Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Back to school. Spring semester is underway and so far all is under control. I ended up getting the writing class I wanted. Having fiction writing and reading for homework will make the 9-credit class load a little easier. My other two classes are Italian and Astronomy. I consider physics just as much of a foreign language as Italian and both are going to be a challenge. That 4.0 gets harder to maintain every semester. I'm positing my first writing assignment - a one-page story, set in an attic, and my assigned emotional core was Disillusionment. Because it's such a short piece, I thought I'd post a before workshop copy and another one after I've had a chance to get some feedback and edit.

Change of Heart

The air outside was so strong with spring you could get drunk from one deep breath. The sunshine smelled of daffodils and dandelions pushing up through the dirt. I came outside to catch a whiff of the perfume and shake the scent of mold and dust and bat shit out of my hair. My hands were shaking. I took another deep breath and started laughing. I was crying, cheeks cramped before I could get myself under control again. Jaime pulled up in his driveway next door. Behind the stack of Thai take-out he still wore a scowl from the fight we’d been having before he left to pick up lunch. He walked around the hedge separating his driveway from that of his current charity project: the neighbor with no living relatives. Last summer Jaime had offered to mow his lawn; the arrangement developed into a friendship and after the old man died, a certified letter arrived bequeathing the entire contents of his house to Jaime.
It had taken us three days to sift through the two-bedroom rambler and conclude that the Salvation Army was going to score. We left the attic for last and of all the crammed-full-of-crap corners in the house it was by far the worst. After a morning spent sifting through tax returns dating back to the sixties and no less than twenty boxes of Christmas decorations—not the porcelain nativity type, but the tinsel variety suggesting devout agnostic beliefs—I was seriously reconsidering my resolution to give Jaime and me one more chance. And I think my inability to hold back the sarcasm had Jaime thinking the same thing.
What a difference a bag full of cash can make.
I’d been such a jerk about this whole neighbor thing and I didn’t feel too great about the fact that it took finding the old man’s stash of money to make me realize I should admire Jaime, not harangue him. He was going to all this effort in memory of a man he’d known less than a year. That he was going to come out of it on top by about 30-grand was proof enough for me that the universe approved of his efforts.
From the back porch I heard Jaime call my name then clomp up the pull-down ladder. I had put the duffel bag back where I’d found it, on top of the last stack of boxes, so he could experience the rush of finding it himself.
After five minutes I couldn’t take it anymore and made my way back to the attic. Jaime was in the corner. The duffel bag was lying, deflated, on top of the “toss” mound.
“Looks like we’re just about finished,” he said.