Excercise: Representing Sibling Interaction
FinsburyParkCarrots
Posts: 12,223
Write a short piece of prose involving two siblings who have not seen one another for years and who are now reunited by some external circumstance. How might you represent in characterisation and dialogue the bonds, similarities and conflicts - whether overt or half-said - between the two people?
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"Andrew, how are you doing?", I said.
"It's good to see you Jess. Let's get the luggage."
No tears were shed. This family had always avoided the expression of sorrow, sadness and loss. And yet, for once, it will be truly felt. That is, the sense of no sorrow and no loss.
I cried when my mother passed away. I opened the door and there she lay, in a dying attempt to change her shirt as her last breath left our stage. I am sure that my sister cried. Andy and John also cried. I am not sure about the lost one, whose only utterance I truly remember was, "I've never done this before. I've never had my mother die."
Andy will be here when our brother dies. So will my brother John. We will sit around the grill, with a drink clutched tight and a will to survive. We will talk about the dark one, the brother who deceived us and spent his last years in a living hell.
His caustic interruptions in our lives, and more importantly, his disrespect for our father, and his ensuing shame, cast his manic madness into a self destructive enslavement I had not seen since my good friend lost his life to a narcotic delusion.
My brother's destruct of choice was 30 to 40 beers every night. He would awaken in a sweat of pure panic, wondering if his life had ended and if his money had dissappeared.
"How did the baseball tournaments go in the valley?", I asked of Andy.
"Oh, Hell the boys played some great ball this year. Did I tell you about the kid from Selma? He'll be drafted no later than the sixth round."
John interjected with a sigh, for he was tired and he needed sleep. "Time for me to go to bed", he said. And with that, he drained his own drink and we all traded the traditional good nights.
And so it will be John, Andy, and Jess and my dear sister Kathy. We will bury my other brother without a bother. Let his life dim for all of us to ignore.
I hate this feeling but I can't shake it. Can't see the good in his miserable madness. Can't feel the love that I should shoulder as it is I who am alive.
** I will most likely edit this. I will copy and edit if need be. I am short of time and my sin is to compose on white page of the forum.. thanks for reading if you will **
As she slams the door in his drunken face
And now he stands outside
And all the neighbours start to gossip and drool
He cries oh, girl you must be mad,
What happened to the sweet love you and me had?
Against the door he leans and starts a scene,
And his tears fall and burn the garden green
I looked into her eyes. The night was dark, and in the back seat, those eyes were all I could see. Our task was complete, and now we were cuffed with our hands behind our backs. I leaned in and kissed her. She struggled at first, and then relaxed.
"Hey, that's fuckin' sick man!" The officer on the passenger side yelled and slapped the iron mesh between the seats. "Stop it God dammit! That's your fuckin' sister!"
Without a word I slid to my side of the back seat and rested my head on the window. I looked out at the black night and kept working on my plan. The police car hit a pot hole and tire splashed up some pouring rain. My head made a nice thud against the window. I couldn't think of a plan. All I knew was that it was safer with her.
I write down good reasons to freeze to death in my spiral ring notebook. But in the long tresses of your hair--I am a babbling brook.
The new moon belied no presence. Their mission was nearly certain to be successful, this time… although the near loss last Friday was still quite fresh in both their minds, and most certainly called attention to itself as Jessie tightened up the laces on her right ankle.
“I’m ready.” She said, “just one more loop.”
“Well, hurry up, will ya? Mom will be home soon, and we have to be home or she’ll ground us for weeks!”
“Yep. Got it.” Jessie said, pulling the cuff of her fatigues over the top of her boot. “Let’s go.”
They crawled through the thick azalea bushes covering the hill. They’d used their father’s canoe to get across the sub-urban lake, and tied it off to a tree on the water’s edge. The wet branches gave way easily, but the sprinkler-water from the leaves drenched their painted faces. It was cool enough to drink, and they both did, licking the moisture that befell their lips. They’d come through the low woods as silently as they could, their intent, their dedication to this task as apparent as the water on both their brows.
