Something Different - Writing Stuff

Picture from:http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Circo_noche_gijon_08_octubre_2005.jpg

For some reason I feel like this post should be in the form of a letter:

From the Desk of Victorya Chase

To Whom it May Concern:

Attached please find excerpts from stories I will probably never finish writing. In fact, both of these are the same story. I just can't figure out how to tell it. I tend to lose steam by page five or six, but how much does that matter?

You see, one of the defining moments, if I was to beleive that one moment can define a person, which I don't, but society (or at least television) seems to think it's all one moment that changes a person, not a thousand little ones that get lumped together by a mind that would rather remember one thing than a thousand, was when a friend and I ran off with the circus. I've always wanted to mine it, to see what happened, to go back and answer those literary questions - what was my motivation? How did the protagonist (that's me) grow? If the world doesn't revolve around the protagonist (me) then how come in memory prophetic fallacy (or is it pathetic fallacy?) seems to be so evident. It's sunny when she's happy, when I remember riding in the car. Then there are periods of rain.

At the risk of making this a long letter, one that probably has already been tossed by your interns anyway, please read the attached.

Sincerely,

Victorya Chase

enc. 2

(sorry, this will be a long post. I saved up all the words from my photo posts apparently. Actually, no, I'll post the second version another time.)

Version 1 excerpt:

(Note, this is about the third or fourth paragraph in)

We lived on a small side street across from the college – Mother, Johnny, and I plus two stray cats. Johnny and I were scared of Mother – secretly calling her “Marine Mama.” She was a living Golem – hard as clay despite her girth and always speaking the words of others. She took the Bible literally when it came to discipline – we had welts sprouting like weeds from our legs and arms. There is no arguing with stone, nor any chance for understanding. Her cold poured forth like the vapors from an open fridge and there wasn’t a place Johnny and I knew where we could hide from her. There also wasn’t any reason for us to think this wasn’t how a parent was supposed to behave. This was the way life had always been.

Our father was left behind in Arizona when I was seven. I never knew him to begin with, though the scar on my lip reminded me there were some people in life we don’t need to know. Johnny was still pining for his father, but family secrets spiraled around their history. He dreamt of a father that loved him and could save him, but Mother would always come around with the court papers at such moments to show him why this dream was a fantasy, and fantasies were against the Bible. Still, Johnny cried when he received word that our father wanted nothing to do with us, the words slipping from Mother’s tongue.

* * *

(This is the last of it so far, I'm skipping to the sixth page, when I'm sent to go work outside the circus tents)

The heat was so strong you could smell it, though I’m sure I was really just smelling the animals that paced on the pavement and the sweat glistening on every worker in the circus that dutifully put up tent after tent and pole after pole. Each of them worked, eyes cast down to the pavement to avoid the sunlight. None of them had hats on, and their skin was baked a golden brown. Every once in a while I caught a glance in my direction. My shirt was reflecting the light as quickly as the asphalt was absorbing it. It shone with each movement, I had to be careful – light had already bounced into my eyes and green circles now dotted my line of vision. A couple of people had filled out applications while asking me questions about the circus. They were regulars – someone could fill out an application every thirty days. Sometimes I let them do it earlier, if I had a good premium, and would just hold the application until the system would accept it again. In this heat, the soda was the best premium we’d had – a whole six-pack too.

I had to use the walkie-talkies twice before lunch-time, the heat was unforgiving.