Fiction post - Keeping it Real
May. 5th, 2006 03:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wordwhackerWritten for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
crimsonata, Project #07 - about a character that is the embodiment of something. In this case: Trust.
This story is still in a larval stage, though I promise I've given it a read-through edit for consistency and spelling/grammar. I'm hoping that I can get some suggestions from y'all re: how to expand on this story. It feels like a Reader's Digest version now, like the bare bones of something that should have a bit more substance. I think the best way to do that would be to include more concrete events - other than the beginning and ending it's very much in "general overview" format at the moment.
I'd appreciate it if you'd answer some of these questions if you're kind/crazy enough to comment on this thing:
- What needs more attention re: backstory and character development?
- Should I be more descriptive, in terms of scenery and what things physically look like?
- Are the themes clear? Do any huge questions come up when you read it that you feel I absolutely need to answer?
- If so, how should I work the above things into the story?
As always, grammar and sentence/paragraph construction nitpicks are appreciated, but don't drive yourself too nuts - mention anything you particularly like or loathe, but I'll be doing a lot of changes before it's done, so I don't want your time and effort to be in vain. :-)
And now, on to the story.
Keeping it Real (short story, 1,700 words, first draft)
I met Jimmy when we were both sixteen and about to jump off a bridge. I was there with something to prove; my parents would never have let me hurtle myself into the open air with nothing but an over-sized rubber band to save me. My uncle, on the other hand, was keen on it, if for no other reason than that he liked to spoil his only niece.
“Now, you’re sure,” he said, and I nodded so vigorously that my ponytail flicked up behind me. He sighed with a proud little smile and turned off the ignition of his truck. “All right. Let’s go sign you over to the devil, then.”
An hour and a slightly illegal “parental consent form” later I was listening intently to a jumping instructor. Another potential jumper and I were being grilled on a smorgasbord of safety hazards. My palms were sweating. I listened, my face forced into an expression of intense disengagement.
The guy next to me was smiling. Not a cocky smile - something calmer. His smile was downright placid.
“Ever jumped before?” He asked as we made our way out to the platform. I was trying not to think of it as a funeral procession.
“No.”
“Me neither.” He said it as if he’d just said, “I’ve never been to this convenience store, either.”
We chatted for a few minutes, me in clipped sentences, he in long, comfortable ones. His Birthday had been a week ago, a few days before mine. I had wanted to try this forever, or at least ever since I was 13 and my dad had told me that girls shouldn’t do crazy things like bungee jump. He had thought of it just the week before.
I asked him why. “Why not?”
I had something to prove - but Jimmy was just there.
Jimmy went first. I watched him with an intense concentration only made possible in times of stress. He was thorough, going through the safety checks without cutting a corner, but when it came time for him to jump he didn’t hesitate for a second. Down, down he went, the cord unfurling and going taut, bobbing his serene form back up, then down again. I couldn’t see his face but I had the feeling he was smiling.
I went tumbling in a frozen wreck off the platform, and screamed all the way down, back up, and down again. Then I started to cry, though by the time they fetched me it was mostly laughter.
We exchanged phone numbers. It was less like a come-on and more like a survivors group to me. He went to another school in town and had friends who had never met mine. In a few years the groups had come together; by the time some of us were shipping off to University there were teary goodbyes, sometimes between friends who would have never met, before.
Jimmy wasn’t one for teary goodbyes. “Either we’ll write and keep up, or it was nice knowing you,” he’d say.
Through high school I got to know him, partly through his friends, the ones who fill you in on the backstory so you don’t have to ask about it yourself. I asked him if he was okay with other people talking for him like that. He’d shrug. “They know me.” The thought that they’d badmouth him didn’t seem to enter his head - or maybe he just figured he deserved anything they had to say, or that there was no point wasting his time setting things right.
Jimmy and I wrote letters. It started as a joke - I wasn’t much of a writer, I even printed them off the computer straight out of my email program a few times at first, before sending them off in snail mail format. Jimmy wrote back religiously, always asking just enough questions to string me along. The next thing I knew we were pen-pals, taking time away from graduate studies and busy lives to write to each other, me in Alberta and him back in New Brunswick.
“Doesn’t anybody else write you anymore?” I asked, teasing him for a particularly long letter I’d received the week before.
“Sometimes,” he replied, a couple of weeks later. “They will, or they won’t. Whatever they do, it’ll be worth the time they put into it.”
That was Jimmy in a nutshell. It was like he trusted everything and everyone to the utmost, a sort of “laissez-faire” attitude to the world. It drove me nuts - at least, at first.
