Excerpt that is sort of a short story...

[Aimée]

Well I was writing my novel, but got wrapped up in this short story competition and decided to chop up the first part of my novel and submit it. I would really love your comments on it as both a short story and an idea/premise type of thing for a novel. Thanks so much for reading! Hope it's not too long...

Edit: I put a space between the paragraphs so it will be easier to read. I would love some more comments on this. Thanks!

The Wayfarer

As an infant, I thought in images, just as all other infants do. As a child, I was jealous of my siblings and friends who were more successful than me, just as all other children are. But as a young man, ripe out of high school, I had the opportunity to meet a bodhisattva, which most young men never have the privilege to do. Every time I saw him, he was sitting there, legs folded in the lotus, muttering something like 'Hakuna Matata' under his breath, his breath that went in and then out and then in and then out again, evenly, softly, serenely.

I knew him for seven years, visited him once a week, and felt I knew him pretty well, though I don't think I even knew the color of his eyes, for they were always closed. The final time I went to see him, I needed advice from him that silence and reflection and spirituality could not give me. I didn't want ask him directly, for I knew he would not say anything. Instead, a sly grin would spread across his face, his eyes still closed, and his breath would continue to flow in and out like ocean waves. That is how I would receive my answer.

The green grasses of Virginia soothed my nerves much more than the grayish snow of New York where I played out the first eighteen years of my life. City lights at night refused to reveal the white dot stars as buses and taxis crawled past my window each day, splashing slush and mush and litter onto the sidewalk. My child head complete with soft, matted light brown hair poked over the windowsill whenever I heard the sounds of jackhammers and car horns and airplanes and people to look out at the world of opportunities spread out before me. Little blonde Leo was tapping my bony child shoulder with his baby fingers urging me back to our piano lesson with the elegant Miss Hendricks, and infant Jane was squealing and squirming around in her swing in the corner of the room. But each time I laid my eyes upon the city and its noises and lights, it let me down, its grime and filth and crime corroding my child imagination.

Even as a humble six-year-old boy, the cool breeze whistling past my little ears as I ran through the park, the desire to take off my shoes and allow the green grass to tickle my petite pink toes overwhelmed me. My mother refused, though, afraid I would cut my feet on a shard of glass from a bottle or receive an infection from some unknown bacteria or parasite.

Our traditional snack at the park was an apple, half green, half yellow-red. It was seedless, genetically engineered for children whose friends and siblings taunted them and warned them that a tree would grown in their stomach if they swallowed a seed. But even the apple that had been grown in a laboratory contained a squirming worm. I was disgusted and vowed never again to eat processed foods.

Because the dangers of the civilization I was raised in hindered me from developing into my true self, I decided to rebel against my parents and climb the largest apple tree in the park in order to pick and eat a fresh, natural fruit, the delicious, supple, natural red skin shining in the sunlight. But not all of nature was as kind to me as the fruit was to my eyes and my watering mouth. As I gripped the top branch, the tough bark spiny in my soft hand, I was suddenly aware of a slimy, slithering creature lurking on the branch next to me. Terrified, I released the branch and fell eight feet, landing on the hard ground. Excruciating pain shot up my right arm, and I knew instantaneously that it was broken.

Unlike most children who have been threatened by a sinister snake, I decided that New York City — and all other civilizations like it — was impure and dangerous, and it encroached on the most beautiful and pure entity: nature. The evil snake had warned me to stay away from the apple, punishing me by frightening me, in turn breaking my right arm. I had been taught, thankfully, that snakes were dangerous, and dangerous things are wrong; I was right to disobey the snake by choosing pure nature over impure society because the devilish serpent had told me to stay away.

So I escaped from my crowded city of six million and my crowded home of nine, and traversed through the mountains and forests and plains, hoping I could learn more from nature than I could learn from a stumpy teacher at the head of a wild classroom or from my parents, sweet and carefree but with too much on their plate, or from Miss Hendricks, whose thin fingers led little Leo's over the ebony and ivory so exuberantly that I decided to quit piano and take up baseball instead.

The diamond with its straight edges and its sharp corners, the dirt stains and the grass stains I received on my uniform, and even the game itself, all unified me with my surroundings. The wide open space of the field isolated me from the crowd of the city and my family. I breathed in the crisp, clean air, the entire entity of nature flowing into my lungs and pumping through my veins. At peace with myself and rewarded with the cracking of the ball hitting the bat like thunder — thunder was one of the few sounds of nature I was able to hear in my unnatural city environment — the game relieved me for an hour or so of the civilization that I was tortured with for eighteen long years.

