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021308
My writing, lately (when I've been bothered to do it), has been slow and boring. This may have something to do with the unusually ordered nature of my life right now. My creativity, oddly enough, doesn't often seem to be spurred on by order. However, in an attempt to bring a bit of sense into my writing life (that, hopefully, doesn't result in boring and overthought prose), I checked this book by Brian Kiteley out of the library. So far, I have found it to be smart and interesting and the exercises are actually inspiring, challenging, and informative.
So, anyway, I'm doing these exercises, and I figured it couldn't hurt to post them here every couple of days. Here goes...
[Write a first person story in which you use the first person pronoun only two times--but keep the I somehow important to the narrative you're constructing. 600 words.]
That first day, it had been a new dress and an old pair of shoes with no socks or hose. It was the summer, and the very idea of donning pantyhose in the city’s concentrated fug conjured up images of sweat-soaked librarians in fuzzy gray cardigans, mopping their brows with embroidered handkerchiefs, expiring (yes, expiring, the perfect combination of old-lady vernacular and bookish understatement) in the heat. The shoes were conservative (and, for that very reason, largely unworn), mary-janes with low heels. They would, most likely, be comfortable.
While walking to the subway, the heels of the shoes had started to pinch. Foot sweat mingled with the stiff leather, a haven for blisters. None of these things, though, were so bad that they couldn’t be ignored. Turning back to change shoes was impossible, now; it was the first day, the first impression. Punctuality was essential.
The receptionist looked like she was sixteen. She had on a sundress with spaghetti straps and her shoulders were bony and tan, with freckles. Her feet poked out from beneath a hulking desk—long and thin, wrapped up in strappy sandals, the nails of her big toes so polished and shiny that they looked like grandma’s silver.
She smiled in that insincere way all receptionists have, her eyes sliding around the tiny room, over the damp surface of the dress, eventually traveling down towards the shoes. Suddenly, everything seemed all wrong. Not just uncomfortable, but wrong, deeply wrong. The dress too tight about the waist, the shoes too dowdy and hurting, skin sweating, makeup running—everything too honest, too apparent, like an airplane with a banner reading “new girl.”
“You must be Linda’s new assistant,” she said. “She’ll be right out to show you around.”
Linda, when she appeared, was short, and wearing pumps, and she was dressed like a JC Penney ad. She said she was happy to see me. She didn’t seem to care about things like shoes or clothes or the faint, frazzled scent of sweat that enveloped the room. There was some hope.
No one else in the office was wearing mary-janes, though, or pantyhose, or any of the kind of stuff that might be described as business wear or office wear or even sensible. Most of the women Linda introduced were dressed like the receptionist. They looked like her, too, and smiled in that same slightly condescending way. Linda seemed oblivious to it all, rattling on about desks and files and the location of the water cooler.
Midway through the day, after orientation and the office tour, the shoes felt the size of a six-year-old’s. It hurt to sit or stand. It hurt to think the word “shoe.” The fate of the expiring librarian, now, seemed most certainly preferable to this. The slightest glance at any sandal-shod appendage caused a great upwelling of emotion, a heady mix of envy and embarrassment.
Lunch was proffered as a variety of take out menus. “All of these places are within walking distance,” Linda said. “I think the farthest is about six blocks away? You could run out and bring something back here. Or eat in the park. Whatever suits you.”
The shoes were growing tighter by the minute. Insistent, throbbing pain reverberated with every step. A chance to be barefoot was immediately necessary.
“The park sounds great.”
Outside the heat was alive, a pulsing dampness. A man on the corner was selling mesh slippers in a rainbow of colors. He had an orange pair in a size nine, with tiny sequined flowers in shades of white and green. They looked refreshing, cool, so much more inviting that those cold upstairs gazes.
“Five dollar,” he said.
I slipped them on, threw the mary-janes in a trash can. And began to walk, and continued walking.
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