Memes: proven to combat exam hysteria
Xmas Stocking
leave a gift for telegraph50freeget your stocking
Nano ficbits. I was reading through mine today and then I realized that I haven't seen anyone's NaNoWriMo products whatsoever. Share, please? Any part that you're particularly fond/proud of. Heck, even if it isn't NaNo material, show me something you're working on- I need something to calm my rattled nerves.
Here's mine. As expected of Nano, it's, uh, weird pretentious crap:
Ellis’s bedroom is next to Dad’s, and their beds touch the same wall, though Dad’s juts out, perpendicular to the wall, so he sleeps with his feet to the window and the street. The window never shuts just right and the morning traffic is always a part of that room; starting around six, the car horns start, and the newspaper hawkers come out, screaming and pacing the block. At night the streetlamps light up around eight, in the winter, nine in the summer; the one outside the window is near enough to touch, bright enough to read by, and sometimes they did.
It is never quiet in Dad’s room. Never dark, the blinds never closed. But it’s the only room that fits the king-sized bed that Dad purchased and has carted around since, he says, forever, which he will never part with, will never relinquish because, he says, after you experience this baby, sleeping on any other mattress will never be the same.
Ellis’s bed has always been twin-sized and a little too soft, the springs sagging the way he likes it, so that, at age six, he screamed and locked himself in the bathroom to cry when Dad bought a new one. He’s always found Dad’s mattress something like a rain-soaked rock, but there was privilege attached to sitting on there, with a book or something, maybe crayons, while Dad marked scores and fell asleep humming along to the same symphony each night, played softly from Dad’s bedside stereo.
“Listen to that trumpet line,” Dad said. “God. God.” His glasses left imprints on the bridge of his nose, and his eyes were half closed; he'd have been looking over and not through the lenses, if his eyes had been open. Well, he only needed glasses for reading; the things were scratched and practically useless. “Listen. Isn’t that amazing? That’s genius. It’s coming up again, El, listen-”
He made listening sound so easy, but it wasn’t, really. The trumpet was there, the notes flying up, sharp and bright, but not magical, life-shaking, the way Dad made them out to be.
“Did you hear that? God. Could slice holes right through the ceiling, that solo.”
Every night. Lying in bed, you could hear it, through the wall, so that by now the notes must have soaked into the walls and framework of the house. Dad said crazy things- that he wanted the symphony played at his funeral, when he died; that, if you paid enough attention, you could hear God speak in the final measures; that this was perfection.
There were problems. The tape had no label; the symphony had no name, no composer, no name to put on the trumpet solo that sounded, Dad said, like a handful of swords. They’d gotten it at a garage sale for twenty-five cents, from a box of unmarked tapes.
God’s voice for twenty-five cents, Ellis thinks. It drove Dad insane. He spent weekends with his musician friends in the library archives until they got tired of sitting round circular tables hidden deep in the stacks, pushing close to a tape player on low, with a pile of cassettes and a thousand reams of paper with call numbers, composers’ names. After that it became Dad’s hobby, a private thing he fiddled with on his leisure, filling notebooks with observations about the orchestration, melodic progression, tempo.
He didn’t speak of it, not as much. But he thought about it. It was always on his mind. The fact is, he played it. Every night, the way some people say their prayers, with his eyes closed and his head bowed reverently low. “Listen,” he told Ellis, and there was urgency in that, but also patience, expectation. His voice said, someday you’ll understand. Give it time.
It’s hard to forget something like that.
leave a gift for telegraph50freeget your stocking
Nano ficbits. I was reading through mine today and then I realized that I haven't seen anyone's NaNoWriMo products whatsoever. Share, please? Any part that you're particularly fond/proud of. Heck, even if it isn't NaNo material, show me something you're working on- I need something to calm my rattled nerves.
Here's mine. As expected of Nano, it's, uh, weird pretentious crap:
Ellis’s bedroom is next to Dad’s, and their beds touch the same wall, though Dad’s juts out, perpendicular to the wall, so he sleeps with his feet to the window and the street. The window never shuts just right and the morning traffic is always a part of that room; starting around six, the car horns start, and the newspaper hawkers come out, screaming and pacing the block. At night the streetlamps light up around eight, in the winter, nine in the summer; the one outside the window is near enough to touch, bright enough to read by, and sometimes they did.
It is never quiet in Dad’s room. Never dark, the blinds never closed. But it’s the only room that fits the king-sized bed that Dad purchased and has carted around since, he says, forever, which he will never part with, will never relinquish because, he says, after you experience this baby, sleeping on any other mattress will never be the same.
Ellis’s bed has always been twin-sized and a little too soft, the springs sagging the way he likes it, so that, at age six, he screamed and locked himself in the bathroom to cry when Dad bought a new one. He’s always found Dad’s mattress something like a rain-soaked rock, but there was privilege attached to sitting on there, with a book or something, maybe crayons, while Dad marked scores and fell asleep humming along to the same symphony each night, played softly from Dad’s bedside stereo.
“Listen to that trumpet line,” Dad said. “God. God.” His glasses left imprints on the bridge of his nose, and his eyes were half closed; he'd have been looking over and not through the lenses, if his eyes had been open. Well, he only needed glasses for reading; the things were scratched and practically useless. “Listen. Isn’t that amazing? That’s genius. It’s coming up again, El, listen-”
He made listening sound so easy, but it wasn’t, really. The trumpet was there, the notes flying up, sharp and bright, but not magical, life-shaking, the way Dad made them out to be.
“Did you hear that? God. Could slice holes right through the ceiling, that solo.”
Every night. Lying in bed, you could hear it, through the wall, so that by now the notes must have soaked into the walls and framework of the house. Dad said crazy things- that he wanted the symphony played at his funeral, when he died; that, if you paid enough attention, you could hear God speak in the final measures; that this was perfection.
There were problems. The tape had no label; the symphony had no name, no composer, no name to put on the trumpet solo that sounded, Dad said, like a handful of swords. They’d gotten it at a garage sale for twenty-five cents, from a box of unmarked tapes.
God’s voice for twenty-five cents, Ellis thinks. It drove Dad insane. He spent weekends with his musician friends in the library archives until they got tired of sitting round circular tables hidden deep in the stacks, pushing close to a tape player on low, with a pile of cassettes and a thousand reams of paper with call numbers, composers’ names. After that it became Dad’s hobby, a private thing he fiddled with on his leisure, filling notebooks with observations about the orchestration, melodic progression, tempo.
He didn’t speak of it, not as much. But he thought about it. It was always on his mind. The fact is, he played it. Every night, the way some people say their prayers, with his eyes closed and his head bowed reverently low. “Listen,” he told Ellis, and there was urgency in that, but also patience, expectation. His voice said, someday you’ll understand. Give it time.
It’s hard to forget something like that.