Fairy/Folk Tale

May 2, 2013

Walk of Champions

There once was a place called Oxford Town

A place you’d seldom find a frown

Until one day, in the midst of May

The squirrels no longer wished to play.

illustration by Mattie Codling

Oxford Town was loved and cherished by many. The people would come and go, but Oxford Town stayed the same. The people would be a part of Oxford Town’s life for about four years, and then they would move on. But their hearts forever remained in the Grove. The flowers that had bloomed at the beginning of this spring year brought happiness to every eye, as it had each year before, but now not a soul walked upon the land. You see it had been a particularly rainy semester up until that day in May. A chemical in the rain made the once friendly squirrels that had scampered to the palms of passersby become giant mutant squirrels and they were angry. They stayed perched high in their trees, acorn pellet guns at the ready to attack any daring to walk by. They had captured the Magical Dean of Students and placed him in the top of Ventress Castle. Without the Magical Dean of Students, chaos had ensued. Students no longer wished to stay in school.

Most students threw their papers in the air and vowed never to return to the school, except a girl named Rebtasha and two of her friends. They knew they had no choice but to fight back against the angry squirrels and rescue their Magical Dean of Students. Rebtasha studied languages and would communicate with the squirrels. Coloneline studied exercise and would train them to fight the squirrels. And Bearbara studied medicine, which she would use to sedate the squirrels, if it came to that.

They used a set of tunnels underneath the Grove, their footsteps echoing as they sloshed through the puddles. They reached the Grove and came out through a hatch on a stage placed in the middle of the trees. Rebtasha and her friends stood and waited for their attackers. The squirrels had seen them. As they ran to the edge of the tree branches to get a better aim to shoot the intruders, the branches snapped and the squirrels fell to the ground. They had forgotten their own size. Rebtasha talked to the leader to achieve peace as Coloneline karate chopped a feisty squirrel behind her. Meanwhile, Bearbara went around to all the squirrels lying on the ground and gave them a sleeping potion. Rebtasha and the leader squirrel talked until they found a way to compromise. The squirrels would return the Magical Dean of Students as long as the humans would feed them Chik-fil-A from their feasting ground for the rest of eternity. All agreed to this exchange. Rebtasha walked through the Grove with her friends and the newly rescued Magical Dean of Students from Ventress Castle. The students came back to the land with papers in hand. The place of battle was honored by all that passed through. From that day forward, they called it the Walk of Champions.

Writing Process

April 15, 2013

Non-fiction.

Writing Process

Prewriting: In kindergarten I broke my right wrist after falling from the monkey bars in Mary Grace’s backyard. I was afraid I’d fall, my hands were sweaty, but she assured me everything would be fine once she put blankets on the ground. Yes, surely the blankets would cushion my fall. They didn’t. This being my dominant writing hand, I was forced to switch to a wobbly left hand, the pink casted right one lying useless, watching my feeble efforts. Not an ideal situation for a 5-year-old just learning how to write her name.

Drafting: The years that followed I wrote in my Wish Bone diary, the place where I kept all my secrets. There was a key to lock it and everything. I soon lost the key and would have to use all my strength to pry it open. I’d write about the cute guy in my fourth grade class that sat in front of me. That time I dropped my pencil and he picked it up for me, or the pizza and breadsticks I ate for lunch that day.

Revising: Up until about a year ago, I had this condition called hyperhidrosis. Diagnosed at the age of 15 when my parents finally took me to the doctor. An excessive sweating disorder that affects 2.8% of the U.S. population. My friends jokingly referred to it as hyperhiGROSSIS. I’ll give them points for originality. My hands and feet would sweat if I was nervous, if it was hot, and even if it wasn't. (It made things a bit socially awkward at times. I’d avoid shaking people’s hands, I hated playing Red Rover or Twister, and when it came time to hold hands to pray, I’d always hope it was a short prayer otherwise I’d get questions like, ‘Why are your hands wet?’ Because I dipped them in water buckets before we started praying. Didn’t you see me do that?)

Because of this condition, in school my papers wouldn't sit flat on the desk. They'd start to curl up on the edges due to the moisture on my palms. I never could write with the juicy ballpoint pens most people love. As I'd move down the page, I'd have to write extra careful so as not to rip a hole in it. Sometimes I’d have to grab another sheet and start over. I'd walk up, put my work on my teacher's desk, turn quickly and walk back to my seat before she had a chance to raise an eyebrow at the damp thing lying on her desk. Even though I had surgery to cure this absurd problem of excessive sweating, out of habit, I continue to avoid juicy pens. Which leaves me with the super cheap kind. The ones I'd see my grandfather use to work the crosswords. Smear resistant. Most often found on the bottom shelf at your local Wal-Mart.

