I am in 11th grade AP English Literature and would like to know if the essay seems appropriate for a coming of age narrative. Also: is it interesting, meaningful, does it bring any questions to mind, believable (in which it is a true personal narrative), clear, or descriptive? Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated, thank you.
A Wild Pack of Wolves
The surging air flowed freely from the gaping wound of a door behind me. A blanket of humidity greeted me now with a suffocating intoxication, quickly reminding me how nice the air-conditioned the department store had been. Trudging along, I began my exile through the parking lot to my car. I left the store behind me and filtered through other corpses that stick baked to the asphalt. My skin glistens and reflects the unforgiving yet naïve sun, the same light that gives the moon its shallow glow. The sun seemed to give this day an individual energy and reality, a true ecstasy giving a hope to those banished from the gaiety of life. Any other day I would have hurried to my car, but today I let the sun’s inescapable veracity sizzle and soak me through, as do novelties a consumer. The tint from inside the car induced the purging of what existed beyond the window from out of what withered inside. Bliss, no matter how much I thought I had wanted it, and tried to get, ended in misery. Who was I fooling; I’m no more human than a puppet that will dance with the flick of a social conformist’s wrist. It’s days like this one that the red curtain retreats before me, giving way to life’s actors who seem to dramatize the same play repeatedly while I watch and recite their next words. I could no longer eat of the apple in all its décor of waxy perfection while this picture hung vainly rotten before me like a day’s till. Is having never tasted the sweetness of truth worse than the infinite dream of a false beauty? I twisted the ignition and cranked the air-conditioning, drinking in my artificial air until I was hydrated enough to adjust to the new light of the car. I sat there, fleeing far from the recesses of the parking lot; from where I sat, I could quietly add up my whole life. However this is no more than what could be fitted inside the plastic bag that lay strewn across the adjacent seat. I sat and wondered about past memories, surfaced from spotting The Jungle Book inside the department store. I wondered, if the boy in the story had continued living with the wolves and lived a lie his whole life, would it be better or worse than living with humans. If his life continued with the wolves he would never know responsibility, love, or religion. On the other hand, is living with humans and knowing hate, jealousy, malice, and vanity better? The time for my innocence had come and left, ripped out of my cradle before I knew whom good, evil, Adam, or Eve was. As I drove away from all that wilderness of the parking lot, all the cries and howls of long ago seemingly transmuted into nothing more than the glimmers of light, reflecting from the stream of asphalt that grew longer, until it became nothing more than the infinite luminosity of the sun that trailed past the distant mountains.
“Travis…Travis…--oh there you are. Hello my name is Doctor Newton and I’ll be your doctor for the next couple of weeks. Now you just come right through this door and we’ll get started with our first session—O.K.?”
I nodded, leaving the quiet emptiness that can only come from a group of people each silently enduring the weekly pain of a not so anticipated doctors appointment. The only detectable manifestation of this pain was the occasional crinkle of a magazine page being turned. As I passed under the ominous arch of the doorframe overhead I prayed silently that I would never have to read any of those magazines again. Doctor Newton’s office was littered with pictures of babies crawling in diapers and clowns with face paint. One clown had a sad face painted on him with a single real tear on his cheek--only the tear had been caked down from all the paint.
A long pause passed before the doctor’s and my eyes met somewhere on her desk; I was sitting on some Playskool desk with paper and crayons.
“So…” the doctor said, “can you tell me why you are here today?”
Another pause passed by without a word. I questioned myself why I was here in the first place and also whether her question was entrapment. Finally, I answered, “I can’t really say, my dad wouldn’t tell me.”
After the brief conversing I was told to “draw a picture—any picture I wanted.”
So I began to draw the clown I saw earlier and a couple other familiar things. I drew for ten minutes and she complimented me on the art. I began to take quick glances at her eyes, for they said what we both knew but only one of us would admit. I wanted to leave. I could feel a stinging pain on the back of my eyes and a queasy sensation in my abdomen.
Doctor Newton cracked the edges of her lips, paused and finally asked, “How do you feel about your mother?”
I uttered silently, “I don’t know—fine I guess.”
“You don’t have any problems you want to share--you know nothing leaves this room,” said Doctor Newton.
I knew she was going to ask, and it came like a reflection in a broken mirror.
“Could you tell me a little about your relationship with your mother and how you feel about her illness?”
The whine of the Ford in the driveway and the horn blow immediately following the clap of a door usually sent happiness through me, enough to send me sailing towards the front door of the house. This evening carried no such melody, only torture. There I sat, listening to the strikes of thunder from her high-heals tear through my heart, and to an awareness of a screaming ever so true. Yet it filled me like a dream that comes like a shadow and all I could do was sit there, paralyzed on the ground next to the door. I knew something was wrong when it should have been right; I could feel the warmth of harmony’s momentary embrace grow desolate as it covered my eyes as I sat crying. The door slammed shut sending a flash of light through the room and then silently returning back beneath the door from where it had abruptly entered. I know not of money, jobs, worry, responsibility, hate, rape, illness, divorce, and now I know not my mother’s eyes before me. These things were cold and sunken, empty shells of the loving and pretty world through which I learned of good and evil. They were dead, destroyed, from another world I had not learned of but heard so much about. I moved down her face to black rivers that tainted the shores of her cheeks. Further down rested a set of vicious white edges, made visible by the panicked wrinkles that made a martyr of her face. I searched violently for my mother, but the closest thing I would ever find to her would be found only in a mirror.
