A Story, Spoken: Chapter One

Today is the start of something special…I hope.

Each November, I participate in NaNoWriMo (more on that next time), and I attempt to draft a book before the end of the month. Yes, really. Last year, all my “good” ideas were super involved and would have required lots of research and time that I had wasted leading up to the start of the project. I had had an idea for a relationship, one you’ll be introduced to shortly, and thought, “Well, I’ll just start there and see what happens.”

I’ve never been one to outline whole stories or anything, but I approached this project as a writing exercise. I had a habit in previous manuscripts of rushing through to each designated plot point and missing out on the richness in between. That’s where this story began. I ended up with a bunch of little vignettes about these characters. It was choppy, the character building was erratic, so I saved one last time and didn’t open the file again until a month ago.

When I read what I’d written I was surprised by how much I really loved it. It needed a lot of work, and I still wasn’t sure where it would ultimately end up, but I wanted to do something with these snippets of a story. Of course, this was around the time I was first setting up this blog and planning what I wanted to do with it, and I had the idea to turn this story into a serial.

This post contains the first episode of what will be an ongoing story that I will add to each month. My goal is to bring this woebegone manuscript out of the shadows and have twelve volumes of a completed story by the end of the year. I hope you enjoy these people as much as I have. Truthfully, they’ve really stolen my heart.

Without further ado – A Story, Spoken: Chapter One

 

I was a child who believed. Magic, wishes, good luck, destiny – it was all real to me. Just as real as schoolwork, the friends that lived in the apartment two doors down, or the smell of bacon frying on Saturday mornings. I had such incredible faith in the power of belief that I had entirely convinced myself that fairies lived in the moderately landscaped scrap of grass behind the complex that we called the garden. Even if they didn’t at first, I thought that if I believed unwaveringly enough they would simply sparkle into existence. So I’d squint my eyes against sunlight and watch shadows flick in the trees as wind rattled their branches and I imagined with all my might a world of fairies.

My mother played the perfect audience to my lengthy retellings of the fairy adventures that took place just steps outside the back door. The queen and king’s arguments about what kind of flowers they should magic into blossoming first come springtime were quite the kitchen gossip for us. She would ask how the princess was managing with her willful dragonfly steed and I would tumble into a tale about how she had taken a horrendous fall. Her dragonfly had turned too quickly to avoid the back fence and she fell, breaking one of her delicate silver wings. I told how they had called for a special fairy healer from a distant garden across the street and how he had bound her with thread from the finest spider’s silk and spoke ancient magic words over her tattered wing. It had taken many weeks, but miraculously, the princess had a full recovery and soon married the healer who had traveled so far and worked so tirelessly to save her. And so it went for years, the neverending fairy saga of the Cedar Creek Apartment flowerbeds.

She was beautiful, my mother. Her smile was genuine even on her worst days and her eyes shimmered with a love of life. She found wonder in small things and cherished them for their fleeting weight. Her hair was a soft curl around my tired finger; her arms an elegant length just the right height to help me twirl. Secretly, I imagined the fairy princess with her face.

She indulged me, as her mother had indulged her. Where my mother was naive and shone with a delicate beauty of fairy tales, my nan was gregarious, loud, and handsome in a blunt way that mimicked her nature. Nan had showered her daughter with love, almost pushing it onto her, dropping her affection in my mother’s lap and then retreating before my mother had time to choose whether or not she would accept it. Love, for Nan, was abundant and all-encompassing. She had a way of making you feel like the center of the universe when she bestowed her love on you, but in a way, not unlike the Eye of Sauron, it was intense. You had no choice but to accept the love, the compliment, the gift she wanted you to have. For my mother, that kind of love had a much stronger hand in her development of character than either of them cared to admit. There’s was a symbiotic relationship. They fed off of each other in subtle ways that I wasn’t really aware of until I matured enough to see the nuance of how they interacted. Once I’d seen it, I couldn’t unsee it and I found it truly fascinating. I had a front-row seat to most of it because we were almost always all together. Nan lived in a small house a few blocks away from our apartment, but I could have sworn there was a divot in the sidewalk that marked the path we had worn between our homes.

Most days, I would come home from school, Nan would arrive within an hour to sit at the kitchen table leaning towards the small open window with cafe curtains my mom had sewn, blowing the smoke from her Capri Slims out into the garden. Even as an adult, I still pictured the garden fairies hiding in their homes every afternoon from the smog that drifted into their kingdom when Nan arrived. It used to upset her when I would try to explain why the fairies I spent so much time pointing out to my mother never appeared when she was there.

