Something Different

Something Different

I reached the climax of my second reading of the day. My audience chitchatted through the first few paragraphs and fell to interested silent past the first page. Cars pass in the background, but I almost cease to hear them except to plan my sentences for their interruption. All that exists to me was the electronic screen in my hand filling in for the print-outs I could not make, the flaking wood of the porch under my head which I use to steady myself, the edging quaver in my voice, and the quality of their silence. It is a very loud silence, remarkable given that there can be no more than fifteen people listening to a story I first began to write in lieu of a first date with a girl named Eileen. For years, the story went unfinished, especially since the romance ended before it could begin and I simply didn't care to do the same with my story. I finished it years later and forgot about it until the night before the Something Different Art Festival, to which I was invited as a presenter.<!-- Photo Caption With Right Vertical Spacer -->

I tried not to falter for a moment in my reading, save for the Doppler cars. I knew what was coming. The romance on which it was based fizzled and finally popped and I do not ascribe to the notion that stories fill in where reality disappointed. The audience's silence was sharply angular. We were outside, but I imagined a sigh that drank in the available air as I drove in the point that this was not going to be a happy ending simply because it was just too much of a fairy tale. I finished, grateful that my story made its point and ended quickly. And there was a moment where they waited for redemption, for me to give up the real ending, but it did not come. Then, for the second time that day, people applauded for me and I actually believed I deserved it because, just for a moment, I had made them hate me. I took them on this journey, dehydrating a month of my life into six or seven fictive pages, and they felt the shock I did.

I was apprehensive about even attending this festival, to be perfectly frank. I first received an invitation through a social networking website and was thus unsure that it would turn out to be anything. When I heard that it was being held at a private residence, I was double concerned. After a series of emails with the organizer of the even, a man name Kenyatta, and a conversation with Emily, I became convinced that I had to do this because it was precisely the sort of thing a writer does. I can't simply call myself a writer because I like the sensation of my fingers flickering over the keyboard, now could I?

Read the rest

Bookmark/Search this post with:

| | | | | | | | |