Done With Donne

I've tried to stick it out. I've tried to be one of those stodgy old scholarly types, absorbing the greats of the 17th and 18th centuries and conveniently ignoring the fact that I'm only studying Old Dead White Men.

Oh, I realize that these old dead white men are the basis for many more greats in literature (who still turn out to be... old, dead, white, and male). I realize that one needs these foundations in order to better understand contemporary work. For Whom the Bell Tolls? Straight out of Donne's Devotions, man.

But I have to say this. I am tired of learning about John Donne. I feel that Donne, Hobbes, Herbert, Jonson, and even Shakespeare have been unnecessarily drilled into my head for years and years. No, stodgy old academics, I do not feel my literature education has been rounded out enough! I do not feel that I have improved for taking a class that is as fresh as a month-old box of saltines!

I don't like the fact that I am missing out on literature written by women, by minorities, by those who were not afforded the luxury of these poor old dead white men.

I am done with Donne. Let it be known.

ETA: I realize the ridiculousness of making these statements after submitting a short story for peer review that's titled "Be Not Proud." Minor quibble.

Be Not Proud

I tried to write my original NaNoWriMo idea into a short piece for my fiction writing class. Protip: Don't try it. There are some things which just can't fit into that tiny space, and a sweeping story of finding your identity amidst demon possession is one of those things.

What did happen, though, was a story I'd started to let gestate during the summer. I was steeped in Sandman and small-town sensibility, and out of this was born the incarnation of Death visiting an old woman in an old house in an old town.

Sadly, the best part of the whole freaking thing is in the last scene, at the big reveal. This would be great, if it hadn't taken eight pages or so of set-up.

Betty looked at the clock. The hands were frozen now, the little one on the three and the long one on the six. She closed her eyes and tried to sleep and take that tall redhead out of her mind.

A soft click startled her awake. Betty’s eyes snapped open and she saw Thandy standing there to the right, leaning against the window.

Betty’s voice was barely a gurgle from her throat. “What do you want?”

Thandy smiled and pulled off one of her driving gloves. “I love this town, Betty Norris, and I love your house. I wanted to see it. I wanted to feel it.” She pulled off the other glove and sat the pair, lightly, on the windowpane. “It’s your house. Why don’t you want it?”

Betty couldn’t explain why she felt so calm, even with a stranger standing in her bedroom at three-thirty in the morning. She suddenly just felt old. She sat up a little more and tried to stretch the age out of her bones.

“There’s too much here in this house,” she said softly. “I was born here, I lived here, I had my children here. I was afraid of dying here.”

Thandy was still smiling. “Are you still so afraid of death?”

And Betty looked up, and she understood.

“I can’t be afraid of death so much anymore, I suppose. Just don’t have anything else I can live for.” Her eyes dropped down and the lines on her face eased. “I miss the living. I can’t sit on that windowsill anymore and look at the sky, since Vann died and I couldn’t get out there to keep the trees clear anymore.”

Thandy extended her right hand. “Here. Hold on to just this hand for a minute.”

Betty extended hers, tentatively, and took the young woman’s right hand with her own. A jolt shot through up her arm and she felt warm in spite of the chilly March night that had seeped through her cotton nightgown. She closed her eyes and smiled.

Behind her eyelids was the house, that room, that big windowsill and her husband sitting on it with their oldest. She smelled that strange odor of growth and rot living on the same patch of ground outside the door, with the new shoots growing up from the mulched leaves. She opened her eyes again to see Thandy outlined by the soft fuzz of faded moon. “I suppose you aren’t actually going to buy the house after all?”

Thandy smiled, showing teeth for the first time since Betty had seen her. They were as bright as her skin, cold and white and almost glowing from the inside. “No, Betty English, I’m not buying it. I don’t guess I do this too often, but I just had to see it before I came tonight.”

Betty could still feel warmth pulsing where her hand met Thandy’s. The pulse didn’t come from Thandy herself but at the same time existed in that space between their palms. Betty had missed the pulse between two hands. She kept staring at the glowing white fingers around hers and tried to put her mind around what she knew would come next.

“Just take my other hand, Betty.” Thandy reached out her left hand this time, still firmly grasping Betty’s right.

And she did take it.

---"Be Not Proud," (c) Caitlin Cauley 2010