The Art of Fact Essays

"Portrait of Hemingway"

So, as it turns out, I actually really dislike everything about Hemingway. I've known this for a while, and it is the kind in which I am stubbornly stuck. I will not stop hating who he was and what he did, and I will never enjoy his writing, not because he was a misogynist, but because I just don't like it.

The assignment technically said "Why you liked," but as I didn't particularly like this piece, I can't abide by that rule. I didn't learn much other than that the person who had the book before I did doesn't understand how to highlight with a straight line, nor when lines are appropriate to highlight in the first place.

And the way it began didn't make much sense, because it was taken out of a larger piece, but was still seemingly out of context. I don't much care for feeling like I'm not getting the whole picture. The style was too clipped for me, and nothing that was being said seemed either important or interesting.

I'm also not sure where this author somehow got this dialogue, or this scene. Reading the intro didn't help on that account, and I am left very confused by what feels a  fictional account of a man I care nothing for, with a very boring scene chosen to write about. I am not sure what the idea was behind writing this, other than as is said in the intro, because it was very much so dull. A chore to get through, some people might say.

Others might call me too harsh, but if by the end of the piece, I was never interested in anything I was reading, I'm not sure how anyone expected me to get through the first page. It seems to equate to someone telling me about every lunch they had for a week: overly detailed for something so dull. The into said that people found it devastating because they wanted to believe that he was a good person, but it's just devastatingly boring. I don't need confirmation that Hemingway was a horrible person. It's just common knowledge, at least as far as I'm concerned.

"Lady Olga"

This piece was much more engaging and witty. It didn't pretend to be anything other than what it was, and wrote in clear, concise writing. The person it spoke about was interesting as well, which held the majority of the story. It's a life that we don't hear much about. I genuinely enjoyed the piece, although it was written like any newspaper piece might be, as I've noticed a lot with profiles. It lead me to wonder why people do that, and don't, instead, try to make it at least a little different.

It takes more skill than one might think to write out the average newspaper article, but no one appreciates that because they're just so darn dull to read. The word choices are all just so neutral most of the time that it gives you no sense of emotion or danger or enticement, and this is written in the same way. Miss Barnell is what carries the entirety of the thing, with her stories and her uniqueness.

The removed narrative may help her to shine through, but I also wonder if there is a good middle ground.

My Face

[Inspired by "My Face" by Robert Benchley.]

Some mornings, when I'm drawing in my eyebrows, my nose seems to take up most of my face. It is those times when I take the time to cover it up and look and imagine what I might be with a different one. I know that I'm too fickle with my own appearance to actually change it, nor would I be able to justify the money. I'm stuck with it, but that doesn't mean I'm happy with it. 

I was told that the nose determines the facial attractiveness of a person. 

 

But that's okay, because I don't always hate it. Some days I wake up and the line of my jaw looks particularly pleasing in the yellowish light of my dorm room and the faint white sunlight peeking over the hills in the distance and held off by a pane of glass and blinds. I tilt my head a few times on those days and smile at myself before going about with my morning routine. 

Being a woman, and being a woman who sometimes bothers with makeup, but only after 9 AM, I spend a lot of time staring at my face. And sometimes only a few inches from the mirror as I try to make an arbitrary line on my eyelid as straight as I possibly can, and then match on both eyes. 

 

Makeup can be dangerous. As it turns out, there are rules. And there are things you need to keep buying every six months, lest you end up with an eye infection. When I first started wearing makeup, just a little bit of mascara, in high school, I ended up with pink eye because no one had told me about that rule. I remembered lying down on a pile of blankets in the living room, taking pain medication that would put me to sleep because although it wasn't oozing puss, my eye did feel like someone was scooping it out from the inside. 

I didn't know what caused it until much later, so I didn't put the blame anywhere, although whether it would be me for not knowing what to do with old mascara or the media for telling me that I needed it in the first place. 

