May 01
Amnesty (Part One)
What follows is a short story written when I was, I think, 20 years old. I would probably consider it juvenilia partly because it isn’t an accomplished piece of writing but more particularly because at the time I did not possess the faculty of fictionalising biographical events or themes in the way I do now. I think it also lacks a certain subtlety, especially in the dialogue and the lack of nuance in the depiction of the adults in the story. When I next get a chance to write, there are some thoughts I want to discuss which this story in some ways relate to, but before I write that, I will also post an excerpt from my novel-in-progress which feeds into those ideas as well, though in a far more fictionalised way.
Amnesty (Part One)
It wasn’t late but it was dark. I wasn’t afraid. It was winter. The car was parked at the edge of Rotary Creek and we were hidden from the highway and the town’s light by trees and a children’s playground. For a long time now we had been sitting quite still in the front seat of the car. My mother was smoking and her window was open. I wasn’t afraid. I was thirteen. The air was mountain blue and the smoke from my mother’s cigarette floated out through the window and into it, disappearing slowly like a deep breath. The bottle was at my feet but empty now and my mother’s polystyrene cup lay beside it. The cup was empty too. My cup I still nursed in both my hands; the golden-yellow liquid in it had grown warm. My mother ashed her cigarette and turned to me. Relaxed now.
Not long before my father was due home I had gotten that suspicious, nervy feeling. I always did around that time. It made me sneaky. I acted like a spy. When he did get home, the door, instead of slamming against the door-frame and bouncing back an inch or two, glided slowly into place and startled me. I had been in my room underneath the stairs where my bookshelves were and writing and when I sprang the steady-tray that had been on my knees fell to the floor. I folded the paper I had been writing on and stuffed it into a brown paper lunchbag. I stuffed the lunchbag under my bed. Then I hurried to my door so I could close it, so I could sever my room from the brand-new Jennings house that we lived in and be by myself. I closed the door and stood waiting for the house to fade away. I heard my parents’ voices and I opened my door a crack to see what was going on. Spying. My parents were squared off in the kitchen and my father was flushed although he couldn’t have been drinking yet; he’d just got home from work. I opened the door a crack more and tried to hear.
My room and the kitchen were separated by a huge, grey family room with a slanting roof that stretched up to the second floor where my parents’ bedroom was and I couldn’t hear clearly. My father kept saying, “Nothing…” and my mother seemed to say nothing at all. Most of their words rose like heat to the ceiling or got lost in the crackle of the wood-stove which was burning furiously in the family room. Then I heard my mother clearly.
“Alex, you had no shirt on.” There was almost a laugh in her voice. Maybe they weren’t fighting after all. I couldn’t hear properly.
“You had no shirt on.” She said it again. They were fighting.
I opened the door and tried to look as if I was going to the toilet. Neither of them noticed me. I didn’t go to the toilet; I stopped where the hallway finished, where they couldn’t see me, and squatted down still trying to hear. None of it upset me though. I was just curious, fascinated by the argument the way some people are fascinated by Jack the Ripper. I still couldn’t hear anything so I went back to my room, this time closing the door behind me. I reached underneath the bed for the poem I had been writing and pulled out several brown lunchbags. I had to open five before I found the right one. I heard a few slamming noises so I turned my stereo on loud and went back to my alcove. I didn’t read my poem and I didn’t hear the music. I heard footsteps coming towards my room and then the door opened. It was my mother and I was glad.
“You’re coming with me.”
And I got up and followed her. We didn’t see my father as we walked through the kitchen where my mother grabbed the wine and the cups. I followed her through the front door.
It was only when we reached the highway that I asked my mother where we were going. She didn’t know. We were almost abreast with the entrance to Rotary Park when she decided to turn in and park the car beside the creek. I thought that we were going to drive straight into the water. She lit her first cigarette with shaking hands and there was something wonderful about it all.
[continued… Amnesty, Part 2]
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May 3rd, 2008 at 7:11 pm
Juvenilia not so juvenile. The rhythm of your sentences is lovely, and the story totally got me in from the first words.