I’m taking another amazing class through the Stanford Continuing Ed School. This one on creating a short story bit-by-bit. One exercise I’ve found outrageously helpful has been to catalogue the setting. Basically, to take a character, and thus the reader, through the scene, to see what’s there and what might become useful to the writer as the story takes shape. When the story gets fleshed out, maybe two of these sentences will make the cut.
Tito dragged his feet through the mud, up the hill back to the black house. The crooked porch stairs creaked under his weight, would creak under the weight of an acorn. Gary Greer—or perhaps whatever landlord came before—had long ago realized that two was greater than one. So he had erected a screen of sorts halving the long porch of the black house, as two halves make two. He had painted it last time the house had been painted, perhaps in the 90s. The screen was vertical slats, each offset by an inch in an alternating pattern, that excellently blackened the opposite side of the porch, and would do nothing to dull the sound, if the other side of the porch from Kiki’s side ever had anyone on it to make sound.
And although he knew no one was ever going to be on that other side of the screen—for the monster never came out—every time he approached the door home he moved his head side to side, trying to force his brain to make an image out of what he could see through the parallax. Perhaps one day the heavy door labeled 41B would hang ajar, or a light would eke through the heavy curtains that always smothered the bay window. It had never happened in his lifetime.
Despite being maybe three inches thick and painted an evil shade, the door to 41A always opened easily, even on the most tumid of days, as though the carpenter—or, more likely, a felon Gary Greer had hired for the day—had measured the doorway wrong. Inside, the wide, rough planks of wood with eyes and gory mouths stretched the room in the beholder’s eye. He had always thought they should put a rug down. The room felt like outer space without one. The had never used the fireplace in the far right corner with little black tiles; Gary Greer had blocked it up when he carved up the old house. On the left, the wide, long stairs—fourteen up a storey where normally there ought to be sixteen—started then bent, cutting over the doorway into the kitchen, which glowed between the two.
The linoleum in here hadn’t always been black, Tito could tell. It formed eight-inch squares with flowerish type plants that used to be green looking. The cabinets matched the walls of the long receiving room: stick brown. The air in here always smelled like cigarettes and freezer, though neither Kiki, Roz nor Tito smoked that stuff, and the sink dripped constantly. Gary Greer had said someone would be by to fix it back in April. In the left corner a washer-dryer combo blocked the scuffed back door from swinging in. If there were a fire by the front door they would all die.
Two windows over the dripping sink took in all the light from past the end of Gould’s End: a blaring gray sky that accentuated the splashmarks on the windows, and the orange, red, brown and black forest past the crick down the hill in the backyard. D-dut d-dut d-dut d-dut, the sink pattered. The stove clicked, too, on occasion. Tito worried it might be leaking gas. The fridge beside it was usually empty—worse so now that they hadn’t left the house in almost two weeks. It’s yellow light practically sighed every time it flickered on.
When the story gets fleshed out, maybe two of these sentences will make the cut.
Walking back to the receiving room, he’d gone to the kitchen in for a glass of water, to wash his hands, and find something to eat in the fridge—a gray banana—he passed the coat closet and the coat-closet-sized lav. 41A had three bathrooms in all. Kiki had bragged about that constantly when she first leased the place, before she moved in.
He padded up the stairs as softly as they would let him. They bent right about halfway up. Each step reached a little higher than felt natural so that by the landing Tito’s knees were always sore. Kiki’s had locked her room at the front of the house. He could see her shadow move around through the inch tall crack at the bottom of her door.
He went up the second flight, steeper, to the third floor, where the two of them had hauled Roz after the robbery, to the room above Kiki’s with lots of light, and the clawfoot tub off of it. The only furniture in the room was the twin mattress on which Roz lay. The curtains on the window were the color of mopwater. Good, spruce planks laid into the ground, nice, warm, with a reddish undertone. The best room in the house—Tito’s room.
Kiki didn’t want this room because of the plywood, and he didn’t blame her. It was obvious to anyone who lived in the house for a full day that the monster slept in a room that mirrored Tito’s. Tito wondered if the far end of its room also had a clawfoot tub. A plank, a doorway and a half wide, of plywood painted cream defended their side of the house from the other. At night Tito always thought how he should move his bed somewhere else, or at least his pillow, so he didn’t fall asleep staring at the plank. But he’d never changed it in two years.
After he gave Roz water, spilling half onto that nice floor, and mopped her brow, and adjusted her pillows and changed her gauze out with an old t-shirt of his, and prayed silently that she not die, please, because he didn’t know what he would do if she did die, he got up and went down to the second floor.
He’d been staying in Kiki’s office for the past week, a cramped room at the back of the house, with a half-window, stuffed up to its throat in cardboard boxes from Home Depot, a broken vacuum cleaner and other cleaning supplies, a bookcase with one shelf still in place and seventeen books stacked on its top and just enough space on the scratched floor for an air mattress.
It was only six or so, but Tito couldn’t keep his eyes open. He’d been like lately. He’d made a habit of checking out his little half-window, which overlooked the creek, to see if Winnie had returned again, ever since that second night. He looked now, but down at the creek he didn’t see Winnie.
He saw Kiki.
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