A short story delivered via tweets. You can follow me at twitter.com/hannahellice


“It’s totally creeping me out. If you dug under those windmills you’d find humans being born in plastic sacks instead of women’s bellies.”

The rain is so thick you can’t see the end of the windmills. They stretch on forever. Just windmills and fog. They surround the car.

Jordyn isn’t afraid of the wind farm. She laughs at my paranoia. She probably thinks I don’t get out of Brownsburg enough. I don’t.

The rain pauses. A rainbow fills the windshield. There are two $3,000 cameras in the backseat. I take a picture with a camera phone.

We get to Newbury. It’s rainy and ugly. Cold. Grey. Strip malls devour the earth and belch out dirty cars.

“Everyone in this town eats either donuts or gyros,” Jordyn says. She has to be right. Donuts and gyros everywhere.

She promises me a gyro that I will never get. She parks the car. I step into the largest puddle known to man.

We’d found the one restaurant without donuts or gyros. We carry sandwiches back into the rain.

We drive to a church. We drive to a banquet hall. We drive by two different houses. The GPS guides us. Reconnaissance. We are ready.

We are at one of the houses. We knock on the door. No answer. We wait. “Is this the right house?” I ask. Jordyn groans.

It is the right house, but no one’s home. We huddle on the porch. The eaves drool on us. Jordyn calls people who don’t answer their phones.

We wait. No one comes. Plan B. We drive through donut town to another house. We stare at it, wondering what the heck we’re doing.

“This is gonna be awkward,” I say. Jordyn nods. “But there’s nothing else to do.” We drag our equipment toward the house.

Groom answers the door red-faced. I wonder if it’s a tanning bed mishap or if he is as embarrassed as we are. “He-e-e-ey.”

“Hey, we couldn’t get in touch with anyone else,” Jordyn says. “So we can shoot you and your groomsmen.” We go inside and load our cameras.

We stand in the kitchen. Jordyn, Groom, me. We stare at the walls. “My groomsmen aren’t here. They’re 30 minutes late.”

Jordyn looks out the window. “We’ll shoot the outside of the house,” she says. We never shoot the outside of a house.

We go outside and take pictures of dying leaves and branches. My foot is still wet. I think it might just freeze and snap off.

A groomsman arrives. He looks like college. Gelled hair and a fleece pullover. He seems confused by the two girls holding cameras.

More groomsmen show up with beer. They slap Groom’s back and say, “Today’s the day” like Groom didn’t know that already.

We want to get out of there. We get a text message from Bride. Her make-up is done. We photograph Groom tying his bow-tie and leave.

At Bride’s house, sorority sisters are squeezing into periwinkle dresses and saying, “No seriously, you are so much thinner than me!”

Bride is beautiful. She gives us fruit and cheese and we take a picture of her dad putting a penny in her shoe.

We drive to the church and fill our pockets with airheads. Catholic ceremonies are long. You never know when you’ll need candy.

The organist plays. He has bad rhythm. Ave Maria still makes me want to cry. Bride and Groom take flowers to Mary.

They wed. The sun comes out.

We take Bridal Party to a monastery. The grounds are a maze of shrines. The sun paints shadows on statues and crucifixes.

The woods are filled with saints.

I've been reading good writing lately. Not good, like . . . oh what a page turner, I wonder if she ends up with the vampire or the werewolf? Good like . . . wow this is depressing. This is humanity.

A few days ago I finished the odyssey that was my reading of "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" It took me only, what? 8 months to finish it? I got off to a very slow start. I was struggling through it. It's a little challenging. Then all of the sudden I understood the protagonist and felt totally heartbroken for him, and then finished the last two-thirds of the book in two days. It was the kind of book that's still haunting me. I guess because I saw so much of myself in the hero. A guy who keeps to himself a lot. Not because he hates people, but because he sees things differently. A guy who isn't lukewarm about anything. He screws up huge and repents huge. I can relate.

So much of the novel is about his experience growing up in the catholic church and this weekend I worked at a catholic wedding. There was this little alter boy in his white robe helping prepare the Eucharist. I couldn't stop thinking about Stephen Dedalus. My brain was swimming in the mixture of beautiful traditions and frightening rules. I tell you what, Catholicism is freaking gorgeous. So much attention to detail. So many saints and uniforms, and icons, and bells. I love it when I work these weddings. I get teary when they sing Ave Maria. I don't even know why.

So to lighten my mood I read a cute little Young Adult adventure novel called "The Game of Sunken Places". The author, MT Anderson, is one of my faves. He's hilarious. Funniest writer ever. Decided. It's helping to pull me out of my introspective funk, but not completely succeeding yet. I probably need to watch some reality TV to wash my brain clean of its pensive attitude.

I just had to go check on Cash. He was screaming his head off. I gave him some teething gel. He bit my finger. Hard. He asked to pray again. This is what he said:

"Dear God,
Thank you for the day,
For Mommy and Daddy and Cashy,
For play with cars,
For church,
For water sky,
For Moon and stars,
For the sun,
For trees and flowers,
For land,
For boys,
For boys and girls,
For music,
For tunes,
For chairs,
Thank you for making me,
Thank you for loving me,
and that Jesus wants to be my friend forever,
In Jesus' name Amen."

According to Jordin Sparks, if your boyfriend is dancing with another girl at the club, the solution is dancing better than the other girl so he comes back to you. That'll show him.

Well, this is great. Instead of encouraging young women to find men who are worthy of them, let's just tell them to fight with eachother over the douchebags that can't be faithful. Congratulations, Jordin Sparks. You've just made me a feminist.

People love complaining about popular culture. I know it's totally pointless, and I shouldn't be doing it. So I've got a plan. Ready? You want to go with me?

I'm infiltrating!

