Shockingly Literate

This one I’m not quite happy with, but I couldn’t bring myself to edit it any further.  ”Teardrop” became my first story to appear in print in the 2007 edition of Bartleby.  It won the award for short fiction that year, so now I can pretentiously refer to myself as “award winning author, Jeremy Hentschel.”  This story is about a little girl growing up in the sticks, and it’s dedicated to my mother.

Teardrop

I hated Christmas time. Some kids got presents on Christmas. Momma and Daddy told me I was a bad little girl, and I didn’t deserve no presents. Every year I woke up hoping Santa came, and every year I saw nothing under that tree. After a while I didn’t even bother to check no more.

The only presents I ever got were for my birthday, but they weren’t from Momma or Daddy neither. My grandma and grandpa sent me a birthday card every year, and inside it there was always a five dollar bill. Daddy always took it out before he gave me the card, but I didn’t care. The cards were always beautiful, and I kept them all in a shoe box under the bed. The best part was what my grandma and grandpa wrote inside each card. Every time I went over to their house they made sure I practiced my reading so I could read what they sent me. My favorite one came on my eighth birthday, April 10^th, 1969 – the last year I ever saw them. It went like this:

“Happy Birthday Rose! Every year you get prettier. We hope we even recognize you next time you visit! Love, Grandma and Grandpa.”

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Here is a movie poster of The Big Sleep, because movies are inherently more interesting than books.

For the Cyberpunk class I’m taking this semester (if you don’t know what Cyberpunk is, get educated) , the first book we checked out was Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep.  That probably rings a bell because of its film incarnation starring Humphrey Bogart as the protagonist, Philip Marlowe.

The story of The Big Sleep isn’t especially important for what I want to talk about today, and on top of that, it has one of the most convoluted plots I’ve ever had the displeasure of deciphering. While trying to adapt it for the screen, the team of writers simply could not tack down who murdered one of the characters.  They got Chandler on the phone, and his response was, “I haven’t a clue.”

That being said, it is still a great book, both as a detective story and as an exploration of 1930’s culture.  Since his appearance in The Big Sleep, Philip Marlowe has become an archetype in American storytelling.  He’s a hard-boiled detective in Los Angeles during the 1930’s mobster era.

A recurring symbol throughout the story is the white knight.  As the first image in the book, Marlowe stands in front of a tapestry hanging in his the front hall of his wealthy client.  Upon it, a knight tries frantically to free a naked maiden from the tree to which she is tied.  He is having trouble doing so, and Marlowe feels like he should give him a hand.  Later in the book, in Marlowe’s apartment, he examines his chess board.  He’s been belaboring his next move, fingering the white knight piece and then putting it down again over and over, unsure where to move it.  ”This isn’t a game for knights,” he comments.
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This is a story I wrote for a fiction workshop in Fall 2008.  I felt that I was putting too much emphasis on plot in my writing while letting other aspects of it suffer, so I wrote this shorter piece about boxing with a focus on intense description. Let me know what you think:

Thanatos

Later, under sweaty sheets in a dim bedroom, a woman would ask me what it was like to kill a man. Not taking my eyes from the ceiling, I’d tell her it felt no different than breathing. But that’s later.

Adrenaline – the body’s natural defense mechanism. Afterburner fuel. When your mind perceives a life or death event, it sets off the red alert for your body. Your adrenal gland fires into action, pumping your brain, your blood, with the stuff. Juicing you up for what’s to come.

Fight or flight.
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