I would start to put dinner together, dicing vegetables, simmering sauces, until my mom stumbled in after her shift at the kitschy boutique a few blocks away. As much as I was sure her feet hurt, she would join me in the kitchen, helping me finish up the meal, swaying back and forth to the beat of whatever oldie had caught her ear on the radio. Nan would pipe up for a verse or two, but mostly she would just watch us like we were a play. She’d sip on her cigarette and smile at us with a secret kind of pride only mothers, and then grandmothers can achieve or even understand.

After a meal, either laughing around the table or silently in front of an old musical dancing across our small television, we would quietly clean up and retreat to our chairs and read. Nan favored a floral printed wingback with a crocheted doily draped over the back. Mom usually put her feet up on the chaise, a garage sale find that Nan had gifted her for Christmas one year. I would flop onto the couch with the kind of slouchy positioning that is only comfortable when you are young and your muscles are more forgiving. And there we would stay, completely engrossed in whatever invented land, adventure, or situation we were reading about in complete silence aside from the small gasp or chuckle brought forth by those special nuggets of story that hit your humanity. It wasn’t uncommon for me to wake up in the middle of the night with a blanket thrown over me, left behind to dream undisturbed.

Breakfast was like a book club meeting. We had diverse tastes, but honest respect and admiration for any book we encountered. Sure there were some genres we generally steered away from, but as true lovers of books and stories, we had such incredible regard for anyone who had successfully written and published a book. No matter how awful the content or quality might be, they had created something out of nothing. That was the magic we all saw and believed in long after my fairies went away to slumber in the hibernation of childhood memories. Our world was small, yet infinitely vast, only limited to the size of the library or the dusty boxes of paperbacks we collected from garage sales.

I graduated high school with honors, enrolled at the junior college and worked alongside my mother at the boutique until I was able to transfer to the four-year college where I earned my Bachelor’s in English. I split my time between the campus, home, and the random shifts I was able to pick up anywhere that would take me. I was grateful for the scholarships my writing and grades had earned me, but school wasn’t cheap. Mom and Nan chipped in as much as they could, so proud of me for pursuing my dream on a road paved with words. When I earned my degree, they coerced half the neighborhood into throwing me a massive block party to celebrate. As I waded through the faces that had made up my childhood, the question echoing from each of them was, “What’s next, Annie?”

And I would smile and not knowing what else to say would reply simply with, “Words.”

As the party was winding down, and the guests were trickling back to their houses, my matriarchs linked their arms with mine and walked me back to the apartment. They asked me if I’d enjoyed the party and if I’d said goodbye to so and so, but I could feel them glancing back and forth to each other with smiles of conspiracy. I knew there was one more surprise coming, but I wasn’t at all expecting what I found when I walked through our front door. A polished, black Underwood typewriter was sitting prettily on the Formica kitchen table. The glossy paint reflected the fluorescent light in a way that made it look like the whole thing was drenched in ink. And I felt like I would drown in it.

It was beautiful, and the most thoughtful and perfect gift I had ever received, but all I could do was pray that my smile was convincing these ladies that knew me better than the mirror in the bathroom. I had always known I would be a writer, but when suddenly faced with the gift of an empty vessel aching to be filled and no reason not to begin, the blank pages stacked beside the typewriter looked like a mountain I could never hope to summit. At some point along the way of infinite security and confidence in my abilities, not without validation either, a small seed of doubt had somehow found its way into my mind and confronted with the possibility of finally fulfilling my dream, I realized that this weed of a thought had somehow managed to worm it’s way around my soul, strangling and constricting me into a web of uncertainty that was debilitating.

And then my mother died.
I was twenty-two, newly graduated, the world at my feet, with a newly discovered fear of success. Nan and my beautiful mother were driving to the store to pick up some essentials for the week and coast by a few garage sales they had seen advertised. They had turned onto the main road after leaving the grocery store, and a kid with a newly minted driver’s license rammed into the driver’s side of my mom’s hatchback. Nan, never one to wear a seatbelt, had been tossed so violently that when she hit her head on the passenger door, she was knocked unconscious and her eyes went black forever. When she woke up in the hospital that evening, she had her first panic attack when she realized the world had disappeared. She had her second a few hours later when I gripped her hand and watched the horror contort her face as the doctor told her that her daughter, my angelic, vibrant mother, had been killed.

I don’t think she cared that she couldn’t see anymore – a small death had been dwarfed and swallowed in one swift and brutal wave. I watched my own agony mirrored in her and flinched with every sob. She clung to me like a lifeline, cracking the bones in my hand, reaching, dragging me into a hard embrace. I felt like she was trying to claw her way out of her own mind, out of a horror she couldn’t comprehend, to chase a dissolving thread of hope.

From the corner of my eye, I watched the doctor retreat from the room, heard the click of the door closing behind, and the rest of the world disappeared with him. Nan and I hovered, alone and drowning, in a sea of uncertainty about what life meant now. We didn’t speak. For the first time in either of our lives, words had failed us.