(For those of you who may have read my last Slice of Life, I want to assure you that things are better, not least because my husband has taken over the bandaging himself. I should also credit him with step 21; that's his dream, not mine.)
I Don’t Notice
I don’t
know who I am talking to. I don’t know whom I am talking to. Mrs. McHenry knows
if I should say “who” or “whom.” She marked my 10th-grade papers for grammar.
Never spelling. I’ve always been good at spelling.
The
cardboard sign I made for when I sit on the street is perfectly spelled, but
I’m not sure of the grammar. “Im lost in New York City need to get to Richmond,
Va. for my mother’s funeral. Please help.” Should I put a comma in there
somewhere?
I lost everything
when my boyfriend took my suitcase. I didn’t notice. I’m napping at his
friend’s apartment. Not really napping. I smoked a joint right after breakfast,
well, it’s not a joint, it’s crack.
I don’t
notice when he takes the suitcase. I don’t notice when he doesn’t come back. I
don’t notice when his friend says I have to leave. I notice when he pulls me up
from the chair and pushes me out the door. I notice I don’t have my suitcase. I
notice when I pawn my pearl necklace so I can eat dinner. I notice how cold it
is on the street.
What’s Your Language?
We drove
into Dubrovnik from the airport. The winding road up the coast offered glimpses
of the blue Adriatic, diamonds of sunlight floating on the surface. Thank god
they drive on the right side of the road here.
At the
hotel I let Dominic talk to the desk clerk. Dominic seemed to inhale languages
as soon as he stepped off the plane. I watched him chat up the clerk in his
baby-Serbo-Croatian. The clerk laughed, shook her head, repeated some word
several times.
At lunch in
the old city, inside the medieval walls, Dominic told me the clerk almost
didn’t give us a room because she thought he was Serb. “There’s no Serbo-Croatian language
anymore,” he mused. “She said I need a dictionary to translate from Serbian
into Croatian.” I didn’t know. I was a typical American, monolingual and
condemned to stay that way.
Dominic led
me up to the top of the wall, where we walked until we could see the water. I
tried to imagine the war, when Dubrovnik was bombarded. Dominic said, “Wait
here,” so I watched sunlight drip into the Adriatic, the bright fade to glow,
the shades of blue deepen to navy. The stone wall chilled in the dark.
Oh, I love them both! So rich and detailed each in its own right. The first story has a very strong voice and tone of lucid panic (can that be?) and the second whirls me right into that sunset dipping into the sea and the impending darkness. Well done! Can't wait to hear what you do in workshop.
ReplyDeletethank you so much. Check here to see what I had to do with those little stories: weird but fun. http://redemma1991.blogspot.com/2015/11/heres-what-workshop-did-with-my-stories.html
Delete