Story time!

Thomas (my government-mandated best friend, AKA the volunteer that lives closest to me) and I both decided that we wanted to improve our creative writing while in Peace Corps. We exchange prompts with each other on a semi-weekly basis, and share and critique our work when it's finished. It's been a lot of fun as a project, and an interesting way to keep the creative part of our brains humming!

While one prompt every couple of weeks is good, you know what's better? More prompts! I'm putting this here as an open invitation to any and all friends I have out there that like writing, think this is a fun project, and would like to have a writing partner that's halfway around the world!

Even if you have no interest in joining me in this endeavor, I hope you enjoy my most recent story! This is in response to the prompt: "Everyone talks in speech bubbles/thought bubbles. There are no private thoughts." All the prompts must be less than 160 characters, and the stories, less than 1000 words.

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“Hey Dean.” I waved at my brother, and walked around the front of his desk, so he’d have to see me. I was tired and sweaty, having  just wandered around his campus for an hour in hopes of finding him. Finally, there he was: predictably holed away in a back corner of the library.

Without checking, I knew my cloud was replaying our last encounter, when he threw me out. At the sound of my voice, his work-centered cloud flashed to the same memory as mine, so even though he studiously ignored me, I knew he’d heard me. My cloud was looping on the moment he pushed me away; my headlong fall onto the prickly, brown grass of his front yard; my cheek scraping against the rough dirt. His, on the moment he turned his back on me, running into his house and slamming the door.

“Dean?”

Nothing.

He still hadn’t forgiven me. It had been 6 months, and he still hadn’t forgiven me. He’s my brother, damn it! How could he think I ruined our family on purpose? Concentrating hard, I thought back to the good times: our parents buying us a puppy for Christmas when we were 7; when he defended me from bullies when we were 10; when I took the blame the time he smashed mom’s favorite vase when we were 14.

I stopped and leaned against his desk, elbows locked. My eyes flitted between his stony face and the place in his open wallet that used to hold a picture of the four of us, since replaced by a photo of him and his girlfriend. Still he refused to look at me.  How could he hate me so much for something I couldn’t control?

Shit, there it goes, replaying that day again…this is sure to help. I tried to move out of his sightline, but I could tell by the stiffening of his shoulders that he had seen. The last straw in our parents’ already failing marriage. The moment that had broken our dad. We’d both known that he was having an affair, and we had gotten pretty good at lying to ourselves and shielding our thoughts whenever mom came around. But one day I slipped up. One day I lost my self-control, and it ruined everything.

Dean and I had recently moved out, headed to college in separate towns. We’re fraternal twins, and we were finding it hard to live apart after having been together, doing the same things, all our lives. I missed him, so the weekend of October 18^th, I decided to take the hour-long bus trip to his house.

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“Dean!” I called out from the front lawn. His house was quiet, the lights were off, but it was a Thursday night. I knew he would be there, working on his book, as he did every Thursday. He was probably just hiding out in a back room. “Dean, you jerk! Come let me in!”

I walked up to the door and pounded on it. Still no answer. I carefully made my way to a side window to try to get a glimpse inside the house. Could it really be that Dean, my reclusive brother, had a social life? Lost in my cloud, watching hypotheses play themselves out about what he could be doing, and with whom, I didn’t hear the approaching footsteps. Dad, always the comedian, had tiptoed up behind me and yelled “BOO”. I jumped about a foot in the air, my cloud too jumping involuntarily to the night I walked in on him and that girl in our house. I immediately clamped down on my thoughts, and only let them show yellow, my cloud color when I’m surprised. But, with a sick dread, I could tell the damage was already done. Sure enough, one look at my mom was all it took to know that she’d seen.

“Sarah, what was that?” My mom had that cloying, sweet voice she used when she knew the answer to a question, and knew that we would lie about it anyways.

“I…I…” What could I even say at that point? I stared at her, feeling the color draining from my face. Her cloud was projecting her “mother knows” face, but it was clearly there to mask her true feelings. My cloud is pink (questioning), my cloud is pink, I thought. I knew that I couldn’t let that memory play out, that it would only make this worse…but again, my concentration slipped. My cloud is pink. Dad and that girl. My cloud is pink. Dad and that girl. I saw the pictures displayed above me, but could do nothing to stop them. My mom’s cloud was a blur, a chaotic whirlwind full of confusion and pain. It was unbearable. I wanted to smother my thoughts, smother myself, smother my dad…oh, god, my dad. He had gone white. Not the kind of poetic white you read about in books, I mean deathly white. And his cloud…there was just…nothing there. I’d never seen that happen to, well, anyone.

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My dad still hasn’t recovered. His cloud, while it’s no longer that unnaturally pure white, doesn’t have the same luster. Maybe it was the shock of things coming out in such an awful way; maybe it was the subsequent terrible fight, or the long and heart-wrenching divorce proceedings…he never really recovered, and you could see it. His once bright pictures were faded and grainy, lacking the clarity of before that day. He still joked with us, still acted like the old dad I knew, but everything was different, and we all knew it.

My cloud slowly faded to the mix of grey and navy blue that is its new habitual color since that day. I sat down on the floor, leaning against the leg of Dean’s desk. Why did I think he would forgive me? Why should he forgive me? I ruined our parent’s life. He was right. I could feel my cloud growing imperceptibly darker above my head.