life is stranger than fiction

I started a story yesterday, but threw it away.  The girl was too stoically sad and the situation too ridiculously dumb.   It was an embarrassment of adolescent angst.

In the real world, the girl is angrily crying in her room.  She’s cursing her step-father in pencil scrawls so hard the words become unreadable and the page of her diary tears.  If the weather was nicer she’d be in the woods, hidden behind the low hanging bows of a stand of old pines.  The ground there is covered in a thick layer of needles.  It muffles the sounds of the world and the rage in her heart.  She would sleep there if she wasn’t afraid of consequences at home.

Things with the step-father aren’t always so bad.  That one winter when he hooked the hot water heater to the toilet?  That was a bit of off center genius.  Exiting a bedroom so cold you could see your breath in the half-light, to enter steamy warmth in the mostly unfinished bathroom? It made late night bathroom visits a mid-winter treat.  It was a very weird but funny winter and definitely something the kids at school would never understand.

How do you explain to your peers about living in a crumbling shell of a house like that?  Tales go untold out of shame.  Remember that time birthday baking was ruined by mouse droppings in the oven’s insulation catching fire?  That’s a story that stays among family.  Who else would laugh about the droppings smoldering like miniature charcoal briquettes?  And how would your friends ever understand fetching water every day?  They stand in their kitchen and turn on the tap.  You stand in the kitchen and look at a tap with no hook-up.  Instead you’re outside every afternoon after school, filling a dozen empty gallon jugs from the spring up on the side of the hill.  Then carrying them back to the house, two at a time; back and forth you go until you are done.  It’s like a strange amalgam of 1783 and 1983.

I miss the chickens.