Intro to Fiction: Assignment #1.
The fairground is empty, and you and your son walk around for a bit, drowned in silence. You nestle the slide of your pistol in your pocket with the tips of your index and thumb, curious of how tense the jack is. The tarps over some of the booths have come undone at the corners, and they rustle and flap, caught between the wind and the wood, and you impatiently watch your son, who eases his hand over his forehead like he's nursing a headache, until he says, "It's coming back to me. A little."
"Yeah?" you say, feigning interest.
The boy holds up his hand, tipping it from side to side.
You lead your boy around a row of stacked cages where, in summer, they set up the dunking machine and the bearded lady's chair and the fast-pitch machines, all of which you've never taken your boy to see. You nonchalantly step over the freshly tilled patch of dirt you spent all last night and all of this morning filling, still picking out wads of dirt from inbetween your nails. You finish digging into your fingers and notice that the boy stopped over the heap.
"Mandy?"
You chuckle softly, a sort of belly laugh that forces a scowl upon your boy's face. You kick an uneven pile of dirt, and look off to the horizon, ignoring him.
"I held it in my hand, you know," your boy says, sounding like a whimper.
"I'd figure," you say.
It's quiet, the land flat and metal-blue and empty for miles in every direction, and you can hear the rustle of the tarps and your boy sniffling and sighing, seemingly unsure of how to breathe in the cold air. You clench the barrel of the gun tightly between your index and thumb and ring fingers, sniff the rotten air of oil and molten steel from the nearby industrial plant, and wonder if Mandy and Gwen enjoyed the quiet.
"Covered the center of my palm", your boy continues, raising his hand like a child flaunting a scraped knee.
"Big, huh?"
"Big enough."
"Running out of patience, boy," you say.
Your boy nods knowingly. "I'd guess you would be."
"Never my strong suit." You realize that it was the first time you hadn't lied in years.
"No."
"This has been nice. Like old times, reconnecting and all that," you say, catching a glimpse of your boy inbetween ignoring glances, looking as if he's talking, murmuring, speaking to someone else or some phantom stuck between the mound of peat moss in front of you.
"I told her that night to just go, just put as much country as she could between you and her until I got out. I told her to trust no one. I told her you'd stay hot on her trail even when all logic said you'd quit. I told her even if I told you I had it, you'd have to cover your bets - you'd have to come looking for her."
You check your watch, wonder what frozen dinner you'll be unthawing tonight, and look off into the sky, spotting a cloud that resembles a tugboat.
"I told her if you ever caught up to her, to take you to the fairground."
"Who's this we're talking about?" you interrupt, the tugboat spreading out over the yellow and maroon sky.
"Gwen." Your boy's eyes turn black, as if forcing something out of his head.
"You don't say." You squeeze the barrel of your gun, prepared now, with your entire hand, grip the barrel, and pull it from your pocket. The gun radiates a dull sheen in the setting sun, surprising for a gun that's had a lot of practice. You tap it against your outer knee. Your boy doesn't seem surprised, his eyes still black and unfocused and wandering, looking for some ghost.
"Told her to tell you that's all she knew. I'd hid it here. Somewhere here."
"Lotta ground."
Your boy nods.
The boy watches you turn and face him, poised and gripping the gun and crossing your arms over your groin, you and your gun curious and waiting to see how long it'll take this boy to fess up.
"The kinda money that stone'll bring," you say, "a man could retire."
"To what?" your boy says, the black cloud fading from his pupils, a weak and curious gleam invading instead.
"Mexico."
"To what, though?" the boy continues, "Mean old man like you? What else you got, you ain't stealing something, killing somebody, making sure no one alive has a good fucking day?"
A warm uneasiness floods into you. The boy surprised you, nothing to do with what he said, that's old news. You shrug, chuckle for a second under your breath, and clasp the barrel of the gun tightly against the dirt-caked crotch of your jeans. For a minute, the uneasy quiet returns, submerged between you two, a dead quiet between the crisp rustle of tarp against tall, unshaved grass. A dead quiet echoing off the mounds of uneven grass eerily scattered beneath the circus props of summer and the solitary oak filtering out the setting sun.. A dead quiet that has forced you to realize that the boy actually made you think, irked you and made you realize something you hadn't quite thought about before.
"It just come to me," you say, forcing something into the silence.
"What's that?" The boy says, acknowledging the conversational gap.
"You've known for, what, three years now that Gwen is no more?"
"Dead."
"If you like," you say, "Dead." Your boy seems curious as to why a man with such a colorfully violent past would prefer to be polite.
"Yeah", he mutters.
"Three years," you say, coughing into the gap between the two of you. "Lotta time to think."
The boy nods, without a singular notion of interest of where the conversation is being led.
"Plan," you continue.
The boy nods once more, the silence bulging like the neck of a toad.
You look at the gun gripped tightly between the coils of your fingers. "This going to fire?" you ask, fully aware of the answer.
The boy shakes his head.
You say, curiously, "It's loaded. I can feel the mag weight."
"Jack the slide," the boy says, as if he built the thing himself.
You give it a few seconds, absorbing the irritating encyclopedia of knowledge the boy seems to suddenly possess. You yank back hard, bending over a bit, but the slide is stone.
"Krazy Glue," the boy sneers. "Filled the barrel, too."
As you struggle with the fixture, the boy pulls his hand from his pocket and opens up his knife. He seems visibly mad, though obnoxiously weak, flaccidly juggling the knife between his fingers. You wonder how the boy ever made it this far without you, how he managed to pull a dumb move like let Gwen leave him bloodied up for the cops, how he could hardly make it with Mandy. The boy was very talented with a knife, you've seen him win money this way, throwing knives at targets, dancing blades between his fingers in a blur, but he was weak. Weak without you.
