- Joined
- 14 Mar 15
- Moves
- 29234
@paul-a-roberts saidAbsolutely. Looking forward to getting stuck in.
Not a vote yet, but just to say, these are amazing stories. It will be hard to get down to a top 3, let alone order them.
Superb writing from everybody!
I am awfully sorry, I midde to put up two stories, due to my incompetence in loading down attachments.
I will post the two entries imidiately. Those who already voted please consider the new stories and alter your vote if appropriate.
Thank you everybody.
All authors please take a look if there is another error. Thank you
Rose Colored Glasses
Luke’s father sat him down at the kitchen table and asked him what was wrong with him. This had come after an argument at the dinner table in the evening. His father was complaining about the Mexicans who came north to take the jobs away from Americans looking for work. Luke had said that Americans did not want those jobs anyway, the Mexicans are “Americans” as well and that it was the corporation who were hiring Mexicans because they could get rid of their higher paid American workers and underpay the Mexicans. His father considered his argument and this led to his taking Luke aside. “Luke”, he said “I don’t know where you get these ideas but you better open at least two of your four eyes.” Luke, nearsighted, didn’t take offense at his father who was always denigrating the basis of Luke’s arguments.
Luke didn’t fight him as it would have been useless but did say that his father should think about what he had said because it had a basis in truth. His father then whacked him upside the head and said “It’s about time you took off those rose colored glasses and come down to earth. It’s time for you to grow up!”
Perhaps it was. He was 19 and had been at the University for a year. He couldn’t help himself by refusing to learn what he was being taught. He thought about what his father had said but couldn’t figure out why what he had said was like looking through rose colored glasses.
The next day when he went off to school on the city bus he looked at the people through the window. They seemed happy and industrious. They went in and out of the stores buying the food they needed for dinner. They’d take the food into their apartments and houses like everyone. Fix dinner, feed the family and then watch tv until everyone went to bed. Luke was satisfied with his observations and promised to take it up with his father at dinner that night.
After his last class he went to the cafeteria for coffee. He sat at the table and was going to read but he took off his glasses and rubbed his tired eyes. He nodded out briefly and when he opened his eyes his glasses were gone. He searched everywhere around the table but could find them anywhere. Resigned to their loss he found his way to the bus stop and caught his bus home.
It was the same bus but what he saw through the window was very different. A man, obviously drunk, chased his kid down the street. He was followed by his wife screaming at her husband. There were full garbage cans at the curbside overflowing with flies and feral cats everywhere. The windows on many apartments were broken, the broken holes fitted with whatever cardboard was around. Old tires littered empty lots and the cars they came from sat on blocks in the streets. A few hoboes circled a metal barrel warming their hands. All the stores save the liquor store were boarded and empty. Rats roamed freely. This so disturbed Luke that he reached into his bookbag for something to read. Along with the book were his glasses which he had unknowingly knocked into the bag. He put his glasses on and looked out the window. It was a different world again. People industrious and happy. Clean streets, no abandoned cars and in every way the opposite of the world he saw without his glasses.
He lifted the glasses to his forehead and the dirty old neighborhood cam back into view. Clean when looking through the lens, dilapidated when not. Which neighborhood was real? Can you live in one place all your life and not see what it was or was his vision correct? He did not like or want the decrepit world. Is that what his father saw every time he drove down a street?! Is this what happens when you get old or am I looking at the world as I want it to be? The world through youthful, hopeful eyes. Which was his world? He pushed his glasses up and quickly let them drop onto his nose. It was no joke.
He wanted nothing of his father’s world and, of his own, he was no longer sure. Was he as naïve as all that? Perhaps what he saw was what he wanted to see. With that he reconciled his worlds – one the harsh reality of his father the other a dream of what he wanted to see. There was never a choice really. He firmly fixed his glasses on his nose. He would live in his own world.
Billy Southridge
When he graduated from high school Billy Southridge wanted nothing more than to get out of the small southern town where he grew up.
His escape route was through education but his grades weren’t good enough to get him out of town but only to the local community college. He realized that this would be a first step but an important one. “Education” as it was known at his high school was at best being baby sat by teachers who had no interest in what they did , had no deep understanding of the subjects they taught and assumed that the best that would come of the high school’s students would be to find something in the farm industries in the area. Most of the students graduating in his class would be slotted in the job openings in the North Central Florida area. Dairy farms, cattle farms, pecans, floral farms, and produce farms were areas that you could choose from if there was a choice to be made. By and large no one complained and went where they were expected.
Billy was bucking this system to the dismay of his parents whose backgrounds were in agriculture. His grandfather was the last of the family to work independently as a farmer. He went bust in 1990 when the chemical companies began raising the fertilizer prices. Unable to pay the prices the farmers folded and went to the cities for work or agreed to maintain farms as employees of the chemical corporations. Billy’s father ran Southridge farm but could develop the leverage to demand more money from the big corporate executives. Rather his father became a pain in the ass to the company who decided to end his employment. The family was forced from the farm and the family’s plight worsened over the years with Billy assisting his father doing handyman jobs His father got work when someone seeing his photocopied availability notice in the Ace Hardware store called him about a job. When Billy was a junior in high school his father was killed when he fell from sixty foot pine tree they were removing from a retired couple’s back yard.
