Ryan Smith

Real-World Materials

            I’ve been writing, or at least planning, short stories for several years now, so when I saw that crafting a short piece of fiction was a class requirement, I thought I might just pull one of my older ideas off the shelf and actually write it. This would probably have worked fine, but better still, I had a small flash of inspiration a week or two before my scheduled reading. I was walking to the house – from work or school, most likely – and I noticed how incredibly manicured the lawn was. If a stray leaf was lying atop the AstroTurf, I’m sure it would be quarantined presently. The back yard is equally impressive, if not more so, with its flowers and fruit plants. This all the work of my father, with some help from my step-mother, and they love doing it. I hate yardwork, not only because I’m opposed to manual labor, but because I’ve always admired Nature untamed. Crazy weeds and unexpected species are more my thing. So, I considered what would happen if my parent s just stopped messing with the yard, entirely.

            I presented, I believe, for the second week of fiction draft exchanges. The responses from people, and nearly everyone said something, were very encouraging – plenty of praise, a healthy amount of criticism and suggestion. Most people seemed to feel what I wanted them to, which is the relief of a move towards freedom and spontaneity, and away from artificiality and routine. Among other things, I learned that some of my experimentation would sentence structure, repetition, etc. did not go over well; I could stress points or themes without being obtuse and unnecessarily complex. I was also urged to expand on the sections people liked best – the sense-heavy, semi-fantastic scenes – sections that I also thought were my strong points. Another general series of suggestions was that I reduce overly nostalgic places, such as the description of my dogs) and focus on fictionalizing memories that are more relevant to the plot. I’ve considered the various responses, done some editing, and, hopefully, have improved my work because of such help.

            There were, of course, more specific reactions, which I mostly have records of on the copies from the reading. Surprising myself, I ended up following a consider amount of them. The majority of comments I considered and then decided against, but a significant amount of suggestions were obeyed, to some extent. For example, the passage, page six of the original, focusing on the snail seemed fairly popular, and multiple people asked for more of it; some asked how big it was, others – Professor included, I believe - simply wanted expansion on the imagery. I went back to edit the passage, tweaking and adding several sentences, and was pleased with the end result. Another request, again by multiple readers, was to edit down some of the aforementioned lispy wordplay and experimental structuring - I say experimental not because what I was doing was particularly inventive, but because it was a testing of the waters for my own writing style. The flawless/flawlessly section, early on, for example, was edited to something more palatable, while still retaining the somewhat nauseating overuse of synonyms. There were also some questions about the main character’s job; his daily routines were described at the opening, but the actual job was left out. I had imagined the character as a sort of a mix, oddly enough, of my father’s responsibilities and my nature, so I decided to edit in a few lines describing the monotonous work (to match the monotonous life). I actually discovered, while searching online, a list of various duties for a job I imagine is pretty close to my father’s and the “Tasks” section sounded so awful I couldn’t resist it including it (link is at bottom of essay).

            Despite the various changes made, there was a fair amount of suggestions that I ultimately chose not to comply with. Near the end of the story, the main character is sitting under his tree and has an epiphany, after which he jumps into the pool. Some people have suggested that I expand on the way of describing the moment, “Something happened,” to explain what actually happened. This, however, would be difficult, because I don’t exactly know what happened. Also, I was asked to show rather than tell the emotions, and I thought this moment needed just that. Another idea was to start the story off with a “hook” and perhaps bring some nature  imagery into the early part of the story. These changes would, perhaps, draw some readers in earlier, but, I thought while revising, lessen the droning of the opening section, which I want to contrast the later relief.

Undoubtedly the most work I did revising was in response to a written comment that read: “The frequent use (overuse) of semicolons overwhelms and makes the sentences not end.” At first I scoffed, think how much I liked to extend sentences in various ways, then I looked over the story and realized that, for the most part, the comment was correct. As a result, I spent most of revising process working on sentence structure, removing comas, semicolons and dashes galore, adding periods. I realized that I didn’t like to read long or complex sentences – at least not with such a high frequency – so I probably shouldn’t write them either. Again, thanks to a suggestion, I ended up more satisfied with the final result of my work.

As for the story itself, it is still unfinished, although I plan on expanding it to completion this weekend or sometime soon after finals. I’ll most likely double its length, having the wife come home among other things. I would be delighted to have it published, once finished, but haven’t put much effort into doing so as of yet. So far, out of everything I’ve written, “Fruition” is my favorite, hands down. Surely, some of this is owed to the prompts, urges and suggestions of this course – and for that, I thank you.

http://www.nycareerzone.org/cz/profile.jsp?onetsoc=51-8091.00

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Original Story

The Yard

            He got up and went to the bathroom. Then he went into the kitchen and turned on the coffee maker. He turned on the television and stared at it until the coffee was ready. Then he poured himself a cup. He stood starring at the TV, drinking. Then he walked back to the bedroom and into the bathroom. He took a shower. Then he got dressed. He watched the news for a minute before he turned the TV off. Then he went to work.

