Mouse, Radiator, Sky

Witness the magic

A post by AWA facilitator, Louise Bierig, and workshop participant, Ann Clark, highlighting the magic that can come from a random set of words.

In true AWA style, Louise points to what she loved about Ann’s piece. She writes:

Ann Clark is a new member of Writing the Wave, the online, generative writing workshop that I lead on Monday and Wednesday nights. On Monday, I gave a prompt from Abigail Thomas’ book titled two pages.

The prompt was, “write two pages on…of nostalgia for scavenging, in which someone fails to move something too heavy, with mouse, radiator, and sky.”

What I love about Ann’s piece is the subtleness of the failing to move something too heavy and the nostalgia for scavenging in contrast with the obviousness of the mouse, radiator, and sky, which are distinctly called out in the piece’s title.

What I love even more than that is the way Ann evokes in me the feeling of being cooped up inside—with the stuck feelings—versus the feeling of being outside, part of the world, the vastness of the sky and the landscape, where feelings seem to shift and move more easily.

Mouse, Radiator, Sky

by Ann Clark

Her cheek pressed to the old, nicked wood floor; she could see his gray tail poking out from under the radiator. “Good thing it’s summer,” she said to the mouse. She rolled over on her back and stared at the sky, or what would be the sky if it weren’t for the way her apartment ceiling blocked the view of what she wanted, which was a corn blue horizon with wisps and curls of white clouds. What she wanted was the pinks and dusty purples, the sages of the New Mexico desert. She wanted monsoons that took her breath away with their rush of thick, dark, burgeoning thunderheads, a quick, fierce drench, and then back to clean, pure sun and blue.

She wanted to roll along on the smooth, flat, shimmering asphalt, to be in the car, alone with her mother, on the way to Albuquerque to the oncology center. She remembered the way the car pulled fast and hard and free away from her mother’s husband, away from his grip of control and his bullet words. He didn’t fit, he didn’t belong. Without him, they were free to sail through the desert sky, even if it was because her mother had cancer; even so, she was alone with her mother in the car, the two of them riding through a blur of creosote bushes and loamy sand. They were riding, rolling, sailing, together.

And now it was just the cracked ceiling plaster, the jagged line running from the overhead light to the wall, now it was dirty eggshell paint, the worn floor and this mouse who seemed to think she didn’t notice him, but when she returned to her belly, she could see him there, frozen except for the twitch of his nose. She wasn’t a fan of rodents, fearing small paws running across her face in the night, or chewed-up oven wires, or diseased droppings, but since her mother’s death, she’d had a hard time dealing with much. The normal duties of wiping down a counter or throwing out old takeout boxes felt monumental. She kept lying down on the bed, on the couch, and now on the floor, corpse still except for her blinking eyes. She lay there, longing for horizons that stretch forever, for eternal, rolling movement. She lay there, missing the blue sky, the way it didn’t care.

Ann Clark’s fiction was featured in Two Hawks Quarterly. Her nonfiction has appeared in Pure Slush’s Lifespan series and in Peregrine. Ann is a psychotherapist in private practice. She lives in Sacramento, California.

Louise Bierig leads the Lansdowne Writers’ Workshop, using the Amherst Artists & Writers Method (AWA). Currently, she is writing a novel titled Zane Anderson, PsyD, LMFT as well as several short stories. Her short story, The Anderson Family Motto, was published in Toho Publishing’s The Best Short Stories of Philadelphia 2021. Her fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction have appeared in Woodsqueer Literary Journal, Pure Slush, Mayday Magazine, shortédition, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Philadelphia Stories, Peregrine Journal, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Louise is a 1997 graduate of The University of Iowa’s Undergraduate Writers’ Workshop.

Our next online write, open to everyone, everywhere, will be led by Vickey Finkley-Brown on Friday, July 17, at 1 p.m. Eastern.

V. ELLASHAWN BROWN is a Southern-born poet, novelist, truth-teller, and language conjurer whose work centers Black womanhood, disability, ancestral memory, and linguistic reclamation. Rooted in the rituals, rivers, and rhythms of the South, her writing blends oral tradition, cultural theory, and healing. A certified Amherst Writers & Artists (AWA) facilitator and member of Fellowship of the Griot, she curates sacred creative spaces—including her Monday-night Decolonizing the Erotic workshop—where women explore the erotic as power, practice, and divine feminine energy. She serves as Vice President of Diversity and Inclusion for the Women’s Fiction Writers Association (WFWA) and is the founder of Southern Momentum Publishing House and the Black Writer Therapy Podcast, both dedicated to amplifying Black and Brown women’s voices. The author of novels including A Kindness and Broken Souls, Brown writes to reclaim language, honor the sacred in the everyday, and affirm the erotic as a site of liberation and rebirth.