Writing as a kid

When I was little my ideas for stories far outpaced my ability to write. Luckily I had people around me (friends, teachers, family) who were willing to help. I just recently found a copy of The Silence, a story my mom wrote down for me when I was six. The paper is yellowed with age, the pencil is faded and the story obviously comes from the mind of a six-year-old. Maybe it's the obvious insert of my friends and sibling's names, or the title that I remember fretting over, or just the fact that it's in my mothers handwriting but there is something wonderful about it.



The Silence
       In the shadow of a lonely hill lay the small village of Hudson. The people of Hudson led happy and peaceful lives until one spring unusual things began to happen. It started when Josh Hewitt, a small boy of six, began disappearing while playing outside. Although he always turned up and seemed alright, he could never answer questions about where he had been. Most people were not concerned because they knew small children have a habit of wandering away, to chase a butterfly, follow a bug or walk toward someone or something seen off in the distance.
       People began to notice a silence that seemed to cover the village during Josh’s disappearance. No breezes stirred, no sounds of animals and not even sounds from the large city on the other side of the hill could be heard.
       The leaders of the village met to discuss the problem. They decided the best plan of action would be to follow Josh. For several days they tried this and found they could not keep up with a six year with unlimited energy and imagination. A decision was made to use other children to help. Three children were chosen, Lee Park, Susan Winningham and Lily Park. They were to spend time with Josh instead of following him. The next day the four children spent the entire day together. After Josh had gone home Lee, Susan and Lily reported back to the village leaders. They said they had all been with Josh every minute and nothing had happened. The leaders thanked the children and sent them home. After the children left the village leaders faced one another with worried looks in their eyes. Twice during the day the silence had come and both times all four children had been missing.
       Now the problem was whether to risk sending more children and maybe still have no answers or to try again with adults. A decision was made to have a village picnic. Tha way everyone would be in the same area and surely someone would catch Josh and the other children before the silence began. All the villagers were invited, from the youngest to the eldest, and all the answers came back that they would attend. The date was set and all the plans were made.
       The day of the picnic began with warm sunshine, gentle breezes and the calming sounds of animals and birds. The people of Hudson gathered near the village school for a picnic and a search for an answer.

       As the man and woman walk along the empty fields in the shadow of a lonely hill they talk about the old stories. The stories that have been passed down for many, many years about a village named Hudson. Of how one day the village and all of it’s people disappeared and nothing was left behind to show it had ever been there. They talk and laugh about how stories start and grow and how only the young or foolish believe in them. As they turn to walk away a silence seems to cover the area the breezes stop stirring and the birds overheard can longer be heard. Instead they hear the sounds of children laughing and playing and of adults talking and visiting, in fact it seems to be the sounds of a village picnic.
The End

30 Minute Story A Day - It's Not Easy Being a Ninja Pirate

It's not easy being able to see both sides.

"That's a little harsh, don't you think?" Stan tugged at his collar worriedly. "I think they're intimidating."

"With those stupid hats and lame poofy pants? They're a total joke!"

"Maybe..." Stan paused as he pulled his mask over his face. "Maybe they think we look silly too."

It's not easy being a visionary.

"I'm not sure this is such a good plan." Stan said quietly, peering out over the dark sea.

"What's so hard to understand, Stanley? We find them, we fire, they surrender, we win."

"We're in this giant thing with a flag and there's all the singing and buckling of swashes and it's a bit obvious."

"What do you suggest, running around in black bodysuits and masks?" The deck broke out in laughter and Stan cringed, turning back to the sea.

"Something like that, yeah."

It's not easy being shunned.

"Enough. Take off that ridiculous getup."

"But you can't even tell I'm wearing an eyepatch under this mask!" Stan replied, staring into the mirror.

"You're either with us or against us, Stan."

"I am with you!" Stan insisted. "I'm just sort of also with them. At the same time."

"No, Stan. You're not with either of us."

It's not easy being on your own.

