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Well this is another bit of coursework so any feedback is much appreciated.
You sit in the middle seat of the car watching her sleep. She is sleeping with her face smashed up against the window, her mouth open a tiny slit. It is not an attractive pose, though you don’t notice.
You are not old enough to know that she is not pretty; her face is perfect for a sister. She has a soft, triangular, elven face, extending into slightly pointy ears, surrounded by shiny, floppy, short brown hair. Her lips curl curiously, and you wonder if she is dreaming. But then, her lips curl when she is awake, too, and you wonder if she dreams awake. Her thin eyebrows narrow down and point at her dainty nose. You worry that she can’t breathe enough through such a small nose.
You don’t know yet that at seventeen she is a few vital pounds too heavy, just enough to be too much. Sam next door talks sometimes about the girls at school and he doesn’t like them. He says he has to run away from them sometimes. But you like Lorna.
She has slept a whole three hours. She sleeps a lot. You wish she would wake up. Your fingers are tapping on the seat, then playing with the seat belt, then tapping again; then you pretend you have a Matchbox car and you push it back and forth across the empty seat, making quiet car sounds. The Matchbox car is yellow and shiny and when you have a real one you will drive her to school every day and all the kids at school will see her in the front seat.
Above her head, the landscape rolls across the window. For a while the land is flat and you see mostly sky—a soft grey sky, with a blur of cloudy white where the sun might be. After a while the land grows hilly, and the forests thicken far off into red and orange and brown clumps. Then the forests come steadily closer and finally they surround the car. The car is under a mass of dark leaves, and still she is sleeping, her face now in shadow.
“Almost there,” says someone. It is your mom; for a while you had forgotten about your mom and dad in the front. Her voice startles you back to the sharp plastic smell of the car and the whisper of the air conditioning.
The car stops, and the car-sounds die, leaving a sleepy, quiet vacuum until your mom talks again.
“Wake up,” she says, half turning. “We’re there.”
“Miss-sess-sennewah,” says your dad, brightly.
“How long’s it been since we’ve been to Mississinewa, Lorna?” says your mom, but she doesn’t wait for an answer and she and your dad start walking.
Lorna pushes herself up from the car door and claws her hair away from her face. She opens the door and stumbles out, and you slide across the seat after her. She nearly shuts the door on you but sees just in time.
“Sorry,” she says groggily, and stretches. Her body looks soft in faded jeans and a grey cardigan, and it reminds you of the last time she hugged you. It was your fifth birthday party, almost a year ago (though it seems like forever). You don’t remember what she gave you, except that it was wrapped in bright red paper and that she stood behind your chair while you opened it; and she hugged you tightly and briefly with her arms clasped to your chest, before you even saw what the present was.
And then she went to her room, and your mom yelled at her to get back out here. Your mom and dad both yelled at her a lot then, but they don’t anymore. Besides, you have a different dad now. You try to remember the other dad, when he yelled at Lorna at the birthday party after your mom was done yelling at her.
He stood outside her door. His back was tight and he was very tall, and he yelled at Lorna who was in her room. Get out here, he yelled, you can’t live in there. Don’t you dare go to sleep. Get out here, be happy for a half-hour for your little brother. Then he was quiet for a minute and then he turned and came back loud into the kitchen. Kids. They gotta hide in their damn bedrooms and write Dear Diary about how Johnny ignored ‘em in the hallway today and Suzy called ‘em fat ass. And then they sleep cause they don’t know what else to do with theirselves. Then his face got blue lines in it and he said Ain’t gonna change. Johnny and Suzy ain’t. Then your mom was crying a little and she said Quit. Then they told you to open your presents, so you did, but you don’t remember any of them, just the piles of bright paper on the table.
Your mom is at the trail already, and she calls for both of you to hurry up. Your dad is a few feet behind her, but soon catches up and wraps his arm around her waist. Everywhere the sound of water roars. You follow Lorna to the trail; almost right away a long flight of wooden steps head down and turn at a right angle every five or ten, gradually taking you to the right. You can see the water now, the top of it jumping, spraying up in bursts like frantic hands. Lorna is still ahead of you a few steps, but when she reaches the bottom she stops at the high railing and looks down into the water, leaning forward with her elbows spread out to the sides. Your mom and dad keep walking, to the right, and they don’t look back at you.
For a second your feet won’t move. You are frightened of the look on her face: it seems like the look she has when she comes home from school, so tired, and walks straight to her bedroom with her plain grey eyes rigid and impatient. She always shuts the door and sleeps for a long time, and when she comes out for dinner she looks as though she just wants to go back to sleep again. Sometimes she talks about when she will graduate from school and have her own house, and then her eyes get shiny and smooth and she doesn’t look sleepy.
Is she still sleepy now? She is looking at the brown, crashing water like her bedroom is down there, like she’s reaching her hand out for the doorknob.
Then you step down and finally you are standing beside her. When she looks at you now she only looks sleepy.
“Look up there,” she says, her voice rough, and points to the right.
The water shoots violent and dirty from a cement duct, and smashes into jagged sheets far far below. There must be something under the water, because some of the water is rushing back up the wrong way and it looks like the water is exploding, over and over and over.
Right below the water is thick and terrible. You stare down into it, watching one brown wave heave and roll over another, and all of it shouting and roaring and moving so fast it makes you a little dizzy.