He says, "Wherever you buried her, you're digging her out."
Dissatisfied with the situation, but reluctant under the circumstances, you nod. "I got a shovel in the trunk."
The boy shakes his head, twisting the knife between his fingers like a drumstick. "With your hands."
Dawn arrives, achingly, the sky bronzed with it along the lower reaches, when the boy chucks the shovel into the grave, cold soil knotted with oak roots and smears of your blood, black and caked along wounds squeezed out from hours of gouging thick, cakey soil. The thick stains of soil smeared along your thighs and calves and the grime on your face drips with sweat and the blood from your broken nails. The boy, your boy, stands there, sliding the tip of the knife along the topography of his palm, seemingly drawing the size of the diamond into his skin.
You cough into the pit of moss and look up at the boy, sweat-resembling tears and dirt in your eyes and mouth. “You know you’re not even my kid? Just some fucking whore’s kid that got thrown into a barrel I picked up for some missing baby scam. I saved you, kid, you need me.”
He smirks viciously, and howls, “Was this in Las Vegas? Or Idaho?”
Before you can say anything, the shovels smashes hard against bone. “Throw It up here,” the boy says, and steps back as you lunge it, rudely and purposely.
The sun is up now, and you kneel over the mound and continue to dig with your cracked, bloody fingers. You claw away the dirt for a while, and then there she is, all black and rotted, bones exposed in some places, her rib cage and bone structure both familiar and uninteresting.
You look up at the boy, and absent-mindedly say, “Now what?”
The boy looks her shriveled body over and says, “What’d you do with her clothes?”
“Burned ‘em.”
“I mean, why’d you take them off in the first place?”
You turn to the corpse, hiding your face and sly grin from the boy, who actually seems shaken and disturbed.
“Look closer,” the boy says, “Where her stomach used to be.”
You squat, dig a cluster of dead roots and crusted bone from the cavity, and peer into it, as if trying to find an obscure detail in a painting. You shift your head from side to side, trying to get a better angle, hardly concentrating on the sound of a shovel scraping across hard soil a foot above you. Finally, finally, you see it.
“I’ll be damned.”
You notice your boy lift the shovel, and the whistle of his swing is the last thing you hear before it connects with your temple. You hear faint sirens, a repeating whistle, and a hot rhythm aching and burning and creeping along it into your forehead.
“Now hold on,” you say, dizzy and desperate. He hits you again, the rat bastard, and the ache whips into your face, the sight and sound draining from you. The third swing makes your head tilt funny on your neck, and, as your knees give out, unlocking and surrendering into the dense soil, you collapse into the grave, beside Gwen, beside the girl you took away from your boy.
I chose to rewrite the short story "Until Gwen" from the perspective of the boy's father, retaining the form and much of the sentence structure from the story, as well as the interestingly-placed second-person perspective. The events that happen with the father and son happen in real-time, meaning I added no temporal cuts or flashbacks to the scene, keeping with the original pace of the story. More or less, the flow hasn't changed, merely the perspective of the scene.
Information is most certainly missing, also some is added in as well. I've always felt that the father in the story never truly respects the son, even treats him as a child, so I've added a certain side to the father that's condescending and perhaps even disgusted with this boy he found: A sentence like'"Covered the center of my palm", your boy continues, raising his hand like a child flaunting a scraped knee.' emphasizes a certain kid of disrespect and a pity that comes from a man unaware of how to be a considerate father to someone. The fact that he never actually refers to his son as "his son", merely "the boy", builds upon that character.
The man is disrespectful, but he's also ignorant and impatient, and I elaborated upon his ignorance: A simple statement such as 'Your father checks his watch, and looks off into the sky.' emphasizes the man in his purest form, but focusing on what goes on his head as his continues through his impatient motions makes his impatient more leering, childish, even rude, as his son talks about his dead girlfriend: 'You check your watch, wonder what frozen dinner you'll be unthawing tonight, and look off into the sky, spotting a cloud that resembles a tugboat.' The elaboration suggests a motion that we already recognize from the father, but there's a different dimension of "How insensitive can this guy be?!" that perhaps we wouldn't have really considered.
The perspective of the father in relation to the narrator is one-sided, and hardly as interesting as the narrator's turmoil. I caught myself playing into the father's ignorance more often than playing into what he brought his son to the fairground for, and I was pleased, because I ran with the motion that the father had done this ritual for so long that he was desensitized even when he was going to do the same to his son. There seems to be an ocean of tension between them, and I built upon that comfortable awkwardness. The impact the father's perspective will have on the reader is relatively nonexistant, unless the reader sympathizes with the criminal and is guided by the tension between them. The father has little or no emotional value to him, and even when he contemplates the deaths of Mandy and Gwen, he merely seems curious, not regretful, for what he has done.
The new perspective builds upon basic truths we have collected from the narrator about his father: he's an ignorant, nearly regretless thug that treats the incoming death of his son as business instead of a burden. The father's perspective allows the reader to understand how he emotionally belittles his son, and how superior he believes himself to be in relation. I've manipulated the father into feeling resentful of his son when he finally figures out the gun won't fire, played into his mask of superiority by his comparing the boy to a child, and even tore out most references to any pain, suffering, or weeping the father endured as he dug up Gwen's grave, a testament to how proud and obnoxiously self-righteous I believed the father to be.
If anything, the new perspective will allow readers to become the villain, become the belittling thug, if only for one evening at the fairground.