Post-It Note Stories

Note from the author:
At Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, I decided to use 4x6 inch post-it notes in a 23-day writing exercise. I wrote 5 stories a day, each had to fit onto one side of one post-it note.

The beauty of post-its is that they’re easily post-able and thus a person can feel a sense of accomplishment seeing them stuck all over the studio walls. They’re also colorful, which helped in December.

In my last week of residence, the visual artists planned an open studio night. Michael Merry graciously offered me a wall (and even lit it properly!) in his studio, where I posted 25 of my stories in a grid along with an artist statement, a table, a chair, a stack of post-its, a pen, and a request that other fellows write stories and slap them on the wall beside mine.

It was fun.

These stories came from that project.

The quiet house and abandoned tangerine peels. The hi-fi equipment, dusty. The runner along the stairs, doilies on the arms of the couch, on the rocking chair where a head would hit. Books—hard leather spines cracking in glass bookcases. A pantry. Jars of jams. Beets and tomatoes pulsing. A clothesline in the backyard, a garden, a doghouse.

Each time Katy drank a cup of coffee, she made a paper crane. It was an origami thing—a square of paper folded up impossibly until wings, a beak, a tail.

The coffee tasted better because of this ritual, almost.

Everything folded and unfolded in the right order until the morning she came upon her five-year-old son, Tim, smoothing all the cranes flat again—turning them all back into paper, saying, “There. There.”

Trees

The trees are a stark horizon, they are skinny men in ill-fitting suits selling bibles, they’re impossible brooms stood on end so the cats won’t eat the thistles.

They’re deep sea creatures, scraggily-haired women who’ve had one too many perms. They are the anorexic cheerleaders, waving their ghost arms chanting: go! Go!

The tiniest tree arrived in the tiniest package—all folded up but ready to assemble. It had glitter and a star and tinsel and little electric lights that blinked, ornaments and a train set with an engine that raced around hooting. There were live microscopic mice wearing striped stocking caps. They sang (in harmony!) but caused all kinds of havoc once they got bored.