“Pretty scary, huh?” she says.
“Yeah,” you say. Your voice is scratchy and quiet.
“Can you imagine if somebody jumped in what would happen?”
“No...” You try not to see it.
“That’s called a dam,” she says. “The water comes in from a river on the other side of that hill, and it comes out here.”
“Ohhh.”
“It gets all pushed close together in the dam and then it’s so angry that it rushes out like this.” She looks angry, too, just for a second, but then she gets tired from the angry dam and from having a tight, angry face.
“Let’s go up there,” she says, and points above the duct where the giant hill stretches up and up and up until it meets the highway. You walk beside her, and she walks beside the railing. She is not looking at the water. The hill is straight ahead. You pass your mom and dad and they look over but don’t say anything. Now you walk up steps that go up past the duct to where the water is not so loud, and then onto the grass. You can see the tops of vans and semi trucks, too small, growing tinier as the highway thins into a pencil line on the left.
For a minute or two the grass flattens under your feet and you don’t think about much except how big the hill is.
“Hey,” she says, and her voice is behind you. “Stop for a second, I’m out of breath. Look at the view.” She turns around and sits awkwardly in the stiff grass, facing back down where you came from.
The water is tiny now, thick and clumped. It is sunken down in the middle of a small valley, surrounded by the hills. The mounds of red and yellow and orange-leafed trees rise up all around it, but some small hills have only grass, like this one. You look everywhere, as far as you can see on one side, and then across the hills and as far as you can see on the other side. All around the hills pile on each other, growing smaller toward the horizon like the folds and lumps of a blanket.
The sun is still a blurry spot in the light grey sky, but everything is lighter from up here, where you are standing on the grass: the earth is low and small and the pale sky reaches down all around and spreads on the grass and the tops of the hills and the hair on Lorna’s head.
She gets up again, pushing herself up from the ground. Then she turns around and walks up the hill toward you, at every step pushing on her knees with her hands. She has the sleepy look, and as she climbs up it is tiring, how hard she looks at you, like she’s climbing up by a rope tied around your waist. Her grey eyes are crashing like the water, and she keeps them focused on you. When she is beside you she takes your wrist, and it hurts a little.
“Let’s go to the top,” she says. She is not out of breath now. Slowly her hand lets go of your wrist and when you look up she is still looking at you, but you are not afraid; the bedroom and crash of water are gone. She is walking so straight up that you laugh at her. She climbs beside you up to the top. Across the highway, on the other side, the river reflects the pale sky, wide and smooth before it reaches the dam. You turn around and lean against the railing, looking at the hills again, but the view is old and familiar now. Lorna stands looking at the other side for a long time, and finally turns around and leans against the railing too.
“Look,” you say, “There’s Mom and Dad.”
“Yep,” she says. She doesn’t talk to this dad. Sometimes she says we might as well have been born without them.
The two of them are small blurry shapes, almost invisible against the sky and hills. The two shapes blend into the hills and only you and Lorna are left, standing at the top, looking at everything together.
Lorna puts her arm around your shoulder, and squeezes tight and quick, like the birthday hug. She is warm and soft and strong. Then she lets go and looks down at you, her hair flopping into her face. Her eyes are still, burning, and not tired. Although the air is cool and it is windy on top of the hill you are not cold. You look down to where your parents were and you can’t find them now.
“You’re a good kid,” she says. You don’t feel like talking so you stay quiet and still. You can tell she is still looking at you, from the corner of your eyes. You hold your neck tense so you will keep looking ahead. She puts her arm across your tight shoulders again and for a minute her arm is tight too, but then it goes soft and heavy. You stay tight because you want to hold her arm up. Then she clears her throat and takes her arm down, and you can look at her again. She is standing on a little mound looking very tall, and in the pale light she looks maybe like your mother, but her eyes smooth and grown-up where your mother’s eyes are never smooth.
“All right, come on,” she says, her voice clear and lighter now than it has been all day. Maybe she will stay awake until bedtime tonight. You follow her down the hill, both of you going slowly and tripping a little because the hill is so steep. Sometimes she reaches out and holds the bottom of your arm, to help you keep balanced. Sometimes too when she trips she puts her hand hard on your shoulder so she doesn’t fall. When you reach the bottom you follow her back up the trail and the steps to the car, and she opens the door so you can climb in in front of her. She fastens the middle seatbelt and pulls on the strap to make it tight enough.
Later there are more trails, ones that don’t run beside water. There are trails to lookout spots and history spots. In the evening you all eat supper at a quiet diner. Your mom and dad talk about the food and what they are doing tomorrow.
Lorna stays awake for the ride home. She looks at the window most of the time. You are very tired now—it must have been the hill. It was a very tall hill. You are almost asleep sitting up, trying to stay awake but it’s very hard. Then Lorna pats her leg and you fold over with your head in her lap, and you put your feet up onto the seat. Her leg is tense now, holding your head up, but you close your eyes anyway and her leg softens.
When you come awake your ear is hot against Lorna’s leg. The car is stopped; you must be home. You don’t open your eyes yet—only when Lorna tells you to wake up.
You sit in the middle seat of the car watching her sleep. She is sleeping with her face smashed up against the window, her mouth open a tiny slit. It is not an attractive pose, though you don’t notice.
