~ Written by Danielle N. Bilski ~
ENG210 Creative Writing: A Practical Introduction
Assessment 2 – Creative piece + Reflective statement based on three different fragments of time.
Thursday’s window
Written by Danielle Bilski
Length: 1,774 words
The year was 1992 and Elle always looked forward to Thursdays. To her, Thursday was the day of the week she got to do everything she loved the most. For breakfast, Elle filled her bowl with Coco Pops and watched the milk turn to chocolate as she stirred. She would watch the smear of Vegemite around her brother’s mouth grow thicker each time her fed himself another triangle of toast.
At eight fifty, after they had taken her brother to his Prep class, her mother held her hand as she skipped to the Grade 2S classroom. As she kissed her goodbye, she would press into Elle’s hand six shiny, fifty cent pieces with a kangaroo and an emu on them. Thursday was the one day of the week Elle was allowed to buy her lunch from the school canteen. Party pies and fruit straps were her favourite. Every other school day her Winnie the Pooh lunchbox contained a yoghurt muesli bar, a box of sultanas, one peanut butter sandwich with the crusts cut off and a shiny, red apple.
While her teacher marked the roll, Elle’s mouth virtually watered as she wrote Elle Bloom 2S and Three party pies with tomato sauce as neatly as she could on the front of the empty paper bag. She would drop four of the coins inside, fold the bag in half and place it into the white basket Thursday lunch monitors, Ben and Charlotte carried past her table.
At ten past nine, Elle was always first in line following Mrs. Sampson’s high-heeled steps to the library for reading with Miss Cole. At the door she took off her polished black Clarks and bounced in her clean white slouch socks across the carpet to a quiet corner. The space was big enough for the whole class to sit on the floor while the librarian read a picture book aloud. Elle sat with her legs crossed and make sure her school dress was pulled tightly over her knees. She would close her eyes and listen as Miss Cole’s voice rolled smoothly over r’s and lisped over s’s. The last twenty minutes of the library session, Elle spent emptying her book bag into the return shoot, before choosing another five books she was allowed to take home to read with her parents.
At recess, Elle would line up and watch the older kids buy their Big Ms and Sunnyboys. When it was her turn, she stood on her tippy-toes and asked politely for six apricot fruit straps. She gave three straps to her friend Katie from 2P, who let Elle go first when they played elastics.
At lunchtime, Elle loved feeling the warmth of the pastry as the grease slowly soaked through the paper, leaving her fingers oily. Sauce would run down her chin when she took her first bite.
After school she would change out of her uniform and sit on the couch with a bowl of strawberry ice-cream covered in Hundreds and thousands. She watched her favourite shows on the ABC until dinner time. She loved listening to the funny British accents.
For dinner, her father would bring home Red Rooster and Elle would eat two pieces of chicken with some chips. At nine o’clock, Peter Bloom would tuck his daughter into bed and read The Secret Garden to her until she fell asleep.
* * * * *
The fifteenth of October was different, although it started out the same. Elle ate her usual breakfast, her brother smeared his face with Vegemite and Evelyn Bloom walked her to class. However, when her mother took Elle’s hand to give her six fifty cent coins, there were three gold one dollar pieces with a family of kangaroos on them instead. Ella wrote her usual order of three party pies with tomato sauce and placed it into the basket for Ben and Charlotte to deliver to the canteen.
Then something really strange happened. Rather than sitting down in her usual reading place, Miss Cole asked two volunteers to help her wheel the television and VCR from the office over to the quite corner. The whole class cheered, except Elle. It meant she would miss out on story time and maybe borrowing time too. Her friend Melissa told Elle the VCR was like the one she had at home. Elle nodded half-heartedly. Halfway through watching The Never Ending Story Elle developed pins and needles in her legs and she couldn’t get comfortable after that. The only part of the film she actually enjoyed were scenes when Falkor the Luck Dragon appeared, because she thought he was pretty cute. Miss Cole told the class anyone who wanted to borrow books would have to come back at lunchtime.
During recess, Elle learned from Katie’s other friends Jessica and Holly that Katie wasn’t at school, because she had a dentist appointment. That meant Elle couldn’t play elastics, because Katie was the one who brought them to school. Elle spent recess sitting on a bench near the basketball courts, beside a boy who looked like he was in grade five or six. His shirt was untucked and his hair was scruffy and out of the corner of her eye Elle could she him watching her as she ate her fruit straps. She eventually held the bag out to him with four left in it.
‘Want em?’ she asked.
‘Yeah,’ he said. Elle thought he could have at least said thank you.
At lunchtime, Elle’s lunch bag returned empty, with a handwritten note scrawled almost illegible in blue marker. It read No party pies today. She spent the whole lunch hour in the library, reading The Secret Garden by herself. Her stomach gurgled loudly when Mrs Sampson was teaching the class about the five food groups on the nutrition pyramid, which made Elle flush with embarrassment.
As Elle fastened her seatbelt in her mother’s blue Commodore that afternoon, she could feel the one dollar coins through the sheer material of her school dress.
‘How was your day?’ her mother asked cheerfully.
‘I didn’t get anything I wanted,’ she replied, snootily.
‘Why, what happened?’
‘We watched a movie instead of reading time…’
‘Which one?’ five year old Joshua asked, with genuine interest.
‘It doesn’t matter which one. Then Katie wasn’t there, so we couldn’t play elastics…’
‘Elastics are stupid anyway,’ Joshua shared. Elle glared at him across the back seat.
‘And get this Mum, they ran out of party pies!’
‘Oh, sweetheart. Don’t worry. Unfortunately, things don’t always go as you expect them to. Besides, if you save your money, you’ll have more to spend next week.’
‘I guess so. Hey Mum, can we still have Red Rooster for dinner tonight?’
