...Sometimes she’s with me, walking beside me, and the wind is blowing around us. I’m trying to tell her it’s not over, it doesn’t have to be, if maybe we could just turn everything around and go back.
We know her only as Sis. In “Driving Shades” (see Part 1 here) she is the narrator’s dead sister: a “shade.”
Sis, who doesn’t exist in the original version, becomes the central focus of a plot that also didn’t exist. I needed her and the other characters I’ve created, just as I needed a central conflict or “problem” that set them into action. In order to build it out into a broader structure, I needed it to be “about” something. Sis doesn’t do much or say much, but she is what the central conflict evolves from and revolves around. She is what it’s all about.
When you write microfiction, you can dispense with story, even plot, because what matters is not what happens next, what that means, and where it leads. It’s about effect. In 100 words, or 140 characters (Twitterfiction), you are trying to surprise and delight the reader.
You’re on!––then, in a single flourish, it’s over.
Microfictions may suggest plot, but can rarely do more than just that: suggest.
Some folks like to say that Hemingway’s “For sale: Baby shoes. Never used,” is the shortest story in the English language. It’s not a story; rather, it suggests a story––or any number of stories, for that matter. But in fact it’s a microfiction, a very good one, and it does what all good microfictions do: creates an immediate and powerful effect and is over.
Tomorrow I’ll move on to the language of “Driving Shades” and how I had to impose strict limitations on the way I normally write so the style would be right.
Here’s today’s installment:
“Driving Shades, Part 2 (Part 1 click here)”
Driving for a living made sense, too, after a while. I always loved to drive. Still do. Put me behind that wheel and I’m back in school, tooling around in my old Catalina, top down, stereo up. Hey, born to be wild! Anybody want a ride? Living, dead, whatever. Even my crazy little sister used to get free rides out of me after school or weekends when I should’ve been studying or hanging out. She was like–”take me here, take me there”–such a pain in the ass, but so cute about it how could I mind? She always sat in the back seat. It was a little game we played. She was “Eloise.” I was her chauffer. I drove her to Rainbow soccer, Brownies. And when she started growing up, I’d drive her by certain boys’ houses where there were parties going on. I didn’t care.
The way I thought about it, Sis was in her teens, so where she went was her business. We were that kind of family: everybody left everybody else alone. A few times I helped her sneak her out to the late movies, even dropped her off places I knew she shouldn’t be, houses with a reputation, sketchy places where she wouldn’t tell me who was inside. There was one house in particular that gave me the creeps, and I told her so. She just laughed.
“Oh, it’s funny?” I said, “Well, guess what? Maybe I’ll just keep driving. If you really want to get off here––”
Before I could finish she’d jacked open the door and thrown herself into the road. We were doing about 30, but she couldn’t care less. I looked back just in time to see her disappear into the house.
You couldn’t say no to that girl.
Sis got the looks in the family, which is saying something because the one thing my family is known for––the only thing––is above-average looks. Mom and Dad were “Best Looking” in their class. I’ve seen old photos of them and I guess it was true. Some girls thought I was halfway decent, but Sis was in a different league from all of us. I’d watch her in the rear view mirror sometimes just to enjoy the sight of her, the lips she kept pressed tight to hide their fullness, the curls she jammed down inside her cap. But God help you if you gave her a compliment! She didn’t want to hear it.
She’d been a sunny, bright little kid. Couldn’t wait to grow up, like most little girls, but when the time came, becoming pretty, growing into her body, all those things she had looked forward to, they just pissed her off. Anything cute about her, she’d long ago figured how to hide it inside some Goth freakiness. She’d dress up only if the occasion didn’t give her any choice, like a prom, but she hated every second of it. She’d put the dress on like she was bandaging a wound. Then she’d come down the stairs, cursing to herself, when she looked so feakin’ good the sight of her would stop your heart.
The Goth stuff—I don’t know, I could tell she was going through something, but I figured she’d outgrow it. I remember one time how Dad took me aside and told me, “I think you ought to know this: your sister has an illness.” But I just thought it was a fad. It wouldn’t be long before she was dating some guy and that would be the end of it. She just had to give herself half a chance.
Sometimes I still feel that way, even with what went down: that all the time, something was leaching into her like poison. Whatever it was changed her whole personality so she wasn’t herself anymore. She’d say hateful things to Mom for no reason. She had a special thing about Dad. She’d turn these looks on him like he was Hitler or somebody. One night she hissed something at him when they passed in the kitchen, and he grabbed her arm and pulled her toward him.
“Okay, young lady–” he said. But she yanked her arm back before he could finish. She stood at the kitchen door and kept her eyes on him in a weirdly accusing way, as if she knew something terrible about him, and wanted him to know she knew it.
Dad, who never raises his voice, ever, made a noise in his throat like I’d never heard before.
Then he whispered, “Go on. Just get out. Whore.”
She kept looking at him, like she wasn’t going anywhere. Then something seemed to snatch her into the night. The door slammed and she was gone.
“She’ll be back, Dad,” I said, after a minute. “She doesn’t have any place to go.”