You are not old enough to know that she is not pretty; her face is perfect for a sister. She has a soft, triangular, elven face, extending into slightly pointy ears, surrounded by shiny, floppy, short brown hair. Her lips curl curiously, and you wonder if she is dreaming. But then, her lips curl when she is awake, too, and you wonder if she dreams awake. Her thin eyebrows narrow down and point at her dainty nose. You worry that she can’t breathe enough through such a small nose.
You don’t know yet that at seventeen she is a few vital pounds too heavy, just enough to be too much. Sam next door talks sometimes about the girls at school and he doesn’t like them. He says he has to run away from them sometimes. But you like Lorna.
She has slept a whole three hours. She sleeps a lot. You wish she would wake up. Your fingers are tapping on the seat, then playing with the seat belt, then tapping again; then you pretend you have a Matchbox car and you push it back and forth across the empty seat, making quiet car sounds. The Matchbox car is yellow and shiny and when you have a real one you will drive her to school every day and all the kids at school will see her in the front seat.
Above her head, the landscape rolls across the window. For a while the land is flat and you see mostly sky—a soft grey sky, with a blur of cloudy white where the sun might be. After a while the land grows hilly, and the forests thicken far off into red and orange and brown clumps. Then the forests come steadily closer and finally they surround the car. The car is under a mass of dark leaves, and still she is sleeping, her face now in shadow.
“Almost there,” says someone. It is your mom; for a while you had forgotten about your mom and dad in the front. Her voice startles you back to the sharp plastic smell of the car and the whisper of the air conditioning.
The car stops, and the car-sounds die, leaving a sleepy, quiet vacuum until your mom talks again.
“Wake up,” she says, half turning. “We’re there.”
“Miss-sess-sennewah,” says your dad, brightly.
“How long’s it been since we’ve been to Mississinewa, Lorna?” says your mom, but she doesn’t wait for an answer and she and your dad start walking.
Lorna pushes herself up from the car door and claws her hair away from her face. She opens the door and stumbles out, and you slide across the seat after her. She nearly shuts the door on you but sees just in time.
“Sorry,” she says groggily, and stretches. Her body looks soft in faded jeans and a grey cardigan, and it reminds you of the last time she hugged you. It was your fifth birthday party, almost a year ago (though it seems like forever). You don’t remember what she gave you, except that it was wrapped in bright red paper and that she stood behind your chair while you opened it; and she hugged you tightly and briefly with her arms clasped to your chest, before you even saw what the present was.
And then she went to her room, and your mom yelled at her to get back out here. Your mom and dad both yelled at her a lot then, but they don’t anymore. Besides, you have a different dad now. You try to remember the other dad, when he yelled at Lorna at the birthday party after your mom was done yelling at her.
He stood outside her door. His back was tight and he was very tall, and he yelled at Lorna who was in her room. Get out here, he yelled, you can’t live in there. Don’t you dare go to sleep. Get out here, be happy for a half-hour for your little brother. Then he was quiet for a minute and then he turned and came back loud into the kitchen. Kids. They gotta hide in their damn bedrooms and write Dear Diary about how Johnny ignored ‘em in the hallway today and Suzy called ‘em fat ass. And then they sleep cause they don’t know what else to do with theirselves. Then his face got blue lines in it and he said Ain’t gonna change. Johnny and Suzy ain’t. Then your mom was crying a little and she said Quit. Then they told you to open your presents, so you did, but you don’t remember any of them, just the piles of bright paper on the table.
Your mom is at the trail already, and she calls for both of you to hurry up. Your dad is a few feet behind her, but soon catches up and wraps his arm around her waist. Everywhere the sound of water roars. You follow Lorna to the trail; almost right away a long flight of wooden steps head down and turn at a right angle every five or ten, gradually taking you to the right. You can see the water now, the top of it jumping, spraying up in bursts like frantic hands. Lorna is still ahead of you a few steps, but when she reaches the bottom she stops at the high railing and looks down into the water, leaning forward with her elbows spread out to the sides. Your mom and dad keep walking, to the right, and they don’t look back at you.
For a second your feet won’t move. You are frightened of the look on her face: it seems like the look she has when she comes home from school, so tired, and walks straight to her bedroom with her plain grey eyes rigid and impatient. She always shuts the door and sleeps for a long time, and when she comes out for dinner she looks as though she just wants to go back to sleep again. Sometimes she talks about when she will graduate from school and have her own house, and then her eyes get shiny and smooth and she doesn’t look sleepy.
Is she still sleepy now? She is looking at the brown, crashing water like her bedroom is down there, like she’s reaching her hand out for the doorknob.
Then you step down and finally you are standing beside her. When she looks at you now she only looks sleepy.
“Look up there,” she says, her voice rough, and points to the right.
The water shoots violent and dirty from a cement duct, and smashes into jagged sheets far far below. There must be something under the water, because some of the water is rushing back up the wrong way and it looks like the water is exploding, over and over and over.
Right below the water is thick and terrible. You stare down into it, watching one brown wave heave and roll over another, and all of it shouting and roaring and moving so fast it makes you a little dizzy.
“Pretty scary, huh?” she says.
“Yeah,” you say. Your voice is scratchy and quiet.
“Can you imagine if somebody jumped in what would happen?”