I remember having discussions with Uncle Gregory about baseball. Sports and guns were the only things he would get excited talking about. When my father mentioned children or cooking or even television, Uncle Gregory would grumble and cross his bulky arms over his enormous chest.

Uncle Gregory wasn't really my uncle. I think he may have been one of my father's war buddies, but he always said he was a friend from work. My sisters, especially Jane, were terrified of him. Whenever he came over for dinner, she would lock herself in her room. It was always difficult to discern from his expression what Uncle Gregory was thinking, unless what he was thinking was 'I really want to kill you right now.' I used to think he carried a gun with him at all times in a pocket of the tool belt he was always wearing. This confused me even more and reassured me that my father did not know him from work — my father was not a carpenter; he worked in an office. When Uncle Gregory walked in the door, everyone knew it; we could hear the nails jingling around in his tool belt pockets from miles around.

Every inch of Uncle Gregory — seventy-five of them I might add — was man; he was the buffest, gruffest, manliest man I've ever met. So one summer day when I was thirteen, I was surprised to catch Uncle Gregory smelling, examining, and purchasing a dozen pink roses from a flower shop.

My mother, Leo, Jane, the little brunettes — my younger brothers were indiscernible from each other at the ages of four and five, so my parents referred to them together as the brunettes as their little inside joke — and I were just leaving the coffee place where my mother bought a steaming mocha every morning before dropping us off at school. There Uncle Gregory stood, hardly a block away, his nose in a frilly pink flower. Hoping my mother wouldn't see him, I tugged her along the street toward our car, but I glanced back just as Uncle Gregory exchanged a few dollar bills for the beautiful bouquet.

I was embarrassed for him at first because I'd never seen a man with the reputation he had show his feminine side, but I noticed how joyful he was — it wasn't often that Uncle Gregory smiled — and I appreciated even more the beauty and elegance and mystery of nature. I desired even more, witnessing Uncle Gregory's joy in buying a semblance of nature in this crowded urban setting, to escape my parents and siblings' grasp and hike through the mountains, lay in the green grasses of Virginia, and gaze up at the infinite stars that New York refused to reveal to me.

I decided that people had created civilization in order to mask their insecurity about the meaning of life. In nature, all alone, they believed that all there was to do was eat, drink, and sleep, so they constructed communities in order to feel more certain that their lives had a purpose. Other people were there to remember their legacies of technologies they invented, but this mask they put on, as time went on, melted into their persona. Everyone now believes that civilization, community, and technology is their purpose, and they have forgotten that all alone in nature, they had already discovered the truth, they just didn’t realize it yet.

This dreamland that occupied the majority of brain for the majority of the time caused me quite a bit of heartache throughout my childhood. My mind wandered from thought to thought, moment to moment, distracted and delirious as I pondered my magical green world. My heart pounded in my chest even as I sat still, and as I scanned my textbooks, I would read one word and by the time I had read the next word, I would have forgotten what the previous word had been. My parents urged me to get a job, but I knew I couldn't handle it for I was too stressed out; I would lose my mind if I added one more activity to my schedule. I only had baseball and school, and my parents called me lazy, but I had only cut back on my activities because I knew I couldn't take it. They told me that they couldn't afford my lethargy. It wasn't them, of course, that had threatened my mind with a repo man who would kick him out if he didn't pay his rent; they were the greatest parents that anyone could wish for, but with our family's financial struggles and my constant rebellion, there was bound to be an argument here and there. In both doing them a favor and proving my point simultaneously, I decided not to go to college, and instead become one of Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums, hiking through the wilderness, searching for some alternate meaning of life besides money or school or settling down and having children. I did feel some remorse at first because the seventh and last child in my family, my baby brother Brice, was only six years old when I left. However, my guilt was quickly relieved when I remembered that he had three other capable older brothers besides me to teach him his way around worms in dirt, equipment in sports, and girls in school, and he had his two older sisters to pester him about his hygiene and cheer him on in his quest to do well in school and sports and music, so there was no need to worry that baby Brice would not turn out just fine. He had plenty of people to care for him; he didn't need me in order to grow up into a fine young man.

However, in the end I settled down and had children anyway. It took me a while, though, to figure out that was what had to be done at the time. Visiting the bodhisattva that day was the spark that started a fire for lost people on a deserted island, the cracking open of the spine of a one hundred year old book that held the secrets of an ancient civilization, the first drip of a leaky faucet that ended up flooding the house. It was the straw that broke the camel's back.