It had taken me a while to open up, but once I had the lines of communication were wide open between us. There was just something real about him, something casually accepting. I wrote to him about my successes and failures, relationships, problems with friends, my parents’ eventual and messy divorce. And he wrote to me about Angela.
He had met her in his third Undergrad year, and by the time year four rolled around not a letter went by without a mention of her. They were the perfect match, interested in the same things, both of them charting compatible courses for their lives. She had a good sense of humour, a definite must for anybody professing to marry Jimmy. That was the plan, after all, once they could make the time for it. There was only one snag: she was going for a PhD in Vancouver, while a job in Forestry was waiting for Jimmy in New Brunswick.
“I can wait,” Jimmy wrote to me, and I believed him. I believed she would, too.
At least, until Jimmy started making excuses for her.
“She’s too busy with school to write letters.” That was my first warning, or at least the first one to make me think that maybe I should say something. I did, of course - what kind of friend would I be if he couldn’t trust me to be honest? At this point, I wasn’t terribly worried anyway. Just a heads up, I told myself. It couldn’t hurt to keep Jimmy on his toes.
His reply took a little longer to come back, but it did. He dabbled around in prose for a while, the way he usually did, answering the other questions I’d asked him and filling me in on how the job was going at the six-month mark. But then he started talking about Angela. “Trust me,” he wrote. “Everything’s okay.”
I got a little chill down my spine when I read those words. I read them over a couple of times, glancing at the phone and wondering if I should pick it up and call him, a rare occurrence. But what would I say? That it couldn’t hurt to be suspicious for once? Jimmy wasn’t the kind to throw trust into a void like that. Trust was something accountable, something that went two ways - not like a tit-for-tat, but a game with equal odds. There had to be the same weight on each side, whether it was Jimmy and The World or Jimmy and The Fiancee.
This time he was using trust as an excuse not to let her pull her weight.
So I didn’t let it go. Jimmy wasn’t himself, and if I didn’t remind him, who would?
I knew my limitations, of course. This was a girl I’d never met. How could I pretend to be a judge of her character? But I had had my fair share of relationships, and Jimmy had heard me talk about more than one of them. I had watched guys lose interest in me, and felt myself detach from once-solid relationships.
“Seriously, though,” I wrote once, at my most brazen, “if she can’t be bothered to make time for you, she can’t be that into you.”
He appreciated it. I could tell - there was that familiar way he had of affirming things without necessarily agreeing with them. Sometimes it seemed like he was humouring me; other times I wondered if he was on the verge of breaking out of his trap of trust with Angela, the amazing invisible girlfriend.
Jimmy didn’t get the chance, in the end. Angela broke up with him on his answering machine. He figured she’d probably found another man. I figured it didn’t matter.
I was in his neck of the woods on business a few months later. We met up, one of the few times we had since High School. Both of us wanted to do something special to mark the occasion.
“How about sky diving?” He asked.
I declined. I had a husband-to-be at home, and I was going to be a mom-to-be soon if I had any say in the matter. Besides, girls don’t do crazy stuff like sky dive.
‘Something special’ wound up being an all-nighter wandering around town, sipping on wine from paper coffee cups and talking about the good old days, those few years we’d shared during High School. The whole time I had it on the tip of my tongue - an ‘I told you so’ that was begging to come out. I fought it, I really did, but it crept out after a few cups of wine.
He looked at me funny. “Told me what?”
“About Angela,” I said. The name sounded strange out loud after having written it for all those years.
“Oh.” He sort of shrugged his shoulders. “Yeah. You did.”
“I knew it would get you one of these days.”
“What would?”
“Your trust.”
He chuckled. “Hasn’t let me down yet.”
I stopped in my tracks and turned on him, feigning anger. “How do you figure?”
“I said everything was okay, didn’t I?” He smiled, the corners of his mouth making it a little wry. “And I am. I’m okay.”
We were quiet for a little while, but the wine helped to free our tongues again. I guess I hadn’t thought of it that way. When it came down to it, if life let him down, Jimmy trusted himself to pull it all together.
“Thanks,” he said. It was a non-sequitur in our rambling conversation, to I asked him to clarify. “For keeping it real,” he explained, and I realized that he was talking about Angela again, how I hadn’t just let it go. I told him he was welcome. What else was there to say?
I invited him to my wedding. He said he was busy, that I’d picked one hell of a season in which to get married, but that he’d do what he could to be there. I trust that he will.
----
There she be. I hope it was at least somewhat enjoyable in its current state. Thanks for readin'!
