The following story I wrote a while back. I wasn’t happy with it but I needed something to submit and it was the best I could do with the time I had.
Marriage and Elephants
On a grey winters day at the age of twelve I became a true believer in magic. My friend Joan and I were walking round a frozen pond. Both of us were lovelorn and we were spurring each other on to higher states of emotional misery.
Joan had just been chucked by Tait. He had ended their one-week relationship in the middle of the dining hall in front of everyone! The humiliation. To make matters worse by the end of the day, he had been going steady with Sue Hamilton. Joan was so aggrieved you could feel the hurt rolling off her. My part in this scorned lovers walk was my tendency towards melancholia and my unrequited passion for Terry which was a pleasing scab to pick at. Again, and again and again. Oh Terry, he truly was beautiful.
Deep in the throes of my angsty pain I picked up a stone and began tossing it in the air. Joan shot me a sideways glance, I am butter fingered and the stone I was throwing skyward could very easily have gone astray, she widened the distance between us. I smiled at her, then pointed at the mouldering statue in the middle of the pond.
‘If I can get this stone in the jar the lady’s holding, Terry will ask me to marry him tomorrow!’
Joan laughed and bent to pick up a stone of her own. ‘It’s an urn not a jar,’ she corrected. ‘If I can get my stone in the urn, Tait and Sue will be squished by an elephant!’
We giggled and launched our missiles. Much to our surprise they both hit, we hooted with amusement and went on our way, thinking no more of the stones, or the urn in the scantily clad statues arms.
The next morning I was late to school. Tardiness was considered a serious offence, so I was sent to the head for a dressing down. On the way to her office I became aware of raised voices and the echo of many feet upon the hard tiled floor of the corridor. I rounded the corner and was waylaid by a crowd of excited people. Terry was at their centre, he was pale, his eyes were wide and vacant. He didn’t look right, something was off. He saw me and pushed through the crowd jostling people out of his way. He dropped to one knee and proffered an open ring box. I stared down at him, blinking in surprise and trying to stop the creeping sneer which threatened to tweak my lips as I looked at the ring nestled in the box. It was gaudy and resembled the one I had pulled from a cracker last Christmas.
‘Marry me, Amanda!’
I burst out laughing. He looked ridiculous and the ring – yuck! In that moment, my young love for him was cured. But my laughter provoked him. His face contorted, he stood abruptly the ring box clattering to the ground and he launched himself at me, fastening his hands round my neck. He was strong. I clawed at his hands and face, but I couldn’t push him off. I stumbled and fell with Terry still upon me, pushing me downwards and onto the hard tiled floor, where I struck my head and slipped into blackness.
I woke in a busy and bright hospital ward. My mum was sitting by my bed, peering down at me with a flushed and worried expression on her face. I sat up gingerly and saw that Joan was also there. She gave me a meaningful look as my mum flustered and adjusted my pillows.
‘Can I have some water please?’ I croaked.
‘Of course, darling,’ mum said. She clucked at the empty water jug, grabbed it and bustled off.
Joan reached into her pocket and pulled out a folded-up piece of paper, she leant forward and passed it to me. It was a poster for Chipperfield’s Circus, emblazoned with a huge elephant.
‘No,’ I protested. But an icy niggle of fear tickled my stomach and I touched a hand to my throat where Terry had laced his fingers round my neck. He hadn’t looked like himself, there had been that odd, confused expression on his face. His proposal, before that day Terry hadn’t so much as looked at me. Something had been at work, could it have been the statue and the stones? Had we conjured a sort of magic that day? But an elephant. That was too much, no way was one going to escape the circus, they’re trained animals, not rampaging beasts. ‘No!’ I croaked again trying to infuse certainty into the word.
Joan wasn’t calmed by my attempt to soothe her. Her eyes rolled, and I realised just how close to hysterics she was. But at that moment my mum arrived with a nurse, ending our conversation. Mum glanced at us strangely, clearly aware she had interrupted something, but she said nothing. The nurse decided I’d had enough exertion so she hustled Joan away from the bed, telling her I needed rest. We shared a pained expression as Joan paused at the wards entrance. There was nothing we could do though, the stones had been cast, we could only wait and see what came next.
