Day 2

Yesterday I completely rewrote part 1 of chapter 1 (out of 11 parts). Today my focus is on part 2. I'm not going to post all of my first draft of it, just the sections I imagine will get a major overhaul.


Pale, frail Jamie Rostau looked upon his sister Ginny, her cheeks rosy with glee around her open mouth full of baby teeth and stained still from the chocolate pudding enjoyed by all before their nap. Her hands were outstretched, fingers spread wide, and she jumped up and down. All around her were throngs of likewise bouncing children, all maintaining similar looks of anticipatory ecstasy. Stationed over all of them, rising above the din of their chorus, sat patiently the Television set, recently commissioned to play VHS videos of technicolored dinosaurs singing educational lullabies to aid in enforcing nap time. The Teacher's Assistant pressed rewind on the videotape, and the frozen image of a muddy orange puppet with glued, stationary eyes was replaced by a cackling static behind which one could just barely make out the image of the President of the United States and the sound of his words read my lips. The screen flashed a sudden white then receded into black and the static roar muted instantly.
On the floor, amidst the refuge of soiled blankets and roughly strewn pillows the squawking children flashed fuzzy suits adorned with trains and teddy bears, clouds and little fishes, princesses and happy monkeys, and one boy wore a shirt printed with the face of a clown, frozen in silent laughter, eyes rolled back, pale as a cadaver. Jamie too was dressed in fuzzy pants with booty socks (he wore crude geometric sailboats all up and down his legs), but unlike the others, he wasn't smiling at the offered host of free cookies. He was looking into the eyes of the other children. There was something in their looks of wild determination that intimidated him, terrified him. He didn't like it. He didn't want to be here. He wanted his babba and his mommy, up in the quiet refuge of their beautiful mountain fortress where the air was luminescent and clear, silent. Where there weren't any other kids (except Ginny, but up there, he knew all the best places to hide from her), where his babba held him and told him about the lemurs of Madagascar, and where he could walk around in the trees and hear the sound of them kissing each other in the wind.
Not knowing what else to do, he fell to the floor, his little fuzzy bottom landing squarely in the unblinking eye of Elmo (who was too busy juggling wooden blocks in the safety of the floor rug to notice the intrusion). Little Jamie began to whimper, then, collapsing under the full force of his confused isolation, began to cry, louder and louder, until his reddening face became a solitary beacon of warning within the frenzied sea of cookiechumming, fuzzypantsed babies, and the rising pitch of his monotonic howl cut through their static din like an air raid drill. Failure.

Tara commanded her Audi 90 Quattro through the painted lines of the September streets of Boulder, Colorado while her son whimpered pathetically in the backseat. Again. What did those books say? If your child, something something, not play well with others. The laws of the playground. So little changes. Growth. The boy needs to learn. A little spine. With them. Can't have him. Coward. Suckling his father's god damned mystic.
"Jamie, listen to me, honey, you can't keep doing this." In her rearview mirror she saw her son's red face still whimpering, but looking now with fascination out the window at the trees and houses as they smeared past. He pressed his forehead to the glass. She turned her glance back to the road, catching briefly the look of her own eyes reflected in the windshield. Something about her harried look embarrassed her. She looked through her eyes to the colors of the foliage hanging down over Broadway. What kind were they again? Balsam trees, linden, maple, popular. Poplar, which one is which? Must be poplars. Popular trees, should be turning soon. Adapting to new seasons, new fashions. Nothing like upstate, but they have their charms. That purple tree blooming in front of the high school. What kind is it? No clue. Beautiful, though. Should be dug up and planted in a gallery. Then everybody would be able to see. The boy. "Jamie, are you listening? If you can't learn to play along with the other kids- Hey! Buddy, listen to me! All the kids like your sister" ("Me!" Virginia yelled out upon hearing her self referenced) "play a certain way, the right way, and when you play, they'll accept you and you'll grow up into…have all the friends in the world. But if you can't learn their games, discipline, then they will treat you pretty - pretty awful actually - and you wont become like, you'll be left lonely. Alone. That's bad, really bad….Do you understand? Are you hearing what I'm saying?"
God, that sounded stupid. Why did she always sound so stupid when trying to explain things to the kids. Jamie, really. With Ginny she could usually express herself pretty damn well, but words always broke down limp when she thrust them at her son's ears. Not like Khalil, he could say anything to James like the god damned pope. Ill Papa. All these old churches. Ironic, just thinking of: Trinity. Lutherans, back on Pine with the old bell and records of the settlers. Small town gossip more likely. Congregational. Daddy before the people back in Greeley: straight-backed, unshakable lips, sneering. Give us this day our daily. Receptacle of a tradition, one sneering son after an old pioneer. Back from the old countries, Luther and St. Patrick, guess old hammerhands won out in the end. Pike's Peak or bust. How many of them busted? More gold than an alligator could sink his teeth into! Fools gold more like it. Radical fools wagoning out to that wasteland. Paradise reclaimed! Not the garden, the one that came next. Mind your own stake of slop in the cracked fucking earth now before it's too late. Each man a millionaire. Generations of chicken scratch. And forgive us our trespasses. Condemn us more like it. Fucking tyrant about what would the neighbors say, God damn me. And mama with her lemonfaced sinner this, sinner that, why can't you be like your. As we forgive those who trespass against us. Sniveling trashhole for all their expectation, carrying their crosses while they sat back in whiskey and judgments you'd think they were their own damn Saviors. Backs at their little girl, redhaired, redeyed, looking out to. Mountains on the horizon, spiking where the sun sets, but out there: cow shit and slaughterhouse. Smells washing town. Dusty, splinterdry farmhouse with the peeling gold crucifixes spackled over like fucking wallpaper. Screaming goats outside before dawn even, tripping over stones and the roosters telling you the struggle didn't dry up in the night. Day after day after year after year. Alone in their cutting words. And lead us not into temptation. Over the damnation howls of bloody America, pastoral into horseshoes. Hardest worker. You'd think the land was sin itself. To be broken. Make them all see. In the church to prove your devotion. The arrogant sneer of demonstrated piety. Ethics in spider webs. Hard work for sweaty clothes. But deliver us from evil. Sharks in the rocks. Alone. Powerless. Until: Light of refuge in seeds of steel, new artifice. Across form: trans. Thy will be done, looking in the I. Escape. New words, recognition, an own Self. America. Times changing, no status quo but creation: ideas, built self, safety in obscurity: gold not found but made. Love for beauty, no family name. Command and conquer on terms flexing stems over deepening roots. To become, to own, terms. Tired of the rural roll? Act now and buy your ticket on a boxcar or forever held in pieces! Bleeker Street. Radical proof from the wasteland to. Penetration. A way. A blossoming collective: salon. A man.