One idea I have re: expanding and giving more depth to this story is showing some of the letters, or parts thereof. Does that have potential, or am I barking up the wrong tree? Or maybe I could have the narrator actually CALL him when she gets that letter that weirds her out, and build some stuff around their phone conversation. Thoughts?
crimsonata, Project #07 - about a character that is the embodiment of something. In this case: Trust.This story is still in a larval stage, though I promise I've given it a read-through edit for consistency and spelling/grammar. I'm hoping that I can get some suggestions from y'all re: how to expand on this story. It feels like a Reader's Digest version now, like the bare bones of something that should have a bit more substance. I think the best way to do that would be to include more concrete events - other than the beginning and ending it's very much in "general overview" format at the moment.
I'd appreciate it if you'd answer some of these questions if you're kind/crazy enough to comment on this thing:
- What needs more attention re: backstory and character development?
- Should I be more descriptive, in terms of scenery and what things physically look like?
- Are the themes clear? Do any huge questions come up when you read it that you feel I absolutely need to answer?
- If so, how should I work the above things into the story?
As always, grammar and sentence/paragraph construction nitpicks are appreciated, but don't drive yourself too nuts - mention anything you particularly like or loathe, but I'll be doing a lot of changes before it's done, so I don't want your time and effort to be in vain. :-)
And now, on to the story.
Keeping it Real (short story, 1,700 words, first draft)
I met Jimmy when we were both sixteen and about to jump off a bridge. I was there with something to prove; my parents would never have let me hurtle myself into the open air with nothing but an over-sized rubber band to save me. My uncle, on the other hand, was keen on it, if for no other reason than that he liked to spoil his only niece.
“Now, you’re sure,” he said, and I nodded so vigorously that my ponytail flicked up behind me. He sighed with a proud little smile and turned off the ignition of his truck. “All right. Let’s go sign you over to the devil, then.”
An hour and a slightly illegal “parental consent form” later I was listening intently to a jumping instructor. Another potential jumper and I were being grilled on a smorgasbord of safety hazards. My palms were sweating. I listened, my face forced into an expression of intense disengagement.
The guy next to me was smiling. Not a cocky smile - something calmer. His smile was downright placid.
“Ever jumped before?” He asked as we made our way out to the platform. I was trying not to think of it as a funeral procession.
“No.”
“Me neither.” He said it as if he’d just said, “I’ve never been to this convenience store, either.”
We chatted for a few minutes, me in clipped sentences, he in long, comfortable ones. His Birthday had been a week ago, a few days before mine. I had wanted to try this forever, or at least ever since I was 13 and my dad had told me that girls shouldn’t do crazy things like bungee jump. He had thought of it just the week before.
I asked him why. “Why not?”
I had something to prove - but Jimmy was just there.
Jimmy went first. I watched him with an intense concentration only made possible in times of stress. He was thorough, going through the safety checks without cutting a corner, but when it came time for him to jump he didn’t hesitate for a second. Down, down he went, the cord unfurling and going taut, bobbing his serene form back up, then down again. I couldn’t see his face but I had the feeling he was smiling.
I went tumbling in a frozen wreck off the platform, and screamed all the way down, back up, and down again. Then I started to cry, though by the time they fetched me it was mostly laughter.
We exchanged phone numbers. It was less like a come-on and more like a survivors group to me. He went to another school in town and had friends who had never met mine. In a few years the groups had come together; by the time some of us were shipping off to University there were teary goodbyes, sometimes between friends who would have never met, before.
Jimmy wasn’t one for teary goodbyes. “Either we’ll write and keep up, or it was nice knowing you,” he’d say.
Through high school I got to know him, partly through his friends, the ones who fill you in on the backstory so you don’t have to ask about it yourself. I asked him if he was okay with other people talking for him like that. He’d shrug. “They know me.” The thought that they’d badmouth him didn’t seem to enter his head - or maybe he just figured he deserved anything they had to say, or that there was no point wasting his time setting things right.
Jimmy and I wrote letters. It started as a joke - I wasn’t much of a writer, I even printed them off the computer straight out of my email program a few times at first, before sending them off in snail mail format. Jimmy wrote back religiously, always asking just enough questions to string me along. The next thing I knew we were pen-pals, taking time away from graduate studies and busy lives to write to each other, me in Alberta and him back in New Brunswick.
“Doesn’t anybody else write you anymore?” I asked, teasing him for a particularly long letter I’d received the week before.
“Sometimes,” he replied, a couple of weeks later. “They will, or they won’t. Whatever they do, it’ll be worth the time they put into it.”
That was Jimmy in a nutshell. It was like he trusted everything and everyone to the utmost, a sort of “laissez-faire” attitude to the world. It drove me nuts - at least, at first.
It had taken me a while to open up, but once I had the lines of communication were wide open between us. There was just something real about him, something casually accepting. I wrote to him about my successes and failures, relationships, problems with friends, my parents’ eventual and messy divorce. And he wrote to me about Angela.