"Give me your valuables." Stan growled, brandishing his sword.

"Are you supposed to be talking? Aren't you guys all silent and menacing?"

"I'm not like them."

"You jumped through my window."

"I've got a sword and...and an eyepatch!"

"Oh. So you're a..."

"Yeah."

"Then why are you dressed like...?"

"Ugh." Stan sighed. "Forget it."

It's not easy being a ninja pirate.

30 Minute Story A Day - Nancy & Cassandra

"Does this strike you as weird?"

"Many things strike me as weird. What 'this' are you talking about?"

"This this. The two of us as the sole members of the junior prom committee."

"Well, it's certainly not what I thought I'd be doing today but I don't know that I'd call it weird."

"We've never even been to a dance."

"It's not like it's a totally foreign concept."

"What about the fact that nobody showed up to help?"

"Maybe they all came to their senses and realized that school dances are an outmoded form of forced social mating that honors materialism and male posturing."

"You think?"

"No. It's more likely that they formed their own committee after we got assigned here for detention."

"That sounds more like them."

"They're probably meeting in a darkened room right now, going over renegade caterers and how to score a disco ball on the black market."

"Streamers and tulle that fell off the back of a truck?"

"A covert plan to liberate their choice of DJ."

"Viva La Prom!"

"I kind of want to go to that prom."

"Me too. Of course, we do have full reign here so we could shape this prom into something awesome."

"And crush the spirit of those rebel party planners!"

"Settle down, Noriega. Let's concentrate on keeping our own spirits uncrushed."

"I never get to have any fun. What's on the our list of doom?"

"Let's see, come up with an original yet timeless theme that embodies the true character of the student body."

"Which is more timeless, apathy or ignorance?"

"Toss up, really."

"Or the race to gain materialistic goods even if it kills you."

"You just want zombies."

"Who doesn't?"

"We're already in detention."

"Good point. Under the sea?"

"Under the sea."

30 Minute Story A Day - Algorithm & Blues

The man on the TV show says that everything is math.

Personally, I've always thought that man was insane.

You see, math makes me inordinately depressed. And I'm a cheerful person. If everything was math and math makes me depressed, then I could not be a cheerful person. See?

I said I was a cheerful person, not necessarily a logical one.

Unfortunately I do know that math makes up a lot more of my life than I know. More than I like, for sure. And there's no question that at this very moment, math is causing me considerable pain and most likely going to make me wind up in jail. The clink. The pokey. The big house.

You see, I am currently robbing a bank because of math.

Oh, math couldn't just be satisfied to torment me all through school. It couldn't gain its pleasure by just making me tear out my hair when I try to balance my checkbook. Math couldn't be content with confusing me on an almost daily basis. No, it had to go above and beyond to completely ruin my life.

It all started with snack food. I really wanted a cupcake after my morning meeting. I work hard. I'm a hard worker. I'm a girl who deserved a cupcake. I perused the aisle of the local coffee shop until I saw one gloriously large chocolate cupcake with a 'day old' sign proclaiming it to be 33% off. I foolishly ignored the math and marched up to the counter with a dollar in my hand only to be terribly embarrassed when the checkout girl told me it was more. Instead of making the others in line wait while I fished out change, I just took out my debit card and paid, silently cursing math all the while.

Since I had never quite grasped the math involved in percentages and the coffee shop had never quite grasped the idea of just writing a price on their cupcakes, I now had to make a trip to the bank and switch money over from my savings to checking. I finished my cupcake on the way, which made me sort of forgive math for it's dirty little 33% trick and I entered the bank to find all the teller lanes empty.

Of course, that was because everyone was currently lying on the floor. I stared in shock at the huddled customers and then stared dumbly at the two armed robbers standing in front of me. I would have stared in some other sort of emotion except my brain kicked into gear and told my feet to take me back out the door. I probably would have made it except there was this potted plant and a counter and, oh yeah, those two guys with guns. I ended up on my butt next to a ficus and staring up at two guys who looked even more confused than me.

They also looked angrier than me, but that honestly could have been the guns. Or the fact that I had just recently consumed 1/3 of my weight in chocolate and my serotonin levels hadn't quite come down. It took several minutes to convince them that I was not a cop, a fed or a highly trained and beautiful assassin. They didn't use 'beautiful' but I'm sure it was implied. After discovering that I was nothing more than a girl on a math-based errand, they were eager to tell me to move over with the other customers. Until, once again, math interfered.

I was standing in front of the robbers when a high pitched alarm rang across the room. There were screams and shouts and shots and I dove to the floor in a graceful and expedient manner. Which meant I stumbled over into the nearest robber and fell on my butt, again. There were sheepish explanations from the elderly man in the corner who said his watch alarm was just alerting him to take his meds but I was too busy being yelled at by the robber I had knocked over who had somehow twisted his ankle. My landing on it, despite his frankly rude declarations, probably had nothing to do with it.

Robbers, apparently, have plans. These things are not entered into lightly, and therefore, plans are made. Plans, that despite my interference, needed to be carried out with two people. By virtue of being totally and completely at fault, I was drafted into helping. I knew I was in trouble before we even got behind the counter but the moment the first robber started talking about us moving all those bags, I realized that I was sunk. Math, once more, was laughing in my face. I'm sure the man on TV would have detailed the problem nicely on his chalkboard. 1 girl + 1 robber + 1 gun = 3 bag carrying hands. Take that and divide by the amount of bags, times the length of the bank, throw in a few equations about wind speed and floor quality, toss in a vector or two and you've got...well, you've got something that I probably wouldn't understand but would basically add up to the fact that me and the robber weren't going to be moving all those bags before the cops showed up.

Which, to be honest, I wasn't looking forward to. I mean, I had waltzed into the middle of a robbery, fell over, got up, almost got shot, fell over again, injured a robber, became a robber and was now lugging bags of money out the back door of a bank. I'm sure that I could explain all this to a police officer but I was pretty sure I'd be explaining it from the back of a cruiser. Or a paddywagon. Do they even have paddywagons anymore?

Sure enough, time and math wait for no one, not even a robber and his reluctant but plucky assistant. I was on my 11th trip out the door (and if you want to know how many bags I had moved you can just call up the man on TV and ask him for the math) when sirens and lights and lots of shouting stunned me to a halt. I immediately raised my hands before realizing that made me look guilty. I dropped my hands before figuring that guilty was better than shot. I raised them again and realized that lifting two sacks of money was heavy enough without doing some sort of exercise routine with them in front of the entire police force and dropped them onto the pavement.

I was about to start my very long explanation of how none of this was my fault when robbers number 1 and 2 came careening out of the bank. There was more gun waving and shouting and several times when the pronoun "we" was used and I tried in vain to explain by miming that "we" didn't include "me". But since I was standing all of about 3 feet from two armed robbers with a couple of sacks of money at my feet, I'm not sure it got across. It's possible I also suck at miming.

To me, it looked like it was all over but the arresting, but at one simple sentence I knew that things weren't going to be resolved so quickly. When the officer in charge shouted about how we "had to the count of 10" I sighed in resignation. Math had been out to get me all day, I knew it wasn't ready to give up yet.

Storytelling

A story written to make a friend smile a couple of years ago.

When the sun sets and all the family gathers round the fire, I tell the story of a man long gone. A man who still inspires me to this day.

A man....who ran the street sweeper.

"Listen here, my children." I say, gathering young Susie and little Peter onto my lap. "Listen and I'll share with you a bit of our history. I'll tell you the tale of..."

"Street Sweeper Joe!" Susie yells and claps her hands in glee.

"Seet sep 'oe!" Peter echoes drunkenly. His mother insists that he speaks that way because he's two, but I swear that I can smell the telltale whiff of whiskey when he comes near. Poor little fellow.

