The writing group was gathering, up on the balcony at Vintage, a Tuesday night regular meet-up, but this one, tonight's, was out of the ordinary. We drew three cards from the Where Should We Begin deck of story prompts: Something I want but haven't asked for; A time I wish I'd dealt with conflict differently; and The best prank I've ever pulled off.
Leading up to this week, I had a sense that the location and the weekly meet-up had a kind of gravity, a compelling reason to gather that I couldn't quite put my finger on, but somehow knew was important. Each week, the energy surrounding the creative writing group had grown, and tonight we caught a glimpse of where it was leading us. We had stumbled, or had been drawn into, a portal.
It sounds crazy, and it is. We were starting to see that things we had written as fiction were becoming real in subsequent days. Things we had written as historical context were becoming unreal, changing, like flickering gaslights. We had tapped into a way of jumping timelines.
Knowing this, not in the mind, but in the body, as a tingling sensation of possibility, we began to use our creativity to rewrite our pasts.
I thought about the prompt: a time I wished I'd dealt with conflict differently. After some pondering, I knew what I had to do, what I had to write, what I needed to get right with my former self. I wish I'd dealt with the inner conflict I'd carried since childhood, the conflict of lying to protect my stepfather.
He had started to spank me, to whip me for some transgression I don't even recall. What I do remember haunts me, and I usually repress it as a way of avoiding that inner conflict. I had been instructed to lie about the reason I needed stitches in my forehead. I had flinched, hit my head on the corner of my toy box, and started bleeding. Likely fearing accusations of child endangerment or physical abuse, I was told to say I had fallen from the monkey bars.
I remember testing out the lie on the playground, and one of the kids didn’t believe me. I insisted it was true, telling the story mostly to myself, avoiding it whenever possible, for my entire life. That inner conflict, where I deferred to bullshit instead of honesty, shaped my intimate relationships for more than forty years.
But writing it down, I could tell a different story. I am telling that story now. The best prank I've ever pulled off is happening in this very moment, as I rewrite my own past, making more informed choices, protecting myself instead of my so-called step-parent. After my mother and he separated, I never looked back until now.
He had died to me in the 1980s, but here in 2025 I brought him back from the dead, just long enough to let him take the burden from me. My timeline, past, present, future, began to align, and the scar on my forehead disappeared.
It's something I've always wanted but didn’t know how to ask for: to tell the truth about what happened to me, to understand it as physical abuse (even if accidental) but also as emotional abuse, selfish and intentional. It's not my fault. I don't even remember what I had done to "deserve" punishment, and I don't need to protect the reputation of an abuser. I will never have gone down that road again. I am free.
This is a work of organic fiction. Any resemblance to me or others is intentional, subconscious, fictionalized, or a combination of all three. I hope it resonates.
🚮 W.A.S.T.E.: Words Assisting Sustainable Transformation & Ecology
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Authorship Current | The pull that makes a walker write the street she is walking. A map under a floorboard puts it plainly: Every doorway you open changes the city. Write carefully. |
| Bryce | He is in most of these, and not always the same one. At Lady Bird Lake he holds a folded paper like a hymn book. By the creek he carries a paper bag of spent tea leaves, and calls himself a lowercase artist. |
| Envelope Push | How tall a wall of cardboard cubes can get before it says no. Behind the school it is already taller than the school, bees live in it, and it has grown a meter since Wednesday. |
| Fort Branch | A small waterway in East Austin, less famous than Shoal or Waller. It has been mended more than once, and now wildlife and neighbors both use it. |
| Future Austin | Austin, a few decades on: the same creek, the same bridge at dusk, a few more vines than the zoning allows. Everything here happens to people who are trying, and are not always right. |
| Glassrain | The chill that follows when a hologram’s light goes through fog: cold on the teeth, then a taste like a coin from childhood. It is gone before you can ask what it was. |
| Grackleclock | The grackles go down to the creek at first light and an hour before dusk, and come back oldest first. Set your day by it. The one with half a tail always takes the top. |
| Historic Hunger | Hunger has gone mythic, something grandparents say to make children finish their bread. Kids toss pears over the bike lane, and a boy misses one, and his friend catches it behind his back. |
| Legacy Fault | A crack poured into the foundation on purpose, to open when history needs it to. In Underneath the Neon the asphalt splits into a spiderweb of light. |
| Library of Renewal | A back room at the bookstore where a woman slides you a sheet of paper and the words rise on their own. You are meant to add to it. |
| Live Action Role Playing (LARP) | A story you can stand inside. The Jejune Institute did it on the streets of San Francisco for three years; here it is done with a planter that has a number. The costume is optional. |
| Neon Spores | A flyer from 1983: bands nobody has heard of, Octavia Butler listed as keynote, a coffee ring on the edge. Either a festival that happened or an infection that spreads like pollen. The archive does not say which. |
| Noir | Rain, neon, a collar turned up. The city is a witness who will not testify. Mira says it was never about the money. |
| Organic Media and Fiction | Stories and songs made to be copied by hand, repaired, and let go. Each one is tied to a planter, a wall or a bench somewhere in the city. |
| Planthroposcript | The blueprint the vines write over your floor plan. Letters creep along the baseboards, a hallway thickens into a throat. It is not demolition. It is mood revision. |
| ReLeaf | The cooperative that keeps the gardens, the stories and the van. Nora Sanchez started it, and whoever tends it owns a share. The name is a leaf turned over. |
| Vintage | A bookstore and wine bar near Rosewood and 11th, built in 1886, that remembers everything that has gone through it. A writing group meets on its balcony on Tuesday nights. Jean pours something amber and does not ask your name. |