Please be kind
K people, it's opinion time. I have a creative writing workshop thingy coming up, and i need to pick one of these two pieces to allow my classmates to read and pick apart and be generally tiresome about it. Need to know which one of these I should use:
When I was a little girl, I lived in a world devoid of blood. If there was an overly enthusiastic backyard-over-rocks session, and my skin decided it could no longer bear the strain of a hyperactive child and her insistence on consistent contact with the earth, my head was always turned away, cradled by a strong hand, my hair stroked, soft sweet murmurings in my ear, my eyes always dropped, and the cloth pressed to the offending area was always dark in color, the better to shade me from the growing circle of dark ooze from the wound.
It’s not that I’m afraid of blood. It really doesn’t bother me much. Never has, but since it was just assumed that all little girls were and are, I went with it. No use fighting the norm, not in that way. When you grow up in New York City, you see it, no matter how many hands shield your eyes. My equally hyperactive schoolyard friends, car and bicycle accidents, and my sister’s passionate love for ER had shown me plenty of blood. But when you’re six, and not afraid of your own blood, they assume you’ll grow up to kill. I didn’t want to be like some of my friends, sent to see boring, soft spoken ladies in wool suits who made them play with legos in incomplete sets, and asked them about their home lives, then take secret notes, resisting the golden rule that secrets secrets were in fact, no fun. No more Sons of Sam on their watch, no sir.
I knew this much at six.
One November New York day I sat on the shining gray kitchen floor, the one that I could play hopscotch on, the tiles were so wide and laid out in a vastly uncreative plateau. It was a Friday, I remember because it ruined my weekend. As a kid I spent a lot of time on this floor, playing a game of my own devising: taking a marble and watching it roll down the uneven floor, picking it out from under the cabinet where it would typically lodge, and doing it again. I was very into repetition.
This day however was different. I had a pencil in my hand. The marble had been abandoned as a lost cause some days previous, I having bowed to the superior holding power of the gap between the floor and the kitchen cabinet. My seventeen-year-old sister Anita leant again the counter, filing her lethal, bright red nails or some other generic teenage girl activity that involves nothing more than one hand and a beauty accessory. Every so often she would reach up to make sure that she still could not run her hand through her mercilessly teased bleached-blonde hair. I hated that hair, far more than my mother ever did. I had always been jealous of her thick, golden hair, and the idea that she would abuse it like that destroyed me. It was never blonde enough, never high enough, never hard as an Englishman’s ass, which is what I was sure she was going for. So I wasn’t paying attention to her. I was busy. The pencil was red, and I was having fun drawing what I saw out of the kitchen window. The woman across the alley was wearing a red shirt, like my pencil.
The rest of the events leading up to the blood are foggy, but what does occur is that I said something to Anita, and the next thing I knew she was screaming for my mother, looking at me in horror, and I’m pretty sure a hunk of that mangled hair was yanked out and dropped unnoticed to the floor. I didn’t really know what she was so worked up about, but I assumed it had something to do with the heat that was spreading over my temple and down my chin and neck. Instinct made me reach up and touch my head, but my eyes led me down to the familiar gray floor, which was now black with some foreign substance. The pencil lay between four, quarter-sized dollops, now slightly redder than before. The two shades of crimson clashed mightily.
Still I said nothing. Slowly I got up and staggered slightly to the bathroom. I felt a buzzing in my ears, a crackling like a ham radio, and the deadened sound of Anita’s wailing as she exclaimed to my mother that this was so not her fault. I gripped the sink, not looking down and still seeing the bright smears left by my small fingers on the blindingly white porcelain. I stepped up on the side of the bathtub, as I did when I needed to reach the mirror. I pulled on foot up, then the other, and steadied myself on the equally blinding white tile wall. My fingers slipped slightly, and I knew why, but I didn’t look at my hands or the sticky trail they had left. I dragged my eyes up to the mirror, forced them to focus through my swimming perception, and came face to face with what was reflected. There was a little girl there, with red and blue-rimmed glasses like mine, and tangled, shoulder length auburn hair like mine. Obviously it was me, but the difference between what I saw and what I was expecting was intense. I don’t know what I was expecting. Maybe to be covered in something other than blood. But there it was. It was turning dark already, and creating foul dreadlocks in my hair. It was on my glasses, obscuring my already fuzzy view of this spectacle. But through the smears and swimming eyes, I saw what was causing this chaos. A dark hole, it looked black from where I was, cratering the soft spot just in front of my left ear. I gingerly touched it. It bled stubbornly, unresponsive to my pleading touch. Then I saw what it had done to my shirt. My lucky t-shirt from Universal Studios with the Roadrunner on it. His cocky smile was dotted with the same quarter-sized splotches as on the kitchen floor, but they were brighter here, impossible to ignore. I faced it. I looked it right in its blood shot cartoon eyes.
