SHE WROTE THINGS?! OH MY GOSH.
This is a "Narrative Essay" I had to do for my writing class, aka, "Expository Writing," aka, "gay class," as my neighbor, Brittany shared with a friend over Facebook (it's a computer lab classroom, so we all have personal computers which is REALLY NEAT except conspicuous typing/clicking is conspicuous, alas) which I think is the most hilarious thing ever, for some reason. "Where you headed?" "Oh, to class." "What class is it?" "Gay class." FFFFFFFAHAHHAHAHAHAH OMG WHY IS THAT FUNNY. Like, it's not even "my gay class" or "my gay-ass class" or even any recognisable form of "this class is gay." It's just "gay class," where we are taught to be "gay" in the derogatory sense that has nothing to do with being homosexual. Okay, don't get pissed off, because, really, it's just funny. "Gay class." AHAHAHAH.
I TALK A LOT. GAH. So, the prompt I chose was "a childhood event." Observe:
"Someday"
Summer never used to mean heat, not really, because “heat” wasn’t a real thing. Sweat was a real thing, facial flush was real. That’s what summer meant: a beaded mustache of perspiration and a certain heavy throbbing in your cheeks which signified that your face was now darkly pink all over, except in that thin area under your nose and around your mouth which remained pale and somehow made the redness look ugly. –If only you could be consistently red, like in the cartoons when a character became angry and blew steam out of his ears. His face was entirely, fantastically fire-engine red but entirely his own, nevertheless. Elmer Fudd never looked as though he’d had someone else’s mouth pasted onto his face with a mustache of sweat.
Your hands changed too, in summer; they smelled like metal and a little like asphalt. You thought maybe it was the calluses that smelled that way, the yellow-grey-translucent bumps on your hands from the monkey-bars and the swing set. There were five of them per hand: one at the base of each of your four fingers and one right in the middle of your palm, like a closed eye or stigmata.
No, no. Of course, the skin, the callus didn’t smell that way; the metallic scent was a combination of dirt and dried sweat. You’ll come to understand.
Just as with “heat” and “summer,” you’ll come to know that it’s heat which paints the faraway horizon with wavering lines that shimmer like water and heat which makes you feel heavy and damp, and which makes summer, summer.
But for now, summer means camp. Camp is what happens when parents must continue to go to work, even when children have vacation. You can’t very well stay home on your own, with no one to watch you or your little brother. That would be neglect, you will come to understand. In the meantime, you will go to camp with a number of other children during the summer, and there will be plenty of grownups to keep close watch on you.
Little brothers are not the same as friends, so you must find your own playmates among the numerous bodies. Making friends is hard, you find. Mostly, there is a herd of semi-familiar faces playing some incarnation of freeze-tag or hide-and-seek; girls and girlish-boys scattering the playground’s woodchips with pastel-colored sneakers, brown stick-legs swinging every which way, calling out, singsong; loud, derisive. These are companions enough for the weeks of camp.
Some days, you’re tired of running around, though, so you drop out of the herd in favor of sitting on the sidelines: large wood beams around the perimeter of the playground. You aren’t the only one sitting there, digging idly, abstractly in the wood chips with a wet stick, looking for treasure, maybe. The word “lonely” is another of those which you’ll understand later in life, but don’t quite know in these days. It’s quiet, here on the perimeter. Quiet is okay with you, sometimes.
Today, a boy approached you on the wooden-beamed perimeter. He was almost uniformly red-faced, with a sweat mustache that matched yours. You stared at it for a while, before taking in the rest of him: short, very short red-sun hair, eyes bright in his flushed face, round faced and round bodied, soft, un-calloused hands, pale eyebrows.
He extended to you one hot fist, which none-too gently encircled a wilted stem. It was a clover flower, the sort that are actually made up of tiny white lily-esque blooms, crowded together in the shape of a bumble-bee’s body; a loose, green-white bauble.
“I gave you this flower,” he explained, “because I love you.”
Solemnly, you took the wilted stem and looked at him again, without expectation. He blinked once, and you both breathed together, in silence. He nodded a little. He walked away. It was time for the parents to retrieve their children.
You dropped the flower carefully and went to gather your little brother.
Today, it means little, maybe nothing. But you’ll come to understand someday, probably. Someday.
Weird tense and POV is DFW's fault. Also, the tense change is deliberate...hope the teacher understands that, um.
I like this piece, even for being an assignement-prompt-thinger. This whole event was so strange, looking back... like, that kid's words; he really said it just like I've narrated-- the different tenses in his phrase are so... I don't even know.
Anyway, THAR U GO. Critique much encouraged!