“Miss Jones is gonna shit a brick when she sees these pansies in her impatient beds!” Said Joey smiling under his face paint.
“Oh, I know, Joey! I can’t wait till they come up. She’ll think the gods have cursed both her and her stupid, perfect little garden, won’t she?”
Joey helped his sister over the fence. Crocco the Doberman was nowhere in sight, sound, or smell. Jessie quietly opened up the packets of Pansy seeds while Joey scratched the dirt between the Miss Jones’ impantients.
“Not too deep, or she’ll notice tomorrow!” hissed Jessie.
“Cool your jets, will ya? I know what I’m doing.” Joey snapped back. And then he started to laugh… “oh my God, she’s just gonna die!”
Jessie giggled, too, as she dumped the seeds into the rich dirt. “Now, let’s get out of here!” she said.
Joey cupped his hands for Jessie's tightlyl-tied boot, and huffed his sister up and over the fence.
They took turns rowing the canoe back across the lake, planning the next move in the war against beady old ladies and their stupid, perfect gardens. Not much of a cause to speak of, and they knew it. But it was, after all, summertime and this WAS better than nothing.
We watched the guys on their skateboards, and we didn’t speak.
We watched them and the sun beat down on us.
My arms began to tingle with the season’s first hot sun. Summer was coming. It was going to be here soon.
We were going to go down to the creek and use the vines to swing out over it . We were going to land in the deepest part of the creek. We were going to do the things that brothers do.
Once he had busted his eardrum. He jumped off a cliff and landed in the quarry. The quarry had a rocky bottom. He was lucky that the only thing he had busted was his eardrum. Other people had died there. It had a somberness about it, a certain haunted, heavy feeling. Even while we were having fun, it was never too far away, that thought, the thought of someone else’s death. It would cross our minds, like when he busted his eardrum, and we couldn’t really laugh about it. We just stared at each other and thought about death and then left.
He can only sit here with me for so long. He’s going to have to go. He’s got to go see Mom, and he’ll need to visit Sheila, his girl.
Dad, he really doesn’t care if he sees Dad, and I don’t care either. Fuck Dad, dick.
But me, he’s sitting beside me because he’s home for a little while.
He said, “I gotta go. Sheila’s waiting on me.”
I said, “I know.”
He smiled at me and messed my hair. I looked away from him.
“I’m going to be fine, Kevin. It’s going to be fine.”
I wouldn’t look at him. I looked at the kids on the skateboards. I said, “I’ll see you later.”
He said, “Okay.”
We were going to go down to the creek and use the vines to swing out over it, but he’s got to visit mom, and he needs to see Sheila, and he might go see Dad because he doesn’t know when he’ll be home again.
Really, when you find it, post it please, I'd like to read it.
At the window Gemma pressed her knuckles white upon the sill and leant her brow onto the breathwet face of the glass, just as she had done as a child watching her sister and brother at play on the green beyond. Now she was forty-one and the room was bare. Rheum was gnarling her back. Chill came from within an emptying room. It scratched at her to turn from the green plain of memory to grey naked floorboards and stripped walls. And she turned from the past of play in wellies in an October dusk before being called inside for tea, to this day of middle-aged brothers and sisters arriving in hired vans and grouped around with eager spouses eyeing up fridges and pianos. The day was here of oblivious friends of the family helping to lift chests of drawers, cupboards, cumbersome wardbrobes, and fragile old stained wooden writing desks, through the door for the final time. A day when bodies of wood were years of spirit touch to some, and were to others, mute, lifeless lumps to be shifted across a threshold of meaningless space. The day was here of all three together again, those left, for the first time since mother's funeral. Here they were assembled and conducting the inevitable plunder of home before the selling of bricks, mortar, foundations and ghosts.
