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Jul. 6th, 2005 10:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elenearielThanks to those who answered my odd question yesterday afternoon. Here’s the reason for it—yesterday the local newspaper printed the first chapter to a story, and invited readers to write chapter two and submit it by Thursday. They will pick the best continuation and print it, and next week people can write chapter three, and so on.
A black shoe. A sandal actually. A single sandal worn by a woman or teen-ager is now laying in the intersection of Southeast Second and Adair Streets.
It’s a Saturday morning in the city. Summertime. Nothing shaking. Too early. There’s time for a motorist to stop and look and wonder all the whos, whats, whens, wheres, whys, and hows associated with a lone shoe in the middle of the raod.
This shoe is thicker at the heel, with a buckle that appears to serve no purpose for this slip-on.
Overhead, there is no power line from which this shoe could have fallen to earth. But it’s not the type of show to be hanging from a power line. This is not a gang sneaker; not a scooter draped by it’s shoelaces over the power line to show gang territory.
Besides, in this city, still far enough removed from Tulsa, the biggest gang is Boys and Girls Club.
No it’s something else, this single shoe, toe pointing eastbound in the westbound lane. Curious.
Two shoes? No problem. That could be a woman walking with both hands full, who kicks off the shoes for comfort and has no wa to pick up something she can replace at the dollar store. Or maybe a woman pushing a stroller flipped off her dogs when her feet got tired. Most women are overloaded these days. Two shoes in the middle of the street is not as great a mystery as one. Other than the rapture, which would have left more signs. Hopefully.
One shoe? That’s another story. Tomfollery? Foul Play? Was this woman so intoxicated that she walked out of her shoe? Was she kidnapped? Or did she jump like Saisy Duke into a carload of revelers and lose a shoe in the process?
Woman try to match things when they dres. Shoes, belt, clothes. They try to coordinate.
So it’s particularly troubling that this is a black shoe. A dress shoe by itself in the middle of the road. Curiouser.
It’s Monday morning in the city. The shoe is gone.
A simple shoe.
No simple answer.
Sometimes Gil Bourke wished he didn’t take in such oddities; wished he could just drive by without ever seeing things, like the various motorists who squashed this shoe and knocked it a few feet further north during 36 hours traffic.
But Gil always seem to see things other people didn’t.
And he usually wished he hadn’t.
My idea of what chapter two should be:
Gil thought too much, and he knew it. He was a quiet man, more prone to silence than speech, to observation than action. Calm, people described him, but he knew better. The thoughts jumbled up inside his head until he was dizzy with them; there seemed to be no way to turn them off. There was no twelve step program for thinking, no Thinking Anonymous, no thought rehab. “I will stop thinking so much,” he’d once thought firmly to himself, and then had seen the irony.
Today he couldn’t stop thinking about the black shoe. He’d always noticed the lonely objects that collected on and beside the streets: broken television sets, stray clothes looking deflated and empty with nobody in them, hundreds of tires, both whole and in pieces, millions of empty beer cans. Some of the things caused him to think more than others. An abandoned shopping cart, rusting from the summer rain; a baby’s bottle, still half full of formula; dead cats and dogs.
It was the animals that usually stayed longest in Gil’s memory. They could be strays, yes. But more likely they were pets, and Gil couldn’t stop imagining the little girl, broken hearted at seeing her kitten’s white fur discolored with red, the young boy lost without his barking companion.
But today it was the black shoe that Gil thought of most, its sudden vanishing almost as odd as its appearing. How a person could lose just one shoe was a perplexing question, but even more curious was why someone would want to pick up a woman’s dress shoe from the side of the road.
And then Gil saw the shoe again, worse for wear but still recognizable, in a most unlikely place.
Now do you see why I needed ideas as to what I could find along the side of the road? Although I don't mind comments/suggestions for my part of the story, deal kindly with it, please--I wrote it in an hour while sitting through the city council meeting last night. =)
A black shoe. A sandal actually. A single sandal worn by a woman or teen-ager is now laying in the intersection of Southeast Second and Adair Streets.