“No...” You try not to see it.
“That’s called a dam,” she says. “The water comes in from a river on the other side of that hill, and it comes out here.”
“Ohhh.”
“It gets all pushed close together in the dam and then it’s so angry that it rushes out like this.” She looks angry, too, just for a second, but then she gets tired from the angry dam and from having a tight, angry face.
“Let’s go up there,” she says, and points above the duct where the giant hill stretches up and up and up until it meets the highway. You walk beside her, and she walks beside the railing. She is not looking at the water. The hill is straight ahead. You pass your mom and dad and they look over but don’t say anything. Now you walk up steps that go up past the duct to where the water is not so loud, and then onto the grass. You can see the tops of vans and semi trucks, too small, growing tinier as the highway thins into a pencil line on the left.
For a minute or two the grass flattens under your feet and you don’t think about much except how big the hill is.
“Hey,” she says, and her voice is behind you. “Stop for a second, I’m out of breath. Look at the view.” She turns around and sits awkwardly in the stiff grass, facing back down where you came from.
The water is tiny now, thick and clumped. It is sunken down in the middle of a small valley, surrounded by the hills. The mounds of red and yellow and orange-leafed trees rise up all around it, but some small hills have only grass, like this one. You look everywhere, as far as you can see on one side, and then across the hills and as far as you can see on the other side. All around the hills pile on each other, growing smaller toward the horizon like the folds and lumps of a blanket.
The sun is still a blurry spot in the light grey sky, but everything is lighter from up here, where you are standing on the grass: the earth is low and small and the pale sky reaches down all around and spreads on the grass and the tops of the hills and the hair on Lorna’s head.
She gets up again, pushing herself up from the ground. Then she turns around and walks up the hill toward you, at every step pushing on her knees with her hands. She has the sleepy look, and as she climbs up it is tiring, how hard she looks at you, like she’s climbing up by a rope tied around your waist. Her grey eyes are crashing like the water, and she keeps them focused on you. When she is beside you she takes your wrist, and it hurts a little.
“Let’s go to the top,” she says. She is not out of breath now. Slowly her hand lets go of your wrist and when you look up she is still looking at you, but you are not afraid; the bedroom and crash of water are gone. She is walking so straight up that you laugh at her. She climbs beside you up to the top. Across the highway, on the other side, the river reflects the pale sky, wide and smooth before it reaches the dam. You turn around and lean against the railing, looking at the hills again, but the view is old and familiar now. Lorna stands looking at the other side for a long time, and finally turns around and leans against the railing too.
“Look,” you say, “There’s Mom and Dad.”
“Yep,” she says. She doesn’t talk to this dad. Sometimes she says we might as well have been born without them.
The two of them are small blurry shapes, almost invisible against the sky and hills. The two shapes blend into the hills and only you and Lorna are left, standing at the top, looking at everything together.
Lorna puts her arm around your shoulder, and squeezes tight and quick, like the birthday hug. She is warm and soft and strong. Then she lets go and looks down at you, her hair flopping into her face. Her eyes are still, burning, and not tired. Although the air is cool and it is windy on top of the hill you are not cold. You look down to where your parents were and you can’t find them now.
“You’re a good kid,” she says. You don’t feel like talking so you stay quiet and still. You can tell she is still looking at you, from the corner of your eyes. You hold your neck tense so you will keep looking ahead. She puts her arm across your tight shoulders again and for a minute her arm is tight too, but then it goes soft and heavy. You stay tight because you want to hold her arm up. Then she clears her throat and takes her arm down, and you can look at her again. She is standing on a little mound looking very tall, and in the pale light she looks maybe like your mother, but her eyes smooth and grown-up where your mother’s eyes are never smooth.
“All right, come on,” she says, her voice clear and lighter now than it has been all day. Maybe she will stay awake until bedtime tonight. You follow her down the hill, both of you going slowly and tripping a little because the hill is so steep. Sometimes she reaches out and holds the bottom of your arm, to help you keep balanced. Sometimes too when she trips she puts her hand hard on your shoulder so she doesn’t fall. When you reach the bottom you follow her back up the trail and the steps to the car, and she opens the door so you can climb in in front of her. She fastens the middle seatbelt and pulls on the strap to make it tight enough.
Later there are more trails, ones that don’t run beside water. There are trails to lookout spots and history spots. In the evening you all eat supper at a quiet diner. Your mom and dad talk about the food and what they are doing tomorrow.
Lorna stays awake for the ride home. She looks at the window most of the time. You are very tired now—it must have been the hill. It was a very tall hill. You are almost asleep sitting up, trying to stay awake but it’s very hard. Then Lorna pats her leg and you fold over with your head in her lap, and you put your feet up onto the seat. Her leg is tense now, holding your head up, but you close your eyes anyway and her leg softens.
When you come awake your ear is hot against Lorna’s leg. The car is stopped; you must be home. You don’t open your eyes yet—only when Lorna tells you to wake up.
I didn't find it that interesting to be honest, but I'm only interested in darkness, violence, weirdness and death :) As a piece of writing, it was well-written.
Should this line have the word Quiet instead of Quit ?
Then your mom was crying a little and she said Quit
Didn't make sense to me. As just a piece of writing it reads well to me, can't really see much wrong with it.
