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Whee!

Following (and lj-cut for your friends-list skimming pleasure) are a couple short fiction (mostly) snippets from Creative Writing. Your life won't be complete till you read them. Really. But if you only want your life to be a little bit complete (or have just five minutes before you have to go to dinner or class or something) read the second one; IMHO, it sucks the least. Though feel free to argue with me about that. Feedback more than welcome, though I don't think these are gonna go anywhere further. I was thinking about polishing and submitting #2 to the Fountain, because we really need more prose, but... nah. In any event, there were five, but one is terrible and another redundant, so you get three. (Though if I feel particularly vengeful tomorrow you may yet get the others. Dave, if you're reading this, for the terrible one, the assignment was "a freshman-year memory"...) Enjoy, or else. :D


crush

He’s got brown eyes that I’m almost afraid to meet sometimes, I think, since my gaze swerves if we’re too close, nervous of the oncoming emotional traffic. Sometimes I’m sure I know the way the sun glances off his hair better than its play in my own. I’ve got a trash can full of first drafts of conversations and poetry comparing him to a heartbeat, and every time I look off into the distance you know what I’m seeing.

He has a sense of humor as quick as his assured walk, and an easy smile I could drown in, or fly. He has his own ideas and the wit to back them up, and the wisdom to back down, with another of those grins. He’s coordinated and creative, and eminently crushable. Of course, he’s also got a girlfriend.

And tempted though I might be to tack “unfortunately” onto the end of that sentence, I’ll refrain. Because although of course in late night giggling gossip sessions, the disappointment I relate is as fake as the melodramatic fainting fits we feign at particularly juicy tidbits shared. Yes, he has a girlfriend, and that puts him in the untouchable category, but it’s a freeing sort of constraint, contradictory as love itself.

This isn’t love, I know at some level. This is just another way to pass the time, a pretty face to desire. He’s my knight in shining armor, my damsel in distress, my wise wizard all in one: the perfect actor to cast in any imaginary drama written to fill the moments. The fact that he’s attached only serves to anchor reality farther from fantasy. There’s no obligation to pursue someone who’s already in love with someone else. There’s no hope that all I need to do is speak up and suddenly the music will swell and he’ll sweep me into a kiss. Instead, I’ve got this sort of contented hopelessness. He’s up so high on that pedestal in my mind that he might as well be some Greek god on Olympus, and we all know the troubles that come when some mere mortal dares to court one of them. He’s not for me, and it’s okay. He’s not for me, so I can imagine what it’d be like if he were.

He’s not for me, so he’s safe. Sure, it’s not the healthiest relationship ever. But he’s like good chocolate -- guilty stuff, terrible for your body, but full of those chemicals and hormones that make you feel good without knowing why, and all in all the best once-in-a-while indulgence invented by man.


====================
Yes, this is partially Based On A True Story. No, I'm not gonna tell you who it is. Been there, done that, burned the t-shirt. ... Actually, I can laugh at that one now, but it was deadly serious then. Er, where was I? Oh yeah.








Divorce: a Fairy Tale

Once upon a time, on a dark and stormy night, there was a bright and calm family, with a mother, a father, two point three children (rounded up) and a couple cats. The children fell neatly into well-defined categories: the smart one, the athletic one, the popular one. Their mother drove to soccer practices, playdates, and spelling bees, while their father worked long hours in his office and came downstairs in the evenings to strum his guitar and hold them on his knees.

But on this dark and stormy night, and on a succession of similar following evenings, the beautiful american dream began to fade. The marriage cracked round the edges, burned like when their grandmother’s apple pie recipe was left carelessly in the oven till the crust darkened and split and the filling swelled out of the chasm, volcanic and angry, and the whole family pushed pie in pointless laps around matching dessert plates. There were loud angry voices, and even worse, quiet controlled ones. Lucrative jobs turned less so, shining As on report cards drifted and shrunk down to small ashamed glyphs in the corners of photocopied forms and parent letters, and nobody really got enough sleep.

It was an ironic July morning when brown cardboard boxes carried everything about the father away through the sunny front yard to an apartment on the other side of town, with one bedroom and a fold-out couch that the three children would argue over one day a week. And as the parents tied dozens of forms of the verb “to love” up in red tape and shipped them off to his-and-hers lawyers, the children discovered that the glossy veneer of their own passions had gone dull. Books held no solace for the oldest, nor giggles and gaggles for the youngest, and no matter how fast the middle could run the hundred meters his troubles would chase him.

Stressful hours turned to days, weeks, and months, and truthfully the children never quite got over it. Who can, really? But they got around it, working their way through new territories and experiences until the chasm in their well-worn paths was as familiar as the childhood friend one assumes will always be there. And one day, when they weren’t quite ready for it, more people arrived. They didn’t fit in the gaps, but they bridged them. Wounds scarred over. Violent or melancholy metaphors faded to the back of consciousness, realized they were no longer needed, and vanished from their sullen existence. The divided family slowly regenerated.