            Every morning was like this, unless he didn’t have to go to work that day. When this was the case, his routine was as follows: he woke up and lay in bed. Then he turned on the television. After awhile, he got up and went to the kitchen, turning on the coffee maker. The he went back into the bedroom, got in bed again and starred at the TV. When he could smell coffee, he got up and went to the kitchen to pour himself a cup. Then he walked back to the bedroom and into the bathroom. He took a shower. Then he got dressed. He got back in bed. Then he woke up his wife to see what the plans were for the day.

            When he wasn’t working or occupied with his wife, he was usually outside, doing yardwork. He didn’t like yardwork, really, but he didn’t much of a choice, either. The back yard was a flawless maintained garden of flowers, shrubbery and fruit and vegetable plants. The front, a flawlessly maintained show yard: flawless tree centered flawlessly – flawless shrubs flawlessly complimenting the tree – flawless flowers complimenting the flawless shrubs flawlessly. They had won a neighborhood lawn contest two years ago, their reward was five hundred dollars in cash and the respect, envy and admiration of people they hadn’t met and neighbors they barely knew. Now, he was lucky if a day went by without the yard being mentioned. This was bad enough, but this year, the people who ran the neighborhood lawn contest – a committee of middle aged women who had nothing better to do, except perhaps go to tanning salons or convince their husbands that the cars, all two to four of them, needed washing again– this year, they were considering doing a backyard neighborhood lawn contest. Because of this, his wife would not merely him to work on the front lawn; no, the back must be done as well. So he did, and it was done flawlessly.

            His wife was gone this week. Gone shopping. She was with her girlfriends in San Antonio. God knows how many margaritas they had all drank on the River Walk. He could imagine them sitting around a table at some over-priced Tex-Mex restaurant, a pile of shopping bags around the legs of their chairs, laughing loudly, margaritas in hand, flirting with the white waiter, flirting with the Mexican busboy. He imagine how much money his wife had spent so far – she had only left yesterday morning – but he didn’t want to imagine it, so he didn’t. It was the first time his wife had been gone for a significant amount of time since all of the neighborhood lawn contest mess started. He didn’t know what to do. He wanted to get back into bed and watch television – there were sitcom reruns and sports recaps to be had – but he remembered what his wife had said. She’d said, “Henry, please make sure you work on the lawn tomorrow. And Thursday. And Saturday. You know the drill honey. We’re gonna win this thing, right?”

“Right.”

“Good. I knew I could count on you. Try not to have too much fun while I’m gone. I’ll be back Sunday, hon. Bye-bye.”

“I won’t. Bye.” But now she was gone, and he didn’t feel particularly obligated. He felt exhausted. He felt like he was tired of mowing the lawns, both of them, twice a week. He walked out onto the back porch and starred at the lawn. For some reason he remembered a place he used to go as a child. It was a relative’s house, an aunt, or a great-aunt, or a cousin or something – he couldn’t remember. It wasn’t even a house, actually, it was a trailer. He remembered playing with some kids, probably more relatives, in the yard. It was no show yard. No prize winning yard. There were kid toys spread out at random – a pink, plastic Barbie tricycle, a couple of neon Frisbees, a dirty baby blanket. Marbles and jacks were stomped on every now and then. He remembered the grass; it was long, and uncut, there were dandelions to blow, bull thistles and stickers to avoid. Your foot would get caught in a patch of mud, hidden by the grass. You could pick one of those tall, skinny things and chew on it, or pretend to smoke it. There were bees and ants and dragonflies and grasshoppers. Whenever the adults would him in, he remembered being bored by their conversation, bored by the TV that never turned off. He would look out the window. Sometimes, there would be a snail on it.

            In his pocket, his cell phone buzzed. It was a text message from his wife. “Lawn? Lol love you”, it read. He decided to stop mowing the back lawn. He decided to stop doing anything to it. He would leave it to its own devices. He had a week for it to grow, maybe summon a grasshopper or two. He could always work on it the day before his wife came home. He started immediately, by going inside the house, feeding the cat, and turning on the television. Everybody Loves Raymond was on. He smiled.

            The next morning he got up and went to the bathroom. His wife had always hated facial hair, even though he’d had a pretty decent beard going when they first met. “I’m looking pretty scraggly today,” he thought, glancing at the mirror. He decided not to shave. “I’ll have a prepare-myself-and-the-lawn-for-the-wife-and-society day,” he also thought.