Billy kept doing the work he could do and as he tried to keep up his studies. It was useless and his mother had to take work as a check out “gal” in the Piggly Wiggly over in Palatka.
Billy’s education came mostly from his friend Danny who gave him good books to read. He was thus introduced to the works Mark Twain, James Joyce, Toni Morrison, Don Delillo and Shakespeare. He became a fervid reader something new in his family who never bought unless they were published by the Florida Department of Agriculture. It was his interest in literature that led him to the community college and beyond the area in which he lived.
He understood the people in his hometown. They were good people except for their misguided religiosity which he hated. He also came to dislike the snide gossip where everyone knew your business and the level of animosity they exhibited when what he did fell afoul of their moral ideas. He also came to hate their contempt of learning. He found this absurd. It made no sense. Why did they hate people who would attempt to better themselves through the seeking knowledge? When someone asked Billy “What was up with him?” He would tell them about his college program or the books he was reading or of his plans to go to a four year college and become a college professor. The conversations generally stopped there because there was no real interest on the part of the questioner. Billy felt alone and perhaps someone who was considered too big for his britches.
When Billy received his letter of acceptance to the University of Maryland he began to seriously plan his escape from the dead world in which he lived. He received a partial scholarship and enough government financial aid to make the move possible. A week before he was to leave for College Park he was driving home when one of those trucks with 6 foot high wheels came up behind him on Rte. 214. As he approached a turn in the road the truck made its move to pass him. The road had a double yellow line which means “no passing”. The truck hit Billy’s car which ran off the road and down into a ravine and into a tree. Billy Southridge had escaped his hometown forever.
And another entry I missed...sorry
Beyond the horizon
The wonderful time at school. Those days of shining newness of all things still unknown to us. We were so eager to learn and absorb all Teacher had to teach us. He showed us the power of gravity, electromagnetism and that all important nuclear force. The forces of the universe were laid at our feet and we made it ours. We became brighter.
Teacher molded us into a real team. He said: “You need to work together. Only when you toil as one, you can make a difference; only then you can shine.” And teacher was right. Only when we were together we felt good, only together we would fill the whole spectrum and were at our best. So we trained and worked hard; to be the best, the hottest, the fastest of all.
Being separated from each other was unbearable, unthinkable even. Segragated from each other we wouldn't be bright enough, or hot enough and far too slow. But teacher showed us there was no reason to be afraid of being alone. His calm words soothed us: “Your togetherness will illuminate each of your individual qualities. Your bond will show, for all to see, what each of you has become, my rainbow children.” We radiated almost to a burst with pride, listening to such high praise.
Teacher's words contained more than just lessons. They held past and future, the observable and unobservable, the all and the nothing, firmly in the grip of their syllabels. Those words also made us strong and all powerfull. We had no doubts anymore. Teacher had taken them all away … but for one stern warning: “Do not pass the horizon of your curiosity.” At the time we didn't give it much thought.
The moment arrived we had worked so long and hard for: graduation. The final moment before we would be let loose and find our own way in the universe. The moment we would experience for ourselves all Teacher had taught us. We could no longer be restrained. Teacher smiled contently and proclaimed: “Live!”
We roared as loud as we could as we left class and surged into the new and unknown. All that restrained energy burst out in a frenzy of laughter and crying as we hurled ourselves into our new adventure. It was bliss to expand ourselves to places never before experienced by anybody. Each of us played the part for which we had studied. Everwhere we went we danced and sang our songs of creation, leaving behind the purpose of our being in yellow, blue and red. The colours ready to design their own space.
For a very long time we were content with what we had achieved. We knew Teacher would be proud of us, of course he was! We were the best pupils he ever had. We looked at what we had accomplished and discussed what teacher would think of it. We had plenty of time to think and debate because there wasn't much maintenance to occupy us with. Perhaps it was inevitable our talks would touch on that one subject we had avoided so far: that one warning teacher gave us.
What had teacher tried to tell us? We couldn't figure it out and debated it at length. We knew what was strongest and weakest, and had seen what would inevitably happen to even the strongest; it had collapsed and nothing remained. Was the collapse caused by the weakest? We couldn't imagine it possible. It didn't fit with teacher's lessons.
We decided the only option was to go and have a look ourselves; so we went. When we arrived we were shocked! There was an emptyness devoid of … everything. This place was not possible, could not be. But it was here. Everything around us drawn to that weird and scary place. Our inner voice tells us to flee, flee as fast as we can from this place and use that ability nothing else in the universe has. But our curiosity for the unknown is stronger so we move closer, and closer ...
I have never felt lonelier, even when I am not alone at all. All my friends are here as well; we are all here. We are stuck here and have given up getting out of this bareness. We failed every time. Even our unique speed wasn't enough.
Coming here was sheer folly and we knew it. Teacher warned us. He warned us not to give in to the lure and temptation of that one place dangerous to us. But we couldn't help ourselves: we had to see it for ourselves. We had to try and visit the negative of … the negative of ourselves. And now we know there is no passing this event horizon. There is no escape.