He had met her in his third Undergrad year, and by the time year four rolled around not a letter went by without a mention of her. They were the perfect match, interested in the same things, both of them charting compatible courses for their lives. She had a good sense of humour, a definite must for anybody professing to marry Jimmy. That was the plan, after all, once they could make the time for it. There was only one snag: she was going for a PhD in Vancouver, while a job in Forestry was waiting for Jimmy in New Brunswick.
“I can wait,” Jimmy wrote to me, and I believed him. I believed she would, too.
At least, until Jimmy started making excuses for her.
“She’s too busy with school to write letters.” That was my first warning, or at least the first one to make me think that maybe I should say something. I did, of course - what kind of friend would I be if he couldn’t trust me to be honest? At this point, I wasn’t terribly worried anyway. Just a heads up, I told myself. It couldn’t hurt to keep Jimmy on his toes.
His reply took a little longer to come back, but it did. He dabbled around in prose for a while, the way he usually did, answering the other questions I’d asked him and filling me in on how the job was going at the six-month mark. But then he started talking about Angela. “Trust me,” he wrote. “Everything’s okay.”
I got a little chill down my spine when I read those words. I read them over a couple of times, glancing at the phone and wondering if I should pick it up and call him, a rare occurrence. But what would I say? That it couldn’t hurt to be suspicious for once? Jimmy wasn’t the kind to throw trust into a void like that. Trust was something accountable, something that went two ways - not like a tit-for-tat, but a game with equal odds. There had to be the same weight on each side, whether it was Jimmy and The World or Jimmy and The Fiancee.
This time he was using trust as an excuse not to let her pull her weight.
So I didn’t let it go. Jimmy wasn’t himself, and if I didn’t remind him, who would?
I knew my limitations, of course. This was a girl I’d never met. How could I pretend to be a judge of her character? But I had had my fair share of relationships, and Jimmy had heard me talk about more than one of them. I had watched guys lose interest in me, and felt myself detach from once-solid relationships.
“Seriously, though,” I wrote once, at my most brazen, “if she can’t be bothered to make time for you, she can’t be that into you.”
He appreciated it. I could tell - there was that familiar way he had of affirming things without necessarily agreeing with them. Sometimes it seemed like he was humouring me; other times I wondered if he was on the verge of breaking out of his trap of trust with Angela, the amazing invisible girlfriend.
Jimmy didn’t get the chance, in the end. Angela broke up with him on his answering machine. He figured she’d probably found another man. I figured it didn’t matter.
I was in his neck of the woods on business a few months later. We met up, one of the few times we had since High School. Both of us wanted to do something special to mark the occasion.
“How about sky diving?” He asked.
I declined. I had a husband-to-be at home, and I was going to be a mom-to-be soon if I had any say in the matter. Besides, girls don’t do crazy stuff like sky dive.
‘Something special’ wound up being an all-nighter wandering around town, sipping on wine from paper coffee cups and talking about the good old days, those few years we’d shared during High School. The whole time I had it on the tip of my tongue - an ‘I told you so’ that was begging to come out. I fought it, I really did, but it crept out after a few cups of wine.
He looked at me funny. “Told me what?”
“About Angela,” I said. The name sounded strange out loud after having written it for all those years.
“Oh.” He sort of shrugged his shoulders. “Yeah. You did.”
“I knew it would get you one of these days.”
“What would?”
“Your trust.”
He chuckled. “Hasn’t let me down yet.”
I stopped in my tracks and turned on him, feigning anger. “How do you figure?”
“I said everything was okay, didn’t I?” He smiled, the corners of his mouth making it a little wry. “And I am. I’m okay.”
We were quiet for a little while, but the wine helped to free our tongues again. I guess I hadn’t thought of it that way. When it came down to it, if life let him down, Jimmy trusted himself to pull it all together.
“Thanks,” he said. It was a non-sequitur in our rambling conversation, to I asked him to clarify. “For keeping it real,” he explained, and I realized that he was talking about Angela again, how I hadn’t just let it go. I told him he was welcome. What else was there to say?
I invited him to my wedding. He said he was busy, that I’d picked one hell of a season in which to get married, but that he’d do what he could to be there. I trust that he will.
----
There she be. I hope it was at least somewhat enjoyable in its current state. Thanks for readin'!
One idea I have re: expanding and giving more depth to this story is showing some of the letters, or parts thereof. Does that have potential, or am I barking up the wrong tree? Or maybe I could have the narrator actually CALL him when she gets that letter that weirds her out, and build some stuff around their phone conversation. Thoughts?
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Date: 2006-05-05 02:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-05 07:21 pm (UTC)