Proofreading: My senior year of high school I started writing letters. I’d get bored in my horrible, windowless Economics class. To the untrained eye, I looked like an excellent student, furiously scribbling notes about GDP or monopolies, but it was generally one-sided conversations to a friend. There were also the quiet afternoons in the law office where I worked as a runner. I was convinced playing on the computer was frowned upon, so in between the rings of the phone and a “Good afternoon, Al White’s office. How may I help you?” I’d write letters. Mostly about my screw ups on the job. Like that time they sent me out to buy paper towels, and I came back with only two rolls. How this was considered dumb. Or that time they sent me to Office Depot and I brought back the wrong type of folder and had to slink back to my desk and sit for another two hours until I got off.

This letter writing continued into college, documenting the mishaps of my freshman year. How me and my roommate never should have told the other girls on our hall we weren’t rushing. Or how we declared the month of October: Make Friends Month. Or in Spanish class when we were learning vocabulary for the different professions and I raised my hand to contribute an answer, panicked, and ended up saying, “Para ser cartero, es necesario saber cómo caminar.” Translation? To be a mailman, it is necessary to know how to walk. While this may be true for those living in small towns, it wasn’t exactly my generation’s perception of mailmen. I thought it was funny to send these letters to my dad’s law office. I imagined all the other lawyers receiving boring business documents in the mail, but my dad would be different. He would get random fun mail. Whether he wanted it or not.

Publishing: In seventh grade I wrote my first book. It might have been a project for my Written Communications class, but a book nonetheless. Before receiving the green light to proceed, we all had to pitch our story ideas to our teacher. Ms. Gilbert was a frightening woman that found pleasure in using the phrase “Tough cookies” after denying a student a bathroom pass. She had every color of stretchy pants you could imagine and always paired them with awful floral blouses. We were shocked to find that this woman that dressed like a grandmother was actually in her early thirties. A rumor circulated that she had been nominated to be on the show What Not to Wear. Sadly, she had declined the offer. She wore her pink stretchy pants with the white top and matching pink flowers that day as I approached her desk and told her my idea.

I was going to write a children’s story about a blue chicken named Blueberry that wanted to join the C.I.A. No, this wasn’t the Central Intelligence Agency, it was a branch strictly for chickens, Chickens In Action. Being born a blue chicken, Blueberry faced his own set of obstacles. He wanted so desperately to be a part of the C.I.A., but he was teased for having this dream because he was so different from everyone else. It seemed unlikely the C.I.A. would ever recruit a blue chicken. However, his dreams started to become reality when an agent mysteriously approached him on a hill in the moonlight. Blueberry went through vigorous trainings, took lie detector tests, and was then admitted. Things got intense when robot chickens came to steal milk out of the vault at the farm where Blueberry lived. Why did robot chickens want to steal milk out of a vault? Not important. What was important was the fact that Blueberry sprang into action, shooting them with water guns, thus short circuiting their wires. He saved the farm and gained the approval of all the chickens that had made fun of him.

            

Back from the Summer

March 25, 2013

This is my first workshopped fiction piece. C.S. Lewis once said, “We read to know we are not alone.”

Back from the Summer

by Molly Dawkins

It hurt, but she didn't say anything. Lying on the rubbery pale blue table, eyes watering from the light staring at her from above. A shadow comes across as a man with a tool like a tiny dagger goes for her face. He pokes, then takes his thumbs and squeezes, pinching her skin.

"I'm allowed to do this," he says, "because I'm the dermatologist and I'm wearing gloves. Don't go home and do this yourself."

He continues to poke at her face, causing her to bleed. The man starts to become blurry, she feels someone grab her hand, realizes her eyes are closed and opens them. Four pairs of wide eyes watch her.

"You passed out, are you okay?" A nurse is holding her hand.

Is she okay? That question still bothers her even after months have gone by since she got back home to the small town, her small town, in Mississippi. It didn’t use to before, before she spent a summer working on an Indian reservation all the way across the country in the southern part of Washington where most often people aren’t okay. Kids hear their mom getting beat up in the next room, and she couldn’t walk very far without meeting someone in mourning. Suicide rates are off the charts, and everyone is affected by alcoholism in some way or another. If she closes her eyes, she can go back to the day she saw a bruise on that 4-year-old girl’s face. The pain is so visible because there’s not much to hide behind in the poverty-stricken valley that’s strangely surrounded by beautiful mountains. When she looked at the mountains, she almost forgot the mess of the valley.

