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timepiececlockHere's the semi-autobiographical short story I'm about to turn in for my fiction writing class. Title:
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Deja Vu
She says to be careful who looks at me in dreams, and don't catch their eyes unless I’m sure I want to, because they could just as easily be looking into me while I stare at them. There’s a glint her eye as she speaks, her nicotine voice a familiar sound to me. Her smoke drifts to the side of her face, and the wrinkles around her eyebrows bend and twist with her smile, loving but cautious.
Dreams are movement, she announces, tapping the cigarette. They take you places, and sometimes you know where you’re going and sometime you don’t. I follow the ash down with my gaze, and nod. I ask her how she knows when your dream is one those dreams, and when it’s just one inside yourself.
She answers that one always knows, when it’s happening. Or at least that I will always know, because I was nothing if not awake to my world, from the day I was born. There’s a familiar, knowing smile, and she gestures for a hug. Her arms are thin and loose, with splashy blotches of blood under the skin, and clothes baggier every day. I wish she’d stop smoking, but she says we make our own choices in life; she’d told my mother just as much when she was young.
As I climb onto the couch, avoiding the piles of manila folders, bank statements, medicine receipts and art magazines, she warns me that if someone is familiar then I’d better remember why. It’s important, even if the answer goes back farther than memories should.
First impressions tell you the world, according to her. Not about who a person is, but why who they are should matter to me. I should look into their eyes and if I’ve known them before I’ll know them again. Time’s funny that way, and she chuckles, because a person doesn’t live all their lives in order. Sometimes it all jumps around.
A piece of me sits up straighter then, and I tell her about playing Q-zar, the laser-tag game, the first time. I tell her about that stretch of moments, my nine-year-old body bent away in the corner with my back on the carpeted floor—no, it was the ground—and my gun pointed into the dark that seemed everywhere around me. I tell her about the onset of feeling that came with the knowledge of my friends close by but getting farther, laser guns in hand and stealthily wandering the pillars and the boxes and maybe trenches, too. I’d hurt my knee rounding the last giant tube and ducking into the ground, but I couldn’t feel any pain, couldn’t feel any thin dribbles of liquid down my skin, and I knew I should stop looking for something that wasn’t there because I didn’t have the time to waste.
I describe lying in the dark with eyes searching the aisles and corners for the others, their clothes faintly glowing in the black lights just like mine, wondering why I’ve never played laser tag before, clutching the plastic trigger with sweaty little girly pink fingernails and watching the power dial on the barrel of my weapon slowly decrease with every moment I sit waiting—camping out, they called it, though I can’t say who taught me that. I tell her about the rush of breath and that sliver of time where everything stilled and the words were scrambling in my head like a marquee—
I know this I know this.
I know the neon lights flashing above me, around me, and the dark swooping in on every side. I know the whine and whirr of electronic vests and the cries and the stomping of feet and the blare of the alarm when the green team breaks through our defenses to try for our base.
I look into her blue eyes, so much older than mine, and I whisper the secret. I tell her how wrong it is, how it was all so wrong because they don't make lasers except in movies and I've never even held a real gun before and I don’t play in the dark and I hate the military, I always have.
My grandma lifts my chin, brushes a curl from my eyes, and asks me how I know I hate the military when I’m only nine years old.
And I frown, because I don’t know what to say.
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And before you ask, yes, my grandma Marje is a bit weird. But she's also my favorite. The fiction aspect here, or semi-lack-thereof is iffy, and difficult to explain. But I doubt my instructor will care.
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Deja Vu
She says to be careful who looks at me in dreams, and don't catch their eyes unless I’m sure I want to, because they could just as easily be looking into me while I stare at them. There’s a glint her eye as she speaks, her nicotine voice a familiar sound to me. Her smoke drifts to the side of her face, and the wrinkles around her eyebrows bend and twist with her smile, loving but cautious.
Dreams are movement, she announces, tapping the cigarette. They take you places, and sometimes you know where you’re going and sometime you don’t. I follow the ash down with my gaze, and nod. I ask her how she knows when your dream is one those dreams, and when it’s just one inside yourself.
She answers that one always knows, when it’s happening. Or at least that I will always know, because I was nothing if not awake to my world, from the day I was born. There’s a familiar, knowing smile, and she gestures for a hug. Her arms are thin and loose, with splashy blotches of blood under the skin, and clothes baggier every day. I wish she’d stop smoking, but she says we make our own choices in life; she’d told my mother just as much when she was young.
As I climb onto the couch, avoiding the piles of manila folders, bank statements, medicine receipts and art magazines, she warns me that if someone is familiar then I’d better remember why. It’s important, even if the answer goes back farther than memories should.
First impressions tell you the world, according to her. Not about who a person is, but why who they are should matter to me. I should look into their eyes and if I’ve known them before I’ll know them again. Time’s funny that way, and she chuckles, because a person doesn’t live all their lives in order. Sometimes it all jumps around.
A piece of me sits up straighter then, and I tell her about playing Q-zar, the laser-tag game, the first time. I tell her about that stretch of moments, my nine-year-old body bent away in the corner with my back on the carpeted floor—no, it was the ground—and my gun pointed into the dark that seemed everywhere around me. I tell her about the onset of feeling that came with the knowledge of my friends close by but getting farther, laser guns in hand and stealthily wandering the pillars and the boxes and maybe trenches, too. I’d hurt my knee rounding the last giant tube and ducking into the ground, but I couldn’t feel any pain, couldn’t feel any thin dribbles of liquid down my skin, and I knew I should stop looking for something that wasn’t there because I didn’t have the time to waste.
I describe lying in the dark with eyes searching the aisles and corners for the others, their clothes faintly glowing in the black lights just like mine, wondering why I’ve never played laser tag before, clutching the plastic trigger with sweaty little girly pink fingernails and watching the power dial on the barrel of my weapon slowly decrease with every moment I sit waiting—camping out, they called it, though I can’t say who taught me that. I tell her about the rush of breath and that sliver of time where everything stilled and the words were scrambling in my head like a marquee—
I know this I know this.
I know the neon lights flashing above me, around me, and the dark swooping in on every side. I know the whine and whirr of electronic vests and the cries and the stomping of feet and the blare of the alarm when the green team breaks through our defenses to try for our base.
I look into her blue eyes, so much older than mine, and I whisper the secret. I tell her how wrong it is, how it was all so wrong because they don't make lasers except in movies and I've never even held a real gun before and I don’t play in the dark and I hate the military, I always have.
My grandma lifts my chin, brushes a curl from my eyes, and asks me how I know I hate the military when I’m only nine years old.
And I frown, because I don’t know what to say.
----------------------------------------
And before you ask, yes, my grandma Marje is a bit weird. But she's also my favorite. The fiction aspect here, or semi-lack-thereof is iffy, and difficult to explain. But I doubt my instructor will care.
