Community Writing Project/Contest

The following is what I wrote for the assignment. My teacher said she only needed a few paragraphs, but when I'm given a creative writing assignment, that is not possible. =P DO NOT READ THIS UNTIL YOU READ THE STORY!


Er zijn in dit wereld twee mensen. Er is het mens dat een hart heeft, en het mens dat het hart van andere mensen te nemen.

I am born.

The porch is bright and cheerful, the fresh coat of white paint drying slowly as honeybees hum around me. A smiling father ascends the steps, the imprinting of his boots leaving faint imprints in the still damp paint. The hot sun beats down and finishes what the crisp air did not finish. The honeysuckle blooms and the ivy starts seeding at my baseboards and foundation. It is a new day, a new chapter, the prologue. Emily breezes through the screen door as it slams shut behind her. Her critical eyes scan every inch of my surface; drifting over the cupolas, spires, balconies, and the wrought-iron windvale perched snugly on the apex of my sloped, high roof, spinning lazily in the sweet breeze. West, southwest. West, southwest. The rooster shines, forever stuck in mid-caw, a silent alert that it is always day somewhere. Conversely, it is always night somewhere else. However, sun does not make day.

The ivy has started creeping again. I feel its wispy tendrils scratching against the bottom sill of the first floor windows. It makes me want to scream, to claw at it with the siding. My paint is starting to crack, weathered and eroded, sun-bleached and abused by the pounding rays of the smug star in the sky. The egotistical star that cares not for the woes and troubles of others. A self-important pig. Yet, as the sun ends its sojourn in our sector and sinks into the ground, yet another sun sets. Emily keeps living, keeps denying, keeps refusing. Her pacings in her quarters are wearing the baseboards smooth. I feel the heat sinking into my core. The heat of feelings and the heat of the sun, once again, intruding through the windows onto my floor. Through the floor. Singing my heart. But soon, the curtains draw shut. Emily stops pacing. Stops refusing. Stops denying. I am hers. But she is not mine. The body is carried away. It got lucky. The paces of the Normal eat up the warped boards of my front porch, once so cheerful. And the mildew starts to set in as their steps leave, not to return for many years. Not truly, anyway.

Her sun rises once again; a blood-red sun. Homer. A noblesse oblige, as people are so wont to say. The expectation of a society pushed upon her for her gentility. Then, the unwanted sympathy of a society whose ideal situation does not pan out as they so planned, as Homer is not a “marrying man”. Perhaps. Or perhaps he simply has “commitment issues”. Or maybe a “wandering eye”. Or he is just a full-on whore. A pig fattened on the praises of society until the slop starts being delivered in a pail, then even that meagre trickling stops. His footsteps crossing my threshold make me retch. The humans blame the wind for the harsh slant that now starts dominating my once dominant frame, but it is the closest I can get to running away. The birds have started nesting in the holes in my roof, and I can hear their tweets all day long. Their rotten offspring clamoring for food they don't get for themselves. Eventually, the whore crosses my threshold one more time. Passes once more through my doorframes and walls. He didn’t know it would be the last time. The Normal assumed he left. The Normal will assume a lot. My doors remain shut. But he ascended my warping stairs with Emily leading him up, his arm locked in her elbow. As an aside, the walls see everything. They see when you are cooking dinner for your three-year-old son. They see you when you’re snorting lines of cocaine off your bathroom counter. They see you when you cry to yourself silently, a gun in your hand. I saw Emily lead him up into that grim sepulcher. I saw her shut the door and undress the two of them. And when the deed was done, I saw her open his mouth delicately as she poured a glass of water into his mouth. He didn’t even struggle. The poison courses through his veins quickly as his eyes grew larger. She calmly redressed as he deteriorated. There is no look quite like the look of a pair of terrified eyes filling with deep, crimson blood as the blood vessels in them explode. There are no words to describe the setting sun in a pair of eyes like that. HIs gasps went unheard, and his convulsions soon stopped. Emily smiles, a sweet smile, if one can call the smile of a murderer sweet, and redresses her lover before going back downstairs to put on a pot of tea. I sit in horror, staring at the corpse of the man in the bed. In my walls. And I slant more.

