(no subject)

[i_id]

Crowd scene.

 
            Zeller insisted I come to breakfast the next morning.  He didn’t say a word about it, but I found myself pulling myself out of the hay long before I had decided to do so.  I was suddenly hungry, like a flipped switch.  The scent of hashbrowns filled my mind, Laura’s hashbrowns.  She was cooking them now, I knew.  Gold and hissing in the oil, and perfect.  I stumbled down from the loft, following that scent that somehow carried all the way out to me.  When I reached the porch, I took a deep breath, and opened the door.

            Everyone knew what had happened to me last night.  I could tell the moment I saw their faces.  Don and Richard were so carefully blank.  Laura, at the stove, wouldn’t meet my eyes, and Irene did so with a determined look.  Only Renette smiled, and she brought me coffee in her small hands, pressed the cup into mine.

            “I’m sorry about Jacob,” she whispered.  “I miss him too.”

            I gaped after her for a moment.  This little girl, this child… I knew, watching her go back to helping her mother, that she spoke nothing but truth.  From the mouths of babes.  She’d never met Jacob.  But she knew my mind now, all of them did.  They knew him as I did.  I looked around at them, and jumped when Allen shut the door behind me.  

            “Caleb, some breakfast?”  The New Jersey accent was back, a contrast to the soft Boston that seemed to be Allen’s normal voice, and I looked closely at him.  He nodded.  “It’s Zeller right now.  Allen doesn’t mind.” 

            I opened my mouth to ask how was I supposed to believe that, but then I knew.  

            It’s all right, said Allen into my mind, gentle.  This is the way things are.

            I held perfectly still, feeling as if my mind would overflow if I moved, like a glass with the water trembling over the edge.   

            “It’s not that hard,” Renette said, and her mother nodded.  

Comments

[snacktaveous.livejournal.com]

That's a nicely written scene. Is it for a class?

[i-id.livejournal.com]

It is, yeah. I'm in a creative fiction seminar, and this is... oh, about a third of a scene.

[snacktaveous.livejournal.com]

Well, fancy that! I'm going to be in that class next quarter. Assuming that you've taken the intro to fiction class, how does the seminar compare to it?

[i-id.livejournal.com]

I have taken both, under Kalpakian. Who will you have for a prof? I'm told they each teach it very differently.

The seminar is usually a smaller class, 15-16 as opposed to 20-22. The projects are larger, assignments faster paced. Kalpakian wanted us to have a story plotted out, researched, and possibly half-written before the class began. It was due, 20pages long and a complete story, before the halfway point of the quarter, and now we're polishing excerpts from that for a public reading, which will be on Wednesday, 3/7 at 2:30, downstairs in the AS bookstore in the room where they sell textbooks. (Come to that!)

[snacktaveous.livejournal.com]

I've read student reviews of Kalpakian that say she's pretty full of herself, so I'm diving at Trueblood. A reading on campus sounds like good fun, though.

[i-id.livejournal.com]

She can be, but she's published tons and tons, so I figure she's doing something write. Her classes are set up so you get a lot of feedback, on pretty much everything you write. If you can tolerate her being occassionally obtuse, read her handwriting, she's really not bad. I'm a bit biased, as she likes the way I write and doesn't tear into me the way she does to some people.

I've never had a class with Trueblood, but I can ask around.

[snacktaveous.livejournal.com]

Rock. I'll be posting my own literary masterpiece in a couple week.

[i-id.livejournal.com]

Yay! I will look forward to reading it.