But I don't know if it was something wrong with me, or some failure for advertisers to get on my brainwaves, but I never thought that I absolutely needed makeup. I believe that I have proven often enough that I don't feel it necessary to put on before leaving, particularly if I know I'm just going to get up, shove myself into some clothes like an overstuffed sausage, and head off to class without much time to contemplate whether that zit needs covered up or not. 

 

My face is ever changing enough that I feel as though no one would notice a day without mascara, although that's likely not true. To other people, my face probably stays the same. They don't devote the same amount of time watching the expressions that it makes in the mirror, looking at all flaws from just half a foot away. 

 

Looking so close at your own flaws has got to have adverse effects on your self esteem. Three percent of women would never let their significant other see them without makeup on, and that figure apparently means just...forever. It isn't as though makeup hides who you are as a person. Your face still looks the same underneath, but to the 33% of women who have gotten up before the person they are dating to put on makeup secretly, perhaps the line isn't as fine. 

 

Hell, I do bother to color in my blonde eyebrows most morning, and yes, I do feel naked without them colored in, to an extent, but I still like my face the way it is. Even if it never looks the same from day to day.

Seeing: Response

"It's all the matter of keeping my eyes open. Nature is like one of those line drawings of a tree that are puzzles for children: Can you find hidden in the leaves a duck, a house, a boy, a bucket, a zebra, and a boot? Specialists can find the most incredibly well-hidden things."

I like what this section is saying, about looking for hidden things and looking harder for the things. It resonates with the rest of the piece, regarding the rest of the essay and parts of it about blind people, because seeing, for them, was work. It took effort, like a person who was deaf and then gets a cochlear implant. It takes effort to hear for the first time as an adult, as it does when you see for the first time. But, at the same time, it can work for people who have always seen. It can be work to actually see the world around you and not just let it go past you without really looking. People who can see take it for granted.

"When I was six or seven years old, growing up in Pittsburgh, I used to take a precious penny of my own and hide it for someone else to find."

The beginning of the piece indicates wanting to hide something and have it found, and although it goes on to talk about seeing, it seems to end up being more about finding. Finding through seeing, and finding the beauty in things that you wouldn't have looked at more than once. A penny isn't something that most people would find wonder in, but to a child, it's great, because they don't know what money is worth to people who need to deal with it.

"I used to be able to see flying insects in the air. I'd look ahead and see, not the row of hemlocks across the road, but the air in front of it."

I love the way that she talks about her as a child focusing on the small things and looking not at the distance, but at something as insignificant as the air, and the small lives that affect people. I think that it adds to the effect the piece has to include this sentiment, and it's phrased beautifully.

"'Well, that's how things do look,' Joan answered. 'Everything looks flat with dark patches.'"

Even though it's dialogue from someone, this line stopped me in reading the story, because I felt that I had to sit and try and see it that way. I tried to stare at something and see it in two dimensions, but it didn't work. I love the addition of the way that Joan saw things after her sight was given to her through surgery.

"Why didn't someone hand those newly sighted people paints and brushes from the start, when they still didn't know what anything was? Then maybe we could all see color-patches too, the world unraveled from reason, Eden before Adam gave names. The scales would drop from my eyes; I'd see trees like men walking; I'd run down the road against all orders, hallooing and leaping."

There's a sense of jealousy here, that she didn't get to experience that altered sense of sight, look at things in the same way, and I think it's how I felt while I was reading about certain things in the essay. She's after something that's different from the rest of what the world sees, perhaps something special, and that altered sight might give that to her. It's a surreal image that she plants in your head, but it's still not enough to get you there.

Three Essays From Short Takes

["Disclaimer," "Moon Snail," and "The Khan Men of Agra."]