After showering and dressing, he went to the kitchen and fed the cat. The cat’s name was Boots; she was Siamese; she had white feet, thus her name. He loved the cat. He loved how much of a bitch she could be, not like the dogs, who were pushovers and yes-men – yes-dogs. She was pretty old, thirteen or so, so she was allowed to be grumpy. He loved that if you pet her on the stomach, she would attack your hand viciously, unless you were also petting her head; if you did both, you were ok. He didn’t even mind that she would meow at unreasonably loud volumes, standing by her food bowl, for no apparent reason. His wife hated that; he didn’t mind it. He gave her some food, did the two-hand petting trick, and went outside to feed the dogs. The dogs were named Princess and Ladybird. Princess was middle-aged, in dog years, but she acted old; she was half basset hound, half beagle; there was a little diamond of brown fur on her forehead, thus her name. Ladybird was just a puppy; she was miniature dachshund, but she was usually referred to as a wiener dog; show was brown with blackish spots; his wife was fanatical about watching the television show King of the Hill; if you changed the channel after accidentally catching half a second of King of the Hill, you were in trouble; the family on the show had a dog named Ladybird; thus her name. He loved the dogs.

He stepped onto the back porch, whistling to call the dogs, but stopped when he looked out at the lawn. He was starring at the tree. His wife had said it was the least attraction part of the yard, by far, but he liked it. It was old, and its limbs were long, crooked and drooping. She’d got him to trim it down to little more than a trunk with a few stumps poking out of it; “Like an amputee,” he’d thought after he trimmed it. Now it was different, not exactly back to how it used to be, but somewhere in the middle. The stumps had branches attached to them, albeit tiny ones, with actual leaves. It had been awhile since there was actual green on the tree; he almost smiled, then frowned, not understanding how this had happened. “Everything was picture-perfect yesterday. Ready for the neighborhood lawn contest.” He looked out into the yard to find the dogs and noticed the grass; it was long; he continued frowning. “I miss a day of mowing, and this is what happens? No wonder Emma is always on me about it,” he said out loud. He was trying to stay calm by thinking and speaking calmly. But the tree couldn’t have started re-growing branches in one night, he knew, and the grass couldn’t just explode like that either – it was already halfway to his knee, when, yesterday, it been AstroTurf. He was confused and didn’t know what to do, so he whistled again – pathetically this time – for the dogs. Ladybird came bounding out of a bush near the fence; she was leaping so far she barely touched the ground. When she got to his feet, she fell over on her back, flattening the grass under her, rolling around, her tongue waving, her tail convulsing. Princes jumped out of another bush on his opposite side; she was fatter than the puppy and could only hop around like an obese rabbit. When she got to him, she copied Ladybird, shifting her weight around, her legs kicking at nothing. Harry smiled and lay down on his back in the grass in between them. He thought about how strange it was that the yard had grown so much overnight, but he didn’t think too much about it because he didn’t want to. Instead, he concentrated on his dogs, and the grass he was lying on. It felt good. The close-cut lawn had always felt unnaturally sharp and brittle under his feet; this felt softer somehow, and stronger, more like a plant than some spiky plastic stuff colored green in a factory somewhere. He liked it and the dogs liked it. “And that’s what matters this week. Right girls?” but the dogs were off somewhere in the grass, playing. He listened to the way the grass sounded under their paws, when their tails whacked it, when they fell and rolled on it. He liked that too. He thought he might let Boots out in it later. She was old but he still sensed that she was a hunter at heart.

Then he got up and walked towards the porch, to get the dogs their food,  although they didn’t really look like they cared at the moment. He stopped at the pool. It was green; very green. Like everything else, it had been perfect yesterday. Flawless. He could hardly see beneath the surface, which was covered with a film of something. He starred at the water, wondering how much work it would take to clean, starting to feel the nervous confusion coming back. He saw the thick green film rise briefly, then sick; something dark was moving under the water – it was big. He hurried to the porch, calling the dogs from their reverie, grabbing their food bowls. The dogs slept inside that night, much to the annoyance of the cat.

The sunshine seemed brighter than usual, and the pleasant change woke him up. He squinted at the window. There was a something on it, casting a round shadow on the bed. He got up and looked; it was a massive snail. It moved slowly up the glass, its antenna moving languidly. The shell was pale cream-colored , with broad, brown stripes. He could see the texture of the animal’s body through its thin, wet sheen. It was bigger than any other snail he’d ever seen, much bigger than the ones he remembered watching crawl when he was younger. He watched it for a minute, then he showered, got dressed and had turned on the coffee maker. He thought he’d have his cup outside today, maybe let the cat play around a little in the back. When the coffee was ready, he called the cat and went to the door – Boots was one of those rare cats who would come if you called her, usually.

