some creative writing.
I'm cleaning out my Google documents and came across this thing I started writing in April? and thus forgot about. I had an idea for this story and it was based on Antichrist. the family would relocate to a small town both parents vacationed in growing up and the girl would undergo a rough coming-of-age. however, school got in the way of that. it's more of a movie I see in my mind- as Sophia Coppola once said in an interview which I really relate to, some pieces are just there to set a mood. which is the purpose of writing this:
(warning, it's heavyhanded, which I'm kind of "eh" about)
This is not a life.
That was what the note, which she kept, balled up in her front pocket, read. Scribbled in a store bought pen's ink, written thoughtlessly on the back of a fast food receipt. She kept it with her, as she scrubbed the remnants of caked food off dishes. She kept it with her, while she put fabric softener sheets in the drier and ran the vacuum until it ripped bits of carpet out. There was line of messy handwriting on it and it haunted her. Kept her up while she slept at night.
This is not a life.
"What? What's not a life?" she'd whisper to no one in particular. A ghost, mostly. There were never any answers- just long silences in which she could only hear herself.
Avery found that she had been carrying it around with her one evening, picking her pants up off the floor.
"This is an unholy transcript," he told his wife. "You should just get rid of it."
"Okay," she nodded, appearing in the bathroom doorway.
She dug it out of the trash later that night, rummaging around like a bum does for scraps. She kept it, still. She needed it.
Jesse Stenton was not a boy that stuck out. Rather, he was ordinary, stuck (lost) somewhere in the middle. Which is as tragic as it is fortunate, as it is for many of us. Teachers wrote on his report cards of the need for him to "speak loudly;" kids had difficulty remembering when exactly he was around. But he was a sweet kid: ask those that knew him. He had a good sense of humor, an amicable nature, an easygoing strut to his walk that could put you instantly at ease. He wasn’t overly outgoing or was he so quiet he gave you chills with his absence of words; he rather spoke when he felt it was necessary, always sure to never go on so long that talk became meaningless (a lost art). He liked collecting old records, the vinyl ones that were toeing back into vogue, and running before the sun completely rose. He held doors open for everyone and would use the skin off his back to keep you warm, if he had to. Stuff like this was essential to his character; it was made Jesse Stenton just that, himself. That was why it came as such a shock when he killed himself. When he went up to the woods, several blocks from the home had grown up in, and shot himself with a garbage bag over his head.
The note was the only thing he had left that day – there had been a search spurred by a frantic call to the police and reports of a gunshot in the uneasy silence that blanketed their New England suburbs. The bag idea hadn’t worked nearly as well as Jesse had hoped: his biggest concern in the days that surrounded his death were trying to dampen the inevitable pain his family would feel, a pain that would only be accelerated if he were to, say, use one of the bathrooms they all shared, and having to know that his mother would eventually get out her bleach and clean the stains of his blood up. But the bag hadn’t worked so well. The bullet left a hole; pieces of skull and hair were somewhat viewable against the dark puddle on the pavement. Neighborhood children that had been playing nearby were swept away by their concerned parents, some of which grabbed them close to their breast, mimicking what Avery and Lana Stenton had wanted to do, but were unable to. Avery had been at home writing; Lana was at the bank, cashing a check she had been holding onto for way too long. And their other child, Cameron, the girl, had been at work, mindlessly checking out another unruly customer at the convenience store that supplied her pay. Jesse was smart, though, planning ahead, as always. Looking to the future, as always. He left his driver’s license on his torso, with a gleaming photo of him, fresh shaven as of two years prior and with a picture-ready smile (teeth white and straight, almost perfection) that read of no hint of despair, none whatsoever.
You couldn’t see it in the collar of his crisp red jacket; you couldn’t see it in the absorbing azure abyss of his eyes. And it was foolhardy to go ahead and try to think you could. Not everything was some ordinate preamble. Try and tell that to his family. Lana was the hardest to convert. He was, after all, her little boy. The one who kept her company during long winters in the early 1990s; the one who would watch corny TV specials with her and genuinely find himself enthralled in the petty details of their plot and manner. He’d pick freshly sprung dandelions for her, before he beheaded others in the driveway. The one who hugged her, even if his sardonic adolescent friends were observing and the one who, she imagined, watching get married, watching achieve great success, watching him go on and be a doting father of his own someday. She wanted him to come to her bedside as her days whittled to an end and squeeze her hand and pulsate his swelling emotion into her own.
He was the reason why she’d been born; he was the sublimation of her forty – seven years of life. And now there was nothing. It was only him for her. Not a husband, not a daughter could begin to fill in that bewildering vacancy left by him and pressed into her mind every time she saw the empty seat at the kitchen and the coat by the door that was now collecting dust.
This is not a life.
Was that what he had meant?
Lana retreated to the fabric softener-tinged sheets that had become her cocoon and she tried to put together pieces in a puzzle that would just not fit, no matter how she ached.
Avery watched; his grief was unbearable, but he kept it in check.