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Post by LadyofShalott on Apr 28, 2013 21:59:53 GMT
Tuck was the kind of person you knew had money even before you started talking to them. I’d never seen him dressed in anything but expensive polo or button down shirts that you knew were $50 or better, and either formal or store-bought-distressed looking blue jeans. All of which fit him perfectly, and he knew it. His light gold hair was styled in a fashionable not-too-long-not-too-short cut. He had the air of a rich kid around him, something I’d seen my whole life and had gotten pretty used to by now. Even though his facial features might not have been in the drop-dead gorgeous category, the way he acted, walked, and even talked, made him seem like he should be in Channing Tatum’s spot as hottest celebrity.
Again, something I was pretty used too, growing up in a wealthy neighborhood, attending a private school district, and now a private university.
His actual name was Tucker Callhoun, but for some reason he hated be called Tucker; it was always Tuck, or Callhoun for his friends. I asked him once why he never went by his real name. He had shrugged and said, “Seems kind of generic doesn’t it? It doesn’t stand out much.”
I didn’t think Tucker was a generic name at all, but I quickly realized that “standing out” was something Tuck prided himself in. Not in the flashy dressed way, but through his personality. As soon as he walked into a place, he was slapping high-fives and throwing greetings to people he hardly knew, or, from some of their expressions, didn’t know at all. Always happy-go-lucky, always smooth, always charming; his entire atmosphere was so powerful it could change everyone’s mood in the room.
I watched him stride across the small lawn to the door. Today he was wearing some of the usual – pricey, tight-fitting polo, a pair of new looking ripped jeans, and black Nikes. The little tinkle of the doorbell went off and I tore my gaze away from the window, took a breath, and went to the front door. -- Stuck In The Middle, something I've been slooooowly working on.
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Post by legrande on May 18, 2013 9:01:04 GMT
The door opens with a creak and he steps over the threshold of the small cottage. It's darker inside than it is outside. The candles have all burnt out and in the hearth is nothing but a pile of slightly glowing embers. Sighing, he places the loaf of bread on the table, and tries to stir some life into the dying fire. He clears his throat, and calls out. "Eliza, are you awake?" There is a rustling noise from the other room down the hall, and a thin voice calls his name. A feeling of relief floods through him momentarily. He doesn't answer immediately.
He pours a bowl of half congealed, lukewarm soup from the pan on top if the fire, and uses his hand to break off a hunk of bread and fumbles around in the cupboards to try and find a stub of candle before he goes.
He finds Eliza propped up in the bed, which would almost seem like a miracle, if it wasn't for her ashen complexion and pinched face. She seems to light up when she sees him. "I've brought dinner," he says, with a smile, thrusting the bowl and the piece of bread towards her. "Aren't you..?" "I've eaten," he assures her, trying to muffle the sound of his grumbling stomach.
"I've got something for you," he says to her when she finishes eating. She looks at him with surprise. The bread was present enough. "Hold out your hand and close your eyes." She does as she's bid, and he pulls something out of his waistcoat pocket and gently presses it into her palm. She opens her eyes, and gazes open-mouthed at the diamond pendant in her hand. He smiles and turns away. -- from Stand and Deliver, my English portfolio creative writing piece.
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Post by Samantha on May 31, 2013 2:14:19 GMT
This is an excerpt from my Iowa-set short story, to be turned into something longer once I quit being so lazy. Never in my life have a revised a piece more than I've revised this one. Less than 5,000 words, yet many, many hours of work. And it still needs one last revision before I'm completely happy. The half-mirror behind the sink in the bathroom was old and warped. There was no sentimentality to the little piece of glass at all, and it would have been thrown out and replaced long ago if not for his grandparents' admirable sense of loyalty to anything that could still do its job. But the warped mirror, he knew, would hang over the chipped bathroom sink until the day that it fell to the floor and broke into pieces too tiny to put back together.
He watched his movements in the glass, reminded of the time that his grandfather had taken him through the house of mirrors at a traveling carnival stopped in Forest City. This had been many years ago, half a lifetime ago, but still he could remember his own fascination with the way that the mirrors had distorted his reflection, turned him into someone different, someone new. It was the only time that he had ever felt so enormously full of potential, and though he'd spent the next fifteen years of his life trying, he had never again been able to recreate the feeling that he'd felt so incredibly back then.
