It was understandable that Clarence didn’t want any ice cream. When Clarence was a child he watched an old man lick ice cream off a dirty tile floor. Instead of fetching any napkins the old man knelt to the ground and licked the ice cream off the dirty tile floor. Clarence thought of this every time he saw ice cream.
But Cheryl was celebrating her birthday. Clarence loved Cheryl. Really he did. He got used to the way she made jokes that weren’t funny. And her love of the color pink. He lost sight of that strange old fear when Cheryl was near. So he took a leap of faith and ordered a cone of Mint Chocolate Chip.
Clarence licked the cone while Cheryl stared. It was sweet and his stomach was littered with butterfly wings. The cool, creaminess of the ice cream went straight to his brain and muddled his motor skills. And as he caught Cheryl’s eye (the eye that says I love you too, the eye that says you can sleep here tonight, the eye that closes others) the waffle cone slipped out of his fingers and smudged the once spotless tile floor.
I sense in you a strength of economy (enough and no more), and I think it would be good of you to nurture that skill. The first sentence anticipates the second, and together they birth the context, and it's all I need to keep reading.
ReplyDeletePerhaps extend the present moment of this.. it was anticlimactic, his conversion quick.
This piece is a circle in a great way. It has three paragraphs but it's not long at all. However, the resolution comes back to the beginning. All the other pieces all into place exactly. The pacing is spot-on.
ReplyDeletethe eye that says I love you too, the eye that says you can sleep here tonight, the eye that closes others
This is my favorite part. I love the language in this so much.
Adding to what Emma said, I would identify the greatest strength of this piece as the simplicity of its language. The result is prose that reads in a Hemingway-esque manner.
ReplyDeleteI love reading the pieces of everyone from our Non-fiction class; it's interesting to see what people come up with now that we aren't limited to non-fiction, haha. I think that's what I liked most about this piece: you only give us a little snapshot from two people's relationship but it was really well represented in both your diction/syntax and the full-circle attitude of the piece. Well done!
ReplyDeleteI thoroughly enjoyed this piece. I agree with Galen and Emma, the simplicity of the language gave the piece a wonderfully readable tempo. My favorite line is:
ReplyDelete"The cool, creaminess of the ice cream went straight to his brain and muddled his motor skills."
The language here is evocative and efficient, drawing these characters and this situation in a few deft strokes. I'm wondering how old Clarence is; though "when Clarence was a child..." suggests that he is one no longer, yet the diction, the simple straightforward sentences seem to suggest a child-like nature to him that might be more effective, more endearing, if we had more of a sense of his age/stage of life. Is he a student? Does he have a job? I'm thinking he did not just get used to her jokes but liked the way she told jokes that weren't funny. I like "muddled his motor skills" for the music of the words, and the surprise of them. I don't like "leap of faith" which has neither. Catching her eye escapes cliché with the parenthetical aside that contains the surprise invitation to bed (or is she sleeping at the ice cream parlor?). Finally, I'm wondering if this might not need another gesture in the end. Does he clean up the ice cream? Does she? Does one, or both, of them lick it off the floor? Do they walk away and leave it sharing her cone? Each an option that gives the story a somewhat different final note.
ReplyDelete"...and his stomach was littered with butterfly wings"...Simon, that is one of my favorite images I've ever heard. The picture is perfect. I can't get it out of my mind. cat.
ReplyDelete