-There's a mountain of ash in the garden, a male voice spoke (Jim, her brother, in from the kitchen). Gemma didn't look at faces. She fixed her eyes on the wooden knots on the floor.
-Oh, the clothes I didn't take to the charity shop I torched. And the old cot mattress. They couldn't take it. Health and safety reasons. Younger sister Samantha's deep voice, tremulous, trying to match the chill but with too much of outside in it, too much of those meadows.
-Oh yes, that's right, it's to do with the kinds of foams they used in mattresses when you lot were kids, proposed through assured laughter Jim's wife, whose breezy gushings made Gemma look up to her late summer holiday tan and bleached hair, scraped off the head.
Those rings she wore! They were mother's! How could Jim be so weak? Gemma stood at the window, watching a wet vole clamber across the stream reeds, holding them down in the browning brook. She would take nothing, she would say nothing. Let them go through the pack a playing card at a time, those outsiders, confound them all! Her legacy would be the memory of this view: she this side of the glass, watching Samantha, her orange dress muddied by hide and seek in the flooded meadow the year the brook burst banks; she watching Samantha laughing and calling Jim who'd forgotten his hiding post and was making friends with the bad lads over from the railway bridge; she watching Jim giving those rogues his football sticker pack to be in with them before they cycled off jeering.
it makes me think about faulkner.
i've read it twice now, and i think . . . faulkner, river banks bursting, siblings at windows, meadows in voices, mud on dresses, gardens, mother's funeral, Faulkner
What story? In all my livelong days I never got round to reading him, shockingly enough. I'd like to check it out.
The Sound and The Fury and As I Lay Dying are the stories
Here's a little blipity bloop from As I Lay Dying (the mud and river):
We return to the river. The wagon is hauled clear, the wheels chocked . . . In the wagon bed it lies profoundly, the long pale planks hushed a little with wetting yet still yellow, like gold seen through water, save for two long muddy smears.
Here's the sound and the fury (one of the narrators, Benjy, is mentally retarded, but his descriptions really stand out in my mind more than the other characters):
Caddy uncaught me and we crawled through. Uncle Maury said to not let anybody see us, so we better stoop over, Caddy said. Stoop over, Benjy. Like this, see. We stooped over and crossed the garden where the flowers rasped and rattled against us . . .
(Caddy is Benjy's sister -- it's odd. Faulkner said that he thought of Caddy as his own daughter, I don't believe he had children, but the brothers are the narrators. She doesn't tell any of the story)
They worked together for one month.
He had hazel eyes,
a head full of rich,satin-smooth hair,
and penetrateable lips.
He would walk into work with his army jacket on,
slowly peeling it off,
as she watched his seductive strip-tease unfold,
peeling off layers of his shiny personality.
After the end of the day,
they would spend their evenings together drinking,
and laughing,
Until the day came when the build up
was too much to be taken loosely.
She decided to take him to a party....
this time on a date.
People were running naked in the streets of Trenton,
she was just sitting patiently,
waiting to stake her claim.
She waited quietlt,
slid closely next to him and said,
"DONT HOLD THIS AGAINST ME IN A COURT OF LAW...BUT"...
And she kissed him.
She kissed him,
and when she did,
she couldn't quite put a finger on it,
but, she knew him.
She took him home to meet her father,
and he said,
"You're Flossie's son-
Flossie is my cousin."
The kiss she shared
with the one and only man she wanted to seduce
turned out to be her cousin.
Fourth half cousin,
still able to marry,
but
Could you?
Would you?
IF I WERE TO SAY THIS IS A TRUE STORY,FINNS...WOULD YOU HOLD IT AGAINST ME?!!!!!:);)
A whisper and a chill
adv2005
"Why do I bother?"
The 11th Commandment.
"Whatever"
PETITION TO STOP THE BAN OF SMOKING IN BARS IN THE UNITED STATES....Anyone?