[NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR]: They say to write about what you know. In hindsight, at the end of this journey, I can see the only story worth telling is my own. So here it is.
It has been an eventful first segment to this project. I've been challenged by friends and peers to write about certain topics, most of which I've postponed for the next segment, I've read a number of stories and poems, and I've increased my awareness as a writer.
A Day in December was a rather miserable attempt at a love story. I tried to connect it to the bittersweet nature of Edgar Allan Poe's "Annabel Lee," but something felt like it was lacking. When they say to beginning writers "Write about what you know," they don't mean "write about high school or living in Germany for a month or owning a dog;" they mean "write about heartbreak, write about loss, write about rage." In order to successfully write a story with the same nostalgic theme, I don't think it would be possible unless I had experienced something like that myself.
A Beautiful Day: J. D. Salinger, eat your heart out. This tale was inspired largely by the short story "A Perfect Day for a Bananafish," including the twist ending. It's about a boy who is full of information about inane things, including the presidents of the United States (much like me), but is empty of emotion and connection. He feels ostracized. He feels like he doesn't belong. If his own brother doesn't love him, then why should he expect anyone to love him in the future? This was my first intentional use of an ambiguous symbol: the orange leaf. And since it's ambiguous, I won't reveal the meaning I gave it when I wrote it.
In the Snow: This one was a breakthrough for me in terms of length. I was able to write and write and write. My ending, as with all the other stories posted, was abrupt, which is certainly an aspect I need to improve. I also employed the use of weather as a representative of the harshness and cruelty of life. I enjoyed experimenting with the narrator's diction. He's very much grounded in reality, as demonstrated by the way he uses swearing phrases like "bullshit." Yet at the same time, he exhibits a philosopher longing to be free. He has the potential to romanticize the glory of the world. In his discussion with the Professor, his mentor describes Salinger as someone much like Luke: "tormented by the world and its wonderful stupidity." I also tried a more subtle approach to the family problems addressed in A Beautiful Day: his mom ran over the dog, yes, but his family as a whole is strained. He initially gives the feeling that he's stuck in California, yet in reality he's in Wisconsin. He hates his parents, he longs to be free, but he feels trapped.
Altogether it seemed a very successful first segment. A few things to work on: 1)Drafting, revising, and editing: each of the stories on here are published "as is" after my first run through. I haven't gone through and adjusted or tweaked any passage significantly, with the exception of a word or two here and there. 2) Reading more - I've read a lot of Poe and Salinger, but I want to diversify my reading more to include a greater variety of authors. One of my favorite poems - "Do not go gentle into that good night" - offers a promising aspect in the works of Dylan Thomas. 3) Peer feedback: I really want to see what my friends and peers think of my writing. I want their opinions on technique, theme, clarity, and plot.
Listen, I don’t want to bullshit you, but just hear me out. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it all. There are people who travel the world and see all these things and do all these things and visit all these places. But when they’re done and dead, that’s all they ever are: people. There’s nothing extraordinary about what climbing the highest mountains or swimming in the deepest depths. The extraordinary comes from telling about the thinness of the air or the darkness of the blue seas.
He’d glance at here every once in a while as he read his book. A slight glance that just fit into his peripheral vision, a couple degrees away from being out of his pupil’s reach. They were fleeting, momentary snapshots that - while captured in less time than he could catch the breath she took from him - were permanently etched in the grooves of his brain.
It had been a year since her mother - his wife - had died. One year exactly. Every time he drove on the icy December road, just part of him wanted to violently steer off the road. His wife and he shared far too much in life - a house, a car, a daughter; their love their affection, their hopes, their dreams. For this past year, he had hoped they might share one more thing - in death.
But every time he clutched the wheel in his hands - every time he had the power to take his life - he couldn’t. They say your whole life flashes before your eyes when you die - that you see every memory, every thought, every recollection. But in that moment, with his hands on the wheel, he found that only to be myth. Or, at the very least, a misconception. For in that moment with his hands on the wheel, he could only see his daughter. She was his life
He looked up from his book and at her in their living room. Her face would have been entirely in the dark of the December night had it not been for the lamp in the corner of the room illuminating her innocent sleeping face.
Never. Never could he leave her. His wife had left them, whether she wanted to or not. They had been a two-man unit ever since. THey say families grow close after a loss in the family. He didn’t quite understand why. Maybe it was because they need to comfort each other. maybe it was because they realized their own mortality and just once wanted to hear someone say “I love you” again. Right now, he didn’t care why. He just knew a special bond between them existed. He could never leave her.
It was late and she probably should have been sleeping in her bed to rest for the next day of school. But he just wanted to sit there and watch. The small hush of a draft whispered through the house, gently brushing the branches of their newly erected Christmas tree.
