Cusp Writers:

Here’s a writing exercise for you. Collaborate with another writer. Write a paragraph about anything and email it to the other person. He/She adds a paragraph and they may edit your work any way they wish as well. Then its your turn again. Go back and forth a minimum of three times. If you don’t have a writer to collaborate with, write to us and we’ll pair you up with someone.

Here’s what happened when Jon and I tried this exercise:

Last night I dreamt about the faceless girl again. The cold bench on the perimeter of the park. I imagined the blue speck in her left brown eye. She was mute but I could hear every word she was trying to tell me. I said her name out loud but it sounded off somehow, so I said it again.

Where you been?

She wanted to know.

She meant it as more of a challenge than a question, but I chose to pretend.

“Everywhere,” I answered. “Everywhere I always told you I was going. Thailand. Paris. San Francisco. That café–”

You and your head again.

She wanted to tell me.

“Alright, little girl,” I said, figuring I’d had this dream enough times, might as well take a new tack tonight. “Why don’t you tell me? Where have you been?”

I knew that she had been absolutely nowhere at all but I had to ask. This was my chance to hear her answer. Ready or not and then the vomiting of a list:

To Singapore. The coffee shop down the street from Mom’s house and that small beat-up car he used to park in the same spot every second Tuesday of the month. Don’t forget the shower. Your shower and the one at the YMCA. I told you already that I went to see where the men sit in the rain where they watch for the birds, the airplanes and for God to suddenly appear. I’ve been there too of course but you knew that. The bus. The train station. The golf course and to the abandoned building on Third.

That was the point at which she paused.

“And?”

No, the building wasn’t abandoned. Not anymore.

This was something new. Novel. She was a liar but she was a consistent one, and she never went back on anything or corrected herself or moved in any direction but forward.

The building on Third Avenue. The one with the interesting facade. Gothic. She knew I knew the one. I nodded. Not abandoned anymore.

“Oh yeah?” I asked. “That dump’s been empty for years. Who would live there? Who could live there?”

She smiled that smile that was a smile only in my mind, because as always she was faceless, but what a smile, shining like a spotlight on our corner of the park.

- Abbie

Abbie Berry writes fiction, as well as teaching and coaching other writers. She currently enjoys broadening her perspective, watching others live and love and writes it all down in Golden Hill.