Then your mom was crying a little and she said Quit
Didn't make sense to me. As just a piece of writing it reads well to me, can't really see much wrong with it.
It's just origional writing so as I'm sure you know it can be anything. Lol I can't believe I forgot though
No offence, but it would be handy if you said what the coursework title was that you wrote this for. Unless you say what it's supposed to be doing then it's pretty hard to give any feedback.
Well this is another bit of coursework so any feedback is much appreciated.
You sit in the middle seat of the car watching her sleep. She is sleeping with her face smashed up against the window, her mouth open a tiny slit. It is not an attractive pose, though you don’t notice.
You are not old enough to know that she is not pretty; her face is perfect for a sister. She has a soft, triangular, elven face, extending into slightly pointy ears, surrounded by shiny, floppy, short brown hair. Her lips curl curiously, and you wonder if she is dreaming. But then, her lips curl when she is awake, too, and you wonder if she dreams awake. Her thin eyebrows narrow down and point at her dainty nose. You worry that she can’t breathe enough through such a small nose.
You don’t know yet that at seventeen she is a few vital pounds too heavy, just enough to be too much. Sam next door talks sometimes about the girls at school and he doesn’t like them. He says he has to run away from them sometimes. But you like Lorna.
She has slept a whole three hours. She sleeps a lot. You wish she would wake up. Your fingers are tapping on the seat, then playing with the seat belt, then tapping again; then you pretend you have a Matchbox car and you push it back and forth across the empty seat, making quiet car sounds. The Matchbox car is yellow and shiny and when you have a real one you will drive her to school every day and all the kids at school will see her in the front seat.
Above her head, the landscape rolls across the window. For a while the land is flat and you see mostly sky—a soft grey sky, with a blur of cloudy white where the sun might be. After a while the land grows hilly, and the forests thicken far off into red and orange and brown clumps. Then the forests come steadily closer and finally they surround the car. The car is under a mass of dark leaves, and still she is sleeping, her face now in shadow.
“Almost there,” says someone. It is your mom; for a while you had forgotten about your mom and dad in the front. Her voice startles you back to the sharp plastic smell of the car and the whisper of the air conditioning.
The car stops, and the car-sounds die, leaving a sleepy, quiet vacuum until your mom talks again.
“Wake up,” she says, half turning. “We’re there.”
“Miss-sess-sennewah,” says your dad, brightly.
“How long’s it been since we’ve been to Mississinewa, Lorna?” says your mom, but she doesn’t wait for an answer and she and your dad start walking.
Lorna pushes herself up from the car door and claws her hair away from her face. She opens the door and stumbles out, and you slide across the seat after her. She nearly shuts the door on you but sees just in time.
“Sorry,” she says groggily, and stretches. Her body looks soft in faded jeans and a grey cardigan, and it reminds you of the last time she hugged you. It was your fifth birthday party, almost a year ago (though it seems like forever). You don’t remember what she gave you, except that it was wrapped in bright red paper and that she stood behind your chair while you opened it; and she hugged you tightly and briefly with her arms clasped to your chest, before you even saw what the present was.
And then she went to her room, and your mom yelled at her to get back out here. Your mom and dad both yelled at her a lot then, but they don’t anymore. Besides, you have a different dad now. You try to remember the other dad, when he yelled at Lorna at the birthday party after your mom was done yelling at her.
He stood outside her door. His back was tight and he was very tall, and he yelled at Lorna who was in her room. Get out here, he yelled, you can’t live in there. Don’t you dare go to sleep. Get out here, be happy for a half-hour for your little brother. Then he was quiet for a minute and then he turned and came back loud into the kitchen. Kids. They gotta hide in their damn bedrooms and write Dear Diary about how Johnny ignored ‘em in the hallway today and Suzy called ‘em fat ass. And then they sleep cause they don’t know what else to do with theirselves. Then his face got blue lines in it and he said Ain’t gonna change. Johnny and Suzy ain’t. Then your mom was crying a little and she said Quit. Then they told you to open your presents, so you did, but you don’t remember any of them, just the piles of bright paper on the table.
Your mom is at the trail already, and she calls for both of you to hurry up. Your dad is a few feet behind her, but soon catches up and wraps his arm around her waist. Everywhere the sound of water roars. You follow Lorna to the trail; almost right away a long flight of wooden steps head down and turn at a right angle every five or ten, gradually taking you to the right. You can see the water now, the top of it jumping, spraying up in bursts like frantic hands. Lorna is still ahead of you a few steps, but when she reaches the bottom she stops at the high railing and looks down into the water, leaning forward with her elbows spread out to the sides. Your mom and dad keep walking, to the right, and they don’t look back at you.
For a second your feet won’t move. You are frightened of the look on her face: it seems like the look she has when she comes home from school, so tired, and walks straight to her bedroom with her plain grey eyes rigid and impatient. She always shuts the door and sleeps for a long time, and when she comes out for dinner she looks as though she just wants to go back to sleep again. Sometimes she talks about when she will graduate from school and have her own house, and then her eyes get shiny and smooth and she doesn’t look sleepy.
Is she still sleepy now? She is looking at the brown, crashing water like her bedroom is down there, like she’s reaching her hand out for the doorknob.
Then you step down and finally you are standing beside her. When she looks at you now she only looks sleepy.
