Thread: A soliloquy if you will

This is a character soliloquy I wrote for the novel/short story (who knows?) I'm writing. I added it because I wanted to write something in the first person; I felt fatigued by writing in third person so much ( my story is written in the third person, naturally). The purpose of it is to basically foreshadow the end of the first chapter this soliloquy being the beginning of the chapter. I need some feedback. There are some errors in grammar but I assure most are intentional as to authenticate the conversational nature of this piece (though errors in punctuation are just a product of my laziness) Here it is:

The tallow branches shook as them sparrows leapt up into the grey clouds. Paradoxical, my cousin Reina called it, because if my memory serves me correct those birds leapt from those branches seconds before them shots rang out. ‘Course it could've been a coincidence - that’s just about what everyone down at the factory said- but a big part of me says it wasn’t. Anyway, if it hadn’t been for my eye catching sight of those birds hopping up in the air I might not have run towards that tree and to go even further I might not have lived.

My Pa told me when I was a boy that animals could feel a change in the weather before us humans could, said besides the sound of our footsteps and the grass crackling beneath em, those deer or birds or whatever we was hunting could “feel” us and…could tell what we was up to. I guess in a funny way them birds had felt that fool’s presence, had felt the storm that would follow. And us three fell at the mercy of that storm.

One second we was walking 'cross the lawn shoulder to shoulder then the next second thunder rang out and in a flash we was all strewn out across the lawn in all different directions like debris from a passing twister or somethin. I, of course made for the tree. I reached out to grab Lorna’s hand but she was already running back towards the house.

A dozen shots later the car screeched off and I looked up from underneath my arms. I suppose it was some sixth sense akin to the one those birds had because lookin ‘cross the lawn at the bodies - one sprawled out near the bottom porch step the other face up in the grass on the other side of the walkway - was all I needed to confirm that both my wife and Red had died. I could “feel” nothin sittin there not a thing.

I sat under that great Chinese tallow for however long it took for the cops to get there just lookin straight ahead into nothin, didn’t move an inch. The paramedic, this young blond thing, was flashin a light in my eyes and tellin the other paramedics, ‘He’s in shock, he’s in shock’ or somethin like that but I wasn’t. I wasn’t budging or respondin because...well I didn’t want to prove myself right. I was on Hill 875 at Dak To: I’ve seen soldiers alive one second and dead the next[1]. I knew they were both dead but for some reason I thought sitting there pretending that the world around me didn’t exist was somehow keeping them alive just a bit longer.

And for a moment the world…the world felt like it moved. It was kinda like ridin on a train and lookin out as the ground, the grass and the trees blur into something like liquid like paint smeared across a canvas. Now, if you look at that for too long when the train stops there's this feelin that the ground hasn’t settled into place yet, at least for me there is, and if you bottled that feeling -just the feeling not the actual sight- that’s how I felt. I felt this...this anxiousness for everythin to set back into place.

Eventually, though, I did get up from under that tree, dusted off the dirt and dead leaves and stared down at the bodies. Tell you the truth even after all the cryin, grievin and all the seasons wedged between then and now I still feel like I did sitting under that tree; I’m still waitin’ for that strange feelin to go away. Everything nowadays seems different, topsy-turvy as my momma called it.

One thing keeps me going though, makes me wake up early. Red gave me a job to do before he died. I can’t live in this world now, not without Lorna, and I don’t plan on doing so but before I go I got one last thing to do.

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[1] An important and bloody battle during the Vietnam War

This is pretty damn good. I felt as if I was sitting across the room from the narrator while he was telling his story. I'm extremely interested in what is going to happen.

Tell you the truth even after all the cryin, grievin and all the seasons wedged between then and now I still feel like I did sitting under that tree; I’m still waitin’ for that strange feelin to go away. Everything nowadays seems different, topsy-turvy as my momma called it.

I can see woody harrelson saying that in a movie, but still morbid.