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Note: In the fall of 2008 I enrolled in a Writer's Studio workshop. The following is one of the assignments from that workshop. Reading it now for the first time in a number of years I recall this as a fairly accurate account of my experience that day.
Assignment #6 – McCullers 3rd
Person – Noble K. Thomas
Preamble: Recall an event from my life
when the world really seemed changed afterwards. Then create a Third Person PN
who has great sympathy for the changed character and is passionate about the
character’s emotional and mental states. Use accurate and colorful language and
stay with the character not telling us anything the character does not know.
Keep the tone matter-of-fact, elegant but not showy, colored by the character’s
emotion but not out of control. The mood is uneasy.
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It
was the one day different from all the other days he had ever known. It began
as an April morning like any other, the day after his birthday, warm and
breezy. After a quick yoga routine he had taken a shower where he typically
loosely plotted the rest of his day and that was when it happened. He heard it,
despite the steady hiss from the shower spout and the sheer distance between
here and there something had happened that wasn’t natural, that wasn’t normal.
With a towel draped around him he turned
on the television expecting to see a live local news report of a plane crash.
It had been that loud, that disturbing. Already news
helicopters hovered above the scene with their reporters aroused and confused. Just
what the hell had happened? Did a gas line break and somehow erupt?
A short while later he drove southward
down the Broadway Extension and there were a few cars that whipped around him
and sped off towards the faraway downtown, towards a wounded skyline that fashioned
a fresh halo but now bent, flattened and dissipating to the west. He couldn’t
help but wonder about those poor souls speeding past – were they husbands, fathers,
sons who had forgotten to thank their mothers for buttering their toast just a
few hours earlier?
He listened to a song on a new CD.
“Water water everywhere and not a place to
stand,
My foundation rests on bedrock but the
bedrock rests on shifting sand.”
Suddenly a pick-up truck came from out of
nowhere, lights on and horn honking, and it was amazing how quickly that
vehicle just disappeared in front of him. He looked down at his own
speedometer: seventy miles per hour and compared to that guy he was nothing but
a concrete-sucking snail. The overwhelming sense of desperation was contagious
and, although not truly shared, he sure felt something turning in the pit of
his stomach. He loosened his tight grip on the steering wheel and turned off
the music. Tuned the radio to a local news talk station where the details,
although still sketchy, were starting to come together.
He was meeting his father for lunch but
they would eat no lunch this day. Instead they drove together toward the
downtown, toward the location of the building that had crumbled to earth, with women
and men and children inside. Out of a morbid curiosity or a need to pay respect
they drove. Or maybe they just couldn’t believe it until they saw it with their
very own eyes. They found a place to pull over a couple of miles north and west
of it, at an angle where the view that sliced through a gaggle of trees and old
homes was surprisingly good.
“It looks like some kind of giant monster
took a huge bite out of it.” The smoke had all blown away now and the silence
was affronting.
“Yep – a couple of bites out of it. God –
I can’t believe it.”
All of a sudden it felt like a great sin
to just be sitting there, gawking at it, wondering and speculating. Human
beings had been crushed right over there, really just beyond the tip of your
nose, a mere hop – skip – and a jump away, inside a building that just last
night he had driven past while on the way home from a birthday celebration in
Bricktown. Jesus Christ. People might
be suffering in there right now as they simply sat and gawked. People at the bottom of the pile, a sudden pressing
midnight, as airless as the surface of the moon.
Just right over there – just beyond the
tip of your nose.
“Let’s get out of here.”
They slowly drove away and spoke not a
word. The radio was still on, more details coming in, apparently an explosion
outside the building a little after nine. A child’s care center was located on
the first floor. His teeth clenched and a breath caught in the musty cavern of
his dry throat.
He dropped his dad off and headed back up
the Broadway Extension, dark springtime clouds gathering above, all cars now
with their headlights on creating some kind of solemn citywide funeral
procession. His sons would be coming home from school soon and what did they
know? What should he tell them?
That
night it rained and rained.
