Nasty Conjugation

Still trying to push myself to write more while I’m not in school. I wrote this today, and I make no judgment upon it. I merely present it to the website as an offering to prove my devotion. Think of it like a vestal virgin, minus the mystery of femininity and/or wrathful gods. I hope you’re all doing well! Drop me a line sometime, tell me the best thing that’s happened to you in the last month.

I wrote a character, and I gave him a life and some quirks. Nothing too complicated, usually, nothing that would make you think twice. I gave him a day in summer with a few hours to kill, and I gave him a big new house with a big new lawn. I gave him a fiancée at work and a cat watching from the window, and finally I gave him a lawnmower.

I wrote him back and forth across the grass, but I wasn’t in a hurry. Like I said, it’s a big yard. I wrote a big cloud of white smoke when he fired up the lawnmower because he had accidentally poured oil into the gas tank. It billows comically out, filling the driveway and drifting into the yard. He mows the lawn, and I make fresh green trails behind him, like vacuuming on carpet. I briefly get him stuck in a drainage ditch by the road. He escapes.

I made him pretty normal, in most respects, though I also made him suspect otherwise. He mistakes minor quirks for actual eccentricity. It’s not that he was made haphazardly, without regard to detail. I took care. I gave him a sense of duty which sometimes causes him problems. I gave him an inquisitive mind prone to over-analysis, circular thought patterns, wild imagination, anxiety. When I gave him a lawn to mow, I gave him plenty of time to think.

He starts by thinking about using the natural decline in his back yard to build some terraced gardens. He wants flowers, herbs, and vegetables to grow there, to make the whole yard look like an overgrown English garden. He remembers reading the Secret Garden over and over again when he was in grade school. His fiancée is reading it now.

Because I am especially cruel, I take this moment to stick a song in his head that won’t go away. I don’t give him the whole song, just the chorus, and I make him unsure of the lyrics. He thinks it sounds like, “Twenty years of sleep/just to sleep/forever,” but after it runs in his head for twenty minutes he’s not sure. I add another brief bit that mentions a building in Japan, but I only give him about half the lyrics.

I make the mower find a hidden piece of wood in the tall grass, splitting it with a loud crack that makes him jump. He thinks about soft tissue, how vulnerable it is, how most things in general are pretty vulnerable. I make him ponder death and the afterlife, which is something I make him do a lot.

I don’t know why I do that to him.

The song is still in his head, so I make him think about the lyrics. Is the singer saying that in a lifetime a person probably spends twenty years sleeping, only to die and sleep forever? He wonders how fast it takes for a thought to form and appear, and then he wonders about dreams (which he does because I gave him particularly strange ones the night before). If a dream which lasts three minutes can seem like days, how long does the last thought resonate at the final moment? Is that what it means to sleep forever? Or maybe that last dream is the afterlife. He makes a mental note to check online for how much someone sleeps in a lifetime.

I made the day hot and blue, gave him no clouds. I did give him trees, and so I make him pause between two of them in the shade. He takes off his hat, runs his hand through his hair, notes that the trees are the perfect distance from each other to hang a hammock. I make a katydid hop away from where his foot disturbs it. He watches it go and thinks about nature.

I gave him all these things, and the death stuff, too, but I’m most proud of the sense of wonder that I gave him. It’s bigger than the morbid fascination, bigger than the anxiety. Sometimes I let him see how big it is, and that makes us both feel better.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 16th, 2007 at 4:27 pm and is filed under Short shorts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.