Writing

Today, before I got stranded in Salt Lake City, I had my creative writing final. The assignment was to write something--anything, really--that could be read to the class in three minutes or less. I am quite pleased with the result and thought I would share it here. Pictures (taken by yours truly this past May) are included for your benefit.

Ironic

The very center of the known universe had to be the Necropolis behind Glasgow Cathedral. Darren was convinced of this fact. From the very center of the Necropolis, which was green this May and smelled of plants and birds and life, he could see all of Glasgow. All of the important parts, leastways. To the east was Alexandra park, where his sister had once counted over forty Galswegians walking around without shirts on when the weather had been abnormally hot for spring. To the south was Clyde River. Darren liked to walk on the footpaths alongside it while the sun set, liked watching the golden light reflect crimson and orange off the water. Nothing particularly interesting laid to the north, just city stuff, stuff that didn’t interest him. And to the west—he loved looking west whenever he was in the Glasgow Necropolis—was Glasgow Cathedral.

It was St. Kentigern’s Cathedral—or St. Mungo as he was also known—and the black spires of the church rose into the air, cutting shapes into the sky line. Darren was a particular fan of the mint green shingles that could be seen from the Necropolis. Black and mint green, he thought, was a peculiar sort of combination, some sort of odd mix of the decaying gothic black of death and the fresh mint of living plants. Just like a reflection of the odd mix of ancient crumbling monuments, crypts, and tombstones and freshly mown grass.

When Darren walked over the wide stone bridge that connected the cathedral to the graveyard, he remembered all the times he chased his sister over that bridge in one of their post-apocalyptic zombie games that they had played long before zombies ever became vogue. In the warm May air—unseasonably warm, like that April four years ago with the forty shirtless Glaswegians—he could still hear her shrieks of laughter echoing off the cement memorials. She always turned right when she reached the ancient peachy-salmon and grey monument that welcomed guests to the Necropolis, and she always lead him on a wild chase through the graveyard, weaving in and out of decrepit stone before flopping onto the grass under the shade of a towering tree. There, she would prop herself up on her elbows and say something like, “Wouldn’t this be a great set for a horror movie? C’mon, Darren, think about it!”

He’d flop next to her and they’d search for the most interesting monument nearby and swap stories about it. It was at his favorite monument that Darren stopped at today. Peter Lawerence, sculptor, who died the 27th of January in 1839. He was forty-five years old. There was nothing that set the large cylindrical pillar apart from the other dark grey memorials, only the remains of the statue that once crowned it. What once had been, according to a Google search, a seraph with great wings was now nothing more than a pair of feet on top of the grey pedestal. It was ironic, Darren thought, just like the smell of life in the City of the Dead, that the memorial for a sculptor was now nothing more than a pair of feet.

And it was ironic like being at the Necropolis to mourn for his sister and feeling like everything was lost and everything was cold and then stumbling upon a wedding party at the cathedral and watching a kilted groomsman and a young flower girl—her hair brown and curly just like his sister’s—skipping in tandem and laughing like the whole world was new and all their very own.