He opened the door – purposely not looking out the glass – and let her out, following her onto the back porch. Trying not to look up, he watched her; she moved quickly, but carefully, and in complete silence. She was edging her way towards the field, all of her senses sharp and absorbing the changes of the yard. And he could tell it had changed, even without looking up; he could hear it. It was full of bugs, which he didn’t particularly care for. He could hear little chirps, and shrill scratchy sounds, like rusty whistles. There was an unnerving shake that came at odd intervals, like someone hiding in the grass was trying to scare him with a pair of maracas, and maybe a tambourine. He wasn’t used to hearing anything out here except maybe the jingling of one of the dogs’ collars, or maybe the muffled sound of the pool pump in the back. And when he was mowing or weed-eating or trimming what little sound there was drowned out anyway. The cat had reached the grass and was no smelling at it, one paw in the air. She looked satisfied and continued her stealthy move into the wall of gold and green.

Hesitating, he forced his eyes up, and instantly felt two things: fear and joy. The yard had grown considerably since the day before. The tree was now as it once was; full of warped old branches and covered in green leaves, just as if it had never been mutilated by him at all. The grass itself was ridiculous now, just over his knees. Scattered weeds could be seen, poking their heads out from the tops of the grass; they were mostly golden wheat-looking things, but here and there were dandelions, big as oranges. He also noticed the impeccably arranged shrubs and bushes had mostly disappeared, been swallowed by the wild lawn. Like everything else about the lawn, this pleased him and worries him simultaneously. He was glad to be rid of the bushes, to be rid of lawn-work, but he knew it wouldn’t last long, and if his wife came home and saw the back yard like this…

Walking slowly, he called for the cat. This time, she didn’t come; he was worried – she may be hunting, but there was that thing in the water to think about. He walked towards the pool, which was practically hidden from sight. When he reached the pool, he again saw the green, but he noticed this time that the color had lost some of its sickening vibrancy, as if the slime had sunk into the depths of the pool, spreading out and coloring the rest. On the pool’s edge, there were cattails, hanging over the water, and in the pool itself, lily-pads. The pool was more like a pond now; it even smelled like a pond, thick, dank, and stale. But even though he turned his nose up at it, he liked the smell. It was how a pond was supposed to smell. Besides, he’d always hated the smell of chlorine. Ever since he was small, he’d hated that raw chemical smell – he thought, especially when it was hot, that it smelled like something they would put on dead bodies in a morgue or something – and he’d grown to dislike swimming because of it. It reminded him of walking down the detergent isle at the supermarket. When he was little, he would hold his nose and hold his breath when his mother forced him to follow her down that awful isle; he would bubble his cheeks and take an unnecessarily loud gulp air, earning his mother’s sigh and a few seconds worth of unpolluted breath. This was different: the pond had a somewhat rotten smell, but it was, more importantly an organic smell, there was life implied. And he liked it.

The sun overhead was painfully hot, even for an August day in Texas, so he wandered over to the tree, which could now, quite miraculously, offer shade. He sat down beneath it, where the grass wasn’t quite so high, and leaned back against its trunk, looking up into the canopy. Little flicks of the sun were coming down through the leaves. A caterpillar – again, like the snail earlier, mammoth – five or six inches long, black and yellow, covered in tiny spikes like needles, wiggled down the tree, towards him. Then it changed directions and crawled onto a low-hanging branch, possibly going for the over-abundance of leaves there. Something happened inside Harry and he got up from under the resting place and ran towards the pond; leaping into the open air, he tucked his legs up under him, grabbing them with both hands just before he crashed into the murky water, and sunk. It was cool under the surface, where no beams of sunlight could sting him – but he had to breathe, so he swam to the surface, laughing as he took a breath. The pond looked bigger from the inside, and he noticed that his splash hadn’t disturbed the lily pads. He floated there for a moment, then dove down towards the bottom of the pool. The bottom wasn’t there, or at least, he couldn’t find it. He surfaced and tried again – it wasn’t there. And he’s noticed a sensation when he was diving; it was something familiar, but practically forgotten. His father, who owned his own modest boat, used to take him out on a lake, usually with some cousins or something. He remembered swimming in the water. It was warm, soothing really, at the surface, but down by your feet it was cold. It would make him nervous, thinking about what could be down there in the cold, by his feet, so he would often pull them, just to lower them back into the cold again, for the sensation. The pool – the pond – felt like this now; it felt like a lake. For a moment he thought he felt something move by his feet, down in the cold water, but instead of pulling up his feet he laughed. He was still laughing when he noticed Boots staring at him smugly from the water’s edge.

He stayed in the pond for an hour or so, swimming, floating on his back (not bothered by the sun anymore) climbing out of the water to immediately jump, recklessly, back in, diving as deep as he could, unafraid of any black monster, laughing all the while because he was happy. He might have remained longer, but it started to rain – to pour, actually – and although he had no real concern about his own safety, he thought it was a decent a time to go back inside as any. So he climbed out of the green-black water, grabbed a dry towel from a rack under the porch and called the cat. She beat him inside, looking back once as if he were crazy.