Monday, April 20, 2009

Rip Current

A couple things:
1. I didn't write yesterday because I was really sick (aka hung over).
2. You should vote on the poll. I'm going to be writing about it at the end of every week. I'll explain this blog's setup later at the end of this week. "Ego" week, that is.

Now, onto today's story.

~~~

Janice hasn’t been there in so long that she had forgotten how it made her feel. Sometimes she would wonder if she would ever go back. This place inspired in her a deep melancholy and pure happiness, all at once.
The tide was slowly drifting out. It made her want to get in and be absorbed into the giant mass of water, never to be seen again. No one would ever be able to hate her anymore. Her life could end, and with it all the sadness she carried, like so much dirty laundry. A waste of a person. She shouldn’t waste the precious resources that more beautiful human beings need. She could just go.
Janice knew that she was almost a miscarriage. Placed in intensive care from the moment she was shoved out of the womb. She had always suspected that her parents blamed her for their extreme poverty. Hospital bills still came in; the interest built faster than they could pay. When Janice had tried to move out of her parents’ house at the age of 18, they had made her get a job and stay to help them pay. Her mother had threatened to transfer the debt onto her if she attempted to leave.
The last time she had been to the beach was with her old friends Sara and Margot. The three of them used to hang out all the time. Well, until Sara had started dating Fred, and Margot got with Jolene. Fred and Jolene were best friends, of course, and so the four of them began hanging out all the time. Janice started feeling like an unimportant tagalong and stopped spending her days with them. Janice didn’t have anyone to turn to, so she then just filled her time elsewhere. She accumulated online friends that lived hundreds or more miles away.
The lack of face to face human interaction might have driven her to severe depravity and self-degradation. She had decided to come to the ocean today because none of it was really worth all this pain. The water was a bit chilly—it made her hair stand on end. Maybe, hopefully, the last time it would ever do that. The sun was on its way down. Maybe she would wait for it to set, and then start swimming towards it.
A sandpiper was flitting nervously across the sandy terrain. Janice noticed that it had four children excitedly following behind. She smiled. If only life was that simple. If only she could experience such a simple joy. If only, if only.

4 comments:

Ashleigh said...

Pretty heavy stuff! I like how this is left open at the end, though.

It would be kind of cool to see more details about her relationships, maybe with the online friends, to show how she ended up at this point.

-Ashleigh

Patrick Zagorski said...

You're right, it should have been a little longer. I probably sold it short a little--I think I could have gone on.

Unknown said...

I think I like her. I'd like to get inside her head more, though. The third person perspective detaches the reader from Janice, which is cool. We get her from more of a storyteller perspective.

Anonymous said...

You're really good at capturing real, emotional stories in a short span.