It’s a Saturday morning in the city. Summertime. Nothing shaking. Too early. There’s time for a motorist to stop and look and wonder all the whos, whats, whens, wheres, whys, and hows associated with a lone shoe in the middle of the raod.
This shoe is thicker at the heel, with a buckle that appears to serve no purpose for this slip-on.
Overhead, there is no power line from which this shoe could have fallen to earth. But it’s not the type of show to be hanging from a power line. This is not a gang sneaker; not a scooter draped by it’s shoelaces over the power line to show gang territory.
Besides, in this city, still far enough removed from Tulsa, the biggest gang is Boys and Girls Club.
No it’s something else, this single shoe, toe pointing eastbound in the westbound lane. Curious.
Two shoes? No problem. That could be a woman walking with both hands full, who kicks off the shoes for comfort and has no wa to pick up something she can replace at the dollar store. Or maybe a woman pushing a stroller flipped off her dogs when her feet got tired. Most women are overloaded these days. Two shoes in the middle of the street is not as great a mystery as one. Other than the rapture, which would have left more signs. Hopefully.
One shoe? That’s another story. Tomfollery? Foul Play? Was this woman so intoxicated that she walked out of her shoe? Was she kidnapped? Or did she jump like Saisy Duke into a carload of revelers and lose a shoe in the process?
Woman try to match things when they dres. Shoes, belt, clothes. They try to coordinate.
So it’s particularly troubling that this is a black shoe. A dress shoe by itself in the middle of the road. Curiouser.
It’s Monday morning in the city. The shoe is gone.
A simple shoe.
No simple answer.
Sometimes Gil Bourke wished he didn’t take in such oddities; wished he could just drive by without ever seeing things, like the various motorists who squashed this shoe and knocked it a few feet further north during 36 hours traffic.
But Gil always seem to see things other people didn’t.
And he usually wished he hadn’t.
My idea of what chapter two should be:
Gil thought too much, and he knew it. He was a quiet man, more prone to silence than speech, to observation than action. Calm, people described him, but he knew better. The thoughts jumbled up inside his head until he was dizzy with them; there seemed to be no way to turn them off. There was no twelve step program for thinking, no Thinking Anonymous, no thought rehab. “I will stop thinking so much,” he’d once thought firmly to himself, and then had seen the irony.
Today he couldn’t stop thinking about the black shoe. He’d always noticed the lonely objects that collected on and beside the streets: broken television sets, stray clothes looking deflated and empty with nobody in them, hundreds of tires, both whole and in pieces, millions of empty beer cans. Some of the things caused him to think more than others. An abandoned shopping cart, rusting from the summer rain; a baby’s bottle, still half full of formula; dead cats and dogs.
It was the animals that usually stayed longest in Gil’s memory. They could be strays, yes. But more likely they were pets, and Gil couldn’t stop imagining the little girl, broken hearted at seeing her kitten’s white fur discolored with red, the young boy lost without his barking companion.
But today it was the black shoe that Gil thought of most, its sudden vanishing almost as odd as its appearing. How a person could lose just one shoe was a perplexing question, but even more curious was why someone would want to pick up a woman’s dress shoe from the side of the road.
And then Gil saw the shoe again, worse for wear but still recognizable, in a most unlikely place.
Now do you see why I needed ideas as to what I could find along the side of the road? Although I don't mind comments/suggestions for my part of the story, deal kindly with it, please--I wrote it in an hour while sitting through the city council meeting last night. =)
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no subject
Date: 2005-07-06 04:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-06 04:27 pm (UTC)I think it's funny that I even mentioned the 'one shoe vs. pair of shoes' thing in my last comment. It must not be all that uncommon!
no subject
Date: 2005-07-06 05:26 pm (UTC)One critique: you should have loads of fragment sentences like part 1. What's with all these complete thoughts?! ;-)
I recognize my contribution to the trash on the side of your road. ::turns pink::
no subject
Date: 2005-07-06 05:34 pm (UTC)If it gets picked for printing, do you want credit for your part? *grin*
no subject
Date: 2005-07-06 05:48 pm (UTC)Of course I don't want credit. That would be silly!