“Look up there,” she says, her voice rough, and points to the right.
The water shoots violent and dirty from a cement duct, and smashes into jagged sheets far far below. There must be something under the water, because some of the water is rushing back up the wrong way and it looks like the water is exploding, over and over and over.
Right below the water is thick and terrible. You stare down into it, watching one brown wave heave and roll over another, and all of it shouting and roaring and moving so fast it makes you a little dizzy.
“Pretty scary, huh?” she says.
“Yeah,” you say. Your voice is scratchy and quiet.
“Can you imagine if somebody jumped in what would happen?”
“No...” You try not to see it.
“That’s called a dam,” she says. “The water comes in from a river on the other side of that hill, and it comes out here.”
“Ohhh.”
“It gets all pushed close together in the dam and then it’s so angry that it rushes out like this.” She looks angry, too, just for a second, but then she gets tired from the angry dam and from having a tight, angry face.
“Let’s go up there,” she says, and points above the duct where the giant hill stretches up and up and up until it meets the highway. You walk beside her, and she walks beside the railing. She is not looking at the water. The hill is straight ahead. You pass your mom and dad and they look over but don’t say anything. Now you walk up steps that go up past the duct to where the water is not so loud, and then onto the grass. You can see the tops of vans and semi trucks, too small, growing tinier as the highway thins into a pencil line on the left.
For a minute or two the grass flattens under your feet and you don’t think about much except how big the hill is.
“Hey,” she says, and her voice is behind you. “Stop for a second, I’m out of breath. Look at the view.” She turns around and sits awkwardly in the stiff grass, facing back down where you came from.
The water is tiny now, thick and clumped. It is sunken down in the middle of a small valley, surrounded by the hills. The mounds of red and yellow and orange-leafed trees rise up all around it, but some small hills have only grass, like this one. You look everywhere, as far as you can see on one side, and then across the hills and as far as you can see on the other side. All around the hills pile on each other, growing smaller toward the horizon like the folds and lumps of a blanket.
The sun is still a blurry spot in the light grey sky, but everything is lighter from up here, where you are standing on the grass: the earth is low and small and the pale sky reaches down all around and spreads on the grass and the tops of the hills and the hair on Lorna’s head.
She gets up again, pushing herself up from the ground. Then she turns around and walks up the hill toward you, at every step pushing on her knees with her hands. She has the sleepy look, and as she climbs up it is tiring, how hard she looks at you, like she’s climbing up by a rope tied around your waist. Her grey eyes are crashing like the water, and she keeps them focused on you. When she is beside you she takes your wrist, and it hurts a little.
“Let’s go to the top,” she says. She is not out of breath now. Slowly her hand lets go of your wrist and when you look up she is still looking at you, but you are not afraid; the bedroom and crash of water are gone. She is walking so straight up that you laugh at her. She climbs beside you up to the top. Across the highway, on the other side, the river reflects the pale sky, wide and smooth before it reaches the dam. You turn around and lean against the railing, looking at the hills again, but the view is old and familiar now. Lorna stands looking at the other side for a long time, and finally turns around and leans against the railing too.
“Look,” you say, “There’s Mom and Dad.”
“Yep,” she says. She doesn’t talk to this dad. Sometimes she says we might as well have been born without them.
The two of them are small blurry shapes, almost invisible against the sky and hills. The two shapes blend into the hills and only you and Lorna are left, standing at the top, looking at everything together.
Lorna puts her arm around your shoulder, and squeezes tight and quick, like the birthday hug. She is warm and soft and strong. Then she lets go and looks down at you, her hair flopping into her face. Her eyes are still, burning, and not tired. Although the air is cool and it is windy on top of the hill you are not cold. You look down to where your parents were and you can’t find them now.
“You’re a good kid,” she says. You don’t feel like talking so you stay quiet and still. You can tell she is still looking at you, from the corner of your eyes. You hold your neck tense so you will keep looking ahead. She puts her arm across your tight shoulders again and for a minute her arm is tight too, but then it goes soft and heavy. You stay tight because you want to hold her arm up. Then she clears her throat and takes her arm down, and you can look at her again. She is standing on a little mound looking very tall, and in the pale light she looks maybe like your mother, but her eyes smooth and grown-up where your mother’s eyes are never smooth.
“All right, come on,” she says, her voice clear and lighter now than it has been all day. Maybe she will stay awake until bedtime tonight. You follow her down the hill, both of you going slowly and tripping a little because the hill is so steep. Sometimes she reaches out and holds the bottom of your arm, to help you keep balanced. Sometimes too when she trips she puts her hand hard on your shoulder so she doesn’t fall. When you reach the bottom you follow her back up the trail and the steps to the car, and she opens the door so you can climb in in front of her. She fastens the middle seatbelt and pulls on the strap to make it tight enough.
Later there are more trails, ones that don’t run beside water. There are trails to lookout spots and history spots. In the evening you all eat supper at a quiet diner. Your mom and dad talk about the food and what they are doing tomorrow.
Lorna stays awake for the ride home. She looks at the window most of the time. You are very tired now—it must have been the hill. It was a very tall hill. You are almost asleep sitting up, trying to stay awake but it’s very hard. Then Lorna pats her leg and you fold over with your head in her lap, and you put your feet up onto the seat. Her leg is tense now, holding your head up, but you close your eyes anyway and her leg softens.
