The other day L Bird sent me an email about a short story contest. She thinks I am a good writer and should submit something, me on the other hand am not so sure I am that good of a writer. I tend to switch tenses a lot, and forget dialogue I forgot all the rules when it comes to writing that junk, but curiosity got the best of me so I googled what the technical definition of a short story is.
It turns out that the definition isn’t so simple, but I honed in on it’s normally a narrative that is anywhere from 1000 – 9000 words. After that you start getting into novellas, novels, and such. Well, I figured I might as well give it a shot what’s the worst that could happen, right? They could only tell me that I should never put down a written word again, yeah right! Like I would listen anyway.
So I wrote a short story and I figured I would throw it up here in segments and see what people thought good or bad. It is roughly 5700 words long (approx 8 typed pages) and written as a narrative. I used my nickname for the “bad guy”, well because, well I don’t know why but anyway I kind of feel like a douche for doing it but it’s too late to go through and change it now. So I guess enough stalling, here we go…
Untold Secrets
The clock on my dash says 6:47 AM. It stares at me mockingly, knowing that I am already late as the morning show hosts on the radio banter back and forth about last night’s newest reality television series. I turn that nonsense off and push the gas pedal down even further hoping to reach my destination by 7 AM without attracting the attention of the local sheriff. I am headed to a greasy spoon diner in rural upstate New York to interview someone for a novel I am really hoping to write. I was supposed to be there to meet him at 6:30, but as usual it seems I can’t get out of my own way and am late again.
As the miles click by down the highway I try to go over what I want to ask and how to approach my subject. There will be delicate areas I am sure and but I really want to get his true perspective so I can relay that in my novel. My mind wanders through the dark recesses of my brain to when I realized I first wanted to be a writer. It was my sophmore year in college and I was fast approaching a precipice of flunking out. I had screwed off all through my college career just doing to bare minimum to squeak through to the following semester but it was catching up to me and there was a very good chance that if something drastic didn’t happen I would flunk. Then as luck would have it, life provided me a catalyst. It was a shitty catalyst but a catalyst none the less. The girl I had been dating since high school sat me down and broke my heart. She told me the truth about myself, that I was an overweight, sloppy, lazy bum who wanted nothing less than to coast through life doing the least amount of work possible while expecting that everyone else work hard around him to satisfy his own selfish needs and that she wasn’t going to be a part of that or my life anymore.
After the initial range of emotions of rage, anger, hurt, and eventual sadness I realized she was right even if I didn’t know what to do to change it. I sulked for about a week, missing classes, not leaving my room except to pick up delivery pizza from the entrance of the dorm until my mother called. She told me that she had received a letter from the school saying that I was on the verge of failing out of school. After fifteen minutes of pep talking me she changed her tactic and told me to get my head out of my ass and finish school or I would be in the most serious of situations and then promptly hung up. I wasn’t sure what “the most serious of situations” was but it was enough to get me up and to my next class which happened to be a literature/writing course.
I walked into the class, neither the professor or my classmates seemed to notice or care about my presence or lack thereof in the recent weeks. I sat through the lecture and received the homework assignment of writing a short story about anything but in the style of Victorian authors like Charles Dickens or Emily Bronte. With my heart still dashed and broken I threw myself into this assignment and wrote about love, heartache and redemption. I finished the assignment on time and for the first time in a long time felt I would receive a grade of at least a C. A week later my professor pulled me aside before class and handed me my story which was emblazoned with a bright red B+ across the top. He complimented me on my story and told me I showed a real affinity for writing and offered to work with me on cleaning up some of my faults. That was the spark that started it all for me, from that point on I changed my attitude and started taking all of my classes and writing seriously. I managed to pull up my grade point average and graduate with a solid 3.5 GPA.
I was pulled from my nostalgic reverie by the hand painted sign for the diner emblazoned with “World’s Largest Pancakes Served Here”. I looked at the clock again, 7:07 AM, not good. I hoped he was still there, he wasn’t exactly a man that liked to be kept waiting. I jumped out of the car, grabbed my messenger bag with all of my stuff and ran towards the door. I was almost to the door when I caught my toe on the stoop and went sprawling on the ground. As I got myself up and dusted off I looked up to see every patron staring at me through the plate glass, not exactly the first impression I had wanted to make.
Nevertheless I picked up my bag and walked into the diner feeling embarrassed and wishing I was so small that no one would see me. I scanned the diner until I saw him sitting at a booth in the back corner. He was seated with his back to the wall carefully observing both entrances, he saw me and gave me the slightest of nods to acknowledge he had seen me. I walked over to his table and he gave me another nod to infer that I should sit, then in a gravelly voice he said “How have you been, Lo?” I sat down and replied “I’m good, Uncle. My Mom says to tell you hello.”
The man seated across from me was my uncle, my mother’s older brother. To look at him in his faded wrangler jeans, plain grey v-neck t-shirt and dusty ball cap he looked like the rest of the old farmers that frequented this diner. He was in his sixties and would have had some sparse grey hair if he didn’t keep it trimmed so short. His face was weathered and checked by deep creases and wrinkles but his clear blue eyes still sparkled. His lips twitched as he concentrated on keeping his massive hands steady enough to hold a hot cup of black coffee to his goatee framed mouth. Everything about him was the look of a common working farmhand and that’s the way he liked it. To me and everyone else in the diner he was Mack Schlage but to the eastern seaboard crime outfits he was simply known as Naps.
To Be Continued …
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