natural treefingers
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- Posted: Wed, 16 Nov 2011 06:51:06 +0000
Vote if you like it! sweatdrop http://www.gaiaonline.com/arena/writing/fiction/vote/?entry_id=102623377
This is a setting experiment from earlier this year. What do you think? I love critique!
Adeline was bright. She was brighter than most children her age. Although her parents thought her very unordinary and almost annoying, she was really just inexplicably bright.
Adeline, mother, and father, recently moved to a new town. Father’s office was splitting into several branches, and the family moved to work at the new branch. Father worked as a paper salesman and Mother as a door-to-door Avon saleswoman. These cookie-cutter jobs suited mother and father’s tastes: they liked dullness, order, simplicity, and monotony. Change was always a struggle, and the only thing that made the move so easy was that they were moving into a “quiet neighborhood that met all of your community needs!”, or so the brochure read. It was just a tract home subdivision, in reality.
Adeline hated reality.
Adeline was quite a different person from both her mother and father—she loved jokes, blue, glitter, mess, galloshes, and dirt. Especially when they were all combined at once. Adeline hated her parent’s ways and found herself constantly bored with the lack of life in the life that they were living. The house they had moved into looked as though it had been copied-and-pasted from the house before it, and the house before that, and the house before that one. There wasn’t even a front yard for her to dig in, and yet mother still wouldn’t allow her to go out in the rain, in fear that Adeline would track in the mud. Adeline felt as though she and her parents were on completely separate planets. She was probably somewhere on Neptune, which she knew to be the furthest planet from Earth that was blue.
Adeline woke up in the morning, in her room that was the same as the neighbors’ child’s, in the bed that was the same as the neighbors’ child’s, and walked down the same stairs that the neighbors have and into the kitchen where her mom was standing over the sink which was distinctly derivative to that of the neighbors’. Adeline shook her head to clear the feeling that she knew the neighbors’ child must be feeling and proceeded to bother her mother.
She took a seat in the plain, white chair that accompanied the plain, white table that they ate their meals at in the very plain kitchen. From this position, she could see over her mother’s shoulder and out the window which was above the sink. The window looked into the window of the kitchen of the house across the street, where someone’s mother was standing at the twin sink doing dishes and looking into our window. This silent exchange unnerved Adeline, and she forced out a chuckle.
She brought her attention back to her mother’s pastel clothing and asked her why she was wearing those clothes, and stated that she looked like a nurse, or like grandma.
“Adeline,” her mother sighed. “Why don’t you go play outside?”
“I’m not allowed to play in the street, and we don’t have any dirt in our yard,” she stated, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. Her mother sighed again.
“Then why don’t you go do something in your room?”
“I’m waiting for breakfast.” Adeline wasn’t hungry. She woke up extra early every morning so she could eat breakfast alone, away from the bleak, white kitchen. She took the food into her room, where she hung colorful cloths on the walls to disguise the similarly bleak, white walls that shone from underneath. She wasn’t allowed to eat in her room, but that’s why she woke up early.
Her mother pointed out that she never makes breakfast. “Your father cooks, I clean. You know this Adeline, so what do you want?”
Adeline chose not to answer and left to find something less stupid to do.
As she entered the foyer she turned a sharp left—she hooked her hand to the last post that held up the rail on the stairs and flung herself swiftly into the sitting room. She knew that she had just used centrifugal force to move faster to where she was going. Adeline sat down and looked around her and thought, and thought, and thought. She looked at the couch, which she was sitting on, and noticed how the white denim-like fabric was divided into stripes by thin, white, silky ribbons. She couldn’t understand why her mother loved white so much. These textures clashed so horribly that Adeline decided she would be much more comfortable standing than sitting on the both scratchy and silky couch.
As she stood, she viewed the white walls, which were spackled evenly and which her mother had decorated with some framed black and white prints of Foxglove flowers that she had bought at the local Wal-Mart. Adeline saw the irony and felt like bursting. She knew that Foxglove plants are absolutely deadly upon ingestion: they cause vomiting, headaches and dizziness, hallucinations, and slowing of the heart. Adeline felt as though she were living inside a sickly hallucination, and as she stared at the prints that were mass produced and sold at a chain store, her stomach felt as though it would erupt. She thought, “I can’t handle this atmosphere.” She burst into tears. She thought, “I have to get out of here.”