‘Of course we can.’
Elle ate her ice-cream and watched her usual TV shows. She ate four pieces of chicken and chips for dinner and when she was brushing her teeth, she told her mother she was still hungry. The next morning, Joshua asked Elle why she didn’t use the three gold coins sitting on her bedside table to buy lunch that day instead.
‘It’s not Thursday,’ she replied, vehemently. By Saturday, Elle had hidden the coins in her underwear draw, after Josh threatened to steal them to buy some marbles. This made Elle laugh.
* * * * *
When Thursday came, Elle was making herself comfortable in the quiet corner, listening to some of the boys sitting behind her. They were whispering about what film they hoped they’d be watching.
‘I hope it’s E.T’, Timothy said.
‘Nah, Ninja Turtles’, added Dominique. Elle giggled to herself.
‘Ninja Turtles isn’t a movie. It’s a TV show, ya silly billy,’ corrected Ricky. Elle turned around just as Dom’s cheeks turned pink, then red. He pulled his knees up to his chest and hid his face, as the boys around him ruffled his hair and pat his back playfully.
Moments later, Miss Cole sat down in her usual position next to the book stand. There was no TV or VCR in sight. Elle felt a familiar flutter in her chest and smiled.
‘Hush, 2S,’ Miss Cole said gently.
The week before, the book stand had remained empty. This week, Elle noticed it held a book titled Window written by someone named Jeannie Baker. The book didn’t have words, only pictures. Each page showed the changes that happened to the environment the more you looked out of the same window.
At recess, Katie opened her mouth wide enough so Elle could see two silver filings on top of her teeth.
‘Did it hurt?’ Ella asked.
‘A little bit, but my cheeks went numb and I couldn’t really feel anything,’ Katie replied.
‘Do you think I’ll have to get some too?’ Ella inquired, rolling her tongue across her back teeth.
‘Maybe, maybe not. The dentist told me everybody’s teeth are different.’
Katie only wanted two fruit straps that day, so Elle only had two herself. The remaining two she gave to Jessica and Holly to share before they played elastics. Elle let Katie go first this time.
With the extra two dollars from the week before, Elle realised she had enough money to order three party pies with sauce as well as eighteen fruit straps she decided to take home for her mother, father and little brother to try. Elle watched each of their faces as they noticeably enjoyed sucking the juice from her offerings. She was even surprised when her brother seemed to be offering to give Elle one of his un-sucked straps.
‘Want a lolly?’
Elle reached out to accept it, but at the last second he pulled it away and licked it, teasingly.
‘Kiss a dolly,’ he smirked. Elle didn’t mind though. At dinner, she pinched some of her brother’s chips off his plate when he wasn’t looking.
‘What are you all laughing at?’ he asked suspiciously.
‘How do you always manage to get so much chicken juice around your mouth, Joshua?’ inquired their mother, reaching over to wipe his face with a paper serviette.
‘Some things never change,’ observed Peter Bloom, shaking his head.
‘Only because you’re not looking through the window, Dad,’ Elle reminded him. ‘By the way, I have a new book for us to read tonight. It’s called Window.’
Elle realised, even when one Thursday happened differently to the way she was used to, that didn’t mean she couldn’t order party pies and fruit straps for lunch when the next Thursday came around. Unless, one day she decided she wanted a Big M instead. Most importantly, Elle Bloom learned that change is inevitable, as long as there was a window to look through.
Reflective statement
This piece titled Thursday’s window emerged from a creative writing exercise addressing the topic of time structure. It was also inspired by David Malouf’s The empty lunch-tin and Gillian Mears’ Bird O’Circle as they both deal with different fragments of time, in past and present tense.
While memory is an individualised, first person experience in day-to-day life, I decided to use a third person narrator. The intention was to focus strongly on the imagery and metaphors within the narrative, which might otherwise have been overlooked by the seven year old protagonist, Elle. If I had written from Elle’s point-of-view, the characterisation may have increased. However, given her age, I believe the depth of meaning and the structure of the piece could have been compromised.
Ultimately, the reader sees Elle and the overall meaning more objectively than Elle would have. From writing this piece, I learned how the choice of narrator can have a drastic effect on the tone and content of a particular fragment of time, how it is remembered and/or experienced by the main character as well as the reader. Controlled use of dialogue helped to psychologise minor characters, such as Joshua.
When I started writing, Elle Bloom became an alter-ego of me as the author. In many ways, the piece is reminiscent of my own childhood. This factor assisted me in establishing the setting and historical time frame, using cultural references, some specific to 1992 and others that readers might still enjoy through a contemporary reading.
What started out as a more broad idea of a flashback from the present tense in 2012, to past tense in 1992 and 2002, quickly became a more condensed narrative. I wanted to capture a coming of age for Elle, using the power of storytelling, as well as everyday occurrences in a chronological sequence. I knew from the beginning I didn’t want to move through time the way the narration does in Bird O’Circle and I maintained this conviction.
The biggest issue I had during the writing process was working out whether the time frames I expressed were distinctive enough. Did they occur too close to one another? Was there a strong enough link that connected each frame to form a complete narrative? I concluded there must be obvious differences, identifying each time fragment as meaningful, both separately and concurrently. For example, the second frame needed to introduce the theme of change based on the routine established in the first time frame, but it had to be done in an authentic, believable way.
Through subsequent editing, I was able to pay close attention to the reasons why particular things were unexpectedly different and why this day in the protagonist’s life was so memorable. Moving through to the third time frame, when most of the things seem to go back to normal, Elle also experiences a level of acceptance and character growth, which gives the piece a sense of epiphany as well as an optimistic, yet realistic future.
My time with you.
©2012 Danielle N. Bilski