Joseph Parker
Intro to Creative Writing
Roxanne Carter
Homework
Look at you. The white hockey mask splattered with blood. I wonder what you’re hiding; maybe a lazy eye and braces. I don’t hate you, I hate the kids who stole your milk at school, and I hate the kids who laughed at your teeth or tripped you up in the cafeteria. I wonder where they are now? Probably safe at home with the wife and kids; working a 9 to 5. They probably forgot all about you. It’s cruel really. I mean if it wasn’t for them you could have been anything; an engineer, an astronaut, a teacher, anything. But now you’re lurking outside bars and nightclubs following people home waiting for you next victim. Looking for some faint sense of control a flicker of the power we always held over you. You know I think you would have been happy on Broadway, I think it could have appealed to your theatrical nature. No casual clothes for you; jeans and a t shirt with a ski mask pulled over your face. It’s a white hockey mask black cape and are those leather boots; power dressing, it’s all part of the act. I think you could have been a kinky guy if you ever got laid. It could have been a hell of a release, but the way those pretty girls sneered at you, the rejected friend requests, the useless e harmony profile all drove you here. And now I’m cowering in a closet peering through the crack in the door. Staring at some cross dressing psychopath and I’m so angry. Angry because I am as clichéd as you are; the trembling coward hoping those black boots will turn around and walk away. Hoping they don’t just disappear for a moment before the door rips back and then you are stood in front of me, towering above me, fuelled by all those nights you spent crying into your pillow. I know its coming and there is nothing I can do about it; just don’t scream it only makes it worse.
I liked the way the person telling the story is putting herself in her friend`s mind, explaining why she became such a monster that kills people. It is not that she is just describing that change, she puts strong feelings of sadness in this change and also talks about a life how it could have been (a happy life on stage). This makes you think about people`s dreams that never come true. What struck me in this story though is the fact that the friend did not change because she wanted to but as she was slowly led into this change by other people making fun of her and mocking her. The change into a monster, therefore, can be seen as a sad but unavoidable result that has its purpose in revenge. This is an also occuring problem in the real world: People becoming depressed and turning into someone who has lost the purpose of life and every desire to be happy, as to other people mocking them and making them feel bad and miserable. Especially in school this problem of making some people become lonely outsiders is an occuring problem.
ReplyDeleteJoe perfectly pointed this out and combined it in a story about "Jennifer`s body". It is not just a horror story but a story that links to actual problems in the real world.
The "cross-dressing Jason" is very interesting. I think it is a good way to relate a cliched Hollywood idea to the rationale of a lot of serial killers. Why is it that adolescents are incapable of empathy? And does it really stop with adolescents, or does bullying just become more subtle? What if this narrator were trying to communicate this thought process to this psycho instead of just thinking it? The disconnect between what this narrator should be feeling, absolute petrifying fear, and this psychoanalysis of his/her assumed murderer is very effective.
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