"Peter, you need to lay off the sauce." I admonish halfheartedly before continuing. "The story of Street Sweeper Joe is a good story, an old story, a story that must be passed on. Now let me think of how to start it."

"Many, many years ago...

The Earth had advanced to a point when little needed to be done to sustain everyday life. The necessities were taken care of and the populace went about carefree and happy.

The people rejoiced. The leaders played a lot of golf. The small woodland animals danced.

Eventually a life of leisure for everyone led to some problems. Mainly with upkeep. Everyone had forgotten how to take care of things and soon they had a problem. There was a scourge upon the land and the name of that scourge was trash. It was piled up on street corners, it was overflowing out of garbage cans, it was fluttering about in the afternoon breeze like a very poetic thing.

But it was not poetic. It was stinky. It was dirty. It was probably very unhygienic.

The people complained. The leaders fretted. The small woodland animals headed upwind.

It got so bad that one day the very last piece of grass was taken over by trash. As far as the eye could see there were piles and mounds of garbage. Everyone walked around with their noses plugged and their eyes watering and their shoes getting soggy with things they would rather not think about."

"Ewwww!" Giggled Susie.

"Mrpp" Peter drunkenly mumbled.

"Really, your mother should take away your whiskey. It's unseemly for a boy your age. Now, where was I?"

"It had gotten bad enough that the population of Earth decided to start picking up their trash. They went out in groups and gathered and shoveled and pushed and poked. But no matter how much effort they put into it, they didn't accomplish anything. They had no trash-picking skills, nowhere to put the trash and they kept getting distracted by having to swoon dramatically over the smell. Honestly, so much dramatic swooning was going on day and night that there was barely time to notice that they weren't accomplishing anything with the trash problem.

The people swooned. The leaders drank. The small woodland animals laughed at the swooning and the drinking and the drunken swooning.

Then one morning, a rumbling sound could be heard across the land. The people stopped their swooning and climbed up out of the trash. Reveled in the rays of the rising sun there stood...."

"Street Sweeper Joe!" Susie and Peter yelled. Or rather Susie yelled and Peter waved his hands wildly and burped.

"Yes, my darlings. It was Street Sweeper Joe, riding into town on his street sweeper of salvation. As he rumbled up and down the streets and highways, the trash was slowly removed. Once again the sidewalks, the pavements, even the grass was exposed to the sun again. The people came out and danced on the now-clean earth. They sang out a song extolling Street Sweeper Joe's virtues. They threw flowers, only to have Joe sweep them up quickly.

The people rejoiced. The leaders gave thanks. The small woodland animals hid from the big rumbling machine.

Finally the job was done, the trash was gone and Street Sweeper Joe pulled up in front of the capital and looked down at all the people. The leader walked up and said to Joe, 'You have saved us, you street sweeper hero! What can we do to repay you?' But Joe was a humble sort and he spoke, his voice as rumbly as the street sweeper he drove...

'Joe is name
Street sweeping is my game
I want nothing more
Than to do my little chore
No gold, rubies or cash
Just let me sweep up your trash
And I'll be happy, I say
Thank you and good day.'

The townspeople were impressed by his sentiment, even though his rhyme scheme was a little off and they gratefully agreed to let him pick up trash. Street Sweeper Joe taught the people how to keep things clean and to this day we honor when the anniversary of the day he came to town."

" 'oe still here?" Peter asked with a slur.

"No, my sweet inebriated child. One day Street Sweeper Joe started talking about recycling and compost heaps and it was decided that he was getting to be too uppity so the leaders decided to kick him out of town. But to this day, if you listen very closely in the dead of night, you might here the rumbling sound of Street Sweeper Joe."

The light fades as the fire dies down and I send the family off to bed, shaking my head at Peter's wobbling attempts to walk in a straight line. One day I'm going to figure out where that kid gets his whiskey. But not tomorrow. Tomorrow we have to go out and swoon dramatically as we try to pick up the trash that has taken over our world.

