French Facade

"Write a short short (500 words maximum) in which the TV plays a role. Let the words/images on the screen interact with or reflect on the situation in the story. Your characters can be watching TV or it can be background noise."

Les Miserables has always brought me more joy than James Bond or Mean Girls. I grabbed it instinctually the night when Megan called and told me to pack a bag because ‘the deed had been done.’

We’ve been at the cabin for over two weeks now and this is the only movie we have. It’s VHS and skips a little, but it’s better than the silence or static that normally floods the air. The end of Act 1 flashes across the screen with the victorious rendition of ‘One Day More.’ I stand up and my shake my left arm, coaxing blood to return into my numbed fingers that for the past hour have been trapped as a pillow/embrace under Megan.

“I’m gunna light up a smoke before we start Act II, you wanna join?” I pull the pack out of my pocket and shake the empty lighter to life. It sparks and I open the door to the porch. We both sit on the wooden bench and pass the Marbolo back and forth, cold fingertips bumping and bare feet dancing on the cool wood. The lyrics to ‘A Heart Full of Love” were floating in the air back inside, “Cosette I don't know what to say. Then make no sound. I am lost! I am found! A heart full of love!”

“We both know I’ll never be able to go back home, not after what I did,” her voice pulled me away from the music, “Where do we go from here John?”

I can’t bring myself to look up into her broken eyes so I take an excessively long drag on the cigarette, burnt paper crackling but not long enough to give me escape. I flick the burning butt onto the pavement and begin,

“Megan, I don’t know what to say anymore. If I don’t get back into town soon it will look damn suspicious. It’s been two whole weeks! My sister says that Meadowbrook is still in shock, the police are completely dumbfounded by your murder. You planned it all perfectly but what happens when they don’t find your body? What happens when the police discover the murder didn’t really happen!” I stopped talking. This is the first time I’ve directly said the M word to her.

The TV inside had progressed and in our wintry silence we could hear Javert singing of the beauty of the stars. I look over at her handsome freckled face; she’s looking up at the heavens in silence. She looked older than eternity. We sat still as two more songs played on the screen back inside. I look over again at Megan and realize she’s staring at me. She dug her cold fingers into mine and we sat together, unsure of what the future will bring. The closing chords of the finale offer us hope in their promise, “For the wretched of the earth. There is a flame that never dies. Even the darkest nights will end and the sun will rise.”

Response to "Television" by Lydia Davis

Lydia Davis artfully uses words to convey an experience that fully defines her character as well as one that is uniquely of this day and age. We are television addicts.

The syntax is one of the most powerful players in Davis’ piece. Syntax is a weapon that many authors do not take fully advantage of, however “Television” is an exception. When thinking about the actual act of watching television, one thinks of not a long continual process, but rather hooks and shocks crammed into fifteen-minute time slots with seven-minute commercial breaks in-between. The syntax of this piece is tactfully similar. The staccato structure secures the attention of the reader while the numbers break your attention between the three different sections.

One of the hardest, and I personally believe most successful, ways to define a character is to let them define themselves. We learn so much about the narrator throughout the story.

Section 1 tells us she is a she. She has a mother. The women in her family are not in control. Her husband may or may not be unsatisfied with their relationship. Maybe he is having an affair. They are a judgmental family but also seek to conform to the standards of society because of the shine of the rich and famous.

Section 2 tells us she is unsatisfied with her self-decided mundane existence. She is either ADHD or a true renaissance woman interested in everything from the weather to “Swamp Critturs” (210). She is also a skeptic and doubts that scientists, more specifically meteorologists, have any answers.

Section 3 tells us at times she believes her life to be riveting and turns to the TV to escape. She sees how much happens to others in a mere hour and a half and realizes she doesn’t have it that bad.

We learned all of that without being told.

Davis is an exemplary model for how to shape a character without forcing personality traits or making her reader dig. Wonderful read. If you’re interested, a link to the work can be found here:

"Television"

War Damn Lydia and goodnight to all.

Forewarning for Spring 2012

Over this next semester this blog will be solely dedicated to my Fiction Writing I class. Thanks for understanding everyone, after this semester the blog will be back to normal.