Here's the way I see it. There's this giant world of creative media. There's music. There's art. Books. Magazines. Poetry. Movies. TV. All kinds of stuff, really. So people everywhere are sending out their messages through these creative and intellectual outlets. Some of the messages are good. Some of the messages make you want to be a better person. Some of the messages make me want to punch Lady Gaga in the face. So when the latter messages flow into my world, I get mad and I want to blame "the media". But the media didn't start this. They just delivered it to me. I don't have a problem with media. I love media. i love books. I love movies. I just have a problem with the messages that were sent through them.

So. Solution!

I'm sneaking in there and poisoning the whole lot! Well, realistically, I don't have enough poison to take the entire system down. I've got just enough to make a few people subconsciously think about something that they never thought before . . . if i'm lucky. But here's the good news. I'm not the only one who can be a part of this! Every one of us has a little bit of the poison . . . or is it an antidote?

The trouble is that people don't know know that they have this antidote, or they are afraid to use it.

When our world began, God spoke everything into existence. He created. He took nothingness and made life from it. After building a diverse and intricate world, he made his favorite creation of all time. You and me. He liked us so much that he let us be like him. He made us from his own image. The importance in this was not that we were physically shaped in God's image, but that we were allowed to have some of his mind. We were given intellect and the ability to create, in a scaled down version of how he created. Now we can't create matter from nothingness, or life from something inanimate, but we can breathe life into words. we can take emotionless paint and create beauty. We can use our mouths as instruments of truth.

We can stop hiding and complaining and instead use our gifts and abilities to give the world an alternative to the hurtful messages that they are being bombarded with. We can give them truth and beauty from its ultimate source. We can go to the Father and soak in his truth and beauty and then become the medium to deliver it to the world. We just have to figure out what kind of media God made us to be, and what message he wants us to send.

I didn't know what kind of media I was, or where my message was, and then I found it hiding in my finger tips. I sat down in front of a computer screen and touched my keyboard and there it was! The message was clear and it flowed out excitedly. It wasn't the most profound message in the world. It wasn't even original. It was just something that might have the power to nudge a few people in the right direction. It wasn't going to change the world, but it was the message that I had been given. It was what God decided I could say to the world. So I have to say it. It's not going to be easy. Saying anything to the world is hard. Usually if you are a woman, you need to get plastic surgery before anyone will be willing to listen to what you have to say. But i still have to try. And Trust that God gave me the message for a reason. Even if it was just to teach it to myself.

We don't have to do anything about the world. We can sit in Christian huddles and complain. We can even take it one step further and blog about it! (It's the greatest! The more angry you are, the more legitimate you are as a blogger) Or we can use what God has created in us as a conduit for his message. A message not of complaining about the shape of culture, but a message of loving. Peace. Truth. Mercy.

I stole that line from Gary Go, a philosopher in skinny pants and a tie-bar.

I've been listening to a lot of music lately and watching a lot of VH1. I've never been into reading poetry. I think I read it too fast. I wish I could slow down and really savor it. I don't think I get the full beauty of it when I comprehend it at the speed of reading. Music however, is like poetry that got slowed down. Well, good music is. Not so much the music that was made so people could bump into eachother in college town bars.

But the good music. When I listen to it, I want to cry. Or I really do cry. The funny thing is that most people like genres. I don't have genres. I have feelings. It makes it tricky when people ask me what kind of music I like. I like angry music, angsty music, cheer-me-up music, quarterlife-crisis-desperation music, Isn't-my-husband=the-greatest music. You get the idea. It also makes it tough to find new music. I can't predict what music will stir me by looking at a cd, or even taking advice from someone else. There are these chord progressions that I'm sure have some name in music theory, but they make my chest muscles tighten up and I can't breathe. I want music with those chord progressions and lyrics that say something real, but in a totally beautiful way. I can't figure out how to type that into the iTunes search bar.

Sidenote: Music is great, but when you spend a lot of time on VH1 looking for the good stuff, you have to wade through a bunch of not good stuff. Don't worry. I'm not gonna be a music snob and complain about what's popular. I'm instead going to mourn the death of women. Yeah, women are dead. They sold themselves out as a gender. They said, "respect? heck no, I'd rather have money and fame." So they got plastic surgery. They starved themselves and burned their clothes. They gave up on developing ideas and instead decided to take stripper dance lessons. I'm sure there's some spiritual truth to see in it. Evidence that women will do anything to get the attention of men. Something that happened when Eve sinned, maybe. Now we're all just desperately scraping for the approval of men.

I realize that this post was slightly disjointed. It's not my fault. I've been reading Jack Kerouac. His voice is stuck in my head.

I just finished chapter one of my second novel (working title: Friction). I'm high. I haven't written new material since January. At that time I finished the rough draft of my first novel and have been revising ever since.

It's such a crazy rush. I sat down last night and wrote for only two hours, but it's like my fingers couldn't type fast enough to get out everything I wanted to say. It was amazing. I can't even explain it. Writing a new story is such a powerful experience. My imagination is freaking out. I've been scrutinizing my grammar for the last 8 months, but now it's back to just straight up imagining. Making stuff up. Hanging out and experiencing people who don't even exist outside of my mind. So weird. So fun.

My brain is still trying to stay in revision mode, so my instinct is to pour over one or two sentences for the next week and hammer them out, but I need to get my storyline written. Get the story out and then go back and make it pretty. That's my plan now. I can't wait. I'm so excited to see where this story takes me. See what these characters decide to show me. There will be frustration. I'll get angry and swear that I'll never write again at some point. I'll cry. I'll decide that I'm the worst writer in the world and give up a few times. I'll also inevitable come crawling back to my story to finish it.

Oh, fiction. My dream. My nightmare.