That's what I like about fiction. You can just come up with an idea and run with it. If you want your character to wake up and begin to have a metamorphosis, as long as your story line is believable, it can happen. If you want a character to be dead, yet narrate your story, it can happen. Nonfiction doesn't work like that.
I hope to get back to some more fiction and poetry in 2010. They are genres I enjoy and miss. Below is a short story I wrote earlier this year called, "Giving Up." I'm sure it's not finished, but it felt damn good to write it.
"Giving Up"
I wake up shaking. I sit up at the edge of the bed and look over at my wife. She stirs from my movement, but is lost in a dream. My heart races and hurts. “Wake up,” I say. Nothing. I shake my wife. She keeps sleeping. “Hey, I think I’m dying. Something’s wrong with me.”
For almost a year, I wake up in the middle of the night in a panic. My heart races, I feel anxious and scared, and I am convinced that I am going to die. Early on, my wife used to wake up with me; talk me off of the ledge, make sure I calmed down before I went back to sleep. She used to get me water, rub my back, tell me about her dreams. After a while, she stopped. She grew immune to my middle of the night outbursts. She complained about being tired at work, unable to focus, miserable.
I take a few deep breaths and let out an audible moan.
I get up from the bed and walk down the hall. My feet are cold against the hardwood floor. It sends a chill causing me to shiver, like most guys do after their morning pee. I like carpeting, but my wife insisted on hardwood. She said it added character to our house. We live in a square box, built a year after I was born. The houses in our neighborhood are plain. These were starter houses; small ranch-style homes, built without basements, without character. She’d prefer living in an old Victorian mansion. I’m happy here.
I tiptoe down the hallway, but then I remember that the kids are at my in-laws for the night. Ever since our daughter was five and our son was two, my mother-in-law insisted on taking the kids to an annual trip to the circus. We had no problem with the offer. It allowed us to go out for the night—Circus Date Night, we called it, where we would go out for dinner, maybe see a movie or go to a bar—and allowed us to be as loud as we wanted before bed. We’ve skipped Circus Date Night for the past two years. It just doesn’t occur to us anymore. I’m not sure how much longer this annual event will continue. The kids are older now, 12 and 9, and they’ve started to complain about having to go every year; especially our daughter. My mother-in-law usually bribes her with the promise of baked goods or special meals. This year she promised that a friend could come along. It worked.
I walk into my office and check my email. It’s two thirty in the morning. I feel like I have to check since I am awake. I work from home and have a Blackberry. I’m always checking my email. It’s like a tic or something. I get uncomfortable if I don’t check it, like I know it’s all piling up. There’s nothing but junk, which I delete out of habit or necessity. I liked life better before email.
I walk into our living room, and see a car parked in front of the house. I’m not good at identifying makes or models of cars. This one is white and looks like a police car. “A Chevy Impala,” I announce, as if I asked myself the question.
I can see two people sitting in the front seat, but only as shapes. The passenger side window faces my house. I notice that the window is rolled about a quarter of the way down. The person in the passenger seat is smoking. I can tell because every few seconds there is an orange flare at the spot where the person’s lips would be if I could see the face. There is also a faint trace of smoke coming out, slowly, through the cracked window.
I don’t want the people to see me, so I get down on my stomach and do an Army crawl toward the front windows. My new position offers nothing better. My wife got into the habit of keeping the outside lights on all night, and the glare disrupts the clarity. She heard from our overly intrusive and very protective neighbor that keeping the lights on at night was a suggestion made by the local police department. There had been a sudden outbreak in mid-day house burglaries. The police knew it was a couple—a man and woman—performing the crimes. They knew the type and color of car the couple drove in. The town was on high alert.
If the outside lights were off, I could see inside the car better; get a good look at who is—as I perceive—invading my space. I think about going over to the dining room for a better vantage point. We have a bay window area in the dining room, where it is very dark. I start to crawl in that direction, but remember that our oversized pine tree would further obstruct my view. I could turn the outside lights off, but I don’t want to let the people know I am watching.
I see the smoker flick the cigarette out the window, onto my parkway. The butt is still lit, and I could see smoke billow from the area. “Sonofabitch,” I say, “That bastard. I ought to go out there.”
Over the years I’ve grown indifferent to our landscaping. I have no interest in keeping my lawn green and healthy, mostly because my neighbor across the street is constantly working on his. He is out there every day, watering and cutting, pruning and preening, fertilizing and planting. He doesn’t have any kids; my excuse as to why I don’t have time to keep the lawn so perfect.
I had resolved to make this season better. I wanted to give it a try. I wanted to show the kids that hard work can pay off. They know the yard looks bad. They know I really don’t care about it, and I wanted to change that perception. The older they get, the more important it is to stay connected with them.
In the spring, I enrolled in a lawn maintenance program. I follow every step the company commands. I water the grass as instructed, and I cut it at the suggested frequency and at the proposed height. I alternate the direction I mow, and keep the kids off the lawn for three days after the company fertilizes.