Although, on the surface, each of these stories seems to be about something different, not related in any particular way other than the book that binds them together, but they're all written in a specific style that I admire. They all focus on on moment in time, describing it, talking about this one time in their life. They elaborate, and then they extend it to mean something else. Every one of these stories seem like they're just going to be a simple narrative about a past event, and then grow bigger and bigger. For example, in "The Khan Men of Agra," she says, "I like to think it was a sweet kind of victory for us both," referring to her opening up and trusting another human being, and the reward that she got out of it, as well as what he got out of showing someone the truth of his city. She's implying a sort of wonder that you can only get out of opening up and letting another human lead you blindly.

And in "Disclaimer," although he is more overtly making a point throughout the entirety of the piece, he is still defining a moment in time. He's also defining a feeling, a sense of immortality and timelessness. But at the same time, that's not all he's talking about. He's looking back on a time in his life, but also inflating it to mean something else, to expand on the notion to show that people in books are inevitably about people that we know, that even when we're writing fiction, we write about people that we know. "Write what you know," they say, but J.K. Rowling never went to wizarding school. But inevitably, whether we know it or not, everything comes from something that we know, and that is inevitably what he is trying to point out.

"Moon Snail" is less about a moment, and more a focus on the one being that is the point of fascination in the piece, the moon snail. It supplements itself with information that was researched and descriptions of imagination and what the snail looks like. But by the time she ends the story, she hasn't said anything explicitly, but there is a suggestion of a bigger idea. She's set out to disprove this idea that something that's small can't be beautiful, and ends with an almost grotesque image of snails and their viscera. The entire time, she discusses the idea of a painting of the snail, because painters bring beauty to things that we don't think of as beautiful in our day to day lives.

And that's what these stories are doing. They bring beauty and grandeur to small moments and small things that go unnoticed, that fade away in the memory or fall to the sides of peripherals. It's bringing to life the idea that you can bring joy and life to things by focusing on the small things. They focus on the small to bring meaning to the whole picture, rather than just experiencing life and trying to take it as a whole. Because sometimes the beauty is in the small things.

Gidget: Rewrite

When I was in third grade, my parents got divorced, and my mom got a dog and a new boyfriend. Eleven years later, and my dad still hasn't had a new relationship, or anything other than fish to keep him company in the 50s house he lives in. The divorce happened around the time my mom was shopping for a cat; the beast she eventually bought only knew a divided home, and loved no one but me. When she eventually ran away, no one made posters. It seemed I was the only one who cared.

After, she just slapped a dog-shaped band aid on my wounds and called it even. 

I loved the pug puppy, but my brother and I were still afraid of her. We hadn't had a dog before, and even though she was tiny, bug-eyed, and lazy, her claws and teeny, pin-prick teeth hurt us occasionally. For the first few weeks, we ran from her, terrified that she was going to draw blood. Perhaps it wasn't her, but was some lingering fear from the furry, grey devil who had just taken her leave from the household. Maybe, in retrospect, we were afraid of the change she represented. My brother was only young, four or five years old at the time, and he likely wasn't thinking that deeply. I probably wasn't thinking that deeply about it. 

It was a safe fear, though. She was something we could channel all of a child's terror into. We were just discovering the world together; I was more sheltered than he was, but it was the divorce that launched us into reality. Fairy tales were crumbling around us like old castles, and we learned that love doesn't always hold people together. 

Gidget loved us despite all of our hangups about her. It was silly, that we were afraid, given that she was so kind compared to Heidi the demon cat. She chased us when we squealed and ran from her, yipping happily, big eyes bulging out of her tiny skull, tongue lolling out of her open mouth. Back then, her black fur was soft and shiny, although now it's going brown along her spine and more often greasy than not. 

It evolved from a fear into a game of “Poison Dog,” where she had the ability to kill us with merely a touch. We ran, giggling, and trapped her under baskets while she just panted and spread out across the floor under the basket, waiting to be let out. When we did, we would sit on our mother's bed and lean over, lifting it up and releasing her, but she was too small to get to us from where we were. She would run around the perimeter of the bed, looking up at us with excitement shining in her brown eyes. 