Then, I screamed.
OR
Just because the room is dark, doesn’t mean you don’t see a lot. That’s pretty much the first thing you learn as a bartender. All the usual stuff you would expect to see in a setting with alcohol and some of society’s most regretful and fatigued individuals: knife fights, cat fights, flying bottles and fists, and once a guy who got his skull cracked by a dartboard upside the head. Link’s is an end-of-the-road sort of place. The place where people go when they don’t have much of a home to go to or just don’t want to go back to the one they have. We don’t ask questions here. We just make the drinks, and nod sympathetically when appropriate.
The Dartboard Incident was the biggest fight I ever witnessed, involving six big guys and their assorted lady friends. One guy had two, so it was thirteen of them altogether, going at it with all the repressed frustration and feral fury that builds up after a long day at the salt mine (figuratively speaking) and a long night of beer headaches. All that and only me behind the bar to protect the Stoli from harm. That was the one time I ever took the six-shooter out from behind the snifter glasses (it’s not like anybody ever orders brandy) and fired it into the air to restore order. Not gonna lie that was pretty badass. Calamity Jane type shit. My boss was pretty pissed about the annihilated light fixture, said I might have thought my aim through a bit more, but he knows better than anyone that sometimes the only thing that will call a room of rowdy drunks to order is a sudden loud bang. Besides, it’s what he’d told me to do if I had to since he’s too cheap to hire a bouncer. “Before you bring in the big guns, bring out the little one” he’d said. By “big guns” of course he meant “cops”. Not a road Lincoln likes to travel down much. He’s been around, and been in trouble before that much I know. I still don’t know what it was he did or what he had to do for it, but whatever it was it made him look a lot older than the fifty-five I knew he was from his alcohol distributor’s license. He’d seen way worse than I have. Whatever story I had for him at the end of the night, no matter how ridiculous or sad or scary or just plain twisted, he had something better, something to up the ante. I never really minded, because they were always good stories that I loved hearing, and I loved knowing the guy they happened to so I could re-tell them later. I love retelling his stories. It makes my friends think I’m worldly and smart, not just because I went to college and use SAT words, but because I know the guy these crazy things have happened to, and have seen a few of them firsthand. But as much fun as it was to know him and his tales, just once I wanted to have one that Lincoln didn’t have.
One night after closing, Lincoln and I lingered in the barroom, as usual with the lights dimmer even than it was when it was open. He figures that turning the lights off or down discourages people from banging on the doors begging for one last drink. Though secretly I think that if someone’s drunk and desperate enough to beg, a little thing like business hours and steel gates won’t stop them. We went through our usual routine every night, vacuuming the popcorn off the pool table and swabbing down the tables, permanently stained with beer and moisture rings. Our customers don’t hold with coasters. And every night there’s a different joe, a different sob story, a different reason why we should let him in so he could give us double, no, triple whatever a Malibu and coke was worth. But Lincoln never ever opens the door. He maintains that he wouldn’t crack that gate to hand his own mother a martini.
Anyway, on this night Lincoln was washing the pitchers while I was attempting to coax something resembling cleanliness out of the perpetually sticky floor, when we heard a noise from outside. It was different from the usual singing, shouting, cursing, or fluent conversations with self that one gets used to hearing outside of a bar. Different in the way that makes me shiver even now. It was a small, mewling sound, like a hungry kitten, but there was something about it that made us know that it was human. And the sound wasn’t moving. Which meant the thing making it was stationary somewhere outside. It was January.
