The Forgettable Unforgettable Assignment

Fourteen and a freshman in high school, Sarah Little could think of nothing worst than having to come to school with a bright red zit the size of Machu Pichu on the tip of her nose. She arrived at Minot High School that morning a bit frazzled and upset, after having to remind her mother for the N-teenth time NOT to drop her off in front of the building. She would much rather be dropped off in front of the City Hall and walk the extra seven minutes to school on her own, despite the hail that was falling steadily the size of wombats outside.

To add to the trouble, in first period, Sarah discovered that her best friend was wearing the same exact shirt that day. How embarrassing! To have to spend the entire day with someone wearing the same shirt as if they had planned it, as if they were in the 4th grade again! There was no other choice, but for her to trudge to her locker and pull out that crappy black fleece sweater that she kept in there for “emergencies”—the sweater that always caused her hair to fly up in static lightning storms, making everything she touched turn into a field of hyperactive electric shocks.

The day did not improve. In Italian class that day, they were having a quiz on the conjugation of the near past participles. “Io ho. Tu hai. Egli… egli… arghhh! I won’t be able to have these memorized before 8th period!” she thought frantically.

So she determined the wisest thing to do was to make a little cheat sheet for herself out of the corner of her math notebook. When she got to class, she slipped the little piece of paper under her quiz and was sure no one would notice.

Mr. D (short for Mr. Di Giovanni) started to announce the quiz. “Numero uno, classe, numero uno…”

“Psst. Sarah.”

It was Nathan. The boy Sarah had had a crush on since the first day of school. He was the captain of the boys’ freshmen soccer team and every time he called her name, she blushed a fuchsia color.

“Sarah. Can I borrow a pen?”

Sarah couldn’t look him in the eye. “Yea, sure, take mine.”

“Sarah! What are you talking about back there?” shouted Mr. D.

“Nothing. Sorry,” Sarah blushed again. Then she fished around her backpack looking for another pen to write with. By the time she found one, Mr D was already onto number 5.

“Classe, numero cinque, numero cinque classe…”

Number five already! She raised her hand and asked Mr. D to repeat himself. He refused and Sarah sat there at the back of the room with her head hanging low.

After the teacher had finished reciting the questions, he came to where she was and sat besides Sarah and began to repeat the questions to the quiz she had missed. In a scramble for her to grab her pen and begin to write them down, her quiz paper flew up in the air and down fluttered her little cheat sheet like a floating butterfly, slowly slowly making its way, right down to the floor, to land right on top of the teacher’s shoe.

“What’s this?” Mr. D picked up the paper. “Aha. So not only were you talking, not listening, but you were planning to cheat as well. You know what that means?” He raised his voice louder calling the attention of the entire class to the back of the room.

“A big fat zero.”

Sarah was mortified. She sat there for the remainder of class with a lump in her throat the size of a cannon ball.

As the bell rang to end the day, Nathan handed her her pen back.

“Uh. Thanks.” And he walked out the door, laughing about what, she was certain she did not want to know.

Sarah felt the tears welling up inside of her. She tried to hold them back, but one tiny drop managed to escape and run down her cheek and across her nose to the tip of Machu Pichu. It struggled, but could not make it’s way over the peak and so sank down into the crevasse between her nostril and her cheek bone and stayed there.

Cliche' Characters...

So these are a few cliche characters I came up with, although after writing them down, I felt like they were all from movies I've seen rather than books, but I guess that doesn't matter.


Miss. Susie Doozey or Cinderella: the awkward, unpopular teenage girl, who somehow meets the cool popular jock, lets her hair fall down, puts on contacts and a tight dress and voila—a deep passionate romance ensues.

Break it:

Fred the Drunk: Cliché party kid who is never sober. His only actions are drinking, partying and then vomiting when the night is over, and usually making a fool of himself. He’s usually part of the ‘cool kid crowd’ as well.

Break it:

The feminist: She hates men, is strong and independent, has had her heart broken, but attracts some guy based on her incredible intelligence and somehow the guy manages to make her fall in love and they live happily ever after.