She's not like that anymore. 

Now, with arthritis aching in her joints and a flap of skin hanging from her right back leg, she spends more time in bed than anywhere else. Her little, curled tail still wags vigorously when she sees me, although her hearing is completely gone. She doesn't bark anymore at noises outside of the house; she only does so when she sees the other dogs barking. My mother bought her a comfortable dog bed in December, and she splits her time between that and underneath the dining room table, to hide from her bulldog bullies. 

The game was a play at real fear. We were just getting a sense of the things that were out there, the divorce showed us the reality of relationships, and television taught us the rest. I started reading books at a higher level, getting into themes that I didn't know how to deal with quite yet. Gidget was an escape. She gave me love when my parents fought over differences in raising me, over custody, over Jason. He's now my stepfather, and one of the worst decisions that my mother has never made. But without him, I wouldn't have my two little sisters, so I suppose there's a reason to thank him.

We dangled our legs between the spaces of stairs and let our dog chase us like a real threat, some imitation of a prey and predator chase. The reward for our predator was cuddling and petting, rather than our bloody meat for dinner. I don't think she would have had the guts. She still wouldn't. It was the thrill of fear without the danger of being murdered. 

As we grew up, new things took the place of our pug fear. Horror movies were our new game, scaring us with things that weren't likely to hurt us, like werewolves, or ghosts. It was a slightly different version of the same thing, but our awareness of the world grew. Fears blossomed with new information. The basics, of course, were ingrained as soon as we could understand them: death, murder, abduction, starvation, homelessness, large animals. They only added on, elaborated themselves, layering on top of one another until we were swamped in fear. Mine differed from his, of course, because he didn't care how high up it was, but I wouldn't mind being in a closet for a while. When I got bit by a wolf spider at thirteen, I never looked at another arachnid the same way again, but after being stung by a wasp in the eye, Brian cringed at the sight of bees. 

Gidget grew older with us, grey hairs around her face, forming a beard and eyebrows that looked constantly quizzical. She had her own fears, although they came later. The smallest dog in a group of three, her two bulldog roommates constantly picked on her. Being chased around the house wasn't as fun for her as it was for us, perhaps because along with the very real threat of being drooled on was the strength of an English bulldog's jaw. 

Gidget is old. Eleven years old, twelve in October. Her acceptance into the family was a change, along with everything else that had been going on, but she's also been through a lot. The average lifespan of a pug is twelve to fifteen years old, and she already has problems. She's been around for over half of my life, for most of my brother's.

Change is difficult. I haven't given much time to thinking about what life is going to be like without her. Before, she was riding in on a wave of changes, lives reshifting and forming around one anther. Her presence was a barely distinguishable event when she joined our family. But with her leaving, she's creating change all of her own. 

I'm terrified.

The Story of a Suicide Response

I liked the way that this was worded. It came off somewhat as a newspaper article, as did both of these pieces really, but I liked this one's use of language more. It felt more like the author was trying to make it feel less like an article and more like a story. It had emotions in it and it was a lot more compelling than just the facts stated as they might be in something like this. That inclusion made it work a lot more than it might have otherwise. What's especially interesting is that I had heard this story before, but never in such detail (SO MUCH detail, too. Why was it so long? Why were either of them so long? It got boring way before the half-way point). Although it certainly wasn't one of the most compelling things I've read (I struggled keeping focus on it, in all honesty) it wasn't horrid.  There were definitely aspects of it that I found appealing and other things that I didn't like as much, but isn't that how it goes?

In Which There is Physical Description

She's shorter than I am, perhaps about five foot six inches, although she doesn't like to wear shoes and oftentimes goes around in her bare feet. She maintains her hair short, above her shoulders but below her chin, and it looks golden brown in the light of the sun, but flatter under dull florescent. I don't think it's her real hair color, but who am I to judge? It's soft, too, when you touch it, which I haven't, but I know people who have. When she looks at you, her eyes are blue, with hints of green around her pupils. There's always a hint of teasing, or joy. You wouldn't want to see her crying. When she's drowned out that sense of wonder, you know that something is horribly wrong. And she always smells inexplicably of pastries, although I've yet to see her baking or spending inordinate amounts of time in bakeries or coffee shops.