“What the hell’s that?” Lincoln asked nobody. Seemed stupid really, we both knew what it had to be. Without answering I dropped the mop and headed for the door. There was no way I could ignore that sound. I knew it too well from my own experiences. I had had a son not twelve months before, and in that time I had come to recognize the sound of an uncomfortable infant. But this sound went way beyond uncomfortable, and had crossed the line to desperation. This child was in real distress.
“Stop!”
My hand froze just above the knob. I spun to face Lincoln, his face stony. “It’s a trick to get us to open the gate. It’s an old one, it’s happened to me a couple times, someone shouts for help, that they’re hurt or there’s somebody after ‘em, I open the door, they bust in and sweep the joint. Don’t touch that fucking door.”
I gave him what my husband calls my ‘laser stare’, more potent, he claims, than ‘glaring daggers’. I couldn’t believe he was asking me to ignore a screaming baby right outside my door. I put my hand on the knob.
“Seriously” Lincoln insisted, his voice rising. “There’ll be an angry, desperate crack fiend on the other side of that door holding a tape recorder. He’ll be too fucked up to even realize that he could just pawn that for more than what we made tonight.” I continued to stare at him darkly as the sound grew louder and more urgent. I didn’t take my hand off the knob. I respected him deeply, but there was no way I was going to let a childless, jaded hard ass like him tell me, a mother, that what I was hearing wasn’t real. With my other hand I reached for the deadbolt and began to slowly pull it back.
“If you open that door, you’re out of a job missy,” Lincoln warned “and anything that gets stolen or anyone who gets shot as a result of you opening that door will be your fault.” He knows my name, but he likes to call me “missy” when he’s mad. He knows it pisses me off because it reminds me of my old man. Which is probably why right as he finished his sentence I yanked the door open and unbolted the gate in one swift motion. Along with a strong gust of wind and a flurry of snow, the sound of a baby’s cries filled the room, followed closely by the smell of vomit. I hesitated beside the door. I looked back at Lincoln, still standing doubled over behind the bar, reaching behind where I knew the brandy snifters were kept. He stared hard past me out the door, and when no one rushed through it brandishing a sharpened toothbrush he straightened up and strode past me into the night. I followed. Three paces into the street I stopped, and retched. Slumped like an oversized rag doll next to the door was a young woman of indeterminate age, her lank, greasy hair hanging over her face, her head lolling on her shoulder, her eyes rolled back, her mouth hanging open, and her lap full of sick. She stank of Steel Reserve and disregard. Next to her on the ground was a capsized stroller, with a gently wriggling lump wrapped in a thin blue blanket strapped into the seat. “At least she strapped it in” I thought as I swooped down onto the stroller, freed the baby from the tangle and rushed back into the bar. I laid it gently on the recently scrubbed counter and peeled the stained and soaked onesie off of it, discovering that it was a boy, and he was not wearing a diaper. My mind buzzed with fury at his mother as I wrapped him in my sweater and coat and called an ambulance. I prayed fervently for him, for him to have not suffered any long-term effects from being both pinned by his stroller and exposed to extreme cold. He was still crying heartily, which I took as a good sign. I set him in a clean washing tub next to the radiator, and went back outside to check on his mother. Lincoln was standing over her. He had covered her with the fire blanket, and was staring at her, watching her breathe raggedly.
“They’ll be alright” he assured me. I knew he didn’t really have any basis for this assumption since we didn’t know what she’d taken, how much, or how long she’d been outside, but hearing Lincoln say it made it true for me. I also knew my job was safe, with that. If he was trying to comfort me, he was foreseeing future interactions with me.
“This…this is a new one,” he said, apropos of nothing at all. He knew I was thinking it I guess. “This is something I’ve never seen.” He turned to me. “Don’t get too cocky about that woman’s intuition crap just because you were right about this one” He said, poking me hard in the sternum. With that he ran back into the bar, rubbing his arms as the ambulance and police lights came flashing into view. Habit I guess, for him to run from flashing lights.