Night came in, relieving shame from the earth and its creatures. I always liked the night for it unmasked the ambiguities of day and gave true shape to what had previously been blinded so childishly by the sun. Tonight I sat in bed and adjusted my eyes enough to see past the glare of the lamp out into the light of night. There was a tall eucalyptus, hunched from the irregularity of its large branches and lack of roots, which grew centered in the lawn and around it was the rest of the backyard lawn. This sanctuary of infinite youthful possibilities tonight would not find relief from the usual cry of laughter, but host the paths of two lives, each tied to survival dependent on the other’s death. The two shadows unveiling themselves, circumvented around the corners of my eyes to find one another at the base of the eucalyptus. There they scratched, bit, tore, and capsized until they became one snarled mess of the same shadow among the sea of grass. I picked up deafly howls and cries, but neither sound belonged to a definite shape. Not until the hissing stopped and one shadow floated erratically back in the direction it had came from could I tell. It was my aged smitten cat Chelsy, but she was the mound of flesh that remained. She had seen night before day, child after parent, prey facing predator, and now she and her tree would see life after death—but never would the roots be less uneven or the leaves greener.
“ ‘And God made the wild beasts of the earth according to their kinds, and domestic animals according to their kinds, and everything that creeps upon the earth was good and He approved it.
God said, Let Us make mankind in Our image, after Our likeness, and let them have complete authority over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the tame beasts, and over all of the earth, and over everything that creeps upon the earth--,’ ”
“Why did God create us?”
“I don’t quite know, maybe God got lonely or maybe he just wanted praise,” Mommy answered. I bent my neck backwards and gawked at her. Her eyes were recoiled and wounded as before, but a little warmth still radiated in the sparkle I always remember her having. I have seen her look at others but the glint of light never shows itself.
“Honey why don’t you just let me finish so we can go to bed,” said Mommy exhaustingly.
“O.K., but I have already heard this part tell another,” I cheered.
“How about this, ‘And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was delightful to look at, and a tree to be desired in order to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she gave some also to her husband, and he ate.
Then the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves apron-like girdles.
And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden—’ ”
“Why did God make the tree? And was God angry at them?”
“Honey, how can a parent ever be angry at a child, except for when that child is no longer one anymore. Even then a parent’s love never dies. God doesn’t create bad people only bad situations. If you remember anything I ever tell you remember this, Love is what you don’t give not what you do give. Maybe truth is supposed to be glorious because you know what love is and you are closer to God for it. So maybe Bliss is what defines innocence and choice is what defines love. If a person doesn’t have choice can they ever really know true love?”
I was now asleep, only I was dreaming dreams that have no place inside a child. Murky dreams where I could feel my teeth come loose and scrape the sides of my mouth, then dangle from the veins that give them life. All the while I watch helplessly the scene of my Mommy willingly feeding herself to a pack of wild wolves. I feel no pain, no emotion, I only watch while I frantically try to understand why I don’t stop her. Upon waking, I could see the door to my now dark room, it was cracked transcending a long triangular light across my bed and up onto the edge of my pillow next to my face. On the illuminated sliver of my pillow I could see pools of dampness that had been absorbed into the inner depths of the cushioning. I sat there, face down wondering if the wet was from tears or saliva, for I had none on my face.
I had already been seated along side the cul-de-sac curb when the shadow of Dad’s Bronco screeched and eased to a halt, blocking the evening sun from my view. The faint circular outline of the moon could already be seen directly overhead. The curb upon which I sat was still warm, the only remnant left of the Sun’s presence in the horseshoe shaped neighborhood that crowned the hill on which it rested. I placed my right hand on the curb for I no longer needed to shield my eyes from the glare angled off from the side-view mirror on the Bronco. The brown cardboard box of memories that lay between my legs lined up with the back tire of the Bronco. These few random objects I managed to salvage before my Dad told me we had to go held no value, but they were the best I could find. A stuffed wolf Mommy had given me for Valentine’s one year sat on the surface of the opened box. Wolves for as long as I could remember had been my favorite animals but now the stuffed sentiment left me with a sickening feeling inside. The sensation wrenched onto my heart, turning it black with blood, until the failure of it all floated down to the pit of my stomach. I flipped the wolf on its face after having seen my opaquely convex reflection in the wolf’s testing eyes. Dad’s words still rung loudly in my fragile skull, forever trapping the question of what my Mommy really was. How could she be? My Mommy of six years could not have a mental illness. Could I still love her? Did she still love me? And ever more troubling, whom could I believe, my Dad or my Mommy? The only truth I could decipher was through the back window of my Dad’s Bronco, for I could see my mother’s face as it grew smaller. She was kneeling down against the garage door, each hand covering one eye; and so the sparkle was gone forever and so was I.
Although I could not bear to look up into Doctor Newton’s eyes I knew from her utter silence that she too was on the verge of tears. If she could see through all that saturation she would have found a boy who once knew the sweet clap of a rubber ball on concrete, a boy who could have told her the difference between the way a blue crayon and a red crayon smells, and too a boy that once knew the sweet taste that fruit could give in the shimmering presence of an ice-cream truck’s innocent call. But today she only found what made all those memories so precious.
Doctor Newton whispered, “that’s enough for today, you may go.”
And so I did, leaving her with nothing to look at but all those frowns of babies and clowns.
Does this narrative essay contain philosophical meaning and is it A,B,C,D, or F quality?
F quality sorry
Its a little short on words and it resembles a question more than an essay... but keep trying and don't forget the potential for a good....E ........Cheers
Reply:Again, if I knew which essay you were referring to I could rate it.
Reply:umm..i dont see any narrrative?
skin care products
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment