Hope rests on you in a filthy white rag. With her name stained onto the chewing gum infested wall behind you, you’ve etched her name above a slab of pavement that she will have to grow up calling home. This is how to be a good father. This is the only way you can repay her, for she is the heater that warms up the coldest nights in your heart. You touch her face and feel the tears that have dried up on her skin. It is this pale trail of hunger drawn into her cheek that reminds you to frequently apologise to her. If only she could understand how sorry you will always be.
You remember her mother crazily clutching your right hand, squeezing until the dark of your skin became white. It wasn’t soon after the birth that your hand regained its complete complexion. Her mother’s hand was no longer squeezing your hand in pain, but she was not squeezing it in joy either.
Your own mother showed little concern for neither your daughter's nor your own safety. Disowning someone does not require a legal document. Only silence. She ignored you from adolescence to adulthood. Although you did not give her the overwhelming feeling of pride that other mothers received from their sons, surely a grand daughter is enough to repay that debt in full? You never got the chance to hear her answer.
The slab on which you are sat upon is getting cold now, and after last night’s showers, the ceiling made of cardboard that you'd rented out from a recycling bin is no longer card-like in structure. You can not help but smile at your baby girl. You pick her up and walk alongside her name, admiring the sincerity of each letter alongside the scruffiness of your handwriting. You promise to one day plate her name in gold, so that she can feel proud when she returns to the slab that she had to call home.
Lisa never stirs in reply. She is a beautiful baby, no trouble at all. Lisa Hope Charles hasn't replied for weeks now, but you do not care. All she ever does is sleep without breathing, and that's good enough for you.
Hi, eternity.forever,
ReplyDeleteHope your summer's going well. I know it can be easy to slack off during the summer period (I really do) but I can see that you're showing the same commitment to your work as always - great stuff.
I love the second person in this piece. As a personnal thing I usually find myself tiring of second person after a while, but here it opperates as a way of bringing us closer to something terrible than another narrative perspective could have done. I like it a lot.
Your metaphors are beautiful, such as: the heater that warms up the coldest nights in your heart.
It reminded me a little of Cormac McArthy's 'The Road.'I recommend.
There's the odd picky bit I have to share. This sentence:
With her name stained onto the chewing gum infested wall behind you, you’ve etched her name above a slab of pavement that she will have to grow up calling home.
- loses clarity. It's down to the repetition of 'her name' and the sentence length; you could probably put the bit about her having to grow up calling this 'home' in a seperate sentence.
I love the image of them being in front of the girls name on the wall. I've been writing about graffiti recently too - contrasting it with grave stones and road names. Grafitti is a mark of identity that's often ephemeral, so it's a good thing to play with it you're thinking about mortality. I'm impressed that you've done the same with it here (great minds...).
Another picky bit is about overemphasising things. Take this: overwhelming feeling.
It conveys what a mother can feel towards her son, but the fact that it hasn't been achieved here makes the fact that it's overwhelming a source of confusion. Because if she hasn't felt 'overwhelming pride' has she felt some lesser form of pride instead. I felt the suggestion was that she wasn't proud at all, so overwhelming confuses things. Picky, but hopefully useful - emphasis doesn't always make things more powerful, or indeed clearer.
This sentence: Disowning someone does not require a legal. Only silence.
- is a neat observation. Sad but true, and with feeling behind it, especially as this is second person. You gauged that well.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading your work again. Hope you'll write lots, and do fun stuff too, over the summer. Take care,
Andy
This is a bold effort. I think your most original choice is in using a second-person narrative voice. The “you” implicates the reader, and makes them feel involved in, possibly even responsible for, the plight of the unnamed father. The voice is a risky one, but I think you pull it off.
ReplyDeleteThere are some sharp phrases in this piece that further aid the readers’ engagement with the father’s struggle. ‘Squeezing until the dark of your skin became white’ is an elegant and economical phrase, which implies both the difficulty of the birth, and the racial element underlying the social issues of this work (on a side note, although you obviously didn’t want this to be a real “social issues” work – and fair play, why should you? – I’m not sure about implicating the mother so heavily in causing the father’s poverty… It’s problematic in terms of the portrayal of gender, and I’m also wondering whether there aren’t wider issues at play for these characters?). ‘This is how to be a good father’ is an underwritten yet emotive phrase, when placed in contrast with the poverty of the life the main character provides his daughter, and I agree with Andy that the graffiti motif is really strong. Occasionally, however, I felt you lost control slightly and slipped into the sentimental: personally, I actually felt ‘she is the heater that warms up the coldest nights in your heart’ was an example of this. I think it’s the ‘in your heart’ that does it – you could happily drop that.
Your sentences are sometimes slightly awkwardly structured, and therefore lack clarity. Andy’s already picked out the sentence starting ‘With her name…’, and I agree that the repetition of ‘her name’ makes it confusing. I’d also highlight ‘It wasn’t soon after the birth that your hand regained its complete complexion’ and ‘the ceiling made of cardboard that you'd rented out from a recycling bin is no longer card-like in structure’ as a bit clumsy; I had to go back and read both of those sentences over, which disrupted the flow of the piece.
Finally: I was not expecting that last paragraph! It came as a complete surprise, and it was genuinely affecting – two things that are really massive achievements. A brilliant handling of structure, tone, and narrative development! A really good effort – I look forwards to reading what you come up with next.
Hello eternity.forever. I am writing my comment before reading what the others have said.
ReplyDeleteI thought this was brilliant. You have such control over language. You effectively 'show' us what is going on, and the relationships between the characters, without 'telling' us - this is a great skill in story telling.
There are two minor things that I think you could work on, which would make your writing stronger:
- look out for unneeded adverbs
- look out for repetition
You use the phrase 'crazily clutching', but I personally would suggest that 'crazily' is unnecessary. The word 'clutching' can easily carry all the meaning in this phrase.
Here the repetition of 'own' stands out to me. I don't think the second one is needed:
'Your own mother showed little concern for neither your daughter's nor your own safety.'
And here you repeat 'alongside', which again jars a little to me:
'You pick her up and walk alongside her name, admiring the sincerity of each letter alongside the scruffiness of your handwriting.'
I'm not entirely sure about this sentence:
'With her name stained onto the chewing gum infested wall behind you, you’ve etched her name above a slab of pavement that she will have to grow up calling home'
The stain and the etch sound like different things. I think what you also have here is a 'dangling participle'. I have written a blog post about them here:
http://sophieplayleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/how-to-avoid-and-correct-dangling.html
As I said, you have a brilliant way of showing the reader what is going on without leading them by the hand. I loved, for example:
'Her mother’s hand was no longer squeezing your hand in pain, but she was not squeezing it in joy either.'
This is great writing: you let the reader witness the scene and figure it out for themselves.
I want to also congratulate you on the successful way you have used the second person. I have read a few short stories written in second person, and most of them don't really work. I think the way you have written it here is very successful. Mostly, people use second person to bring the reader more immediately into the situation, but it almost felt to me that the protagonist was using it to distance himself from the difficult situation.
Great work.