Constructive criticism, fine, but be nice. It's up to my class to make me cry.
When I was a little girl, I lived in a world devoid of blood. If there was an overly enthusiastic backyard-over-rocks session, and my skin decided it could no longer bear the strain of a hyperactive child and her insistence on consistent contact with the earth, my head was always turned away, cradled by a strong hand, my hair stroked, soft sweet murmurings in my ear, my eyes always dropped, and the cloth pressed to the offending area was always dark in color, the better to shade me from the growing circle of dark ooze from the wound.
It’s not that I’m afraid of blood. It really doesn’t bother me much. Never has, but since it was just assumed that all little girls were and are, I went with it. No use fighting the norm, not in that way. When you grow up in New York City, you see it, no matter how many hands shield your eyes. My equally hyperactive schoolyard friends, car and bicycle accidents, and my sister’s passionate love for ER had shown me plenty of blood. But when you’re six, and not afraid of your own blood, they assume you’ll grow up to kill. I didn’t want to be like some of my friends, sent to see boring, soft spoken ladies in wool suits who made them play with legos in incomplete sets, and asked them about their home lives, then take secret notes, resisting the golden rule that secrets secrets were in fact, no fun. No more Sons of Sam on their watch, no sir.
I knew this much at six.
One November New York day I sat on the shining gray kitchen floor, the one that I could play hopscotch on, the tiles were so wide and laid out in a vastly uncreative plateau. It was a Friday, I remember because it ruined my weekend. As a kid I spent a lot of time on this floor, playing a game of my own devising: taking a marble and watching it roll down the uneven floor, picking it out from under the cabinet where it would typically lodge, and doing it again. I was very into repetition.
This day however was different. I had a pencil in my hand. The marble had been abandoned as a lost cause some days previous, I having bowed to the superior holding power of the gap between the floor and the kitchen cabinet. My seventeen-year-old sister Anita leant again the counter, filing her lethal, bright red nails or some other generic teenage girl activity that involves nothing more than one hand and a beauty accessory. Every so often she would reach up to make sure that she still could not run her hand through her mercilessly teased bleached-blonde hair. I hated that hair, far more than my mother ever did. I had always been jealous of her thick, golden hair, and the idea that she would abuse it like that destroyed me. It was never blonde enough, never high enough, never hard as an Englishman’s ass, which is what I was sure she was going for. So I wasn’t paying attention to her. I was busy. The pencil was red, and I was having fun drawing what I saw out of the kitchen window. The woman across the alley was wearing a red shirt, like my pencil.
The rest of the events leading up to the blood are foggy, but what does occur is that I said something to Anita, and the next thing I knew she was screaming for my mother, looking at me in horror, and I’m pretty sure a hunk of that mangled hair was yanked out and dropped unnoticed to the floor. I didn’t really know what she was so worked up about, but I assumed it had something to do with the heat that was spreading over my temple and down my chin and neck. Instinct made me reach up and touch my head, but my eyes led me down to the familiar gray floor, which was now black with some foreign substance. The pencil lay between four, quarter-sized dollops, now slightly redder than before. The two shades of crimson clashed mightily.
Still I said nothing. Slowly I got up and staggered slightly to the bathroom. I felt a buzzing in my ears, a crackling like a ham radio, and the deadened sound of Anita’s wailing as she exclaimed to my mother that this was so not her fault. I gripped the sink, not looking down and still seeing the bright smears left by my small fingers on the blindingly white porcelain. I stepped up on the side of the bathtub, as I did when I needed to reach the mirror. I pulled on foot up, then the other, and steadied myself on the equally blinding white tile wall. My fingers slipped slightly, and I knew why, but I didn’t look at my hands or the sticky trail they had left. I dragged my eyes up to the mirror, forced them to focus through my swimming perception, and came face to face with what was reflected. There was a little girl there, with red and blue-rimmed glasses like mine, and tangled, shoulder length auburn hair like mine. Obviously it was me, but the difference between what I saw and what I was expecting was intense. I don’t know what I was expecting. Maybe to be covered in something other than blood. But there it was. It was turning dark already, and creating foul dreadlocks in my hair. It was on my glasses, obscuring my already fuzzy view of this spectacle. But through the smears and swimming eyes, I saw what was causing this chaos. A dark hole, it looked black from where I was, cratering the soft spot just in front of my left ear. I gingerly touched it. It bled stubbornly, unresponsive to my pleading touch. Then I saw what it had done to my shirt. My lucky t-shirt from Universal Studios with the Roadrunner on it. His cocky smile was dotted with the same quarter-sized splotches as on the kitchen floor, but they were brighter here, impossible to ignore. I faced it. I looked it right in its blood shot cartoon eyes.