His hands, in the mirror, fumbled with the tie that was knotted around his neck. He'd never had the need, not in his lifetime, to learn how to tie a tie. The last time that he'd worn one had been the month before he'd gone to the carnival, and he'd been forced to put it on. He could still remember the way that all of the others had looked in theirs: men with nooses around their necks, how uncomfortable; unfamiliar without their heavy-duty work jeans and sun-faded flannel shirts. It was because of this that in his mind ties were forever associated with crumpled faces and whispered condolences. His grandmother, though she tried, couldn't even get him to put one on for church on Sunday mornings. —Because They Couldn't Stay
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Post by Zoe on Jun 17, 2013 7:09:45 GMT
Been writing this story for a while now. This is probably the first story I've actually planned in more depth than main conflict, exposition and end, and to be honest, it's so much easier to write. My mother smirked upon seeing my car.
"Only four?" she asked me, her eyes glinting humorously as they landed on the bike rack hooked to the tailgate. "It must have been the hardest decision in the world for you." I shrugged lazily, forcing my long board into the rear seat atop my suitcases and wiping my forehead with the back of my hand. I examined the small droplets of sweat transferred from head to hand, and wiped the moisture off on my shorts.
"I decided to bring the ones closest to me, for sentimental reasons."
She laughed through her nose—the breathy kind of laugh that outlandishly intelligent people seem to do often. "I can see that." I turned toward her, gripping the leash that restricted my Bloodhound—Bing—maybe a bit too tightly. His droopy jowls swung to and fro and he attempted to pull away from me. I apologized softly, loosening my grip on the leash.
"I also see you're bringing only the bikes I've purchased," she added, running her finger along the shiny top tube of my Mercier. "But then again, your father had only ever bought you one." My eyes again forced themselves not to roll toward the sky. I had heard plenty of her jabs toward my father, and contrariwise. Since the divorce, they couldn't stand each other. While I can admit it was humorous on some occasions, it was plain annoying on others.
"Yeah, I get it," I snapped, closing the car door. "My father's an insincere, pretentious bigot."
"There's no need to get sassy, Harley."
"All I'm saying is that it's frustrating, you know? You two always complain about each other. Stop acting like children and grow up a little." She ignored my reprimanding and embraced me, her cold arms wrapping around my body tightly. I stood there awkwardly. I'd never been used to the human touch, or even exaggerated human emotions. It had always been an awkward and unfamiliar territory for me. My parents were only touchy with me on the rare occasion like this one.
"Sometimes I wish you weren't so smart," I jumped a bit as she mumbled this in my ear. "Just so you'd be able to enjoy life a little more." I sighed, looping my arms around my mother's shoulders.
"Sometimes I do, too." - Handlebars
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Post by LadyofShalott on Jun 28, 2013 19:40:01 GMT
Eh, I'm not even sure what this is. It's pretty much a drabble I wrote at 2 in the morning that has no purpose or direction whatsoever. But I kinda like it. I knocked twice without an answer before turning the knob and slowly pushing the door open. Late morning sunlight streamed into the room in between the slats in the blinds and cast bright stripes onto the pale green carpet. Not really on the carpet really, the carpet was hardly visible beneath a layer of clothes, magazines, books, shoes, and other assorted scraps of things. A dresser and chair was against one wall, a bookshelf piled with novels, movies, and CD’s, and a mirror rested across the room from them. A twin bed was pushed underneath the roof overhang; the same wall was covered from floor to roof (overhang included) with posters of bands, singers, TV shows, video games, and an old one of a white and orange kitten in a tree. Everything about the room was just as I remembered it; the furniture, the mess, the light pattern on the ground. It even smelled like it did six months ago when I left – a diluted version of her favorite Victoria’s Secret perfume.
A bright orange comforter was thrown on the bed in a huge disorderly mess. There was a large lump underneath it that could have passed for a heap of pillows if it didn’t move every once in a while. And if there wasn’t a foot sticking out from under it. A smile tugged its way onto my face when I saw the chipped pink paint on her toenails. Just the same.
I just looked at her sleeping shape for a moment, something I hadn’t been able to do in months. A quiet snore escaped from under the comforter every once in a while. She always hated when I told her she snored, but I thought it was adorable. Along with the way she constantly twirled a piece of hair around her finger when she read, or how her eyes tripled in size when she was intently focused on something. They were little things about her that I never knew I loved so much until I didn’t see them every day.
After a couple minutes, I called her name very softly, still in the doorway. Part of me didn’t want to wake her up, even though it was already 11:30, but I couldn’t stay for too long. I said her name again, rolling a little louder off my lips this time. The hump of orange jerked, the pink-painted foot moved, and a weird grumbling sigh sound came out of the covers, but she didn’t wake up. Always a heavy sleeper, this one was.
