This past month I’ve had the good fortune to take part in Monica Drake’s online fiction class where we’re using different approaches to invigorate our writing. Monica has published two excellent novels and a collection of short stories, but many know her as a teacher and workshop leader. She has an excellent ear as well as an encyclopedic knowledge of writing techniques. I have gotten a lot out of this class and give it my heartiest recommendation. It’s also great to have the opportunity to directly support a writer I admire without all the intervening structure of publisher, university, or Amazon taking their cut.
As part of the final class, we were given a loose assignment to use description and voice to create something fresh. Here is the one I came up with:
Nobody wanted to touch it.
That much we agreed on.
There was a time that we might put our heads together to figure out what the hell this thing is and maybe where it came from, but clearly those days are no longer.
I'm not saying I didn't have ideas about it, but I kept them it myself.
I learned to do that the hard way, to stay out of it.
I used to try and put my oar in, venture an opinion or a suggestion, but it never helped anyone.
I think on my old grandma and how she mostly stayed out of things.
She had wisdom, all right.
She liked to say wisdom came from experiencing a lot of non-fatal errors.
She's been dead most of my life now, but it gives me comfort to bring her to mind, to see how right she was.
All this started when Nephew found the thing and had to come out and tell everyone.
I been the one to find it, I would have kept my mouth shut.
Like I say, wisdom.
But Nephew, he run in jabbering and yammering about this thing he never saw before, how it was not there one minute and there the next, how he would have never believed it had he not seen it with his own eyes.
Of course not a one of them believed him.
I didn't myself, but then I haven’t cared for Nephew since he was the baby all of us adored.
I don’t know what turned him into what he is now.
Nephew is always riling somebody up until they're boiling, then greasing them until they calm back down.
I believe him to be a coward, maybe because he's the smallest of all of them.
Nephew wouldn't back down from somebody smaller.
Looking at it now, it would have worked out different had we just taken him at his word.
I might have even believed him, though I wouldn't have said so.
But it didn't matter what I thought since none of them took him at his word.
Soon they all after him to tell them all about it.
One of the brothers was the chief instigator, the younger one.
He let out that sort of horse laugh that's as good as calling somebody a damned liar.
"Yeah," he said, "so what's this thing look like, then?"
Those words started it, helped along by the tone of utmost derision.
Even Nephew wouldn't back down from such a naked insult, so he come right out and started to talk about it.
I remember exactly what he said, since that is my particular skill––not a song I hear on the radio that I can't sing back exactly right, even though I only listened once.
So, this is what Nephew says to us:
"It's like a kind of metal, only it's hot like a freshly baked cake, with steam coming off it. It’s orange, but not like the fruit…more like the way orange feels, if you get me. I knew right away not to touch it. It has a smell like when it rains and the lightning is far away, but there's somebody lit a fire within a few miles so the odor of smoke is mixed in with it. It makes a noise like crickets, only low and sweet like they was down a deep well. It's bright like the sky gets at the end of a hot day a half hour after the sun goes down. And it has legs like a table, only more than you can count."
Well, that got 'em going.
Immediately they all felt in a rush to go get a look at this thing that had so many different properties that disagreed with each other, but most still had chores to finish before the night came on.
In the end, it was Sister and the three cousins were the first to go.
When they came back, they were furious with Nephew for his descriptions.
The oldest cousin shook her head in scorn and wouldn't say a word, so the other two followed suit and just stood there with their arms crossed in the most severe displeasure, like they didn't trust what their arms would do if they turned them loose.
Finally Sister flat out called Nephew a liar, and when he balked, she shushed him down with a stern finger like a school teacher.
She told him to keep his mouth shut while she informed us what was really there.
"I'll agree with Nephew that we ought not to touch it," she said, "but nothing else. It ain't a new thing at all. Why, we see this every day, in every house and shop, at the church and in the schools. They have them by the hundreds in the cities, and you never saw a picture show that didn't include at least a dozen varieties. I've known things exactly like this all my life, and so have you. In fact, when I got to where Nephew said it was I had trouble believing that this was what he was talking about, this thing I know as well as my own hairbrush. As for its smell and all that other claptrap, maybe that's how he sees it––I never thought that boy had a lick of sense, and using dreamy words to describe something that's a ordinary as a loaf of bread is just his style."
She shook her head and stomped up onto her porch, slamming the door after her.
As the day wore itself out, little groups of two or three of them went to see for themselves, always coming back disagreeable and angry.
Most of them didn't say nothing about it, like it was a waste of time to even discuss it.
Them that did agree that they shouldn't touch it, but on nothing else, as I said.
All of them blamed Nephew, as though he'd fetched this thing with the idea of creating strife.
I was glad I never said nothing, kept my own counsel.
But as often happens, being a neutral party did not remove me from the conflict––instead, it placed me at the center of it, and I found that soon every last one of them was after me to see for myself and then rule on who was right and who was wrong.
It was clear there would be no peace until somebody had the last word on what it was and where it came from.
But watching them faces I'd looked at all my life, the way that they'd changed since looking on this wonder, I knew that seeing it for myself was the last thing I wanted to do.
Late in the night, after the last of them gave and left my porch, I packed my belongings and a little food and set off the opposite direction.
The only thing I was sure of was that I didn't ever want to know.
Not knowing was the best thing for me.
Still is.