coagulated

this is good story

so monday night, my creative writing class trekked across the parking lot and through the doors into gorgas library. we travelled to the third floor, my favorite floor, because it is full of fiction, literary criticisms, and science journals. our assignment was a simple one: find a book, pick a page, and use the words on that page in any new form you choose to create an original work. our teacher put money in the copier, and we were told to choose one page with lots of text, and copy it. i searched for a book for longer than anyone else, my desire to find a genetics book and use their scientific jargon to create prose. my search proved futile, so at the last second i grabbed "an american dream" from the shelf - a small, antique-looking book with a battered brown cover. i flipped through the pages, and on a certain page the word "coagulated" jumped out at me and i chose that page- page 59. i photocopied the page, stuffed it into my bookbag, and left- it wasn't due till wednesday.

so today, after french, i walked over to the starbucks to start on my assignment. i ordered a sweet coffee, sat down on a couch, and pulled out my notebook. i took a few seconds to rip off the edges of the photocopy to reduce my copy to the single page- page 59. i sat down, ready to start, and read what i had brought with me.

you can read what i read if you like, at the bottom of the page, you then may understand my feelings better.

i was moved to tears. unbelievably moved. magnificently changed. i read over it what must have been ten times, just in awe. how did i manage to pick this page, this moment, this desperate scene out of all the hundreds of pages? how could i have walked around with such emotion in my bag and not felt its weight? how could these words have been hiding in my pack for two days without them breaking free and screaming "look at us we are beautiful!" until i was forced to read them. the page, isolated from all its brothers and sisters, tells only a tiny fraction of a story, but at the same time tells so very much. i cried in the middle of starbucks, surrounded by people blabbing about facebook and vanilla lattes and gymnastics, and they were ignorant to the bright light i held in my hands. i just wanted to force them all to read it, to start a sobbing fest in that coffee shop and change everyone's life.

the tiny bits of dialogue are the most amazing. it is so horribly sad without using any words like sadness, or any tears, or any explanation. its description and simplicity evoke the deepest sort of sadness and sympathy, and there is so much about the narrator that is revealed. a good book is one that you can read the entire story in one page, and this is that. the words are so sweet, the narration so matter-of-fact while at the same time being so intensely mournful. i couldn't get enough of it. i wanted to swallow it whole, i wanted the words to run through my blood, i wanted something to show for this feeling that overcame me. i wanted to burst into flame.

after reading it enough times to where i was satisfied with my feelings for it, i started my assignment. i wanted to use every single word the author had, i wanted to somehow get that same reaction and that same meaning and make eveyrone in my class just burn with the same intensity that i had. i separated the whole page, made columns for all the nouns, all the verbs, the adjectives, adverbs, prepositions. i wrote down all the personal pronouns, articles, adjectives that could be nouns and prepositions that could be adjectives. i picked apart every piece i could get my fingers on, separating and labeling every part of every sentence. i wrote down all the punctuation- i wanted to be thorough.

then, as i readied myself to begin rearranging, i suddenly felt a great sense of guilt. what had i done? this beautiful piece, these moving feelings and intense emotions, i had just reduced the entire page to several pieces of paper covered in meaningless garbage. i felt like i had gone into someone's home, stolen their baby, and pinned it down and dissected it, spreading all its parts on their floor, and yelling "i didn't mean to! it was so beautiful! it was only homework!" i looked at all my work and rearranging and felt disgusting, like i had destroyed something irreplacable. i read the original page again, trying to catch that original feeling, the holes it stuck in me- but still, i felt so plainly awful.

so i crumpled up my pages of dissection and stuffed them in my sweet coffee cup and threw them away. i read the page over again, and penciled in some thoughts on the copy, underlined particularly good words, and contemplated different ways to rearrange. but i just couldn't sit there any more with all the baby parts lying in front of me in a bloody mess. i'll do the assignment, and i might post it if any of you want to read it, but i just thought i would share this strange little experience.

it's changed my life in a very small way.
and i'm going to read this book.
<3>An American Dream page 59

of pink-tinted glasses was sitting in his car, the door open, holding
his temple, and groaning in a whining gurgling sound which be-
trayed the shoddy state of his internal plumbing.
But I had broken through the crowd and was about to kneel at
Deborah's body. An arm in a blue serge sleeve held me back.
"Officer, that's my wife."
The arm went down suddenly. "You better not look, mister"
There was nothing agreeable to see. She must have first struck
the pavement, and the nearest car had been almost at a halt before it
hit her. Perhaps it pushed the body a few feet. Now her limbs
had the used-up look of rope washed limp in the sea, and her
head was wedged beneath a tire. There was a man taking photo-
graphs, his strobe light going off each time with a mean crackling
hiss, and as I knelt, he stepped back and turned to someone else, a
doctor with a satchel in his hand, and said, "She's yours."
"All right, move the car back," the doctor said. Two policemen
near me pushed on the automobile and retired the front wheels a
foot before the car bumped gently into the car behind it. I knelt
ahead of the medical examiner and looked at her face. It was filthy
with a scrape of asphalt and tire marks. Just hald of her was
recognizable, for the side of her face which caught the tire was
swollen. She looked like a fat young girl. But trhe back of her head,
like a fruit gone rotten and lying in its juices, was the center of a
pond of coagulated blood near to a foot in diameter. I stayed between
the police photographer who was getting ready to take more pictures
and the medical examiner who was opening his satchel, and still
on my knees, touched my face to hers, being careful to catch some of
the blood on my hands, and even (as I nuzzled her hair with my
nose) a streak of two more on my cheeks. "Oh, baby," I said alound. It
might have been good to weep, but nothing of that sort was even
near. No, shock and stupor would be the best I could muster.
"Deborah," I said, and like an echo from the worst of one's past
came a clear sense of doing this before, of making love to some