Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 20 by Gavin J. Grant Kelly Link

Author:Gavin J. Grant, Kelly Link [Link, Gavin J. Grant, Kelly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: zine, Science Fiction, Short Fiction, LCRW, fantasy
Publisher: Small Beer Press
Published: 2010-08-17T17:21:23.518452+00:00

Workshop

Laura Evans

"Can we see your basement?"

I don't know which of the writing workshop students asked the question, but I think it was one of the high school boys, maybe the one with the startled black hair who'd said he wanted to write horror. That would be ironic, wouldn't it?

"No.” Frank, the writing professor, turned back to making herbal tea. We stood around in his kitchen during a break, leaning against the counters, mostly waiting to use the bathroom. The house was old, built in the late twenties, with a two-bedroom second story added some years after that. I'd told him I liked it. The house had a good feel, and he'd smiled and told us—me, really—that the house had a basement.

"A basement?” I said. “Wow. Not many houses in California have basements.” Frank was reheating my coffee on the old gas stove. They didn't have a microwave. They. He said his wife was out of town that weekend, which made sense because surely he planned these all-day workshops for a time that worked for his wife and his teenaged daughter.

I'm not sure who first started joking around about what he had down in the basement. I was uncomfortable with the silence while we waited for Frank to tell us why we couldn't see it, so I may have said something like, “Maybe he doesn't want us to see what he has down there.” Then somebody else said something about bodies wrapped in burlap. Then somebody else (probably the kid who wanted to write horror) said something about aliens, and we all laughed. Frank wasn't laughing. He poured my reheated latte back into the Starbucks cup.

"That smells good,” he said. “See if it's warm enough."

I sipped it and told him it was perfect. We followed Frank out of the kitchen, and went to sit in our places.I was sitting in the dining room, next to the floor register that pumped heat from—well, I suppose from the basement. I'd chosen to sit at the end because it was better than sitting in the middle of the row with men crammed in on both sides, elbows touching mine, breath smelling of onions and cigarettes.

Frank was at the other end of the tables, his back to the fireplace that hadn't been lit even though a fire would have been nice on a cold rainy day like this one. “Rainy” really doesn't tell it right. It was raining like it rarely does in southern California, hardly any space between the big swollen drops. I wondered if the basement flooded. Maybe that's why he doesn't want us to look in his basement. It was probably wet and dank down there, with piles of old stories he wrote long ago in musty cardboard boxes. His wife must hate that, all that soggy cardboard down there.

It was then, thinking of his wife, that I started to notice little things—there were no photographs in the room. There were lots of objects on the walls, just no photographs. One of the workshop students, an older woman, was taking too long to tell about a story she was writing.

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