|| Benjamin Green || Writer

All content is protected by law ~ Benjamin Green © 2013 ~ Photo by LAJ

Category: Short Stories

May 30, 2012

Our Last Night Together

Tonight will be my last night with you. I have been saying that I am ready for it. Ready to go back. Now that it’s here, this last night together with you, I can feel my heart sinking. I took the long days with you for granted. It felt like they would never end.

And now, I am sad in the same way I was torn when I left my hometown to move west.

My point is: I am going to miss you, Portland. From the Skidmore Fountain to Hollywood and 42nd, from Belmont to Hawthorne and across the Morrison Bridge to Southwest on a Tri-Met bus, I will miss you. From your characters, hospitality and the mouthwatering entrees sizzling in front of me prepared by the culinary magicians of your fine establishments ranging from Bernie’s Southern Bistro on Alberta to the toasted peanut butter and jelly stand on 23rd, I will miss you. I will miss having access to so many pages of books and cups of Peruvian and Columbian roasted coffee poured by hands of aficionados. Most of all, I will miss my alcove hideaway under a canopy of shady treetops just around the block on the corner of Hoyt and 17th tucked away in the ever-developing hive of boutiques and timeless Victorians in the neighborhood that is Northwest.

I will miss being part of this vibrant city, but I look forward to our next adventure together. Thanks for the memories.

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May 25, 2012

Blue Hour Serenade

For days, you have chosen to stay in and write. You will continue to stay in and write from the wooden, green and brown thrift store chair you purchased for $8 until something profound gushes from your fingertips. An altruistic muse who will whisper secrets into your ear and give you permission to reproduce them in your own way and claim the original idea as your own will visit you. As she sings sweetly, she will cup her hand at your ear to be heard over the bleating smoke detector that chirps in a sequential tick every 36 seconds from a nearby, undisclosed location. It is either attached to the ceiling in the hallway of the apartment complex you have not left or perhaps it hovers from your neighbor’s ceiling like an upside-down bat that clings to the slick rooftop of a dark cave. Because you can hear your neighbor’s loneliness at work through a vent in your bathroom, you decide this is the most likely possibility. At first you feel embarrassed and ashamed for being witness to your neighbor’s audible rummaging. Then it occurs to you that in the past few days, Read the rest of this entry »

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May 23, 2012

Pancake Batter

I’m making blueberry pancakes. To guide me, I have a homemade recipe on my computer screen that my wifelike girlfriend challenged me to try out. In an effort to pour a reasonably proportionate distribution of batter for each round of flapjacks I proudly create over a gas-burning stove, I’m leveraging a ladle. Like a bartender hooks a white linen apron to their belt loop so that it dangles right about where their hands hang so they can wipe ice cold water from their red fingertips or perhaps drape the linen over a beer bottle when cracking it open to avoid slicing through their palm like a German knife through avocado skin, I keep a dishtowel at the ready. My first batch turns out piss-poor and most of the batter ends up burnt and wadded along the rim of the smoldering pan I’m using, which I cannot assure you was not manufactured from the sort of Teflon that was banned at one point around 1984. I decide this is not a non- Read the rest of this entry »

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April 14, 2012

A Night At The Opera

Friday the 13th is my favorite holiday. I don’t mean in the cult classic sense, as in burning hours of my finite life with a coterie of horror buffs who watch all 27 Friday the 13th films [edited, with commercial interruptions] on the USA network. I adore the number thirteen and I have always liked Fridays, so I decided a long time ago to adopt the sparsely recurring holiday as my own. Thankfully, it has not yet become mainstream and, as a result, fallen peril to the brilliant minds of advertising whores responsible for bringing things like evil bunnies to the masses [oh, pun] in April.

This Friday the 13th marks the tail end of my first week as a full-time writer.

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February 1, 2012

Prometheus And His Creature

There I stood, stifling any would-be helpful contribution in the throws of bedlam. I was in the kitchen of a single family home. My lady was viciously constructing a cake and I knew better than to get in her way. Bowls filled with dark mixtures danced on the counters like a spinning top coming to rest. Things ticked time away and boiling pots spit liquid over their rims like furious volcanos and it hissed and sizzled in the roaring blaze of a gas-powered stovetop burner. The oven baked all sorts of things that occupied every shelf in there and through the resonated looking glass of the oven door, a stove light created the appearance of what I imagine hell looks like. To complete one of her potions, my lady needed another grade-A organic egg. There were no more eggs available in the kitchen. Being the most obvious candidate as an errand boy, I elected myself the procurer of brown shell chicken embryos.

We live at the top of a very big San Francisco hill and I did not feel inclined to hoist an armful of bags back up it [I rarely come back from this sort of trip with just the thing I set out to get]. I needed access to someone’s car. My lady said, “Fine. Take mine.” As I skipped gleefully toward the front door, she screamed out, “Treat her as if she were your own!” This is a trick my close acquaintances like to play. You see, I am neurotic and likely suffer from a myriad of unfortunate conditions such as tactile defensiveness disorder and the commonly self-diagnosed ailment; you guessed it, obsessive-compulsive disorder. Read the rest of this entry »

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January 25, 2012

What Gives You the Write?

What gives you the write?

A few nights ago, I was fortunate enough to be in Park City, Utah as a patron of the Sundance Film Festival. For me, the goal of being a worthy patron is to see every single bit of footage that plays and consume every word spoken by the creators of the cerebral stories and imagery. Following the midnight screening of “THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID” [written by Kellie Overbey and directed by Carrie Preston], the festival busses had ceased to run and there were no cabs [or life] in site. I found myself standing outside in an effective blizzard with time to think. What came to mind initially was the festival. It was inspiring to be there and mingle with writers, producers, actors, fellow patrons, locals and directors of the films I adore. As I reflected on being in the midst of such a stimulating assemblage, I experienced an inward confrontation with my ego who asked, rather abrasively, “What gives you the right to regard yourself as a writer?”

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