Then, I screamed.
OR
Just because the room is dark, doesn’t mean you don’t see a lot. That’s pretty much the first thing you learn as a bartender. All the usual stuff you would expect to see in a setting with alcohol and some of society’s most regretful and fatigued individuals: knife fights, cat fights, flying bottles and fists, and once a guy who got his skull cracked by a dartboard upside the head. Link’s is an end-of-the-road sort of place. The place where people go when they don’t have much of a home to go to or just don’t want to go back to the one they have. We don’t ask questions here. We just make the drinks, and nod sympathetically when appropriate.
The Dartboard Incident was the biggest fight I ever witnessed, involving six big guys and their assorted lady friends. One guy had two, so it was thirteen of them altogether, going at it with all the repressed frustration and feral fury that builds up after a long day at the salt mine (figuratively speaking) and a long night of beer headaches. All that and only me behind the bar to protect the Stoli from harm. That was the one time I ever took the six-shooter out from behind the snifter glasses (it’s not like anybody ever orders brandy) and fired it into the air to restore order. Not gonna lie that was pretty badass. Calamity Jane type shit. My boss was pretty pissed about the annihilated light fixture, said I might have thought my aim through a bit more, but he knows better than anyone that sometimes the only thing that will call a room of rowdy drunks to order is a sudden loud bang. Besides, it’s what he’d told me to do if I had to since he’s too cheap to hire a bouncer. “Before you bring in the big guns, bring out the little one” he’d said. By “big guns” of course he meant “cops”. Not a road Lincoln likes to travel down much. He’s been around, and been in trouble before that much I know. I still don’t know what it was he did or what he had to do for it, but whatever it was it made him look a lot older than the fifty-five I knew he was from his alcohol distributor’s license. He’d seen way worse than I have. Whatever story I had for him at the end of the night, no matter how ridiculous or sad or scary or just plain twisted, he had something better, something to up the ante. I never really minded, because they were always good stories that I loved hearing, and I loved knowing the guy they happened to so I could re-tell them later. I love retelling his stories. It makes my friends think I’m worldly and smart, not just because I went to college and use SAT words, but because I know the guy these crazy things have happened to, and have seen a few of them firsthand. But as much fun as it was to know him and his tales, just once I wanted to have one that Lincoln didn’t have.
One night after closing, Lincoln and I lingered in the barroom, as usual with the lights dimmer even than it was when it was open. He figures that turning the lights off or down discourages people from banging on the doors begging for one last drink. Though secretly I think that if someone’s drunk and desperate enough to beg, a little thing like business hours and steel gates won’t stop them. We went through our usual routine every night, vacuuming the popcorn off the pool table and swabbing down the tables, permanently stained with beer and moisture rings. Our customers don’t hold with coasters. And every night there’s a different joe, a different sob story, a different reason why we should let him in so he could give us double, no, triple whatever a Malibu and coke was worth. But Lincoln never ever opens the door. He maintains that he wouldn’t crack that gate to hand his own mother a martini.
Anyway, on this night Lincoln was washing the pitchers while I was attempting to coax something resembling cleanliness out of the perpetually sticky floor, when we heard a noise from outside. It was different from the usual singing, shouting, cursing, or fluent conversations with self that one gets used to hearing outside of a bar. Different in the way that makes me shiver even now. It was a small, mewling sound, like a hungry kitten, but there was something about it that made us know that it was human. And the sound wasn’t moving. Which meant the thing making it was stationary somewhere outside. It was January.
