fell, but found their wings and flew away. Don’t ever listen to your teachers unless they have wings.
    At night my window fills with tiny green jewels of emerald lights, and it’s hard not to long for the time when the moon was white and round and filled with milk. Back then, we dreamed, both you and I, of going there one day. That was before it splintered into all these thing jewels which, when you got out into them, beware. If you come back, you won’t come back the same.
    Our teachers told us not to share the show and tell items until after recess. We stow our dolls and soldiers in their cubbies. Nothing is said about recess. We hold our fort in the hollow tree, fight the boys in their fort of sticks and swarm into the forest playground. We rough up the boys; the boys are just as bad. No one is punished. Then recess is over. We go back to the classroom and carry our dolls and soldiers into the circle.
    Whenever the wind starts up I feel empowered and connected to the Earth. In a city devoid of true seasons, days become monotonous blurs. The Santa Anas, once an annoyance, now a needed annual remind of the passage of time. I launch my arms out to the side, beckoning the wind through the trees. She whips my hair, crasses my cheek, reminds me I am alive.

Thanks to this year's authors: Michelle M., Craig Lincoln, Kelly B., David Kornblatt, Audrey Abramo, Matthew Levine, Michael Asmus, Tom Adams, Chelsea Kurnick, Gina S., Liz Stephens, Rod Moore, Kate Haake, Mona Houghton, Carolie Parker, Chuck Rosenthal, Gail Wronsky, and a number who chose to remain anonymous.

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Audience Collaboration, 2015

The strangest thing about the postworld is how many of us are already there.
          In the postworld, we are never certain whether we are learning or un-learning.
          I don't know where I am or where I'm going, I only know where I've been.
          An outsider might think everyone is constantly aspiring, but it's not that way, at all.
          We were here, content and democratic, before you plunked yourselves into our midst.
          The strangest thing about the postworld is how many of us are already there.
         Was it me? Or was it you?
          Maybe there'll be a future someday, and a past.
                                      
                                                So how beautiful are we, then?
                                                 As it turns out, Earth's first representative to extra-terrestrial life was the platypus,
                                                        which is fitting, when you think that no animal, mineral or vegetable, could ever
                                                        be representative of all that is Earth.
                                                  And it turned out that downtown Los Angeles was the preworld and the postworld.
                                                  So there we were, the waves pleading at our feet, their white repetitions counting
                                                         the minutes...
                                                  By the time we realized the sea had become a portal, it was to stop the rushing
                                                         reverse migration. I stood as the wave bit at my ankles, watching them
                                                         disappear, one by one.
                                                  ...but it's not that way, at all.
                                                  ...he wanted to feel something again.
                                                  With a darkened look of determination, he gazed over his shoulder at the creature,
                                                         in my direction, and exhaled loudly.
                                                  What? Did you expect the postworld to be empty?

                                                  The papaya became the most dangerous animal. Once a semi-enjoyable fruit, but
                                                         now a postworld monster. Beware of its vomit-tasting qualities.
                                                  And their eyes were like little mirrors, so when you looked them in the eye, I mean
                                                         really looked, like you were in a staring contest or something, all you saw was
                                                         your own face staring back at you.
                                                  You said, "I hate nostalgia," and I agreed with you—except, consider the possibility
                                                         that if we look back and back again, we will actually be gazing into the future.
                                                  No, you say, no. No! But they just gallop away, as if you have not spoken or no didn't
                                                         really mean no.
                                                  Stop feigning surprise by our banding together, hiding our animals from you... these
                                                         creatures survived what you survived, not because they are faithful or devoted
                                                         or delicious.

                                                  There was nothing we wanted more than to go back to our preworld, but it was too
                                                         late; turning back was impossible.
                                                  By now, their emotions had atrophied—vestigial beauties they enhanced with drugs
                                                         & anonymous extreme acts that brought them something like pleasure.
                                                  Put bluntly, between the taunting from the ones you hold so dear and the way all of
                                                         you stuff your faces without ornamental fruits and vegetables, I ask you, why
                                                         shouldn't we recoil, rebel?
                                                  Things taste better in the postworld, but all the animals are lonely.
                                                  Now the night is lit only by fireflies and bioluminescent owls.
                                                  Can we dance with our shadows? Do we even have shadows?
                                                  Can't we just play gin rummy?
                                                  So how beautiful are we then?
                                                  In the postworld, the air is thick and pungent, leaving your throat raw and wanting. But
                                                         for what you can't remember.
                                                  ...with our soft bodies, redolent of musk, rightfully frightened of you with arms and legs
                                                         and now digits growing helter-skelter so that after ten tries most of you have simply
                                                         given up clothes, and waltz around bare-assed, your awkward bodies all the more
                                                         unsightly in their nakedness, spikes and all.

                                                  The strange thing about time is that it makes aliens and strangers of us all, reducing
                                                         first name relationships to postworld, alien, vague memories.
                                                  Fear is what most of us felt when the circus came to town.
                                                  Listen for the sound: the gears, the atoms; the grind tells the old man his watch is
                                                         breaking down.
                                                  Or did the circus animals and their masters steal a bit of everyone's soul before they
                                                         left town? Will they be back for more?
                                                  Bob flipped on his screen. It showed lots of swimming fish. We rolled past the
                                                         remnant of the circus, the parade, through the downtown of dogs.
                                                  After a while she realized that losing a limb in the postworld is no longer what it used
                                                         to be. Nor was losing a head (or two).

                                                  So we hauled in a sophisticated looking fellow and gave him a parade, allowing him to
                                                         lounge on his moistened juggernaut and take in the crowd, breathing in our
                                                         atmosphere just as much as he might like, through a specially fitted mask. And
                                                         breathe he did.
                                                  Oh, the horror: I am stuck in a state between pre and post. If only there were a name
                                                        for it.
                                                  Alternately, the bus driver stepped back from the fountain of wine.
                                                  I only know the postworld, which to me became the world; my perception is only of
                                                         this world.
                                                  The whale from the ocean joined the present postworld, speaking to all in a blubbery
                                                         cry, "All is not well in the seas."
                                                  Their eggs are delicious, provided you can catch one. If it doesn't kill you first...
                                                  If I didn't know before the jealousy of thriving, I shudder to think what this swallowing
                                                         of tongues would say about the the last breath of the cassowary, sound of
                                                         joyful whistling.
                                                  And I crawled down in the chasm and into the fissure.
                                                  The strangest thing about the postworld is how many of us are already there.