Writing Exercise I

In my Fiction II class, we get a lot of in-class prompts, and we're asked to write about 500 words for 'em, after which we can turn the prompts in or take them home to polish. I kind of like how this one turned out, so I figured, since this is a writing blog, why not stick it up.

The prompt, in this case, was to write a fabulist piece. Comments welcome, though I don't really plan on doing anything with this.

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No matter what anybody tells you, dead mothers don’t make good alarm clocks.

I know, I know, should be self-evident, along of dead things don’t usually move, or talk, or start playing your favorite radio station at full blast, unless you stuck a radio inside a dead thing, in which case I think you’ve got more problems than I can help you with.

But it’s actually not the “dead” part that’s the problem, in this case. Ma didn’t quite catch on to being dead, see; she was patient about it for awhile but when we started closing the coffin lid, well, let’s just say me and my brother would’ve been grounded forever if we hadn’t let her up. Ma’s always been a nonconformist, says Da, and we should be good boys and respect her point of view, and also it’s hard to get a dead body into a wooden box when it doesn’t want to go. So we drove her home from her own funeral, helped her get her mouth unglued, and since then it’s mostly business as usual, save for the small fortune we’ve spent on air fresheners and scented candles (because whoever told you mothers smell like fresh-cut roses and ivory soap never had to live with a dead one).

Like I said, though, it’s not her being dead that’s the problem, at least not that alone. Dead things can still be alarms. Jason down the street says his dog wakes him up at seven sharp every morning, and Skitter’s so dead he doesn’t even have fur anymore. No—the problem’s when you mix “dead” with “mother”.

See, ever since Ma died she’s got this idea in her head that we don’t want her here anymore. Which isn’t true, really. I mean, my brother really freaked out last week when he found one of her fingers sitting in Da’s ashtray, but I think that was just ‘cause he was disappointed it wasn’t a cigarette for him to steal. We want Ma there, if for no other reason than she makes the best peanut butter sandwiches in the world (even if they have a clingy sort of graveyard taste to ‘em now). But you can’t argue with dead people, really, and she thinks we don’t want her.

And I mean, if you thought your kids didn’t want you there, and you came in the morning to wake ‘em up, and there they were sleeping, would you want to wake ‘em? Nobody likes getting up in the morning. Especially not when they have a big test, even if they studied hard, you know? Ma was just trying not to push things, plus probably she doesn’t really realize how important school is, since she’s dead now and time doesn’t matter so much anymore.

So I really, really don’t think it’s fair to count me tardy, unless you want to tell my dead mother she’s not allowed to wake her son up for school. I mean, I know dead mothers don’t make good alarm clocks, but it’s not like you can punish her for being late.