Vacuums

Vacuums

            Marsha went to the most epic vacuum store she could find. See, her cat had made a hideous mess out of his kitty litter in the middle of the newly carpeted living room. He seemed to have dragged it all the way form the kitchen. He must have had some kind of motive. Maybe his food wasn’t enough or it wasn’t his favorite kind. Anywho, the salesman brings Marsha back to reality.

            “Now this right here is the best in the business”.

            “Ill take it!” exclaims Marsha without hesitation.

            “You don’t want to hear anything else about it? I have the whole informational speech down pat’ he says.

            “Nope, that’s all I needed to hear” Marsha is impatient. She pays for it and proudly shows it off to her husband once she got home. She just cannot wait to tackle that kitty mess on the carpet. She plugs it in around the corner in the kitchen and goes to turn it on. All excited, she hits the ON button and…nothing. She keeps on trying.

            “Agghhh!” Marsha exclaims.

            “Just keep trying, sweetheart,” says her husband. So she kept on trying. She checked all the cords and the outlet and everything seemed to be working. She finally decided that was it and she was taking it back. As she rounds the corner to unplug and wind up the cord, her husband sits there giggling like a little school girl holding the cord in his hand. 

Fiction Packet 3

These are all very interesting stories. Very different than what I am used to. It seemed that a lot of them were maybe written in a  different language and then translated. So they are not American stories.

The first story, When It Rains, It Rains a River, was very repetitive. It used the words, "brother", "mud", and " girl" a lot. The sentences were also repetitive, for example, "we fish, when it rains, and us brothers, in the rain, fishing like this, this makes the earth turn t mud". the story seems to take awhile to move on because it does repeat a lot of words and phrases. However, because it does repeat, it was difficult for me to focus on the content and I'm not even sure what the story was about. I know there was a girl that the boys made and there things they did like when she turned into a "cave"and they made her all muddy. The Singing Fish was another part of the story and that one was even more confusing because it started talking about words and then about talking fish. It was definitely different.

I liked the The Falling Girl most of all because the language was a little easier to understand, however, the content made you think a little harder. My thought was that the girl was committing suicide and she was jus seeing what she was missing out on either in her past or her future. I thought it was interesting and different twist that she was an older woman at the bottom floors but only in a matter of one night. The time was a really difficult thing to understand because it was only one night and she was just trying to make it to the party at the bottom on time. At the end, the older man even says you can't hear her thud so it makes you wonder if she actually fell or if she stopped herself and took someones help.

The story, August 25, 1983, was very interesting. the man was seeing himself as an older man who was dying because he committed suicide. The old man told the young version of himself all about their life but told him they wouldn't remember it because it was all a dream. My question is if he really was dreaming because he never really wakes up. I thought maybe he really is dying and the old man is hallucinating. There are so many ways you can interpret the story though.

The last story was also very interesting. I didn't quite get it. I did not understand why there were different titles that had different stories behind them. It got very repetitive o it was not a story I necessarily enjoyed. The language was very different, however and I kind of liked that aspect. One part that stuck out to me was when she said, "in my craving to encounter the statues which my perspiring night has erected". She uses language that has multiple meanings and it makes you read twice.

Wreckage of Reason

All of the stories were so interesting, but these seemed to stick out the most to me.

The first story was called, The Blue Girl by Laurie Foos. This was a very interesting story to me because it wasn't happy or funny, but more dark and serious. The beginning of the story slightly confused me and so did the whole story in a way. There is a lot of metaphorical talk in this story. Some examples would be the blue girl herself (is she literally blue?), the moon pies that are full of the women's secrets, and when the blue girl licked the woman's hand clean. My idea about the moon pies is that the women use marshmallows to represent all of their secrets that they keep. When the last woman went into the girls bedroom, she fed her the whole pie which I see as giving her secrets away to the blue girl and the girl took them all and cleaned her hands of them, literally and metaphorically. I think this story leaves a lot to the imagination because it sure did for me. I needed the story with a lot of questions.

The second story was called New York/LA Whirlwind Romance by Karen Lilis. This was an interesting way of writing a story. It was not a narrative where there are two people talking and someone else telling the story about the background of everything. This is just phrases that someone has said. The first part is mostly lovey dovey and portrays a positive person, but once we actually meet the person, their language changes and they become selfish and rude. This is what can happens when you talk on the phone, you can hang up and be done with a conversation but when it is face to face, there is so much more involved in the conversation. I enjoyed this story even more because at the end, Karen said that these are just lines that she has heard people say as they were passing by on their phones. To be able to compile all of them and make a story out of them was a really cool aspect.

The third story that I read was called, More Than Winter or Spring by Jessica Treat. This was styled as a traditional story I would say. There was a little bit of a twist in the story however. In the beginning where the two people are sitting and talking, Jenny was asking her friend how much her friend liked her but we did not know if her friend was a boy or girl. I automatically assumed that it was a boy because it seemed like they were flirty with each other. It seemed apparent that they were younger in age because of their actions and language. We find out later that it is a little girl when her mother is giving her a bath and calls her a 'silly girl'. It was a sweet story of friendship between two young girls but I can see where it can get offensive at the end when they are cursing at God and nothing happens. Overall, it was a good story that was fun to read and kept my interest the whole time.