When you come awake your ear is hot against Lorna’s leg. The car is stopped; you must be home. You don’t open your eyes yet—only when Lorna tells you to wake up.
You sit in the middle seat of the car watching her sleep. She is sleeping with her face smashed up against the window, her mouth open a tiny slit. It is not an attractive pose, though you don’t notice.
You are not old enough to know that she is not pretty; her face is perfect for a sister. She has a soft, triangular, elven face, extending into slightly pointy ears, surrounded by shiny, floppy, short brown hair. Her lips curl curiously, and you wonder if she is dreaming. But then, her lips curl when she is awake, too, and you wonder if she dreams awake. Her thin eyebrows narrow down and point at her dainty nose. You worry that she can’t breathe enough through such a small nose.
You don’t know yet that at seventeen she is a few vital pounds too heavy, just enough to be too much. Sam next door talks sometimes about the girls at school and he doesn’t like them. He says he has to run away from them sometimes. But you like Lorna.
She has slept a whole three hours. She sleeps a lot. You wish she would wake up. Your fingers are tapping on the seat, then playing with the seat belt, then tapping again; then you pretend you have a Matchbox car and you push it back and forth across the empty seat, making quiet car sounds. The Matchbox car is yellow and shiny and when you have a real one you will drive her to school every day and all the kids at school will see her in the front seat.
Above her head, the landscape rolls across the window. For a while the land is flat and you see mostly sky—a soft grey sky, with a blur of cloudy white where the sun might be. After a while the land grows hilly, and the forests thicken far off into red and orange and brown clumps. Then the forests come steadily closer and finally they surround the car. The car is under a mass of dark leaves, and still she is sleeping, her face now in shadow.
“Almost there,” says someone. It is your mom; for a while you had forgotten about your mom and dad in the front. Her voice startles you back to the sharp plastic smell of the car and the whisper of the air conditioning.
The car stops, and the car-sounds die, leaving a sleepy, quiet vacuum until your mom talks again.
“Wake up,” she says, half turning. “We’re there.”
“Miss-sess-sennewah,” says your dad, brightly.
“How long’s it been since we’ve been to Mississinewa, Lorna?” says your mom, but she doesn’t wait for an answer and she and your dad start walking.
Lorna pushes herself up from the car door and claws her hair away from her face. She opens the door and stumbles out, and you slide across the seat after her. She nearly shuts the door on you but sees just in time.
“Sorry,” she says groggily, and stretches. Her body looks soft in faded jeans and a grey cardigan, and it reminds you of the last time she hugged you. It was your fifth birthday party, almost a year ago (though it seems like forever). You don’t remember what she gave you, except that it was wrapped in bright red paper and that she stood behind your chair while you opened it; and she hugged you tightly and briefly with her arms clasped to your chest, before you even saw what the present was.
And then she went to her room, and your mom yelled at her to get back out here. Your mom and dad both yelled at her a lot then, but they don’t anymore. Besides, you have a different dad now. You try to remember the other dad, when he yelled at Lorna at the birthday party after your mom was done yelling at her.
He stood outside her door. His back was tight and he was very tall, and he yelled at Lorna who was in her room. Get out here, he yelled, you can’t live in there. Don’t you dare go to sleep. Get out here, be happy for a half-hour for your little brother. Then he was quiet for a minute and then he turned and came back loud into the kitchen. Kids. They gotta hide in their damn bedrooms and write Dear Diary about how Johnny ignored ‘em in the hallway today and Suzy called ‘em fat ass. And then they sleep cause they don’t know what else to do with theirselves. Then his face got blue lines in it and he said Ain’t gonna change. Johnny and Suzy ain’t. Then your mom was crying a little and she said Quit. Then they told you to open your presents, so you did, but you don’t remember any of them, just the piles of bright paper on the table.
Your mom is at the trail already, and she calls for both of you to hurry up. Your dad is a few feet behind her, but soon catches up and wraps his arm around her waist. Everywhere the sound of water roars. You follow Lorna to the trail; almost right away a long flight of wooden steps head down and turn at a right angle every five or ten, gradually taking you to the right. You can see the water now, the top of it jumping, spraying up in bursts like frantic hands. Lorna is still ahead of you a few steps, but when she reaches the bottom she stops at the high railing and looks down into the water, leaning forward with her elbows spread out to the sides. Your mom and dad keep walking, to the right, and they don’t look back at you.
For a second your feet won’t move. You are frightened of the look on her face: it seems like the look she has when she comes home from school, so tired, and walks straight to her bedroom with her plain grey eyes rigid and impatient. She always shuts the door and sleeps for a long time, and when she comes out for dinner she looks as though she just wants to go back to sleep again. Sometimes she talks about when she will graduate from school and have her own house, and then her eyes get shiny and smooth and she doesn’t look sleepy.
Is she still sleepy now? She is looking at the brown, crashing water like her bedroom is down there, like she’s reaching her hand out for the doorknob.
Then you step down and finally you are standing beside her. When she looks at you now she only looks sleepy.
“Look up there,” she says, her voice rough, and points to the right.
The water shoots violent and dirty from a cement duct, and smashes into jagged sheets far far below. There must be something under the water, because some of the water is rushing back up the wrong way and it looks like the water is exploding, over and over and over.