The chill prompted him to pick her up and take her back to her room. She had enough for one day. He lifted her with a brief, low grunt. He wasn’t quite as young as he used to be. Holding her along his body, he couldn’t help but remember the days where he could hold her in just one arm. He wondered where those days had gone.
Her silky blond hair had once been nothing more than a budding fuzz on her head. Now it was down beneath her shoulders, just has her mother’s hair had been. Her eyelids - held shut to protect her dreams from the danger of light - concealed her perfect brown eyes, which were just like her mother’s eyes. She had her mother’s hair, her mother’s eyes, and her mother’s perfectly proportional nose. She was - in almost every physical sense - his wife.
He laid her in her bed and tucked her in for the night. He walked out quietly and shut the door, turning the handle so the door wouldn’t make a loud click when it shut. THen he leaned back against the door and took a deep breath. He held it in with the hope that he could hold onto this moment. During this night in December, all was still and all remained unchanged - and that’s how he wanted to keep it.
He could never leave her. But he had to. Through every day he held on, but one day there will be a day where he could hold on no longer. Loss wasn’t what drained his soul - it was love. Every time he shows his love, time is taken away from him. Every kiss, every “Hello,” every “Goodbye,” every “I love you” had its own personal cost. You can only give someone so much of yourself before you lose ownership entirely.
There would come a day - he realized - where he will have shown as much love as he could show. And on that day, he would die. He exhaled. What kept him up at night wasn’t financial problems or job difficulties. It wasn’t even the longing to have his wife next to him just one more time to brush her hair, rub her nose, and stare into her eyes. It was the burden of the very idea that he would have no more love to show.
They say heartache is when you’re sad - so sad you can’t eat, you can’t drink, and you can’t sleep. Real heartache isn’t about being morose. Real heartache is when your heart skips a beat in the hope that the heart of another will beat for you, only to realize no other heart is out there.
He had tried counting, but he couldn’t keep up - his heart skipped too many beats in one day to even calculate. And this was his everyday. Each day was met with this heartache.
He walked down the hall into his own room, shutting his door just as carefully and quietly as he had shut his daughter’s. He crawled into his own bed, and once inside, stared up at the ceiling through the darkness.
“Twenty-two.” “Grover Cleveland.” “Thirty.” “Calvin Coolidge.” “Twenty-four.” “Grover Cleveland.” “You just said Grover Cleveland twice.” “He was president twice.” James shook his head and said, “How the hell can you store that much information in your head?” If the life of Harry meant anything, it only meant that he had mastered obscure trivia. Presidents, mostly. He usually thought his interest in US Presidents was because of the fact a president shared his name, Harry Truman. He could recite pi to thirty-six decimal places, he could tell you the Academy Award winner for Best Picture for every year since its inception, he could recite the presidents in order, he could regurgitate the most obscure facts about biology and mathematics. He was brilliant.
“I guess maybe a more important question would be ‘why the hell do I have that much information stored in my head?’” Harry mused.
The pair were walking home from William Henry Harrison High School, or as Harry often referred to it before having to make himself clear to someone else, Number Ten High School. They reached James’ house first. He departed, leaving Harry to walk the final few blocks alone. The autumn wind was beginning to pick up. The fall was hardest for him. Everywhere he went, he saw the brown of dead leaves. Everywhere he went, he saw the color of his brother’s hair. It had been six months since his brother died. Damn cancer. Maybe he cared. Part of him felt he should, but another part of him told him he couldn’t. His brother wasn’t technically his brother, and the two never got along well together. They fought. Frequently. They engaged in battles of brawn and brain, ranging from fist fights to passively-aggressively sitting in one another’s chair. His brother never really liked his adopted brother Harry. He said he hated Harry. There wasn’t one day that didn’t involve the yelling of insults or the slamming of doors between the two boys. Harry knew his brother was an asshole. But he was still sad.
The teenager arrived home, tossed his bag and books to the floor near the pile of unfinished and overdue school work, and threw himself on his bed. The leaves outside his window fell in a scattered stream. The wind blowing through the trees carried the leaves through the air. The tree and the grass outside of Harry’s window were a mucus-like blend of the most depressing shades of yellow, red, and brown. But no orange. Isn’t that funny? Harry thought. So many leaves of so many hues, but there’s not even just one orange leaf.
Harry was a good kid. And a walking oxymoron. He was intelligent, yet he was blonde. He was intelligent, yet he never really tried. He was intelligent, yet he never really cared. Overdue work? Check. Studying that would never be done? Check. Dead asshole of a brother? Check. Parents he hated? Check. Parents. As a kid who was in foster homes, Harry thought he should be grateful for people like his parents who rescued him from the system and delivered him to the safety of a real home, but they were shit.