Some might attribute her annoyance with this question to culture shock, but she’s pretty sure it’s a better awareness of how not okay people generally are, that bugs her. Everywhere she goes now there’s a “How are you?” attached to the “Hey” greeting. People aren’t even thinking about it. She starts to notice out of a robotic nature because she’s asked so often, or because she knows the person she’s talking to isn’t actually interested in how she is, or because she doesn’t want to involve anyone else in the mess, like everybody around her, she always replies, “fine” to that question.

She can tell she’s been in her head too long. The nurses look like they’re about to run out for another doctor, so she nods. Nodding, that’s what they want her to do. They don’t care if she’s okay or not. They don’t care that by the end of the day she’ll probably be in her closet. They don’t want to know that’s where she goes when she feels helpless.

"Here, take this." They hand her a white cloth. "Apply pressure."

She holds it to her face. They give her a lollipop.

"Alright, let me see," the nurse says after a few minutes. The show is over now, so it’s only her and one nurse. She lifts the cloth.

"I'm going to put a band-aid on that spot on your chin. We can't have you walking out in the waiting room with blood all over your face."

No, she thinks. We wouldn’t want people to actually see what’s been going on in this room.

She gets in her car and takes the band-aid off. She looks in the mirror, a bunch of tiny red dots cover her face. She pulls back her long brown hair and then takes her thumb, licks it and tries to get rid of the unwanted color. She turned 18 last month, she didn’t think adults had to deal with acne. She reaches for her foundation and brushes on a new layer of perfect skin tone. Key in the ignition, she cranks the car. She has to go meet her boyfriend Sam. Her hand shakes as she reaches to change the radio station.

She walks inside. He’s not there yet, he’s always late. She picks a booth by the wall, writes her name on the table with her finger as she waits, J-A-M-I-E. She starts to write it again, this time in cursive. J-A-M…

“Jamie?”

She looks up. It’s Sam. He’s wearing a tan polo under his hoodie, it almost blends in with his skin. He should be wearing the green shirt she got him for their one-year anniversary, it really brings out his eyes.

“Oh, hey, Sam.” She erases her name in the pretend ink off with her sleeve.

“How was the dermatologist?” he asks as he sits down.

“Just fine,” she says.

“I need to tell you something.” His eyes sail off to the left. He’s watching a guy wearing an orange shirt that says “Fear the Beard” pick up a kid from its stroller. “I can’t do this anymore,” he continues.

“What do you mean? What’s wrong?” These questions are a formality. In the back of her mind, she knew this was coming.

“You’re different since you got back from the summer. You won’t let me in anymore. You’re holding me at a distance. I don’t know why either. You know you can trust me, but this can’t work unless we can both be open with each other.”

He’s still talking, but none of it’s making sense. She’s trying to make him see reason, but it doesn’t even look like he’s listening. She’s just talking, she’s rambling, she just used a rubber band as an illustration for their relationship. If you pull it long enough, it stretches out and never goes back to its original shape. He wants the original shape.

“Then I guess we’re done here. That’s it,” she says. She gets up, grabs her bag, and starts walking towards the door. She opens the door herself.        

Her eyes are glued to the ground as they walk on the concrete sidewalk. Her legs are moving, but she doesn’t remember telling them to. Sam is lagging behind. She wishes he had stayed inside and let her walk alone. One foot in front of the other, stepping on the cracks. His hands are in his pockets. He’s wearing those dumb flip-flops, in the middle of winter, the ones with the outline of a pineapple on the bottom. They’d had to stop to buy them at that tiny shop off Beaver Dam Road after he had ruined his other ones racing down the beach. Though it might have been her fault. The old ones had snapped after she tripped him to get a head start.

People are walking past them now. There are too many people. They shouldn't have met here on a Friday afternoon. She had to park too far away. She crosses her arms. Out of the corner of her eye she can see he's still behind her. The pavement won't end. And then without warning, it does. She stops. He walks a few steps to reach her, and then he stops too. Nodding to the left, she says, "I'm that way."

Pointing the opposite direction, he says, "I'm that way." Their eyes meet. She hopes he doesn't see her. She says, “See ya” and knows it will be the last. She doesn't know why she came here. She wanted to fix it, but instead ruined it all.  She doesn't look back. One foot in front of the other.