This is a setting experiment from earlier this year. What do you think? I love critique!
Adeline was bright. She was brighter than most children her age. Although her parents thought her very unordinary and almost annoying, she was really just inexplicably bright.
Adeline, mother, and father, recently moved to a new town. Father’s office was splitting into several branches, and the family moved to work at the new branch. Father worked as a paper salesman and Mother as a door-to-door Avon saleswoman. These cookie-cutter jobs suited mother and father’s tastes: they liked dullness, order, simplicity, and monotony. Change was always a struggle, and the only thing that made the move so easy was that they were moving into a “quiet neighborhood that met all of your community needs!”, or so the brochure read. It was just a tract home subdivision, in reality.
Adeline hated reality.
Adeline was quite a different person from both her mother and father—she loved jokes, blue, glitter, mess, galloshes, and dirt. Especially when they were all combined at once. Adeline hated her parent’s ways and found herself constantly bored with the lack of life in the life that they were living. The house they had moved into looked as though it had been copied-and-pasted from the house before it, and the house before that, and the house before that one. There wasn’t even a front yard for her to dig in, and yet mother still wouldn’t allow her to go out in the rain, in fear that Adeline would track in the mud. Adeline felt as though she and her parents were on completely separate planets. She was probably somewhere on Neptune, which she knew to be the furthest planet from Earth that was blue.
Adeline woke up in the morning, in her room that was the same as the neighbors’ child’s, in the bed that was the same as the neighbors’ child’s, and walked down the same stairs that the neighbors have and into the kitchen where her mom was standing over the sink which was distinctly derivative to that of the neighbors’. Adeline shook her head to clear the feeling that she knew the neighbors’ child must be feeling and proceeded to bother her mother.
She took a seat in the plain, white chair that accompanied the plain, white table that they ate their meals at in the very plain kitchen. From this position, she could see over her mother’s shoulder and out the window which was above the sink. The window looked into the window of the kitchen of the house across the street, where someone’s mother was standing at the twin sink doing dishes and looking into our window. This silent exchange unnerved Adeline, and she forced out a chuckle.
She brought her attention back to her mother’s pastel clothing and asked her why she was wearing those clothes, and stated that she looked like a nurse, or like grandma.
“Adeline,” her mother sighed. “Why don’t you go play outside?”
“I’m not allowed to play in the street, and we don’t have any dirt in our yard,” she stated, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. Her mother sighed again.
“Then why don’t you go do something in your room?”
“I’m waiting for breakfast.” Adeline wasn’t hungry. She woke up extra early every morning so she could eat breakfast alone, away from the bleak, white kitchen. She took the food into her room, where she hung colorful cloths on the walls to disguise the similarly bleak, white walls that shone from underneath. She wasn’t allowed to eat in her room, but that’s why she woke up early.
Her mother pointed out that she never makes breakfast. “Your father cooks, I clean. You know this Adeline, so what do you want?”
Adeline chose not to answer and left to find something less stupid to do.
As she entered the foyer she turned a sharp left—she hooked her hand to the last post that held up the rail on the stairs and flung herself swiftly into the sitting room. She knew that she had just used centrifugal force to move faster to where she was going. Adeline sat down and looked around her and thought, and thought, and thought. She looked at the couch, which she was sitting on, and noticed how the white denim-like fabric was divided into stripes by thin, white, silky ribbons. She couldn’t understand why her mother loved white so much. These textures clashed so horribly that Adeline decided she would be much more comfortable standing than sitting on the both scratchy and silky couch.
As she stood, she viewed the white walls, which were spackled evenly and which her mother had decorated with some framed black and white prints of Foxglove flowers that she had bought at the local Wal-Mart. Adeline saw the irony and felt like bursting. She knew that Foxglove plants are absolutely deadly upon ingestion: they cause vomiting, headaches and dizziness, hallucinations, and slowing of the heart. Adeline felt as though she were living inside a sickly hallucination, and as she stared at the prints that were mass produced and sold at a chain store, her stomach felt as though it would erupt. She thought, “I can’t handle this atmosphere.” She burst into tears. She thought, “I have to get out of here.”
