De Mortuis Nil Nisi Bonum *revised!*
so i just turned this story into my creative writing class for workshopping on tuesday. since it was the first class, and hardly anyone had anything ready to turn in for next week, me and this other guy said we'd turn in pieces we wrote over the summer. that night i came home, read this story, and then freaked out about a few minor details, and ended up changing a few parts, adding a bit here, trimming a bit there. so here's the new draft (wish me luck on tuesday!):
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Lake Wildwood is an amoeba-shaped man-made reservoir, created about 25 years ago to provide an attractive, logical centerpiece for the middle-class suburban neighborhood I grew up in. As far as lakes go, I reckon it is a small one, perhaps two miles long and a mile wide if you measured between the most distant shores. The water is a deep, olive-toned brown, which darkens in the middle and fades out towards the ruined, weed-choked public beaches, of which there are two. One is tucked away off the main road next to the concrete spillway (something like a gutter 75 yards wide, which the road bravely traverses, dipping down and lurching back up like a roller coaster), and the other, the more popular one—if such a term can be used—is stretched out like a sunning alligator beside the road which loops and dives around the clubhouse and swimming pool. Every once in a while, on the hottest Saturdays of the summer, when "Let’s make a day of it!" became the enthusiastic mantra of bare-chested fathers everywhere, the pool would get crowded and polluted, and we’d find that the brown, lazy-lapping water of Lake Wildwood didn't look quite so bad anymore.
But this beach below the pool, despite the sun-blistered nostalgia of the primary-colored playground in the corner, despite the oddly satisfying metallic squeal of the ancient swing set— you dare me to let go?!?—had certain fatal flaws. Two of them. Rising from a coarse tuft of weeds at the rear of the beach, seven or eight yards to the left of the swing set, looms a single white lifeguard stand, cheap paint cracking and peeling off along the seams of the wood, each joint bleeding a trail of rusty orange. Its twin, thirty yards to the left, rises above the cluster of off-balance picnic tables and cinder block barbecues. Both are tall as one-story houses and both just as menacing as those sooty lookout towers you see at the corners of concentration camps in World War II picture books. Most often, the people who slunk down the wooden staircase of railroad ties to this beach did so in order to tan themselves on the soft, sun-warmed sand rather than the pebbly concrete of the treacherous poolside (lounge chairs were horribly in demand). Having no desire at all to touch the water, they gave very little thought to the nazi lookout towers. But for us kids, tired of swimming with our elbows out and of being shouted at for running—however carefully—to the diving boards, a few new sets of pretentiously vigilant lifeguard-eyes were agents of oppression we could definitely do without. And on those Saturdays when the narcissistic roar of the coconut-scented pool crowd came rolling down the thickly-wooded hill like thunder, these eyes were especially ruthless. This was due, at least according to a retrospective theory of mine, to a guilty stigma which hovered over these unfortunate lifeguards, either humiliatingly demoted or simply not yet ready for the waterlogged hustle and bustle of chlorinated society. “Lake duty” was to be abhorred, and perhaps it was because of this inherent shame—or perhaps due to the well-intended illusion that nature is more dangerous than an overcrowded, urine-soaked swimming pool—but when these authority figures were present, there was little fun to be had. No swimming past the second blue and white floating rope (its length dotted with slimy buoys like forgotten footballs), no jumping from the swing at the height of your beautiful arc, no leaping silently over oblivious sunbathers, and rule #13, absolutely no sand-throwing (that, indeed, was a sure ticket home). Fun was prohibited here, so we were often left to our own devices.
Thankfully, there were options. Lake Wildwood is heavily adorned along its edges with both public and private boat docks, some long and gangly, others short and stout, some brand new with shiny wood that turns the rain to star-beads, others rotting soft and cool under your bare feet. Some of them you can get to by scurrying down a rocky trail from the road, and others you can’t get to at all. These docks, with their built-in diving boards and musky, cavernous underworlds, were fine substitutes for sand, but not without their own sinister drawbacks. In the autumn of my sixth or seventh year, a little black girl—a few years older than myself—had reportedly fallen from one of these forbidden docks while walking along the water's edge, alone. She'd left her sandals at the foot of the dock and waved to a grumpy, distrustful face in the window of the house to which it belonged ( "Yeah, I saw her there...She waved...I closed the curtains..."). The body wasn't found, not ever, and though it is certainly possible that she was kidnapped, or that she simply ran away, the members of the community—thirsty for a terrible myth to claim their own—unanimously agreed that she was still in the lake, drowned, dead.
