The girl sits at one of the rickety wooden desks with a blank sheet of paper. She doodles on it for a minute drawing star-flowers and her own name in curly-cues. She writes an arbitrary sentence.
Jim walked through the field and sat down amongst the dark leafed clovers.
She stares off into space for a while, sucking on the rubbery pink end of her pencil, a finger in her ear. Well, that’s a clever sentence, she thinks, but why does Jim need to ‘sit down’, can’t he just ‘sit’? The girl ponders this and then scratches out the word ‘down’. And what about ‘walked through’? Do we really need to know that? She rewrites the sentence.
Jim sat in the field amongst the dark leafed clovers.
The temporal lobe chimes in.
“But we don’t hear anything. You can’t possibly have a story without any sounds.” True, the girl thinks.
“And colors!” The occipital lobe shouts. “You need colors!”
She draws a thick black line through the sentence and writes below it:
Jim sat in the field amongst the dark-green leafed clovers, a red-black hawk cawing overhead.
A hand pops up from the first row.
A fellow classmate asks, “Is Jim hunting the hawk?”
The girl shakes her head.
“Well, then why is the hawk there?”
“Atmosphere?” The girl suggests.
The classmate shrugs and murmured whispers ripple through the front row. A great throat clearing echoes through the room.
“Atmosphere is all good and fine, but what is Jim’s purpose for sitting in this field? Where is the plot? Why is this story being told today?” the teacher asks.
The girl scratches her temple with the now eraser-less end of her pencil, leaving jagged pink lines across her face.
“Can’t I just finish the story first?” she asks.
The teacher shakes his head.
“You’ve got to have it mapped out first. Class? Any ideas? From what does this piece derive its energy?”
Whispers and giggles fill the room.
“Language?” someone asks.
“The action?” the girl’s father offers.
“Jim!” her mother yells. “Jim! Jim! Jim!”
“Ah, yes,” the teacher says, rubbing his chin. “It is a character driven piece. So what do we make of Jim as a character?”
“But I don’t want it to be a character piece,” the girl protests.
“Quiet!” the teacher says. “You aren’t qualified.”
The girl sulks, she sucks on the fraying edge of her collar and twists her shirt around her stomach.
“Where is Jim from?” her mother asks. “He sounds like such a nice boy, I’d like to know where he’s from.”
“Mom!” the girl cries.
“An excellent point, mother!” the teacher says, his eyes lingering on the mother’s breasts. Her mother blushes, whispering to her distracted father who is staring at the bare-midriff of a young coed in the front row.
The girl scribbles a new sentence.
Jim sat in the field amongst the dark-green leafed clovers, having just run away from his oppressive stepfather and the stark Nebraskan countryside.
“Does Jim have a dog?” her grandmother’s frail voice wavers. “Everybody loves dogs.”
The girl pulls her split ends apart, her hair loose and tattered.
“What type of story do we have here?” the teacher asks, striding militantly around the room.
“A love story!” the girl’s best friend squeals. “But how dare you write about my ex-boyfriend Jim!”
“I didn’t,” the girl pleads.
“An action story!” her little brother yells, throwing himself to the floor with his fingers pointed like machine guns.
“Hmmm… Possibly,” the teacher says.
The girl shakes her head and swipes at the brother as he tries to bomb her paper with scribbles. She chews her ragged cuticles, pulling callused bits of flesh away.
“A bildungsroman!” Dickens boasts from the middle row as Kundera and Joyce come in late, sneaking in noisily through the back door.
“Yes!” the teacher pumps his fist in the air. “You are correct, Charles.”
Dostoevsky rolls his eyes.
“What about form? What are we writing here?”
“A novella!” Kafka shouts, twittering his fingers, nervously glancing back at Kundera who is making obscene hand gestures as Joyce breaks out a flask.
“A Novel!” Tolstoy yells.
“A short story,” Nabokov says in his low voice, analyzing the whole scene in a brief glance before walking out. The girl nods vigorously, filling the paper with illegible scratches as Williams, Baldwin and McCarthy whisper in her ear, pulling at loose threads in her shirt. Droplets of blood fall from her fingertips to the paper and a salty crust collects at her mouth corners. Faulkner writes his own version next to hers that is far better, will always be better, she should just give up.
Jim sat in the field, fingers twined around a bit of rope, amongst the dark-green leafed clovers, tears like rivers flowing down his face. The sky darkened to a purple gray over the cold Nebraskan countryside as the parentless twelve-year-old looked to the tree line in the distance, a shadowy figure watching him.
“Parentless?!” Jim’s mother cries. She rattles her fists in the air.
“You’re a liar!” Jim’s father screams. “That isn’t how it happened at all!”
“But I didn’t even write you,” the girl protests.
“You think you are the God of this world?” the father shouts. Jim’s baby sister runs in screaming, her pants wet and urine dribbling on the floor.
“I want my brother!” the baby screams. “I want my brother!”
Yellow droplets fling onto the girl’s bare legs and she feels the warm liquid dripping down her calves.
“See?” the mother yells. “You’ve upset the baby!”
The girl holds out her hands, but the baby runs away and then she looks up at the back of the room and a pitiful little boy sits huddled watching them, tears streaming like rivers down his face, his eyes huge and wide.
“Look what you’ve done!” the ensemble cries. “Take some responsibility!”
“I can fix this,” the girl stammers, scrawling away at her paper. “I can fix this!”
She takes a deep breath.
Jim sat in the field, fingers twined around a bit of rope, amongst the dark-green leafed clovers, tears like rivers flowing down his face. The sky darkened to a purple gray over the cold Nebraskan countryside, thunder cracking overhead, as the twelve-year-old runaway looked to the tree line in the distance, a shadowy figure watching him. The shadowy figure chased him and the boy encountered perilous obstacles along the way –“BUT WAIT WAIT WAIT” she yells at the groaning audience- in the end he is better for it. He defeats the shadowy figure in duel of wit and strength –her brother howls in pleasure- and finds his way back to his family, both his parents alive and well- the parents beam- and he finds what a man he truly is inside, a great man, who has cured cancer, married his long lost love, discovered the meaning of life and thereby proved the existence of God!
The girl holds her bloodied hands to the heavens. The room is silent.
A frail voice pipes up.
“Couldn’t you add a dog though? Everybody loves dogs.”