As I’ve posted before, I’m doing NaNoWriMo this year. Looking at my past blogs, one would notice that I did NaNo in 2009. I began a potential novel titled “Darkness Falls.” I really liked this story, but was not up to the task of writing an entire novel on the characters. I do not know them, or the story they are to go through, well enough. My file on NaNo 2009 is about 15,000 words (if I’m rounding up).
This year I made a different approach. I decided to write memoir. My life is full of characters I know very well, and this year I’m doing awesome. As of this night, I’m just past 35,000 words. This is over 110 pages in MS Office. I believe I will finish this year. There are only two hurdles in my way. I have two separate essays in two different classes due the same day NaNo ends. At 35k, I’m going to try and get ahead a bit this week, especially of Thanksgiving weekend.
I also read aloud this weekend at this: http://www.cswritersreading.blogspot.com/
What I read is pretty much a work of fiction using those characters I know from real life. I believe that much of my writing is melancholy, devoid of humor, and far too serious. This is because much of it is just that, so with this piece I wanted to prove to myself that I could write something funny and serious, not just serious.
And with no further ado, an untitled work for whomever even reads this blog. There must be one or two people.
Ten minutes after meeting my father, John Stephen Jones declared that “the boy would cause no end of trouble for me and mine.” He uttered the prophecy while sitting in his favorite chair, a worn and comfortable coffee colored thing. The chair groaned like a prisoner of war forced to undergo another familiar torture. The cushions bulged, threatening to spew their yellow cushioning all over the floor, held in only by clever stitching performed by my grandmother, intent to keep the prisoner viable for torture as long as possible. John Stephen Jones looked at the man that would be my father, beginning at his eyes, where, he said, you found a man’s worth. Michael Ferguson’s pale, watery eyes, blinked rapidly at my grandfather, flitting here and there, landing on my grandfather as a bird does a likely spot to eat, unsure of whether of their own well-being. John Stephen Jones harrumphed, raising a hand oak-like in its strength and color, dismissing his daughter’s young man from his presence. John said his piece, his family could take it into account or not, it didn’t matter to him.
Michael Ferguson looked to my mother. My mother stared at my grandmother, pointedly ignoring the looks of both men in the room. My grandmother acted as if the book she read, Roots which she read at least once a year, occupied the entirety of her attention. Lisa did not miss the curl of her lips, the way her shoulders seemed to tremble under some unseen weight. Lisa did not fail to note that her mother, Judy Jones, seemed to be shaking her head at Roots, disagreeing with the words of Alex Haley as she never had before. Michael floundered, finding no help in his girlfriend’s presence and no comfort in Judy’s apathetic smile. He opened his mouth and closed his mouth, and opened it again. He looked at Lisa again, his hands clenching in a silent plea. Lisa continued to frown at her mother, unconsciously rubbing a hand over her stomach.
“Sir, um, Mr. Jones” Michael said.
“What?” John said.
“I’m pregnant,” Lisa said.
Roots fell to the floor, its hollow thud swallowed by the bellow of my first grandfather. Standing over six feet tall and weighing over three hundred pounds, Michael never expected John to have the ability to move with the fluidity of flowing water. The strength to crush Michael’s neck, the young man had surmised from John’s size and did not appear at all surprised to find the older man’s hands currently gripping his throat. Michael’s hands found their way to my first grandfather’s, but his own hands were but weeds to the man’s oak, and almost as annoying. The look in my grandfather’s eyes, so my grandmother says, stole the mobility of every person in the room. Michael James Ferguson, convinced he was soon to die, could only choke out sounds. He believed he said, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” What he actually did was cough, slivers of spittle trailing down the sides of his mouth, pooling at the skin between my grandfather’s hands and Michael’s neck. Lisa, for the first time in her 16 years on God’s green Earth, was shocked into silence. One hand found its way to her mouth where it stayed positioned as if she smelled something foul, the other on the burgeoning swell of her belly. My grandmother moaned, “John, stop.” Repeatedly.
And my first grandfather did stop. He released Michael’s neck, holding his hands above his head and looking down at the young man in disgust. The look he spared my mother was coated in disappointment. Lisa had the grace to look down at her feet, ashamed.
“Sixteen years old,” was all he said. And left. The sound of his car starting came through the door.
My grandmother shook her head, tsk’ing. She picked her book up off the ground, looked at her daughter and my father, and tsk’ed again. She placed the book on a coffee table before she went into the kitchen, began running some water, occasionally looking back at the two kids who did not move. She grabbed a tea kettle from the cupboard, filled it up with water, put it on the stove where she let it warm until its whistle sounded. She poured three cups, adding a shot of liquor to each before putting the mint tea bags into the cups. She put them each on a tray, with three spoons for stirring, and gave them to her daughter, her daughter’s boyfriend, and took one for herself.
Warts and all. Revising is for later.