Orphan

I had a teacher in junior high who was just the right mixture of handsome and cool. All the girls had crushes on him and all the boys hung out with him. Everyone loved Mr. K. Even me. Although my fascination with Mr. K didn't manifest itself with schoolgirl crushes or fraternity-style jokes. No, I wrote a story and the teacher that everyone loved was much more sinister in the pages of my notebook.

There! Megan groaned in relief as she spied the doors at the end of the hallway. She felt like she had been running for hours, turned around in the darkened rooms and dimly lit halls of the high school. Throwing a hand out to lean against the nearest locker, she was surprised to see a red scrape across her knuckles. She had thought she had cut it when she shimmed under the gate at the library, but surprisingly it didn't hurt. She flexed her fingers for a moment and watched as a sluggish drop of blood ran down the back of her hand.

"That looks like it hurts." The soft voice came from so close behind her that Megan could feel his breath blow through her hair. She whirled, her hand flying out to push him away as she started to run.

"No. No. Nononononono." Megan chanted breathlessly as she careened down the hallway. She had come too far to let him get her now. With a burst of speed she aimed for the push bar on the door, hoping to get through before he could catch up. She ran, her aching lungs straining in her chest and with a cry she hit the doors.

And they hit back. There was a metallic rattle as she pushed against the bars and Megan looked through the window to see a chain wrapped around the handles. Thumping her head against the window, she felt a few tears escape her tightly clenched eyes. She could hear his footsteps behind her, slow and steady. As terrified as she was, she refused to keep her back to him now. Turning, she raised her chin and tried to meet his eyes.

"Oh, very good." He nodded as he stopped in front of her, his hand reaching out to tap her chin with one finger. "This bravery is almost believable."

Megan flinched and tried to clear her throat before speaking. "W-w-what are you going to do to me?"

"That would spoil the surprise. But I promise it'll be fun." He leaned in, his breath tickling her ear as his hands tightened on his shoulders. "I wouldn't lie to you, would I?"

With an almost silent whimper, Megan closed her eyes as he pulled into the nearest classroom.

That's actually it. It isn't part of a larger story at all. Just that one orphan scene. I've always wanted to write more of it, figure out just what Mr. K was going to do or why Megan was running, but it never materialized. It's forever just this orphan scene inspired by Mr. K grinning and whispering "I wouldn't lie to you, would I?" when he refused to tell us anymore about a special project for the next class. Even though I really liked the teacher, it sounded so wonderfully sinister that I couldn't help jotting down the snippet that popped into my mind. It's a story that's always haunted me, unable to be expanded on or finished for well over ten years. But the story and the whispered phrase still gives me the shivers.

Light

This is one find that made me very happy. When my old computer bit the dust, I realized that I had lost quite a few bits and pieces of writings. Oh, the big stuff I had saved on disks and flash drives. But the little things, the odd story that popped into my head one night or the half-finished conversation between two characters...those things I lost.

Which was why I was happy to find this story printed out and shoved in the back of a chemistry notebook. It's long, so I'm not going to post it all, but it has a different tone than a lot of what I write. It's a dark piece filled with hope. I don't know that it makes a lot of sense, but it certainly makes me feel. And after all, isn't that what good writing is all about?

Excerpt -
Not what I caused, mind you. I never cause wounds. I don’t hold the knife or the needle or the gun. I just whisper in the heads and in the hearts of those that do. A sibilant cheering section, a push to an edge that they were already nearing. Another told me once that we were just speeding up the process; that the children would destroy themselves with or without us. Lie or not, it makes my job easier.

It’s what I tell myself as I hear the blood slow to a trickle. Not my fault. Not my fault. If I pay attention, I can time the phrase to the whistling sound of their dying breaths. Not my fault.

Not my fault.

Not.

My.

Fa-

Across the room and with my eyes closed I know when it ends. Death is silence and silence is louder than one expects. It roars into the room and blankets it till I have to make a noise or go insane. I laugh.

There’s no malice behind it. No humor either.

I laugh simply because I wasn’t created to cry.