When she speaks, she has people entranced. The words that she says don't matter as much in light of the beauty that is her voice. She doesn't say good things; rather, she's cruel and vicious. She doesn't know when to stop, or where he boundaries are. She's mean. But it doesn't matter, because people fall for the tone of her voice, like she's an angel and these are merely her battle hymns. She doesn't like people, but people like her. She could rule a kingdom with an iron fist, and she could bring it down without much thought to herself. She'd just keep on the way she always has, oblivious and self-absorbed.

The American Male at Age Ten Response

I'm not sure I would call this piece 'effective'. The sentence structure was boring. It was the same sentence over and over again "We would..." and it didn't hold my attention, and then when that was over "He is..." for another paragraph. I think that was a downfall. I can see how it could have worked, if the piece was written in that child-like tone, but I think that it really failed here. Although, I do think that some of the humor worked well for it, but the writing itself felt really underwhelming and boring. It was a good idea, but it wasn't executed well with the style or tone of the story. I believe what I'm trying to say in a roundabout, long enough for the word count required way, is that I did not like this piece. I don't think that it worked so I would be hard pressed to write about how it was effective, because I don't believe that it was.

Response to January

What I found interesting about this story is that it did a subtle switch from present tense to past tense, and then it just ended. I didn't catch it until the second time I was reading through it, and it jumped out at me how subtle it was (which doesn't make the most sense, but I'm going with it). Another thing was that it just reminded me of home. When I go home, all my family talks about is the barn, and their horses. My mother and my little sister love their horses, and my mom and my stepdad fight all the time about the horses. It consumes their lives, so I think that even if I didn't understand first hand what she was talking about during certain parts of the story ("If you live with horses, you soon get used to the feel of a line lying across your palm and fingers...") I think that I can at least understand what it looks like in other people.

It was a short piece, and even after two read throughs, I'm still not entirely sure what it was about.

Muskgrass Chara

I found the sheer amount of detail in this piece to remind me of Ryan's piece. Both of them had an abundance of details that could just put you in the moment, and it really brought them together. There were differences, because Ryan's was in a specific scene, but Moore's focused on a lot of smells that came together in a story that worked out. Moore's piece was very poetic and beautifully written. Both of the pieces flowed like someone's thoughts, but worked in the same way that careful word choice does. And there was an emotional undercurrent that really held them together, and made them work.

Response: Two Or Three Things I Know For Sure

While not entirely similar, reading this story made me think back to Camille's untitled work. It was that similar sense of disappointment in the men in their lives, although they do have distinct differences. They both have a sense of growing up with that disappointment, and learning to live with it, even if they can't accept it.They do have those fundamental differences. Where Camille expresses this outright inability to accept what she's grown up with, Allison has a more subvert way of doing the same thing. She acts as though she can accept it, much as Camille does to her mother, and then at the end, she prays and hopes that she won't end up like her family. Even she has a hard time accepting it, and it's such a vulnerable thing to explore and put out there that they end up feeling very similar in that aspect.

The Lantern Bearers: Response

Perhaps it's not a response to the metaphor itself, but more what he was trying to say. I love a message in stories that I read, especially in non-fiction, but not so overt as this. There is a difference between trying to convey something that you've learned and trying to show it through writing and trying to tell people what they feel and how they should act. The essay makes quite a few generalizations (not to mention saying that all poets are men, which I understand is a product of the time, but makes me much less likely to take the rest of his advice, as misguided as that may be.