Break it:

The rich bitch: She’s popular but no one really likes her, has her own little clique of snobs. She picks on the heroine of the story and in the end gets what she deserves, humiliation.

Break it: She runs into the girl she picked on like ten years later, sweet revenge… Maybe in a job interview, with the girl she picked on as the boss or employer.

Ms. Worry Wart: she is usually a comical character that worries about everything, a mother or a nerd, someone who is constantly questioning whether something is safe or a good idea. Perhaps the goody-two-shoes.

Break it: She gets herself hurt or killed in the most ironic of ways, perhaps by following the rules.

The artist: Enough said. The starving but brilliant artist with so much talent to give to the world. Egoist beyond all belief.

Break it: Decides to actually get a job, instead of stay a starving artist. Perhaps something really embarrassing like being a kids cartoon character in costume at birthday parties. He never gets discovered. No American Dream fulfilled here.

Hometown Exercise...

Parker Street was my childhood home, an infinite street within finite borders. Without knowledge of what lie beyond the corner, some of the dirtiest slums in Newark, I only knew the great uneven gray sidewalks that went from one cornet to the next. Where giant oak and maple trees shaded the pavements and where every house on the block was unique in shape, color and size, making Parker Street a quilt of architectural homes patched together by the people that resided there together. On our left, there was the brick house where no one lived, and in the backyard bloomed a wild rose bush. My brother and I would sneak through the gap in the shrubs to steal roses in the summer and pretend it was our own secret garden. Further down the block was Shawnee and Shavonee’s house, the Puerto Rican Jehovah’s Witnesses whose daughters would sneak upstairs into our apartments sometimes and steal our mangoes from the fruit basket. Their father’s company, Chico’s Roofing, owned a pink van which had murals of imitation Disney characters painted all over the sides. Then came Alfred and Alexandra’s mansion. Really only a large house, but at the front sat two stone lions which, to me, as a young girl symbolized only the finest of homes. With the twins and my brother at my side, we rode the block on our bicycles up and down spring and summer. Until Autumn stole the greens from the tree tops and soon we would take turns riding down to the end of the block where the big acorn tree grew and collect buckets of acorns to put in our backyard for the squirrels to easy When autumn would arrive, we would take turns riding down to the end of the block where the big acorn tree grew and collect buckets of acorns for the squirrel’s convenience as they prepared for their winter slumbers.

Thelma Dudley Characterization Scene

A thick wall of humidity greeted Thelma as she exited the air conditioned freezers of the Dudley Butcher Barn. She unzipped her poufy down jacket and placed it down on the rolls of extra butcher paper beside her gloves and scarf. She made her way down the concrete corridor, out the door and across the gravel parking lot to her beat up ‘91 Ford pickup. The wipers swooshed against the dry windshield when she turned the key, smearing heat and dirt across the glass. Thelma smoothed out her light pink dress which she had worn underneath her jacket, and exchanged her heavy fishing boots for a pair of scuffed white flip flops. She studied herself in the rearview mirror for a moment. Her blond curls had flattened in the summer heat. Her matador red lipstick had faded from her lips, and the mascara had smudged from her lashes, making the circles under her eyes appear deeper than they really were. She opened her glove compartment and pulled out a string of artificial pearls and clasped them around her neck.

Every Wednesday in the summers after work, Thelma would drive 40 minutes to Forsyth Park, on the opposite side of Savannah, where the city held a “Culture Concert” series. And for sixty minutes Thelma would sit on a rusted metal folding chair, upon uneven clumps of splotchy yellow grass and pretend to be those second rate performers coming from all across the great state of Georgia, on the stage. Any person on that stage, she thought, would be better than being Thelma Dudley, the butcher’s daughter.

Critique of "Whippoorwill"

*There was a lot of great images in this piece:

“I was dusty and road-weary, had touched the shores of California…”

“…white and red flames curving upon black miles…”

“I rounded the truck and saw Gade standing just within the wooded area, staring up into the sky, singing his Hank Williams ballad to a three-quarter moon.”