“I don’t care. I’m finished with her,” Dad said, in a tough whisper. He was breathing hard and his eyes were all bugged out like they get when something really scares him. Mom stared at him like she was demented, then turned and ran up the stairs and into the bathroom, slamming the door behind her.
I had the feeling they were seeing something I couldn’t see, but whatever it was, I didn’t want to get into it with them. I’ve never been big on uncovering secrets. I usually just let them stand. I don’t know, maybe I could’ve helped her deal with it, whatever it was. Hindsight’s always perfect, but back then, all I saw was a little girl struggling to keep her innocence. Nothing darker than that. Kind of a Pollyanna view, yeah, but I was convinced that was the right way to see her. It had to be the way she saw herself, only for some reason, she didn’t want to let go.
That it might have been something else, something so powerful none of us could have stopped it…well, that was the farthest thing from my mind.
The only time I see Sis these days is in a dream I have almost every night. She’s talking to me, like out of a video screen, and her voice tells me it’s okay, but her eyes are too dark to see into. Sometimes she’s with me, walking beside me, and the wind is blowing around us. I’m trying to tell her it’s not over, it doesn’t have to be, if maybe we could just turn everything around and go back. She looks at me and the look says everything. Back? She doesn’t even know what that means. But I keep trying until I realize I’m talking to an image in my mind somewhere. She’s not here; I’m talking to a dead girl, and if you’re dead, there’s no “back,” in your world. Then I’m awake, and it was a dream. Just a dream.
One thing about shades: they look totally normal. Almost. You’ve probably seen one without knowing it. The only difference is, they’re a little bit paler than they ought to be. I’ve never come across a shade in daylight, but if I did, my guess is that, even on the beach at high noon, they’d look like they were in moonlight. Another thing that gives them away is the eyes—black pools. You might think they’re looking at you, but it’s just for show. Those eyes aren’t seeing anything, at least not what you think they’d see. Shades never blink, never look down or glance around the room. When they move––slow or fast, it doesn’t matter––there’s a spooky kind of dignity that sets them apart. They’re focused. They’re on a mission.
If I’d thought there was a rat’s ass chance Father Mackey would get it, I would have asked him, what’s the big deal about being alive anyway? After all, we’re only here for a flicker, long enough to learn how little the world cares about us, then we’re dead. A world that hates us is the way Sis put it, but I wouldn’t go that far. To me, the world doesn’t care enough to hate. Sis started saying these things the year she got sick, the year it all ended.
“What does it even matter that we were ever here?” she’d say at dinner. “We’re just going to get snuffed out like you’d step on a roach.”
Mom and Dad just stared at her, wagging their heads. Sometimes Dad would lose it and tell her to get out. Sometimes Mom would get up and leave the table. Sometimes Sis wouldn’t be home for a while, and nobody would say a word about it.
I never called her “sick.” It was just the word Mom came up with. Then Dad started using it, and then I followed along. It became her label. Sick, like she had cancer or something.
But truthfully, it was that she just went from bright to dark, started evolving backwards, from a butterfly into a spider. She’d been hanging out with guys since she was 12, and the guys she picked—I could never figure it out. She could have had the coolest boyfriend in town but instead, God knows why, she hung with the Goths. Creeps––I didn’t even know their names, but she let one asshole after another have her, and every one of them tore off a piece, a piece of my sister. And I couldn’t do a damned thing.
Mom and Dad were way over their heads. I remember overhearing Dad once tell Mom they ought to ask Father Mackey about exorcism—and I laughed out loud. I’d learned a few things about building self-confidence from my coaches, and I thought I had some answers. I dropped something on her one day that still makes me cringe. “Sis, if you want to feel better about everything, try respecting yourself a little more.” I have no idea where that clunker came from. Seriously, it would make even a Catholic youth leader blush. But I remember how she laughed at me, like she was laughing down from a great height at her poor dumb retarded jackass of a big brother.
It didn’t stop me. I’d give her little spiels about dangerous guys, or STDs, and I’d check her reaction by looking in the rear view mirror. I might as well have been a Martian speaking ancient Greek. One time somebody she was hanging out with left some bruises on her arms, closed one of her eyes. I figured I knew the guy and went looking for him. I’m not a tough guy, but I can be intimidating if I have to be, and I found him—a pimply kid with slicked back hair. I punched him twice then I stood over him and told him who I was and what this was about. I said a few things to ice his soul, but I could see it wasn’t working. Even lying on the ground in a pile of hurt, this kid had a weird mocking air about himself and a contempt for me that came from someplace I couldn’t reach.
“Want to kill me?” he said, with a smirk, as if he’d hacked into my mind. He knew I had nothing. I was out of moves.
I gave him another kick and left him on the ground. Sis didn’t speak to me for a month.
After that, she was on her own. She wanted to be treated like an adult, fine, I would let her have that. I backed off. From then on, when she wanted to go somewhere, I’d take her, but no more motivational speeches. I would drop her where she needed to be, nothing more. That’s how it was the night she died.