Things have not really improved. My neighbor even mentioned it. “You sure are working hard on that lawn,” he said, slowly looking at it as he spoke, mentally commenting on the sorry shape of things. “I hope all that work you are doing will help.” I worry that the flicked butt would damage my precious commodity.
After a minute of no real movement or activity, the passenger door opens up. A young girl—no one I recognize—gets out and closes the door. She is wearing a black T-shirt and a pair of dark shorts. I could see her legs from my position on the floor. They look thin, as does, from what I can tell, the rest of her body. The girl walks over to the butt and steps on it.
“Thoughtful,” I say. The girl leaves the butt on my parkway which, while irritating, is fine since she killed the heat.
The girl can’t be more than sixteen or seventeen years old. Her hair is pulled back in a pony tail. I can’t tell what color her hair is, but I imagine brown, like my wife’s. She walks over to the hood of the car and takes a small backwards jump on top of it. She looks up at the sky and points with her right hand, saying something to her friend. I assume the friend replies because the girl seems to be laughing. At least her body shakes that way.
The girl’s friend opens the driver’s side door and closes it hard. It makes a loud thud, breaking the silence. I begin making the figure out as the driver walks toward the girl. The companion is another girl who looks a bit older, in her twenties, I conclude. The companion girl is similarly dressed, except I could clearly see that her shirt is a plain white tee. Neither of them looks familiar to me. I wonder if the younger girl goes to school with my niece, who lives down the road. I remind myself to call her up in the morning. I will try to describe the couple and see what she can tell me.
The companion girl eases herself onto the hood next to her friend. I can see that they are looking at each other, talking. Occasionally, one of the girls place a hand on the other’s leg or arm. They are both very animated as they speak. I wish I could hear what they are saying. It’s like watching a silent movie, or a show on TV with the sound off. I don’t even get the courtesy of closed captions.
I conclude that the girls are not the local thieves, and begin to lose interest in peeping at their interaction. I start to crawl back away from the window when I notice the older girl lean over and kiss the younger one on the lips. It is a full blown open mouth kiss with heads turning in opposite directions. I ease myself back toward the window to watch the show to which they are not selling tickets.
“They’re doing it in front of my house,” I say. “I have every right to watch.”
The older girl breaks away from the kiss, jumps off of the car and moves in between the legs of her friend. They begin kissing again, with the same intensity as before. I feel dirty for eavesdropping, but I cannot pull myself away from the free live show.
“The younger one,” I say, “she’s got to be at least eighteen,” This helps to ease my guilt. “I’m not a dirty old man. They’re both consenting adults.”
I watch the older girl reach her right hand under the younger girl’s shirt. Her arm moves left and right and around the girl’s back. After a second, her hand comes back out from beneath the shirt. She is holding the girl’s bra and dangles it in, teasingly.
The girls both begin laughing, but do not release their embrace. I am getting a bit uncomfortable from my angle on the floor, so I slowly shift and lay on my left side close to the bottom of the window. They continue kissing. I cannot look away.
I think about all of the times my wife and I did this as teenagers. Late night conversations in the car, talking about life after high school, making fun of our parents, kissing. We used to love those times together in the car. We’d sing along to all of the popular songs on the radio: Abracadabra, Eye of the Tiger, Rosanna, Jack and Diane. We were them, once upon a time, I think to myself. My wife and I don’t sing to songs on the radio anymore. She can’t stand the popular music our kids like. “It makes my ears bleed,” she says. My wife prefers to listen to public radio. I’m fine with that. I like keeping up with the news, and I like Ira Glass. I think we’d be good friends.
I decide that I am in this for the duration. I am getting extremely excited by their actions and hope they go beyond kissing. As if on cue, the older girl removes her friend’s black t-shirt and starts kissing and cupping her breasts. Their bodies are more animated. I pretend that I can hear their sounds.
“This is not happening,” I say, almost too loudly. I am a kid in a candy store. I have won the lottery. I am suddenly pleased at my crappy sleep pattern.
I think about pulling my boxers down to join them remotely, but consider my sleeping wife. She’s not a big fan of DVD porn, think about the reaction I’d get if she walked in on me, masturbating to two young girls parked in front of our house.
I suddenly see headlights from a car off in the distance. As it slowly approaches, the girl’s movements ease up. They stop kissing and hold each other close. The black t-shirt gets draped around the back of the younger girl to conceal her naked body. The car passes. I wonder if it’s the neighborhood thieves, casing out our street at night. Maybe they will decide to skip our house because of all of the activity. Maybe the girls have scared them away from our street, altogether.
The older girl tries to reignite the flame of passion that has been extinguished, but the younger girl has lost her spark. She puts on her shirt, picks up her bra off of the hood of the car, and drapes it on her arm.
The moment is over, for all of us, but they have business to finish later. I hear my wife in our bedroom, call my name. I wonder if the girls will still be together in several years from now, or even in a month. I wonder if this is just girls being experimental. “Love is one thing,” I say. “Life is another.”
My wife calls my name again. I get up from the floor, look down at myself, and think about cancelling my lawn service.
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