“Gabe was offering something up into the high darkness.”

*Gabe felt like a developed and interesting character: I like this feeling of him as “He drove and smoked and kept largely silent.” And the description of his wedding, “Only time I ever wore an ironed tee shirt.” His peculiarities give him life.

*The narrator however, I felt was a little vague and abstract, perhaps that was intended? I wanted to know about why he dreaded the “Got a girlfriend” inquiry. Was that solely because he was afraid the truckers were coming onto him? I also wanted to know more about this line: “Twenty-three years seemed vast and paltry, and I wished I were already home.” Why is that?

*Also, I wanted to know why this narrator chose to recall this memory… two decades later. Is there a connection to his present life. Where is he going with it?

Thelma Dudley

Thelma Dudley was born in Savannah Georgia to Phil and Judy Dudley. She was the oldest of six children and although she grew up with her father's insistent pressures for her to take over the family butcher shop, she dreamed of becoming a singer on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera house in New York City.

Mozart, Verdi, and Puccini were foreign names to her growing up, sounding more like pasta dishes than anything else--yet their music worked their way into her brain long bfore their names had any significance to her.

It all stated the summer of her sophomore year in high school, when she had to work the back of the butcher shop, running and i and out of the freezers, wearing athick winter jacket whilst her friends ran around outside barefoot in shorts and tanks. She found an old radio in the back to play to keep time from jolting to a stop, unfortunately or fortunately, the only station she could get reception from, way back in the freezer was 97.5--the only classical radio station in all of Georgia.

Bank Robber Scene...

I focused more on the teller than the bank robber... and this is what came about...

***

“Stick ‘em…up”, the masked robber announced calmly pointing the black handgun to the teller’s window. The elderly teller with the coke bottle lenses and badly dyed mauve hair lifted her saggy arms to the sky exposeing her woolly armpits. She squinted, causing all the creases in her face to become more pronounced, and cocked her head forward, trying to get a better look at the robber. In all of her 28 years working in the Minot Savings Bank in North Dakota, she had often daydreamed of a stick up during the dull muggy summer afternoons, but she never thought she’d see the day when it would actually happen.
She imagined this scene—and several variations—dozens of times: the masked robber coming in, shouting to “Stick ‘em up”. She imagined panic that would spread across the bank lobby, the high pitched screams of the ladies and the deeper gasps of the gentlemen customers. Her repulsive manager, the round stuffy man whose shirt was usually drenched in sweat, would start to drip profusely splotches of salty sweat onto the cold concrete floor, while he remained tied to a chair in the locked safe.
In every fantasy of the bank robber scene, the old teller could never decide if she became the hero or if the robber took her hostage and she had to be rescued by a good Samaritan in the bank lobby. The teller felt a sensation of excitement pass through her, a feeling she hadn’t experienced since her late husband passed away more than ten years ago.
“What are you staring at you old hag?! Turn around!” the robber shouted.
She complied reluctantly. She didn’t want to miss any of the action to follow. The only thing she could make out now was the chipped brick wall in need of fresh coat of white paint. The woman heard the robber bark orders of filling the bags with money to the other teller. She was a younger woman who still held ambitions and hopes for making something of herself in the world. She nervously fumbled with the keys trying to locate the correct one to open the registers. Her face, normally glowing with a natural blush was now as white as the florescent lights shining down upon them from the ceiling.
The lobby was empty and the usual crowd of people that come on their lunch break had already returned to work. The bank was silent except for the clanging of the keys, the nervous breathing of the young teller, and the ticking of the clock. The older teller started to tap her foot impatiently.
“What the hell are you doing?” Stop that!”
She did immediately. She scanned the room without moving her neck and was reminded that she was within close reach of the security call button. Easily, she could have maneuvered herself without being noticed, to hit the button, yet the old woman didn’t budge. All her focus and frustrations were on the fact that she couldn’t see what was going on behind her.