The following day I was allowed home. My neck was stiff and laced with deep blue and purple bruises, I had a dull constant headache, but otherwise physically I was fine. Mum came up to the ward to get me while dad waited outside smoking in the car reading his newspaper as he hated hospitals. He rolled the window down and wafted the paper to clear the smoke as mum helped me into the backseat.
‘How are you pickle?’ He asked as he passed the paper to me in the back seat and started the engine.
‘Fine. Bit of a headache, but fine otherwise.’ I replied which physically speaking was true. However my stomach was churning and my mind was racing. I was desperate to speak to Joan, to find out if anything had happened. It was Thursday so she would already be at school, I would have to wait until she got home and called. We needed to come up with some sort of plan in order to deal with the elephant situation.
Dad started the engine and we drove homewards. For a while I looked out the window, but the world hurrying past turned my head and sent me spinning so I picked up the paper dad had handed to me. I scanned the front page of the paper and my heart stopped.
Elephant escapes from Circus, two Parsons Green Secondary school students killed in freak accident.
I would like to say Joan and I learned our lesson, that Tait and Sue’s deaths meant we never again visited the pond, with the statue of the lady clutching her urn. It would be nice if we had only thrown stones into the urn when we had really important wishes, good wishes, not selfish ones. But that wouldn’t be true, we were twelve-year-olds who had just come into incredible power.
© Juliet Robinson 2022, all rights reserved.
Self Critiquing
If I am to be honest I didn’t like much about this story, but I needed something to hand in! So here are five things I would change if I were to rewrite it.
One – The Title
I actually like the title, its one of the few things I don’t dislike here! But it gives away too much. I have never been good at titles and they are so important. A great title should be short and sweet, it should spark a potential readers interest and it needs to stand out.
Two – Character Limitations
I had decided from the outset of this story that my characters needed to be young, and this limited what I could do. The wishes made by Amanda and Joan had to be the sort of things love-sick twelve-year-olds might desire. They were low-stake wishes, well, until Tait and Sue were trampled to death by the elephant. Now, an older teenager might have made much darker wishes, and that could have taken the story in a whole different direction.
Three – Character Development
I had little word space to develop the characters. Short of telling you how old Amanda is and that she has a deep unrequited love for Terry what else do you really know about her? There isn’t much going on with her that might draw a reader in and there is certainly nothing to make you root for her. I don’t even touch on the background characters, they are one dimensional. Consider Terry – what was it like to suddenly be magically highjacked? What happened when the spell broke? These are things that would have been interesting to develop.
Four – Show don’t tell
I do a fair amount of telling in this story right from the off (remember the title?). I state that Amanda is lovelorn which is lazy – I could have attempted to describe her emotions, to show how she felt, but I didn’t do the leg work because I was worried about the word count and I needed to move the story forward.
It is always better to show. Identify the most important and impactful details of the story and paint them in your readers mind, do this with vivid descriptions of actions, thoughts, feelings and dialogue. This helps to create strong emotional connections with the reader as you draw them into your story.
Five – Building Suspense
The circus advert and the newspaper headline were just plain lazy, I didn’t take time to build up much if any suspense. I handed the story’s climax to the reader in a very dull way, it was sloppy and poor writing.
Further Thoughts
With a greater word count I would have liked to consider the potential moral dilemmas of the wishes Amanda and Joan made. What other wishes did they go on to make? These two young girls had just been handed the ultimate power, there is a lot of room here to do some very creative writing.
I doubt very much I will return to this story, but I do think there was potential here. Who knows maybe one day I will come back to it.
It is important to reflect upon your work. Self critiquing doesn’t mean beating yourself up its about approaching your work honestly and objectively with the goal of making it the best it can be. We learn every time we write, even if it doesn’t feel like we are!
A Year of Time 