Fragment

Summer of a Doormouse: After the Party (Prose)

These fragments are from a very early draft of Summer of a Doormouse in which the main narrative followed directly after the Prologue instead of going into a flashback as it does in the version of Chapter I posted on this blog. You may notice some discontinuity between these fragments and the other posted parts of Summer of a Doormouse. This is because they come from two different drafts. I do not have a copy of my original draft of the prologue on my computer. I’m missing it and other pieces of the first draft, though I believe I have them in storage somewhere. If I locate them I will post them.

29 December 1979

His delicate, somewhat attractive, feminine features are now drawn, shallow, and sickly. The light build that I’d once found strangely alluring is now repulsively frail. The over sized nose, which I had once defended as being aristocratic, now seems swollen and bulbous. Eyes that once transmitted so much emotion, be it laughter or tears, are now glassy and bloodshot. His hair hangs long, stringy, and unwashed. I don’t think he’s shaved or bathed in at least three days. It would seem that he’s turned destroying his life, among other things, into an art form.

Continue reading →

Summer of a Doormouse: Alternate Prologue #2 (Prose)

These is a revised version of the first Alternate prologue for my unfinished Summer of a Doormouse project. It was written around 4 years later in October 2008. It is, if I’m not mistaken, the last major work I did on this project.

Summer of a Doormouse

Prologue

Through the dirty mud smudged bus window I watch as New Jersey blends into Pennsylvania, traveling to a meeting where a complete stranger will decide my future. I am alone, without a home. Not that I am homeless by any means. I live in a dorm room at Columbia University in Manhattan, while the majority of my belongings reside with my fiance in Pennsylvania in the apartment we share when I’m not at school. But neither of these feels much like “home” anymore, if indeed they ever did. Strangely, the Columbia dorm room feels more like a home than my fiance’s apartment these days, and not merely because I spend the majority of my time there. I hesitate to let the thought crack my conscious mind, but I feel her life slipping away from mine, as though we were still “together” out of habit as much as anything else. How telling is it that I am returning to Shillington briefly for a bankruptcy hearing and she could find no time to see me while I’m here.

Continue reading →

Summer of a Doormouse: Alternate Prologue (Prose)

This prose fragment is an alternate beginning to Summer of a Doormouse. This version of the story never got passed this point. A few years later I rewrote this prologue pretty extensively, but didn’t get any further.

Summer of a Doormouse

Prologue

The years peel back like an onion as memories float by outside the dirty Greyhound window. So long ago it seems a dream, or a story told to me long ago about someone else. Maybe it didn’t happen at all. Could it all just be a story I’ve told myself so often, trying to get the details right, that it seems real to me now?
The bus travels through the Lincoln Tunnel toward New Jersey as I write, the vibration of the bus on the road making it difficult to write legibly, which is always a challenge when my brain talks faster than my hand can write.
To be sure its a story I’ve attempted to tell many time over the past few decades, always with little success. I even tried piggy backing, marrying it to another unfinished story by another author. It was a good story built around a grand dream. But it wasn’t my dream; it wasn’t my story. Its hard enough in life to try and live out your own dreams without trying to tackle someone else’s as well.
I’m traveling home now for a brief meeting with my lawyer. I don’t recall any lawyers from my dreams, but sometimes in real life you must meet with lawyers. Despite what you may have heard, life is not a dream.

Continue reading →

Summer of a Doormouse: On the Beach (a prose fragment)

The following fragment was written for my Summer of a Doormouse project. I wasn’t quite sure where it would be placed in relation to the rest of the narrative, though the scene is mentioned in passing in the draft of Chapter II I posted on this blog as one of Jack’s reaccuring dreams, though the nature and relative reality of these dreams is not addressed within the chapters that have been written and posted thus far.

All my life everything seemed to be building up to something. Something special. Something that I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to participate in. I had been expecting something on the order of Christ’s passion, or at the very least something similar to what had happened to Kilgore Trout in Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions. In the end it all seems somewhat anti-climatic. Nothing happened. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe life has no point to it after all.

Continue reading →