Through this strange process of social mitosis, the family (like any organism) grew into a family that spills over the edges of picture frames and the careful lines of standardized forms, where clearly defined roles blur and caricatures grow into portraits. And though “happily ever after” was far too bland and constraining for this motley group, they were willing to concede that at some point in the future, on some day when nobody was working or at after-school meetings or college classes or their noncustodial parent’s place of residence, they might be able to do a fairly joyous day or two, provided nothing else came up to interrupt... and, well, maybe even if it did.


====================
The second last paragraph is icky. "More people arrived"? Blech. I still can't quite get that transition right though, so it stays.








i can't think of anything remotely resembling a title for this

December 1
Her mom let her open the first door on the advent calendar today, so she knows Christmas is coming. Behind hid a mere bite of chocolate in the shape of a boat, but she’s pretty sure if she complains her mom won’t let her have it in the mornings any more, so she doesn’t. “The Twelve Days Of Christmas” crackled through her school bus’s aging speakers on the way to the elementary school, and the boys in the back seats proudly sang their own versions of the lyrics, putting particular emphasis on the lines with the added fart jokes. And her art teacher’s earrings were small shiny green ornaments that reflected small spots of sunlight onto the faded walls of the art room.
‘Twas the season.

December 4
She sits at the kitchen table, concentrating intensely as she carefully drafts her annual letter to Santa.. Wobbling penciled letters line up in careful rows across the clean white paper as she details exactly how good she’s been this year, and exactly how hard it’s been to keep up to snuff given the influences of annoying classmates, great temptation, and (ew) boys. Then she specifies the brand names she feels she deserves in exchange and elaborates on which channel she has seen the advertisements for a particular desire.
Her father chuckled when he saw what she was up to, and in a voice he thought she couldn’t hear asked her mother cryptically, “Really, Jan, don’t you think she’s a little old for this?”

December 8
Her mother wraps her up in her purple winter jacket and takes her to the mall in the afternoon. The entrance from Garage A is guarded by a pale Santa with blue eyes and a soft tenor “ho-ho-ho”. At the food court they meet her aunt, who is tall and sophisticated with a quick, easy smile, and her mother explains that Aunt Liz is going to take care of her for a while, and won’t she be good for both their sakes? Once her mother has turned the corner, her aunt leans down and tells her conspiratorially that they’re gonna go buy something for Mom, just the two of them. They go to a brightly-lit, heavily scented store where she picks out a bottle of lotion and her aunt takes her up to the counter and pays with plastic, and then to the ice-cream place where her aunt lets her get whipped cream, hot fudge, marshmallow, and M&Ms on her sundae, and finishes it for her when she gets full halfway through.
Her aunt’s cell phone rings and after a few minutes of murmured agreement, she tells her that they’ll just meet her mom at home, all right? On the way to her aunt’s car, across the mall, they pass another Santa. This one is booming and baritone and on the whole much more what she expects from the legendary man. She wonders how much fast food he had to eat to get that much bigger that fast.

December 11
Her best friend lost a tooth yesterday, and enters school triumphantly waving a crisp two dollar bill. “That isn’t real,” one of the other kids says skeptically, tired of seeing it for the fifth time on the playground.
“Is too!” her best friend insists. “My mom gave it to me.”
“What about the tooth fairy?” lisps a first-grader.
“There is no tooth fairy,” comes the scornful response.
She asks her mother that night if Santa is real. Her mother sighs, then brightens. She disappears upstairs, then returns, reverently bearing a yellowed newspaper clipping. They sit on the couch, and her mother helps her read the long words, like “Virginia” and “editorial” and “scepticism”. At the end her mother smiles, her eyes very bright, and asks, “Does that answer your question?” before going off to pull the cookies out of the oven.
Personally, she thinks it’s a bit of a cop-out.


==============
This was gonna go on till December 24th, with a big finale involving catching the mom red-handed or something, but it was also only supposed to be 300-500 words and I was really tired. Question: Do you guys recognize what the newspaper clipping is? My teacher didn't, and I assumed everyone in the world would. ???

Date: 2004-03-04 07:08 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] merulina.livejournal.com
Only had time for a quick skim before bed. Will read more in depth tomorrow.

And to answer your question: Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. Of course I know what that is. Didn't Virginia write a letter to the editor? And that was a line from the editor's reply?

Date: 2004-03-04 07:37 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] godream.livejournal.com
Yup yup yup! You're exactly right. In school, what happened was my teacher xeroxed a couple random stories from the class for the whole class, and this was one of them. She'd underlined "scepticism" as in questioning the spelling -- which I'd put that way because it was a quote -- and then later she mentioned she didn't quite get that part. One of the other kids in the class explained so I didn't have to, but I was rather surprised, since I thought it was a pretty obvious reference. Glad to know that I'm not totally out of touch here. :D

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August 2010

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