“What the hell’s that?” Lincoln asked nobody. Seemed stupid really, we both knew what it had to be. Without answering I dropped the mop and headed for the door. There was no way I could ignore that sound. I knew it too well from my own experiences. I had had a son not twelve months before, and in that time I had come to recognize the sound of an uncomfortable infant. But this sound went way beyond uncomfortable, and had crossed the line to desperation. This child was in real distress.
“Stop!”
My hand froze just above the knob. I spun to face Lincoln, his face stony. “It’s a trick to get us to open the gate. It’s an old one, it’s happened to me a couple times, someone shouts for help, that they’re hurt or there’s somebody after ‘em, I open the door, they bust in and sweep the joint. Don’t touch that fucking door.”
I gave him what my husband calls my ‘laser stare’, more potent, he claims, than ‘glaring daggers’. I couldn’t believe he was asking me to ignore a screaming baby right outside my door. I put my hand on the knob.
“Seriously” Lincoln insisted, his voice rising. “There’ll be an angry, desperate crack fiend on the other side of that door holding a tape recorder. He’ll be too fucked up to even realize that he could just pawn that for more than what we made tonight.” I continued to stare at him darkly as the sound grew louder and more urgent. I didn’t take my hand off the knob. I respected him deeply, but there was no way I was going to let a childless, jaded hard ass like him tell me, a mother, that what I was hearing wasn’t real. With my other hand I reached for the deadbolt and began to slowly pull it back.
“If you open that door, you’re out of a job missy,” Lincoln warned “and anything that gets stolen or anyone who gets shot as a result of you opening that door will be your fault.” He knows my name, but he likes to call me “missy” when he’s mad. He knows it pisses me off because it reminds me of my old man. Which is probably why right as he finished his sentence I yanked the door open and unbolted the gate in one swift motion. Along with a strong gust of wind and a flurry of snow, the sound of a baby’s cries filled the room, followed closely by the smell of vomit. I hesitated beside the door. I looked back at Lincoln, still standing doubled over behind the bar, reaching behind where I knew the brandy snifters were kept. He stared hard past me out the door, and when no one rushed through it brandishing a sharpened toothbrush he straightened up and strode past me into the night. I followed. Three paces into the street I stopped, and retched. Slumped like an oversized rag doll next to the door was a young woman of indeterminate age, her lank, greasy hair hanging over her face, her head lolling on her shoulder, her eyes rolled back, her mouth hanging open, and her lap full of sick. She stank of Steel Reserve and disregard. Next to her on the ground was a capsized stroller, with a gently wriggling lump wrapped in a thin blue blanket strapped into the seat. “At least she strapped it in” I thought as I swooped down onto the stroller, freed the baby from the tangle and rushed back into the bar. I laid it gently on the recently scrubbed counter and peeled the stained and soaked onesie off of it, discovering that it was a boy, and he was not wearing a diaper. My mind buzzed with fury at his mother as I wrapped him in my sweater and coat and called an ambulance. I prayed fervently for him, for him to have not suffered any long-term effects from being both pinned by his stroller and exposed to extreme cold. He was still crying heartily, which I took as a good sign. I set him in a clean washing tub next to the radiator, and went back outside to check on his mother. Lincoln was standing over her. He had covered her with the fire blanket, and was staring at her, watching her breathe raggedly.
“They’ll be alright” he assured me. I knew he didn’t really have any basis for this assumption since we didn’t know what she’d taken, how much, or how long she’d been outside, but hearing Lincoln say it made it true for me. I also knew my job was safe, with that. If he was trying to comfort me, he was foreseeing future interactions with me.
“This…this is a new one,” he said, apropos of nothing at all. He knew I was thinking it I guess. “This is something I’ve never seen.” He turned to me. “Don’t get too cocky about that woman’s intuition crap just because you were right about this one” He said, poking me hard in the sternum. With that he ran back into the bar, rubbing his arms as the ambulance and police lights came flashing into view. Habit I guess, for him to run from flashing lights.
Constructive criticism, fine, but be nice. It's up to my class to make me cry.