Wednesday Writing Assignment
In the spirit of Halloween, let's get spooky. Tell me a spooky story. Or anything you like that has to do with Halloween, really.
I should add: Feel free to retell a story in your own way.
posted by kStyle @ 10:41 PM
4 Comments:
True story:
It's 1982, I'm seven years old, and I'm sitting in a darkened movie theater. My mother is on my right, my sister on hers. The film is "Annie," which right there is enough to make this a Spooky Story, but never mind.
It's the last twenty minutes of the movie and something large and shapeless catches my eye and then blocks my view. A woman has walked into the theater. A vast woman. A mountainous woman. She is standing in the aisle as Annie--in one of the film's several "improvements" over the stage musical--nearly falls to her death off a drawbridge. I try in vain to look around her. But there is no "around" her. It's a widescreen film, but this woman is wider.
Finally she takes a few steps back, without taking her eyes off the screen. She's going to sit down somewhere! I'll be able to see the ending! Well, she does sit down somewhere. Without even turning her head, she sits down on my seven-year-old lap.
"Oof," I say as my knees flatten under her rump. My mother immediately turns: "Excuse me, could you get up, please?" she says, far too politely for what my knees regard as a fairly urgent situation. The woman does nothing. She keeps watching the film, which from later viewings I can attest is not nearly interesting enough to warrant her being this engrossed in it.
My mother speaks up again, more harshly this time: "You're sitting on my son." Now she has caught the attention of this behemoth of a filmgoer. The woman turns to my mother, then turns her large pumpkin-like head a little further, to see my small one. She gets up. Moves into the aisle. Walks a few rows toward the screen. Sits down again.
Not a word emerges from the lips of this confused dirigible of a woman. She remains today a mystery.
Meanwhile my lap still gets some phantom pain from time to time, particularly in the presence of red-headed females who sing.
One inky night there was an explosion. Through the haze of sleep I thought, that thud, the fat cat must have jumped on the bed, then realized it was something more. Groggily I dragged feet up the stairs to the kitchen to see if the refrigerator or oven had exploded. Everything was in order. I returned to bed, uneasy but irresistably sleepy.
The next morn was cold and sunny and I awoke, in my bed, unsettled, vaguely recalling the sound. I dressed and went outside; everything seemed normal. I walked to the great yard down aways and sat. I sat and looked around to see what was different. Someone opened a door in the distance, a woman or a man, I couldn’t tell. Everything seemed in order, except me. I thought I must be dead. Everything seemed normal, except for an explosion felt, heard, in the night. Perhaps this was the next world.
Frantically, I asked everyone I passed, did you hear the explosion? Did you feel it? Palms sweaty, I sought an answer. People brushed past me, faces blank, like I was the crazy person on the subway, or like they couldn’t see me. A week later, another chill December day, a passing woman told me that the house under construction in the lot next to hers had exploded that night. I felt comforted, relieved. At the little deli I ordered a sandwich: lean corned beef on rye. Handing the sandwich to me, the burly aproned man leaned over the counter and winked. “Feelin’ better? I heard the bang when I came, too. Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it.”
Ann, I know what you mean, I think, about the scariness of time simultaneously piling up and slipping away. It's stifling...
And Eric: Sheer terror.
Understandably. Remember that story, I think it was called "Far and Near", about the train conductor who stops to talk to the woman he waved to every day?
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