Another assignment from the creative writing class. This time, we were asked to select a sentence from a list of random sets of text and create a short story based around it. I wrote something kind of unusual for my style, and my professor really liked it. Which is either heartening or incredibly discouraging, depending on the way I choose to take it. I'm still up in the air about the whole thing, is what I'm getting at. Hell, I'm more upset about having to explicitly press the shift key in order to capitalize letters as I type this, because I'm so accustomed to my (newly retired) Blackberry doing it for me, than I am about the matter of whether my writing style is teh suck so far as my prof is concerned. Basically? Meh. That's where I am about it. Is that concerning? I. Don't. Know. Am I on the verge of making a massive mistake? Probably. Would I know if a massive mistake were slapping me in the face like an angry fishwife dressed in faded poplin and covered in boils? Of course not.
In other words, it's Debbie 1.0 all over again. Whee!
*****
Grow
Hubert gave Charles and Irene a nice baby for Christmas. It arrived as an egg, packed into a wooden crate, surrounded on all sides by mounds of golden straw, dry on the tips and warmly moist within.
Charles harbors suspicions of the egg. He likes things to arrive in synchronicity, and this egg should have been preceded by something. Anything. A warning. A phone call at midnight from a chicken bereft.
Not only that, but Charles feels resentment toward the egg. How dare it show its face without showing its face? He realizes, as Irene coos over it, that it will eventually reveal itself. But to refuse an initial introduction? It only adds to his suspicions.
He imagines a machine that would allow him to see through its shell while he clicks on cells in an Excel spreadsheet on his computer in the room where he works, the smooth white walls around him, knowing there are better ways to do things. Charles knows it and knows, too, that he lacks the singular capacity to create such a mechanism. If only the shell were visually permeable with a Microsoft Office program. He could do it like that. Snap. He snaps his fingers for effect. The sound stays nicely contained within the walls of his smooth, white office.
Charles gets hungry when he’s inventing. He pushes away from his desk and swivels toward the door. He never dismounts from the chair until he’s right next to the door because that makes it easier for him to mount the chair again just as soon as he returns. The chair stays put where he ditches it, at the mouth of the office.
Charles has arrived in the kitchen, where he drags his hands across the surfaces of the room, labeling, in his head, all of the accessories with small, white labels, names in typewriter font. Fuck Helvetica. He hates Helvetica. He’s in the midst of a strong personal backlash against Helvetica and all those who profess love for its tidy dominance. What was good enough for Hemingway is good enough for him.
He drifts in a starved near-faint to the room where the egg sits in its brown box and wet hay. He looks longingly at it. So smooth. So damn smooth. He rests his hand gently on its head. Not, of course, that he thinks the top of the egg is a head. He just pretends it is. He holds its tip in both of his hands. Irene would be so pissed.
He runs back to his office, his gold and black Nike high-tops pounding the polished cement floor, the floor he and Hubert had christened after they’d used all the expensive treatments to give it depth and striations of subtle color, because they were so drunk neither of them could make it to bathroom and one, then the other, had vomited, because they’d forgotten to wear the masks, and the chemicals plus the beer made them sick, he runs to his office. His hands are shaking as he rips open drawer after drawer. He can’t stop shaking. Then he sees it, the thing, the very item, the tool itself, he grabs it up and runs back, gold and black feet blurred in staccato rhythm through the rooms with their smooth white walls, he is panting, he runs to the room where the egg sits in its box. The egg is glowing. Charles is glowing too. He stands in the door of the room and begins to stamp something out using the tool. Stamp, stamp, stamp. It makes a loud clacking noise. The room is filled with the noise of the clacks. The egg is quiet. Charles is sweating.
The tool produces a white slip of something. Charles pulls it gently from the tip and carefully tears it away. He sidles up to the egg as if to say, “It’s all right, Egg.”
The egg is quiet.
Charles places the slip, with its sticky underside, on the egg’s head. Its crown. He pats it carefully into place.
It says “EGG.” In Garabaldi.
you're so talented.
Posted by: slouchy | February 13, 2011 at 05:52 AM
I like it.
Posted by: Nancy | February 13, 2011 at 06:56 AM
Nothing wrong with trying a new style, lil db. And people liking that new style doesn't mean the old one (the one that feels closer to your sense of how you write, I should have said-- it's still current)doesn't mean the other one was bad.
I like Charles's smooth white office. And I feel like this story has more to say.
Nice work!
Posted by: roo | February 13, 2011 at 10:04 PM
You are AMAZING, my friend.
Posted by: Catherine | February 14, 2011 at 08:08 PM