The myth was effective. For years afterwards, and to this day as far as I know, it was soberly explained to the younger kids (perhaps those who were living out their first summer of freedom, a freedom marked by that immortal moment when your mother finally surrenders, lets you ride your own bike to the pool, doesn’t follow you in the car) that the girl yet lurked beneath the slow, brown, softly-glinting swells of the lake; that she was an angry, wet ghost, unable to rest until her death was avenged. A death, which, as time lengthened and the neighbors’ memory of the girl lost its grasp on reality, silently acquired the chilling tones of foul play. She was murdered, of course, everyone knew that. Pushed into the water by a spiteful, satanic playmate; abducted, raped, and disposed of by a faceless murderer— monster!—who still lived in the community, among us. It didn't matter which. What mattered was that she was not a complacent corpse, and she would drag down by the ankles any swimmer unlucky enough to pass over her invisible sepulcher. She had no sense of remorse or justice; she was dead, and restless, thirsty for blood. The kids failed to recall that all she had really been was an eight year-old child. She had played with dolls, eaten fruit roll-ups, danced on kitchen floors in thin white socks. And then she had died. The stunningly intense pathos of the actual event paled and eventually grew transparent, and finally, inevitably, the ultimate crime was committed: the little girl became fictional.
It didn't stop there; young minds rarely halt at the abstract. They cannot be appeased with rumors alone, for I believe now that there is a very real need for tangibility at that age. Even myth requires a touch of reality, and often enough, it is this reality which creates myth. Fog, for example, is always, always supernatural; the mossgrown jaw of a deer skull in the woods belongs instead— no, I swear to god!—to a saber-toothed tiger; and stumpholes are invariably bottomless pits. The list is as long as the imagination is boundless. Thus, as the lake was haunted, there had to be something to feel.
So the myth grew. Those patches, you know, in the lukewarm lake water, once you've swum out to where your toes stretch for the clay at the bottom but stretch in vain, those cold patches you float through all of a sudden and without any warning, which start at the feet and work their way up like death itself until your body numbs and seems on the verge of going limp...that's herhe little dead girl, pacing the muddy floor. You're swimming directly over her and she sees you, smells you. and as she ascends through the murk, reaching out with her ghost-fingers for your pale, paddling ankles, you feel her aura. And you swim like hell towards the shore.
I remember when they told me about her. And I remember not believing them. In fact, I’m almost certain that I never did believe a word of it. That a girl died was more or less common knowledge—no reason to doubt that—but I wouldn't buy the rest, no way.
So what.
I felt the death melting up like ice from the bottom of that lake just like everyone else did, and it didn't matter then that I could plainly see I had passed through the shadow of a pine tree's plumage or a low-slung cloud. And knowing full well that the sun can't warm what the sun can't reach, I swam away as hard and as fast as any, kicking my ankles like one possessed.
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granted, it's not too different, but i feel the changes were important ones.
~fygmynt
"type slowly." ~ stephen malkmus
jedijetboy Registered User
Posts: 66
(8/25/01 9:23 pm) Reply
Re: De Mortuis Nil Nisi Bonum *revised!*
still brilliant! I'll just add a few abstract coments, which are essentially baseless opinions. It feels like your taking a deep breath and then leting out a sigh rather than a shout. What I mean is, maybe trim down the setting build up, and build up the death of the girl, and then the finel revelation that he, the narrerator, couldn't help but get caught up in the myth as well.
Also, I'm not getting a solid feel for the character. I know he is very observant, good with words, poetic and a bit cerebal, but these are more observations on his writing style than his personality, ya know? I don't know how to say this...I feel like his purpose is to write a good story, which is fine, but the effect of the narrative loses some steam from it, maybe. I wince while I write that, because I don't know how to solve that "problem" and I'm not 100% commited to that idea, and it's a thing I write with the so called "gut-instinct:" I "feel" like this guy is trying to impress me with the way he writes...and I AM impressed, but I'd rather be moved by the raw material, if you will, of the story. And it's all there, the raw materail is great--the idea of the tragedy of death becoming more important in its myth form to most people--but, somehow, i can't pinpoint why or how, this idea gets lost a little bit, and I think was more prominant in your first draft.
Maybe try moving the girls death, the myth, and the effect of all that on the narrater sooner in the story, and expand it a bit. ...maybe.
I still love your writing. "Thin white socks," was a very memorable line for me; i smiled a lot while reading, like your writing often makes me do.
As a side note, I think writing workshops are, or can be, fun and useful, mainly to see how different people react differently, where there's a consesus, and what people got from the story. It's also fun just to disagree with people flat out, and dismiss them as idiots, which I often did. You're too smart to be even told this, but this goes for viewers to, and whoever, but it's been my experience to not try to mold any story so that everyone in the class likes it. It just becomes mush that way. Tell us how it went, will ya?
Thanks for that. It's always a treat to read your stuff.
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