"Well I don't know how we're supposed to pay for college if we're still working off the payments from the cancer treatment..." Harry heard the words of his mother from the kitchen directly below him. "He doesn't need to go to college. He's smart enough to make it on his own," his father replied. "My parents couldn't afford to send me to college and I turned out just fine." Seriously?! Harry shouted in his head. What. The. Fuck. You dipshit. Do you not fucking realize that to "make it" I'll need a goddamn degree? No one takes deadbeat asswhipes like you. Yeah, just look where you are. You didn't turn out "just fine." You're living in a shithole that you can't move out of or even make it bearable to live in because your dumb ass can't do anything right. You can't get a job to get the money to get a decent home, you can't afford chemo for your son who's now dead, and you can't give me the start I need to life. Why? Because you're a fucking idiot, that's why. His mother went on. “Irregardless, we still don’t have enough money. Maybe if you could afford not stopping by the bar every single day we could start to scrape together ---” “Oh go to hell. It’s better than being stuck here with you the whole damn day.”
And so it began. The bickering. The yelling. The screaming. The shouting. The fighting. What number was it this week? Today was Thursday, so counting both rounds on Sunday and the three round knockout from Tuesday, Harry figured it was fight number eight. Just like clockwork. If there was a God, Harry pleaded Him to give evidence of a miracle by making his room sound proof. Then and only then would he believe. Well at least the neighbors only complained about the noise twice this week, so maybe there was hope.
Harry looked out his window. He stared out his window. He thought that maybe if he could focus on something, he could take his mind off of what was going on under him. This was the strategy he chose every day, but it never worked. Yet without fail, he tried it. Almost as he was about to stop thinking for the first time all day, he spotted a singular orange leaf on the branch of the tree outside. The wind was roaring through, but the leaf was holding on by a thread. It didn’t want to budge. But in the end, the wind didn’t give the leaf a choice. In an instant, the leaf was gone and out of sight.
Harry walked into his father’s room and pulled his father’s service pistol out from its hiding place in his father’s closet. Maybe he’ll be good for something. Harry walked back to his room in his father’s house. He sat on the bed and continued to look out the window. “You lousy son of a bitch!” he heard below him. Harry lifted the gun and opened his mouth. He could feel the cool barrell on his lips and just on his tongue. Harry noticed the wind was beginning to calm outside. No more leaves had been swept away.
As Harry pulled the trigger of his father’s pistol in his room in his father’s house, he looked out of his window and saw for the first time in a long time the still sea of yellow and brown of autumn colors.
Well, the Bible started at the beginning, so why shouldn’t I? It was a Tuesday. It was a Wednesday. I don’t remember the day, in all honesty. I just know that it was yet another day in the hell on earth that called itself Saint Paul the Apostle’s Academy. The school itself seemed nice enough, with the buildings covered with the facade of a welcoming nature, but once your parents start on their five hour car drive home and you were left to fend for yourself, you remove the veil, cross the threshold, and you’re left with the very disappointing realization that you are not the first man to grace those hallowed halls with your presence.
My dad bought my way to Saint Paul’s so I could have the best education money could buy. He could afford to, what with his outrageously excessive fees for his high profile clients and all. No matter how much he spent on admission fees and room and board, my dad couldn’t buy the ability to wipe away the looks I received from my peers. I once walked into my room after my history class to discover a swastika and the words “Go home, kike” painted above my bed.
The added benefit of being the only one with a name like “Ziegler” at Saint Paul’s was that every roommate I had miraculously received a transfer to another dormitory, leaving me with a room all to myself. This meant that I could focus on my studies. Even if they didn’t want a part of me, I would have something to rub back into their faces. I consistently received the highest marks of my class. By senior year, I was sitting comfortably on top of my class.
Anyway, it was Thursday. I’m almost certain. Graduation was upon us, and it was almost time to announce the valedictorian. Saint Paul’s had a long tradition of bestowing the title on the young, distinguishable man with the highest marks, no questions asked. For some reason, they decided to start a new tradition for my graduation class: the top five of the class would be interviewed by a committee consisting of an assortment of teachers and administrators.
I later discovered that this was the only year Saint Paul’s used this method.
My appointment with the committee was that afternoon. I had prepared myself for every question imaginable. I had spent hours refining how I would skillfully articulate what could be said in a straightforward manner by simply stating “I’m better than everyone else. I deserve this the most.”
