Her default expression was a smile that had absolutely nothing to do with her mouth. Still not even the most obvious, untalented poet would try to claim that it had something to do with her eyes. Eyes don’t smile. Eyes refract light onto the retina, slowing the light down and allowing the brain to process images. I’m not trying to say it had anything to do with her goddamned eyebrows either. Just relax your face in an open and innocent and sad way that it is not at all naive and if you are capable of doing that perhaps you are capable of understanding her. Don’t look in the mirror though because her expression is not anything like the ridiculous expression on your slackened maw.
After high school she moved to Paris to study ballet and she found that the city was comforting to her, especially because in Paris language was no longer abrasive or invasive, as it was back home. Because she could not understand the foreign tongues of Parisians, the incessant noise of people nattering became like muzak except not annoying or shitty. Unburdened by understanding she could stand to venture out into public and to listen. Her muscles relaxed, her dancing improved. Her thoughts were clearer than they had been in eighteen years, which is to say clearer than they had ever been. The need to shut out the world slowly shrank away. She got along by pointing and smiling and humming quietly to herself so as not to begin to pick up the language, accidentally. Local grocers and booksellers did not even have to excuse her ignorance for they never suspected that she did not speak their language. They were too enraptured by her movements and her face to think of anything other than what she had gestured for.
She was never in want of physical company for the boys were drawn to this strange girl who never seemed to talk. She shut them up by placing a finger to their lips and if that did not work she simply left them, dumbfounded.
Of course the girl was not living a silent existence. She would however only carry out her intellectual discourses in English with the more socially withdrawn students from the University’s mathematics department whom she found mostly too clumsy to be arrogant or suave and who simply fell back on what they had recently learned about Wittgenstein or Riemann which she enjoyed. One of these students, something like a friend of hers, was a young woman who’s older brother was a prodigiously talented pianist and a composer and was very good looking in a way that wasn’t at all annoying and she loved to hear him play the piano but he only spoke French so she kept her distance even though she was magnetically attracted to him.
She feared him because she knew that if she began to spend time with him she would quickly learn French because there was no way in hell she would ever consider putting her finger to his lips because she was well aware of how damned silly and pretentious that was. She enjoyed doing it because she never could have gotten away with it with the boys in high school who all thought she was extremely pretty but who found her to be too painfully sad to hold hands with or sit next to at the movies.
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5 comments:
What is the overarching idea behind this story, does it even mean anything to you? Were you more interested in the uniqueness of the plot than you were in the message behind it? Do you even connect with the characters you sketch, understand them? Do you understand the sad and open expression, which is not at all naive, or is that to you merely an interesting paradox - an openness that does not fall prey to naivete? Or are these characters merely parodies of poorly etched characters, one-dimensional sketches of an unformed and inchoate idea. The message here is lost, if you initially intended one. Without a message, an investment in the characters and a profound idea, an idea with which you are familiar and therefore into which you have insight, writing has no heart. And writing without heart is not worth reading.
Give your writing more heart and purpose, and you will see results. Write what you know.
not of the heart but of the glands perhaps?. thank you for the criticism.
All right, if you want to criticize my metaphoric use of 'heart' as anatomically incorrect, as an ignorant and uninterrogated ages-old expression which inaccurately assumes the heart's position in producing emotion and feeling, then go ahead. Cool. Though I'm not quite sure what you achieve by saying that, unless you are merely hoping to demean my input in a prideful reaction to criticism.
That said, you are a very unique writer, I really hope you continue working.
No, No! "Not of the heart but of the glands" is a Faulkner quote. I have nothing but appreciation for the criticism.
Oh, then I apologize, that was my own ignorance. Looks like I was the one reacting pridefully...
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