Wednesday, May 31, 2006
Today I Wrote a Story
It's a very scary story, one I've been meaning to write for a long time.
When I was about ten, I was standing in my bedroom, brushing my hair or something, when I heard, very clearly, a woman laughing outside my window. I remember how all my muscles locked up, how fearful that sound made me. It was so loud, and so close, and so unmistakably the sound of a grown woman, crouched in the bushes that surrounded the house, laughing.
I went to go tell my parents that there was someone outside the house, and my stepfather got a shotgun that I had no idea existed from the top shelf of a closet and went outside. I think that maybe this was around the same time that my sister was followed home from her boyfriend's house by some guy who had to be scared away by my stepfather; he'd actually pulled into our driveway and was going to get out of the car when Tom came out, so tensions were pretty high at the time. We had started locking our doors for the first time I could remember.
I sat with my mother in the living room and we listened to my stepfather prowling around the house, looking for whoever could have been out there, laughing. Of course, there was no madwoman in the bushes, and the whole thing was dismissed. It was well-known that I had an overactive imagination. Or I could have been asleep and heard the sound in my dream, as I had a problem with sleep-walking and -talking. But I knew. There was no way I could have imagined something like that, not unless I was downright schizophrenic, which I was not.
So, I've played with this idea for a long time. In a poem, I proposed that it was my future self I heard, my own laughter echoing from a different time. In this story, I've used the sound of laughter, first as a disembodied presence, then reembodied in a young girl who bears an uncanny resemblance to her paternal grandmother, the original source of the sound. Tomorrow, after Clurg proofreads for me, I'll post the story. This will signal my new commitment to blogging on a daily basis.
Sorry I've been so boring lately. Let's blame it on how f*%$ing hot it is in Mobile. Ninety degrees and counting.
When I was about ten, I was standing in my bedroom, brushing my hair or something, when I heard, very clearly, a woman laughing outside my window. I remember how all my muscles locked up, how fearful that sound made me. It was so loud, and so close, and so unmistakably the sound of a grown woman, crouched in the bushes that surrounded the house, laughing.
I went to go tell my parents that there was someone outside the house, and my stepfather got a shotgun that I had no idea existed from the top shelf of a closet and went outside. I think that maybe this was around the same time that my sister was followed home from her boyfriend's house by some guy who had to be scared away by my stepfather; he'd actually pulled into our driveway and was going to get out of the car when Tom came out, so tensions were pretty high at the time. We had started locking our doors for the first time I could remember.
I sat with my mother in the living room and we listened to my stepfather prowling around the house, looking for whoever could have been out there, laughing. Of course, there was no madwoman in the bushes, and the whole thing was dismissed. It was well-known that I had an overactive imagination. Or I could have been asleep and heard the sound in my dream, as I had a problem with sleep-walking and -talking. But I knew. There was no way I could have imagined something like that, not unless I was downright schizophrenic, which I was not.
So, I've played with this idea for a long time. In a poem, I proposed that it was my future self I heard, my own laughter echoing from a different time. In this story, I've used the sound of laughter, first as a disembodied presence, then reembodied in a young girl who bears an uncanny resemblance to her paternal grandmother, the original source of the sound. Tomorrow, after Clurg proofreads for me, I'll post the story. This will signal my new commitment to blogging on a daily basis.
Sorry I've been so boring lately. Let's blame it on how f*%$ing hot it is in Mobile. Ninety degrees and counting.
// posted by Amethyst Vineyard @ 12:09 PM 
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