Rather than just telling a personal story and showing the readers what he has learned, Stevenson seems to be trying to make a rather large statement about what all people are like, what all people feel. "In nobler books we are moved with something like the emotions of life;..." I disagree, but he's stating this opinion as though it's fact. And 'nobler' is vague enough that I can't fully get what he means. Does he mean that they comply to his moral standards? That they write well? And the emotions that people feel are only 'like the emotions of life'? Does this emotion somehow differ from actually feeling something? No. A book, not even particularly well written, can make us feel emotions as if we were going through something to provoke it. It's the wonder of human sympathy.

I understand that a lot of this is time and the differing of societies, but this essay is so far from a personal essay to me. It's a man preaching to people how they should act and feel, and trying to shove his personal life in there almost as an afterthought. It's not particularly well done, and the story isn't compelling. I could barely force myself to read up to the point where he actually mentioned his life, let alone to the part where he finally started forcing this metaphor on us. It's cheesy, overdone, and not well executed. I don't think that the motive for writing this seems to be that he wanted to talk about an event in his life and see how it could help others, it was that he wanted to impose his own ideals on others. It's okay if it's done well, if it's presented as an option, as a revelation of the author's rather than an explicit order on how to behave.

The metaphor, then, wasn't something that seemed to come naturally. It was a way for him to go about this, it was a way that he was trying to disguise this as something other than what it was.

I'm A Hateful Being

I hate introductions. Particularly when they're significant in length. A few pages, I can handle reading that. I'm sure it was riveting to the middle aged man who wrote it, but sometimes his opinion is just...entirely too boring, too conceited for me to deal with. I'd rather just read the rest of the book, please.

I hate tortellini. It doesn't matter what the filling is, what sauce you try to disguise it in. I hate it. The texture, the taste, the shape of it is entirely unpleasant because all I can think of is tasting it on the way back up, combined with cherry, anti-nausea medicine that I'd choked down only minutes prior.

I hate my stepfather. I hate the things he says. 

I hate when people smoke while they're walking. I hate smoking in general, but it's especially rude when you're walking in front of other people, not caring what toxins you're making them breathe in or if they have a severe reaction to accidentally breathing it in. I've had to duck off to the side and throw up because I wasn't expecting someone to be smoking on the pathway.

I hate em dashes. I'd prefer real punctuation. 

I hate acephobia. I hate it the most from the LGBTQA+ community, and I hate it the most when people don't realize that they're being horrible about it. I hate being told that I'll "find the right person" that I "must be boring" or that I "must have been sexually abused as a child". I hate it when people claim that acephobia doesn't exist while hating on asexual people.

I hate that so many people think that women's bodies are public forum. I hate that people assume the motives of women and girls because of how they dress or act. I hate that I am expected to take up less space or cower in a man's presence and I hate that I am supposed to smile because my anger, my hated, makes me ugly in their eyes. I hate that I can't go through my life without being subjected to the whims of men, but men can go through their lives without thinking about a woman's existence as a person.

I hate that I'm so hateful.

Response: September

I'm interested in seeing what makes this story a personal narrative, about what this means to her. It's clear that she's drawing some connection with the small animal and herself and her own experiences, but it's left open and ambiguous. Perhaps the purpose of that is so that we can relate it to ourselves and feel a sense of connection with her, because we feel like we understand what she was going through, when in reality, we don't know.

To me, it speaks to a sort of sadness, to a willingness to be that cat and just sink back into the earth so that we don't have to feel anymore. It's quite a bit of emotion packed into just one paragraph, into a lot of what seems to be non-emotional sentences like "I learned it takes only days for a small animal's body to decompose at this time of year..." which is very try. It just states the facts. But when you put it together, there is a lot of imagery there, "To press its outline back into the soft earth..." and it is full of double meaning and hidden motives.

Gidget

When we first got my dog, my brother and I were terrified of her. There is no mistaking now that she is anything but vicious, her paws aching with arthritis and sores, and she spends most of her time lying in her dog bed and being picked on my the bigger, younger dogs of the house. She's just a small, plump, old pug, but when she was a puppy, she had boundless energy.