I called to her once more and this time she let out surprise noise and the comforter moved again. After a couple seconds of fighting her way out of the mess, a head became visible out at the top. Her dark hair was loose and majorly disheveled with sleep. Her whole head looked like one mess of dark brown hair, but finally two green eyes popped open. Even from the doorway I could see the sleep still in them, making them droop and drift around the room, looking for the noise that woke her from her sleep. Finally, they hit me, still standing in the doorway, and tripled in size. She shot up into a sitting position and would have wanged her head on the overhang if she didn’t have eighteen years of experience avoiding it. Her hair fell away from her face, making my heart skip at the sight of her familiar features. She was caught off guard, no makeup, hair in disarray, and in an old band t-shirt from tenth grade with a hole near the hem, but she was still the most beautiful thing I’ve seen.
Finally, recognition registered in her eyes, and a smile the size of the Grand Canyon spread across her face. She said my name, and I hurriedly crossed the room and wrapped my arms around her.
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Post by Samantha on Aug 27, 2013 3:31:02 GMT
Hearing his name, the border collie mix on the front porch lifts his head, fixes us with his bleary black eyes, and then huffs and nods back off to sleep. My grandfather smiles fondly at the dog, and then turns back to the truck to discover that he's still holding that dirty scrap of a rag in his right hand. He begins to wipe at the corrosion that's built up around the battery terminals, frowning as he works, and I watch him. He has the eyes of a drunk though he doesn't drink—a watery, pale, there-but-not-quite-here blue—and when he focuses on something, it's like he's trying to recall a dream that's just out of reach. These are Lape eyes, beautiful in that unattainable sort of way, so that by the time you've found the perfect word to describe them, they've already gone and given their attention to someone or something else. His East Coast eyes, I call them, because that's where he's from—or was once from—and that's what I imagine the Atlantic Ocean to look like. I haven't seen it for myself, not yet, but one day I will, and one day I will come across the perfect word.
I do not have these Lape eyes. I have Hessey eyes, which are brown and stubborn, kind of like the Hesseys themselves. Or kind of like all farmers, I suppose, because they have to be or else they perish. So I have stubborn eyes, and probably I do not even carry a recessive gene for my grandfather's East Coast eyes, because Hessey genetics are just that stubborn. Blind persistence is the perfect phrase for it—how ironic, though, being that we are talking about eyes. I tuck away the promise that I will one day ask him from whom he gets these blue eyes—one day when we are not working on cars, when he has already fixed everything that is broken.
—Untitled
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Post by LadyofShalott on Sept 17, 2013 1:10:11 GMT
Dad was rummaging around in the open hatch as Cindy reached her arms toward the sky. “I don’t know what I want to do first!” she declared. “What do you guys want to do?” she turned to the three of us, each standing at a far distance from the next. Chris gritted his teeth and ferociously jammed a button; Braden shrugged; I looked at the ground and pushed a pebble with my shoe. Cindy was not deterred by our indifference. “What about swimming? It’s so hot out today,” she fanned herself and looked at Dad for backup; he nodded enthusiastically as he pulled the first tent box out of the car.
“I don’t swim,” I said, maybe a little too forcefully. I hadn’t meant it to come out like that, but Dad, Cindy, and Braden all snapped their heads in my direction. For a couple of moments, the only sound was the war music coming from Chris’s headphones. “I mean,” I choked, “You can if you want. I can’t swim.”
“You can’t swim?” Braden repeated with such surprise that made me want to slap those raised eyebrows and round eyes back to the way they should be. I shook my head.
“Well that’s okay,” Cindy said quickly, “There are lots of people who don’t know how to swim. Maybe we can teach you this weekend.”
“Sure,” I said, only because she was staring at me expectantly and I didn’t know what else to say. I didn’t mention how Christi had tried many times before, and failed everytime.
Cindy ushered her kids to their packs and dufflebags so they could get changed into their swim trunks. I heard Braden ask Dad where he could change, and he replied in his most masculine voice, “Behind a tree, like a man!” before several moments of awkward silence and pointed him to the restroom.
I sighed when they were gone and wandered over to the hatch where Dad was struggling with something that had gotten hooked on the backseat. He grunted, and was finally able to slide the fishing pole smoothly across the carpet. “Think you still know how to bait?” he asked me, handing the pole out in my direction.
“I think I’ll figure it out,” I answered, taking it from him and reaching for the tackle box. “I can help you set the tents up if you want,” I added, remembering the struggle the last time like it just happened this morning.
Dad looked at the tent pieces then back to me. “I think I’ll figure it out,” he breathed, and gave me a small grin from the corner of his mouth, the kind that I had to grin back on. A full blown smile broke over his stubbled face, “There it is,” he said. “No, but seriously, stay close. I’ll call if I need ya.”
-- Something entirely new because I can't stick to one idea for as long as a week
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