Right after Thanksgiving weekend, I was sifting through the hundreds of posts in my feed reader and I found this one. It intrigued me. It inspired me. It made me go back through my archives and see how my posts have changed. They’ve gotten shorter, choppier. And (gasp!) I’ve found a lot of typos and grammatical errors. (Why don’t you people point these things out to me??)
Mrs. Flinger created the {W}rite of Passage group, and I’ve joined the dork fest fun. Each Monday(hopefully), I’ll write based on the given topic. Challenge #1? “Character. Take a person and write a fictional story surrounding them.”
I’m on it. Here we go, in honor of Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day.
(Oh, how I wish this didn’t suck quite as bad as it does. I swear to you that it’ll get better.)
They don’t even know who I am. Who I was, really. It’s been years since I even thought about that kid. As a matter a fact, I don’t even remember bein’ that kid.
They see a gruff old man. One who yells when they get on my lawn. One who scowls when they wake me from my afternoon nap with all that hoopin’ and hollerin’. Just ain’t necessary. They see an old, washed-up man. But they don’t know. They just don’t know.
One leg gone. Just gone. The other one burned so badly, I wish they’d just have cut if off then.
They don’t have a clue what it’s like to be laughing with your friends one minute and then wakin’ up with just one leg? One leg ain’t real helpful without the matchin’ one, yaknow?
You know all that stuff they talk about in the textbooks, the History channel, the news. All those pictures they show. All the footage. I don’t remember a damn thing. Folks out there with stories and memories, and I got nothin’. Straight from a good dirty joke to a pain that hurt so bad I don’t even remember that neither. I wish I could at least remember the joke. It was the funniest damn joke I’d ever heard. I wish, for the life of me, I could remember it. Remember somein’.
But here I sit, stuck in this damn chair. Year after year in the damned chair. It’s no a wonder that they think I’m a bitter, mean old man.
I’m not mean, I’m sad. I’m not grumpy, I’m lonely. I’m not looking for a hand out, I’m looking for someone to extend a hand and help me out.
**Neither of these pictures belong to me, but I found them on the Creative Commons website and I’m a little confused about to whom credit should be given and how.
**I know that there was a giveaway I promised would be up this weekend. But I ended up making cookies with my mom and kids all day on Saturday, and then spending the day with some of my favorite youth yesterday. Both of those things were much more fun than writing a review. 🙂 I’ll get it up soon. **
Bridget, you are truly an amazing writer. You don’t give yourself enough credit.