She pulls into the driveway, it feels like someone’s squeezing her heart and they won’t let go. She wishes they’d let go. She gets out of the car, so she must still be breathing. She fumbles around until she finds the house key. She puts it in the knob, pauses. Takes a breath, turns the key.

"Hey sugar, how are you?" her mom asks, drying off the dishes in the sink.

She opens her mouth, closes it. Swallows. "I'm fine."

"Did you see the newspaper?"

"No, why?"

"Do you remember the Stevenson boy?"

She had been in grade school and high school with him. He was the tall, class clown type with spiky blonde hair that everybody knew even if you weren't friends. Her mom hands her the paper. A large photo of Charlie with his goofy grin is on the front page. He’s wearing camo, like he's just been hunting. She starts reading. It’s a story about his suicide. The article reveals a struggle with drugs, his years of dealing and using. No one had known, not his friends, not his family. There wasn’t one person that knew he was at the point where he figured a rope around his neck was the only way to stop the pain. In his note he said he felt empty. His heart had hurt. Why hadn't he said anything?

A different face, a different place. Washington, Mississippi. An Indian reservation she didn’t know existed until a few years ago, or the home she hadn’t left for 17 years. It doesn’t matter where she goes, where she is. The hurt's felt the same way. Native Americans, all Americans, probably non-Americans too. The pain is all around her, she can’t escape. Back in this small town, her small town, it’s hidden behind smiles. It’s much harder to find. She touches the spot on her chin she covered in foundation. Smiles are the band-aids you take off, alone, in the car. She wonders how Charlie would have answered the “how are you?” question. She bets there was a slight droop to his eyes, maybe he looked down before smiling and saying, “fine.”

Her mom is asking if she wants take-out for dinner.

“Sure,” she mumbles as she walks down the hall towards her closet. 

Solutions for Losing your Keys

March 6, 2013

Solutions for Losing your Keys

Solution #1

Retrace your steps. Retrace your thoughts. Think about baby Abigail and the way she loves it when you jangle your keys to get her to stop crying. Go to Abigail’s room. Check under the crib, beside her stuffed Bob the Builder, and next to the rocking chair.

Solution #2

Call Bill. Tell him you need a ride to work. Try not to roll your eyes when he says, “Really, man? This is the third time this month.”

Solution #3

Tell your wife Carla to grab the boxes out of the garage and start packing. Quit your job. Disassemble Abigail’s crib, pack up the stuffed Bob the Builder, and put the rocking chair at the end of the driveway with a sign that reads, ‘Rockin’ chair, needs good home.’ Load the U-Haul and move to a big city with public transportation.

Solution #4

Panic. Flail your arms and run through the house screaming. Wake the baby. Become paranoid. Imagine everyone is out to get you. They took your keys so you can’t get to work, so you get fired, so you can’t support your wife and kid, so you lose the house, so Carla runs off with the high school sweetheart you always knew she loved more than you, so you end up living on a street corner, so your only possession is the stuffed Bob the Builder Abigail left behind, so strangers give you quarters, so you get mad when someone gives you a dime, so men with flashing blue lights on the top of their cars stun gun you down, so you wake up in a white room on a cot with nothing but the silence to keep you company.

Solution #5

Call your boss. Tell him you’ll be late. Ask Carla to drive you to the nearest Ford dealership. Have Carla flip her hair and bat her eyelashes at a salesman. Get a new key made.

Self Portrait

This one was a little writing exercise we had to do. Basically it just had to be a self portrait at our current age.

January 24, 2013

"Self Portrait at 21"

I had a professor that once called me Blue Eyes as a way to help her recall my name, which struck me as odd seeing as I'd grown accustomed to having blue staring back at me in the mirror for the past 21 years. That's the thing about people. You see yourself so much, you have no idea what you actually look like to the outside world.
           I can't sleep with the door open.
           Matching pajamas freak me out.
           Incessant binging noises drive me mad.
           And coffee is poison. As a college student, you'd think I'd drink coffee. But I don't like it. It might be delicious if you throw in a bunch of sugar or some type of caramel goodness into it, but it makes me jittery. I remember sitting in the class where I was known as Blue Eyes and being unable to stop my leg from shaking up and down, and side to side. When I realized the impulse to get up and dance was becoming increasingly more difficult to resist as the class progressed, I knew I should never touch those caffeinated beans ever again.
           Blue-eyed, quirky girl.
           Self portrait at 21.