The ivy has surpassed the apex of my second floor windows. Thick and ugly, it doubles back over itself in a lattice of chlorophyll and thorns. The paint, curled and brittle, chips off with the pounding rain streaking through the sky. The curls litter the ground around me like the skin of a snake. The cracks, holes, and gaps of my porch quickly fill with the tears of the Earth. As if the sun has anything to cry about. The rusted red rooster screams in protest. West. North. Southeast. Northwest. I can do nothing to stifle its cries, just as I can do nothing to abate the roaring wind. Emily pulls back a curtain and is met with tendrils of ivy and screaming leaves, ripped from their trees. I still stare with disbelief at the man that has for so long been a prisoner in my walls. We finally have something in common. The smell has finally died, along with most of the skin and organs once trapped in and within the cage of bone. The neighbors have stopped crawling around my perimeter, searching for the source. As if I would be the source. If I could speak, I would scream. Get people to barge in here. Air out all the rooms. Clear out every shred of evidence that this ever happened. The little fools poking around outside didn’t even know what was happening right on the other side of my suffering walls. MY walls. A prison of myself. Me stuck in me. The skeleton in the closet of the self, unable to claw its way out.

The Normal cross my warped, rotten, termite-infested porch once again. The pills of chewed-up wood pulp are flattened beneath the waxed dress shoes stepping directly in the footsteps of their predecessor: the first man to ascend these depressed steps. Tobe brings the greedy political pigs into my chambers, into the living room coated in a stale, cloaking dust. It curls around the shiny black shoes of the intruders. I chuckle slightly at this; they would need to buy a new pair of shoes if I had my way with them. They hear nothing but the creaking of my tarnished floorboards as I chuckle to myself. Soon, the hog herself comes waddling into the room, fattened on her own torpid nature and self-reassurance that she is the top of society as she once was, the top that was passed down the familial ladder, earned not by her own hands. These men appear taken aback. I can only imagine how they would feel after seeing just how much my walls have seen and heard. The hog snorts out a few lines in response to the pigs’ demands for money, and, eventually reaching the conclusion that this is not going to be a visit in which they are able to get what they want, walk out, taking a splinter I so lovingly placed in them from the disintegrating doorframes. And then, finally, my sun rises.

The coroner comes in and takes care of the body as the Normal flock in. The dust stirs and screams in protest as it is inhaled by the many nostrils of the Normal. Their curious eyes scan over me like I will reveal some secret. They are wrong. Soon, satisfied with the cracked leather chaise, long-since eaten by moths and other insects, the cobweb-ridden fireplace that hasn’t been lit for decades, and the picture frames, cracked with time and neglect, they ascend my stairs. My screams of “Hurry!” are only echoed in the guttural groans of the steps as they rise. They try to turn the accurséd doorknob to no avail. The fattest pig says a few words to the waiting crowd and elbows his way forcefully to the front. The door—my door—is all but ripped from its antique hinges as they storm into the room. The inch-thick layer of dust attacks the intruders, the rescuers, obstructing their view of the already dark room, the windows long-since boarded up to protect her baby.

His suit is folded neatly along with his belongings on the bedside table. Those few weeks after his death still resonate with me today; the routine the madwoman established of cooking him a breakfast of bacon and eggs and bringing it up to him. She would then get livid about his lack of respect for her cooking when he doesn’t eat the food and try to shove it forcefully down his throat with a rusted fork. Then she, being satisfied, undresses him from the nightgown she pulled over his disgusting frame the night before and dresses him in his suit. Next is lunch. Next is dinner. And the nightgown is placed back on his meagre frame, and she crawls into bed next to him. The same position every night. The maggots started squirming in his ribcage as the bacon and eggs were replaced with chunks of rats. On a morning that she tried to feed him, she ended up stabbing one with the fork and shrieking with disgust. That’s the day the nightgown stayed on his bloated body. That’s the last day he got fed. That was the last time the room was opened until today.

The Normal cover their mouths in shock and disgust. The nightgown has long since draped over the different pucks and knocks in the bones and is now a part of the skeleton, and the skeleton is part of the bed. Nightgown to bed. The eternally-grinning skeleton is the meat of this morbid sandwich. With disdain, one of the smaller members of the Normal picks up the curled salt-and-pepper hair on the pillow next to his empty eye sockets, staring into nothing. Staring at the growing water stains on the sagging ceiling. The rotting wallpaper curls and weeps. The Normal leave, and they take the body and her belongings with them.

This was all years ago. The ivy has finally reached the top of my tallest spire. It didn’t used to be the tallest; the tallest spire collapsed fifteen years ago. I sag and slant and slowly decay, but it’s better this way. I am finally alone The pigs stopped treading on my yard of prickling thistle and poison ivy long ago. The sun doesn’t rise anymore. But my sun rose the second Emily died and the Normal left my chambers for the last time. The porch has been devoured by termites, but the pain is numb at this point. I am at peace, save for the empty container of arsenic stashed under the floorboards in the damned room, the one thing the Normal left behind.

I'm not honestly sure I could easily translate my writing into Dutch. I don't know all of the language's nuances to the point that I could actually write it in another language, especially with the florid way I write.