The last kid on Jupiter - Writers Forum

helpless · 02-11-2008, 02:36 PM

This is part of something I've been working on bit by bit lately. I posted it at another site, but I haven't gotten any comments, so I'm gonna give it another shot here. (: Thanks in advance to anyone who reads/comments.

The last kid on Jupiter
Excerpt: Thelma

Gracie remembers when her father died. She was ten when Thelma came in her rusted purple Honda with the paper licence plate, driving the distance from Nevada to California in the car she had just purchased for under two thousand in a rush attempt to salvage the only extended family she had.
Gracie sat on the window sill with its dead flowers and rejected cigarette cartons, watching the rain make little silver patterns in the ducked taped panes, and listening to her mother laugh hysterically in the other room with her best friend from prison, Alana, drowning out all the little sad facts of life with marijuana and refusing to live the life Gracie saw every day.

Gracie had never seen Thelma before in her life, and her first impression of the woman who clattered out of the pathetic vehicle and onto the asphalt driveway was that she looked remarkably like the spiders that always crawled up the drain and into the bathtub. Her head was too big for her skinny body, and her eyes were so remarkably large in proportion to the rest of her features that she looked permanently shocked. She had messy blonde hair, which in the muggy moments of that long and pitiful spring, was pasted to her forehead in defeat. Her clothes were the kind that you might see on sale at a thrift store - too big in all the wrong places, ripped, cheap, and in the past maybe even cool.

Gracie was hiding half behind the makeshift burlap curtains that covered most the windows, observing the strange woman in her too big clothes, as she pulled out a cigarette, and totally unaware that anyone was watching her, stood smoking and staring up at the little bungalow with its ugly curtains and chipped paint. Gracie thought she might have seen her sigh, but then again she wasn’t sure. When Thelma exhaled, the smoke came out her mouth and nostrils like an angry dragon. She was wearing very high shoes that looked, even to ten year old Gracie, still very much a child, desperately uncomfortable.

When she walked, they clacked on the pavement. Click, click, click. Gracie had never seen shoes like that, and she liked them. With their stark red plastic coating, they made you want to wet your lips and kiss them.

Thelma crushed her cigarette under the heels of the fancy shoes, until the little drug rearing flame gave up and died. She stood and watched the house for another minute, with her arms crossed over her voluptuously round breasts, as if expecting something to happen. The laughing increased in the other room and something that sounded precious came clattering and smashing to the ground.

Gracie squeezed her hands over her ears to drown it out, and Thelma disappeared onto the porch, having finally given up her strange observations for the more practical approach of actually entering the house. Click, click, click. The fancy shoes carried Thelma to the screen door, hanging lopsided on its hinges. Another minute passed, until it appeared that Thelma had gathered up the courage and knocked.

Gracie didn’t move. She knew her mother and Alana were not on planet earth right now, and that if anyone was going to open the door and let the badly dressed insect lady inside, it would be her. Still, she figured, like the milkman and the paperboy and the credit card companies, if ignored long enough, there was a possibility she might go away.

But the knocking kept going. It kept going, and going and going. Once or twice, Gracie considered going downstairs and opening the door for the pathetically over determined woman, but then she considered that letting Thelma into the house would probably over complicate her already decidedly difficult existence, and instead decided to start a game with herself to see how long it would last.

After a while it did stop, but Thelma didn’t go away, nor did she try to open the door. Instead, she sat on the front steps, pulled out a second cigarette and some sort of manual and sat reading and smoking until Gracie got bored.

A-L · 02-11-2008, 03:47 PM

Its odd, in a good sort of way, I'm not sure if it was meant that way but I like the way it reads. I would really like to see you post more.=D>