Smear Resistant

January 26, 2013

I'm taking a Creative Writing class this semester. I've jumped off a bridge in a foreign country and I've taken a college tap dance class (with no prior tap experience). Neither of those things freak me out as much as the thought of writing. I generally feel sick to my stomach every time I hit the "Publish" button on this blog. Writing for yourself is one thing, having other people read it is another. This is actually a little easier than the thought of sharing in front of my class. You guys are virtual. It's kinda like how some actors never watch their own movies once they're finished. I'm still not sure I want to be around when people read what I write. But as scary as writing is, it's also fun. So from now on I'll be posting some stories, and, well, who really knows what else at this point. Some might be good, others might be bad. I'm just going to jump.


"Smear Resistant"

They said I needed a ritual, a writing ritual. So I went to Office Depot to buy supplies. I needed a notebook. A notebook that would be devoted solely to my writing. I needed a special pen, one that could only be used for the special notebook, so that when I see that notebook or grab that pen-it means it's time to enter another world. The automatic doors lead me into a store that feels nothing short of a gateway to endless possibilities. What will be printed on the thousands of blank pages in those boxes? I try to pick up a box. It's paper, how heavy could it be? Soon enough, I learn. Heavy, very heavy. I mean, after all, it's basically a tree in a box. Even pushing it free from its other box friends proves to be a challenge. Left arm in the ready position as if I was preparing to catch a partner in a trust fall, while the right slowly pushes it into the waiting arm. It drops. I wasn't ready. My knees buckle, the muscles in my arm tense. This was a mistake. Gotta put it back. Squatting, I muster what little upper body strength I have and heave.

Whew.

The stack's not as orderly as it was prior to my arrival. Red faced I look to the left, then the right. No one is on this aisle. Alright, keep moving before anyone sees you. Scanning to the right. No, I don't want a 3-ring binder. Those are the worst. I've graduated from such paper keepers. Besides, my fingers have gotten into enough trouble opening and closing those rings. Middle school days, thumbs pressing down in slow motion, waiting to see the exact moment the rings go from the partially opened mark to wide open. The shockingly loud noise that occurs when it does. Like when you're winding the crank for a Jack-in-the-box. Pop! Goes the weasel. Why we choose to intentionally inflict that sense of fear within ourselves, I'll never know.

One subject notebook, college ruled. A plain cover, nothing flashy. That's what I want. Nothing that will call attention to me writing. It's my little secret. I'm supposed to write with the door closed (until I'm ready to revise). A figurative door, of course. That's what Stephen King told me. I'd like a soothing color, but to no avail. Kittens, birds, and lilies cover their notebooks or everything is wide ruled. Ick, wide ruled. That's for children that haven't quite figured out how to write at a normal font size. I'll go with a red cover, college ruled. That'll just have to do.

A pen, I still need a pen. I have pens back at the apartment. I don't need a new one. Wait, yes, yes I do. It has to be special, remember? I'm trying to create a ritual. There's a whole wall of pens. Black pens, blue pens, red pens, green pens. Fat pens, skinny pens, tall pens, short pens. I've never been able to write with the juicy ball point pens most people love. Up until about a year ago, I had this condition called hyperhidrosis. Diagnosed at the age of 15 when my parents finally took me to the doctor. An excessive sweating disorder that affects 2.8% of the U.S. population. My friends jokingly referred to it as hyperhiGROSSis. I'll give them points for originality. My hands and feet would sweat if I was nervous, if it was hot, and even if it wasn't. It made things a bit socially awkward at times. I'd avoid shaking people's hands, I hated playing Red Rover or Twister, and holding hands to pray-I'd always hope it'd be a short prayer otherwise I'd get questions like, 'Why are your hands wet?'
Because I dipped them in water buckets before we started praying. Didn't you see me do that?

In elementary school, my papers wouldn't sit flat on the desk. They'd start to curl up on the edges due to the moisture on my palms. As I'd move down the page, I'd have to write extra careful so as not to rip a hole in the page. I'd walk up, put my work on my teacher's desk, turn quickly and walk back to my seat before she had a chance to raise an eyebrow at the damp thing lying on her desk.

Like a lot of kids, my mom made me take piano. I only lasted a year. My piano teacher would keep a roll of paper towels on top of the piano so every few minutes I could dry my hands off. Even though I had surgery to cure this absurd problem of excessive sweating, out of habit, I continue to avoid juicy pens. Which leaves me with the super cheap kind. The ones I'd see my grandfather use to work the crosswords. Smear resistant. Bottom shelf.

Incognito notebook and (not so special) special pens in hand, I reach the cash register. The cashier barely looks at me as she rings it up. I smile. I've got the tools for my own box of endless possibilities.