I walked up to headmaster’s office, where the meeting was supposed to be. It was ten o’clock, Friday morning, and I had reported to his office as instructed. I arrived only to find the door shut and locked with no one home. I waited. Ten fifteen. No one was there. Ten thirty. No one was there. I waited until about ten after eleven until I left. I thought that maybe the meeting had been postponed and I just didn’t get the message in time.
I went back to my dorm room and waited. I was never called.
The very next week, Saint Paul the Apostle’s Academy had announced the valedictorian of the graduating class: James O’Connor, a boy of Irish descent who it seemed frequently had a higher blood-alcohol level than grade point average. Anyone looking from the outside in at the statistics of the class would undoubtedly raise a brow when he saw the choice for valedictorian. But I knew why. Everyone on campus knew.
The day before the graduation ceremony, a mannequin was hanged on the lamp post just outside my window. Along with the noticeable quality of being on fire, the dummy had a large, protruding fake nose glued to it and a bag with a dollar sign in its hand.
In all of my years at Saint Paul’s, I never had the fortune of meeting Jerome until the day of graduation. We sat in the back corner, next to the other Zs and the one or two Ys in the class. He was a nice boy. He didn’t hate me. We ended up talking to each other as the pride of Saint Paul’s, James O’Connor, slurred his way through his speech. After the ceremony, he didn’t leave as quickly as he could. Instead, he waited to finish our conversation. We kept in touch over the next few years, but didn’t really meet again until after we made it through college.
He invited me to a bar one night so we could catch up. As it turned out, neither of us did much in college to take note of. Both our fathers died, something I had mentioned but he failed to in our correspondence. I asked him why he never mentioned it. His rather callous reply was “I’m glad the bastard’s dead.” His comment created a rather awkward air for next hour until we walked back to his apartment. As we walked in, I couldn’t help but ask him why he was glad his father was dead. Jerome looked at me and inexplicably and quite without warning began to sob. I took him to my shoulder in an effort to hush his blubbering for long enough for him to form words, an endeavour I thought to be in vain until almost ten minutes after he began. He finally calmed down and, after half a box of tissues, could talk.
“He provided for me. For that I can be thankful. But the man was a bastard. A pedophile. A creep.” He paused to catch his breath. “Every day when I came home from school as a kid, I wasn’t allowed to do my homework or read until he was through with me. Some days he wouldn’t even allow me to go to school.”
I had met his father and he actually had seemed a decent enough man. Disbelief would probably describe my state of mind at that moment. All I could do was give him a hug. I mean, what are you supposed to do when your only real friend tells you that his recently deceased father molested him as a child? After a minute I pulled back and we looked each other in the eye.
We used only one bed that night.
“I’m sorry, but there’s nothing we can do.”
I won’t forget those words. Not for as long as I live. As short a time as that is. They don’t quite know what it is, but the general mood is that it’s only a matter of time. As I understand it, my body is a time-bomb. I’ve been diagnosed with an apparently incurable virus of some kind. The doctors asked if they could perform some tests on me to gain a better understanding of the disease I have because it was so unknown. Sure. Why the hell not?
The details of my remaining life were grim at best. As far as they could tell, from experiences with other patients, my body would shrivel up like a raisin in the sun until I ceased to exist. There was no telling when that process would begin, as far as they could tell. Here, in the end, I’ve realized that my life had become what I’d always wanted to be. In a way, it’s what I always was to the James O’Connors of the world. And to Jerome.
I am special.
My American Dream? To gain a sense of inclusion, belonging, and trust in a world which is destined to fight you and damn you. To be able to fit in, yet stand out as exceptional.
The purpose of this blog is to help me improve as a writer and a reader. Fantasy is expected and reality is suspended. My posts will fall into two to three separate categories.
1) Short stories - these will be creations entirely of my own. I'll take cues from the works I've read, especially if I read a novel or short story and want to experiment on my own with themes and techniques I picked up from that work.
2) Experiences with writing - these will be reflection pieces about the trials and tribulations of creating fiction.
3) Miscellaneous - these will most likely be reviews of things I've read during the course of this project or other musings.
My first post will NOT be a short story I've created for the purpose of this project. It's an untitled story I wrote my sophomore year for a project on the American Dream. After reading Death of a Salesman, my class was instructed to create a project that depicted our version of the American Dream. We were given absolutely no restrictions. We could make posters, videos, collages, anything. I took the road less traveled by and wrote a short story.
I would also like to refer you to the "Author" page to leave a comment about the blog and my work. I've also posted on that page the following disclaimer:
"Real break-through happens when we are driven by individual passion"
It's with this quote from the assignment in mind, as well as the purpose of this project as a whole, that I reserve my right to express or articulate my stories in any way I see fit. It's only by having no limits as a writer that I may make the most of this project.