Right below the water is thick and terrible. You stare down into it, watching one brown wave heave and roll over another, and all of it shouting and roaring and moving so fast it makes you a little dizzy.
“Pretty scary, huh?” she says.
“Yeah,” you say. Your voice is scratchy and quiet.
“Can you imagine if somebody jumped in what would happen?”
“No...” You try not to see it.
“That’s called a dam,” she says. “The water comes in from a river on the other side of that hill, and it comes out here.”
“Ohhh.”
“It gets all pushed close together in the dam and then it’s so angry that it rushes out like this.” She looks angry, too, just for a second, but then she gets tired from the angry dam and from having a tight, angry face.
“Let’s go up there,” she says, and points above the duct where the giant hill stretches up and up and up until it meets the highway. You walk beside her, and she walks beside the railing. She is not looking at the water. The hill is straight ahead. You pass your mom and dad and they look over but don’t say anything. Now you walk up steps that go up past the duct to where the water is not so loud, and then onto the grass. You can see the tops of vans and semi trucks, too small, growing tinier as the highway thins into a pencil line on the left.
For a minute or two the grass flattens under your feet and you don’t think about much except how big the hill is.
“Hey,” she says, and her voice is behind you. “Stop for a second, I’m out of breath. Look at the view.” She turns around and sits awkwardly in the stiff grass, facing back down where you came from.
The water is tiny now, thick and clumped. It is sunken down in the middle of a small valley, surrounded by the hills. The mounds of red and yellow and orange-leafed trees rise up all around it, but some small hills have only grass, like this one. You look everywhere, as far as you can see on one side, and then across the hills and as far as you can see on the other side. All around the hills pile on each other, growing smaller toward the horizon like the folds and lumps of a blanket.
The sun is still a blurry spot in the light grey sky, but everything is lighter from up here, where you are standing on the grass: the earth is low and small and the pale sky reaches down all around and spreads on the grass and the tops of the hills and the hair on Lorna’s head.
She gets up again, pushing herself up from the ground. Then she turns around and walks up the hill toward you, at every step pushing on her knees with her hands. She has the sleepy look, and as she climbs up it is tiring, how hard she looks at you, like she’s climbing up by a rope tied around your waist. Her grey eyes are crashing like the water, and she keeps them focused on you. When she is beside you she takes your wrist, and it hurts a little.
“Let’s go to the top,” she says. She is not out of breath now. Slowly her hand lets go of your wrist and when you look up she is still looking at you, but you are not afraid; the bedroom and crash of water are gone. She is walking so straight up that you laugh at her. She climbs beside you up to the top. Across the highway, on the other side, the river reflects the pale sky, wide and smooth before it reaches the dam. You turn around and lean against the railing, looking at the hills again, but the view is old and familiar now. Lorna stands looking at the other side for a long time, and finally turns around and leans against the railing too.
“Look,” you say, “There’s Mom and Dad.”
“Yep,” she says. She doesn’t talk to this dad. Sometimes she says we might as well have been born without them.
The two of them are small blurry shapes, almost invisible against the sky and hills. The two shapes blend into the hills and only you and Lorna are left, standing at the top, looking at everything together.
Lorna puts her arm around your shoulder, and squeezes tight and quick, like the birthday hug. She is warm and soft and strong. Then she lets go and looks down at you, her hair flopping into her face. Her eyes are still, burning, and not tired. Although the air is cool and it is windy on top of the hill you are not cold. You look down to where your parents were and you can’t find them now.
“You’re a good kid,” she says. You don’t feel like talking so you stay quiet and still. You can tell she is still looking at you, from the corner of your eyes. You hold your neck tense so you will keep looking ahead. She puts her arm across your tight shoulders again and for a minute her arm is tight too, but then it goes soft and heavy. You stay tight because you want to hold her arm up. Then she clears her throat and takes her arm down, and you can look at her again. She is standing on a little mound looking very tall, and in the pale light she looks maybe like your mother, but her eyes smooth and grown-up where your mother’s eyes are never smooth.
“All right, come on,” she says, her voice clear and lighter now than it has been all day. Maybe she will stay awake until bedtime tonight. You follow her down the hill, both of you going slowly and tripping a little because the hill is so steep. Sometimes she reaches out and holds the bottom of your arm, to help you keep balanced. Sometimes too when she trips she puts her hand hard on your shoulder so she doesn’t fall. When you reach the bottom you follow her back up the trail and the steps to the car, and she opens the door so you can climb in in front of her. She fastens the middle seatbelt and pulls on the strap to make it tight enough.
Later there are more trails, ones that don’t run beside water. There are trails to lookout spots and history spots. In the evening you all eat supper at a quiet diner. Your mom and dad talk about the food and what they are doing tomorrow.
Lorna stays awake for the ride home. She looks at the window most of the time. You are very tired now—it must have been the hill. It was a very tall hill. You are almost asleep sitting up, trying to stay awake but it’s very hard. Then Lorna pats her leg and you fold over with your head in her lap, and you put your feet up onto the seat. Her leg is tense now, holding your head up, but you close your eyes anyway and her leg softens.
When you come awake your ear is hot against Lorna’s leg. The car is stopped; you must be home. You don’t open your eyes yet—only when Lorna tells you to wake up.