She would chase us up the stairs of the condo, leaping with her little legs over the gaps in the stairs. That was something else we were afraid of: those gaps. We thought we'd fall through and die, that Gidget would slip through and her teeny legs would snap in two. Because we were children, these were just the kinds of things that we spent our time worrying about. It wasn't as though we knew any better. We thought that was all there was to fear; nothing scarier than that played a role in our lives.

We feared puppy bites at our ankles instead of starving to death, something that our own relatives had dealt with. We feared unrealistic plunges into the basement, but we didn't think about being kidnapped, because we were optimistic and young.

Eventually, that real fear grew into a game of fear, a joke because how could we have been afraid of something so small and harmless? We started pretending to be afraid of her, but it wasn't real anymore. We would dangle our feet between the gaps in the stairs, pretending that it made us brave when we knew that it didn't. And my puppy grew older and fatter with time, two surgeries, and a broken leg. We looked back at her and thought of how silly we were to be worried about her jaws when there was so much more out there to be afraid of.

Response: Those Who Stay and Those Who Go

Something that happens in this particular piece is that the writer, Ann Daum, uses a certain, more clipped, blunt sentence structure. The effect that this has is that it lends itself to a more 'matter of fact' tone. She is, in fact, just stating what happens, and then elaborating very little on that. "Joy comes in small, daily pleasures. The incredible colors of the sunset here. Watching your son win a buckle at a 4-H rodeo. Neighbors helping your husband harvest wheat when he's laid up for a week with kidney stones. I could go on." She's explaining things in a very short tone, but rather than it seem emotionless or dull, it just comes off as run-down, like bleak acceptance of the fact that this is how life goes here. She still gets the idea across: this is the way of life, and it's either this way, or not at all (not at all being not the option that you die, but rather the option that you leave because you can't live there if you're going to live a different way from the rest of them.)
It works for when she continues to say that she doesn't fit into this dichotomy. She's in between, as she says, and the beginning helps set up the tone so that you know what that means for her, that you get the feeling about how it works out, or how the people of her community view her. That is also when the structure of the sentences changes; they flow better and it reads in a stark contrast to what she was writing before. In short, she accomplishes making you feel that same outsider's status that she did, and that's effective.

I Remember

(I kinda wrote a scene, but here it is anyway.)

I remember the burnt down farmhouse in the field behind my mother's house that my brother and I would climb out to. It's captivating, and it's crumbling. All of its majesty is in the past, in its broken, brown bricks and in the root memory of plants growing between the cracks. The wind hits often when we wander out, casting a howling in our ears and the strong scent of burning in our noses, so fresh it's ad if it's happening now. The floor is now all grass and weeds, littered with bones--from what, we don't know. They just are. Pieces break and crumble in our hands like sand between our fingers, plants bend and break and crack beneath our heels. Sometimes, if the wind hits just right, we get a bit of grainy brick dust in our mouths, and it tastes like something old that we don't understand. Perhaps we're drawn to it, my brother and I, because it's like us; all that force trying to knock it down and it still has one wall standing. No one bothers to ask how it got that way, and no one cares, because we can make up our own past if we want to.

Scene Add-On: Casper

"In the winter, my mom's van (named Casper for its coloring) made the loudest noises that it ever did. It stuttered and whined and echoed around the garage before it was too filled with clutter to fit the vehicle. I don't think that we ever really liked that thing; my mom regretted needing a mini-van, and it filled the garage and entryway of the house with the terrible smell of rotten eggs. But it was the way that I got to school and from my father's house in the afternoon after I walked home.

That van was always a mess, but in the wintertime it was even worse. The cold air of Ohio made the metal creak and groan even when it was completely safe, and my stepfather worked on it at least once every two months, or so it seems in retrospect. I liked to close my eyes and listen to it when I was having a particularly fantastical day. I daydreamed a lot, got called the weird one in the family, but I liked to get lost in my mind.

My mind could turn the engine noises and hissing exhaust pipe into something different if I just subjected myself to the back of my eyelids. I pretended that I was somewhere else to escape where I really was. As long as I couldn't see the dank garage and dirty silver paint of the van, I could be anywhere, from a spaceship to a rickety, old boat. I made up elaborate situations to go along with these sounds, to supplement this fictional reality that I had created.

But then I would always hear the sound of my mother beckoning me into the house and I would leave that world behind."

 It was often that imagination that saved me, in the end, from some of the horrors I would rather not have faced. Everyone has a sob story; I am no different. I don't really think that anyone wanted to focus on their family's shortcomings. Mine was simply this: my two younger half sisters were loved more than my brother and I were. I know that was how our stepfather felt, and it was how our mother acted.  It was just something that we learned to live with.

Even though she probably loved us all the same, I think that the reminder of who we were and the past mistakes that we'd come from were often too much for her. I stayed out of her way; I took to my room, to my journals, to my solitude of the mind, where I could just relax and let be. It was so much easier to focus on someone else's problems, particularly if they were fictional and I knew that they would win in the end.

It can be funny, though, the want to reflect only on our best moments, but finding ourselves drawn only towards the worst. Pain can plague you, twist the figments of your imagination into twisted caricatures of themselves.

And those worst moments aren't always as bad as they'd seemed. I had it better than some people; we actually had a vehicle, even if it was clunky and obnoxious. But pain doesn't work relatively, does it? There's no way to compare it like a sandwich at elementary lunch, no way or exchanging your problem's for someone else's.

Response to: Signs and Wonders

The wonder of this story is that it's written in the first person, which is so unusual for nonfiction, or I would assume it is. It flows and ebbs and she doesn't end talking about the same thing she began, because we ended up taking a journey with her. It's raw and real and about discovering things--about yourself, about others, about the ecosystem that we live in--and figuring out what they mean, if anything. It's a ramble, but it's one that comes together and has meaning, and in the end, you don't feel like you wasted your time. You feel more like you've come to know the author and you feel like you understand something more about yourself, even if it's only in the most vague of senses.

Casper

Inspiration: Night Song

In the winter, my mom's van (named Casper for its coloring) made the loudest noises that it ever did. It stuttered and whined and echoed around the garage before it was too filled with clutter to fit the vehicle. I don't think that we ever really liked that thing; my mom regretted needing a mini-van, and it filled the garage and entryway of the house with the terrible smell of rotten eggs. But it was the way that I got to school and from my father's house in the afternoon after I walked home.

That van was always a mess, but in the wintertime it was even worse. The cold air of Ohio made the metal creak and groan even when it was completely safe, and my stepfather worked on it at least once every two months, or so it seems in retrospect. I liked to close my eyes and listen to it when I was having a particularly fantastical day. I daydreamed a lot, got called the weird one in the family, but I liked to get lost in my mind.

My mind could turn the engine noises and hissing exhaust pipe into something different if I just subjected myself to the back of my eyelids. I pretended that I was somewhere else to escape where I really was. As long as I couldn't see the dank garage and dirty silver paint of the van, I could be anywhere, from a spaceship to a rickety, old boat. I made up elaborate situations to go along with these sounds, to supplement this fictional reality that I had created.

But then I would always hear the sound of my mother beckoning me into the house and I would leave that world behind.

Response to: Brief History of my Thumb

I was pretty amazed just by the experience that this author had. It's so different from anything that I was taught to do that it was captivating. The use of language, also, just pulled me in, because it just showed the reader how casual it was to them, how little they thought of it, and how routine it was. She writes with incredulity of how it changed, and seems to miss the fact that people used to do this. It ended on a strangely touching note; her trust of a stranger, and how that trust meant something to him. It's at the same time a personal story and a common one. She mentions that a lot of other women have similar stories, but it's unique because it's her story.