I leaned in close and heard a voice that I had never heard before and would never hear again. "Do what you've always done." The bodhisattva whispered the same way as he breathed. His words rolled out like soft waves, the spaces in between them — there were few; he spoke as if the sentence was one long powerful word — were the crashing of these small blue waves upon the sand, and their meaning was the ocean.

What I had always done was nothing. As an infant, I did nothing with those brilliant images of this beautiful world I lived in, just as all other infants do. As a child, I quit taking piano lessons once I discovered that my younger brother excelled at it, just as all other children do. And as a young man, I sat alone around my house or with a friend at his house spending my time sorting baseball cards or sleeping the day away, just as all other young men do. All other people waste their lives doing nothing, searching for the meaning that I had already stumbled upon, but his words shocked me with an epiphany, though today I understand that for me it was completely false. Maybe the meaning of life wasn't silence and emptiness. Maybe there was no meaning of life at all. Maybe I should listen to my wise parents and settle down and start a family after all. They had always told me and my brothers and sisters from the beginning that having children gave their lives meaning. So on that day, for the first and the last time in my life — because I never saw that wise man again after that meeting — I disobeyed a bodhisattva.

Disappointed, I stood and exited the tiny cloth building awkwardly, leaving him, alone and stagnant and empty, inside. I trudged in my sandals toward my Charlotte, who was conversing with an earthy, barefoot woman. Charlotte was in all her glowing glory, sparkling earrings, processed polyester jacket, and all — items which her new comrade wouldn't be caught dead wearing. I took Charlotte's soft hand and led her to her rusty, pale blue car.

Behind me, from the rock and soil of the barren ground, rose the jagged humps of mountains I had once climbed over, one foot in front of the other for mile upon mile upon mile until the bruises and blisters on my feet no longer ailed me. I had grown used to the wear and tear of the cold and the wind, the rain that pounded my back, the thunder that deafened me, and the darkness of night that blinded me until the rising sun of the morning allowed me to regain my sight. But in front of me lay a great plain, green and yellow and blue, with patches of orchids and pink roses, identical to the flowers Uncle Gregory had once relished. Though it may have been all in my head, my mind convincing me that there was some hope ahead of me on my journey, I took a step forward, without glancing back over my shoulder at what I had overcome, and kept my eye on the prize: my destination, my future. Yet, as my hand met Charlotte's hand, I imagined our new family's happy Christmases and picnics and goodnight kisses, and I realized that the destination might not be all that it's cracked up to be, and what really makes the difference is the journey and who with you travel along the treacherous path of life.

[J. T. SHEA]

'Hakuna Matata!' indeed! A wonderful piece. You might subdivide the long paragraphs. Some people will ask you what it's all about. Don't tell them unless you have to!

[Username]

Can I make a suggestion about the formatting?

I think that text (posted at a forum such as this) is easier to read when an extra space is inserted at the end of every paragraph. I'm not sure if that's what the person above is saying or not - but in my opinion it makes the text just a little easier to read.

[BlancheKing]

I liked it until it got here...

"The green grasses of Virginia soothed my nerves much more than the grayish snow of New York where I played out the first eighteen years of my life. City lights at night refused to reveal the white dot stars as buses and taxis crawled past my window each day, splashing slush and mush and litter onto the sidewalk. My child head complete with soft, matted light brown hair poked over the windowsill whenever I heard the sounds of jackhammers and car horns and airplanes and people to look out at the world of opportunities spread out before me. Little blonde Leo was tapping my bony child shoulder with his baby fingers urging me back to our piano lesson with the elegant Miss Hendricks, and infant Jane was squealing and squirming around in her swing in the corner of the room. But each time I laid my eyes upon the city and its noises and lights, it let me down, its grime and filth and crime corroding my child imagination."

Too much description. I feel like I'm reading something for school, and as much as I appreciate a cityscape, one or two sentences will do.

[Aimée]

Thanks for the comments!
I will be submitting this for a short story contest, so I would love some more feedback.

[Gina Frost]

I think the imagery is amazing in this piece of work. The details of his thoughts about the world around him is not overdone for me at all. The words seem to flow, putting you right there, seeing what he sees. It is difficult, however, to know where exactly the character is at the moment, the flashbacks seem a bit erratic. Besides that though, I would definitely vote for it if I were a judge in a contest and I would love to hear more of the story.