Fiction 101: Thicker than Water, by Mike Peterson

Max didn’t know Dax was a swamp monster. Dax didn’t even know it. Their dad had suspected it, but he was curious to see how it would all play out.

As Max descended the spiral staircase for breakfast, he felt Dax’s teeth sink into his Achilles tendon. Max wailed in pain, but mostly he wailed for justice. Mom intervened. A time-out was issued. Band-aids were applied.

Max finished his Cocoa Puffs and yelled, “Last one in the pool is donkey drool!” He slapped Dax’s forehead and darted out the door.

Dax waited before following. He patted his growling stomach and smiled.

Day at the Office

There’s a scene in Dances with Wolves where Lt. Dunbar (Kevin Costner) shoots a buffalo as it charges toward Smiles A Lot, a teenage boy. The buffalo instantly becomes lifeless. It face-plants and slides to a thunderous halt, stopping inches from the boy’s feet.

Today I arrived at my office at UNH feeling energetic and ready to read and evaluate a stack of personal essays for the textbook I’m editing. I grabbed the first essay, entitled “Summer of Change,” and made it two lines in before face-planting into my desk. I’m amazed at the efficiency with which students can suck your will to live.

I’ve come to a conclusion: essays about the death of a grandparent can be interesting, but not when written by college freshmen. There were a few other abused themes I had to deal with: prom night, the best summer ever, the car crash, the first kiss, the big game, and—for some weird reason—the dog that died of cancer. Dog cancer is apparently endemic to northern New England.

My office is on the third story of Hamilton Smith Hall, which is completely deserted now that the semester has ended. The lights are off, the halls are silent, and the bathrooms are clean. It’s eerie, but I enjoy the solitude. After Cinnamon, the third cancer-ridden dog, finally died, and the student realized that life is short and each day must be lived to its fullest, I limped from my office feeling like the buffalo after taking five shots to the chest.

I needed a diversion, so I grabbed a book off my shelf called Proust was a Neuroscientist, and began writing quotes from it on the whiteboards hanging on the office doors of my colleagues. There are 16 offices on the third floor, and I could only find five or six good quotes, but that didn’t stop me. On one white board, I quoted the copyright page. When I finished, I decided it was stupid, so I erased all the white boards and returned to my office.

I charged through another five essays and started having weird emotional responses. I found myself laughing at things that weren’t meant to be funny. I felt angry at one essay that was excruciatingly boring but had a fantastic ending that involved the student and a mentally-challenged girl spinning in circles on the front lawn of the high school. It was devastating and beautiful. Why did it have to come at the end of six pages of mindless wandering?

After reading an essay about a chubby twelve-year-old boy who rides a BMX aimlessly for seven pages, I decided my random white-board quotes were actually kind of funny, so I made the rounds and rewrote all of them.

It took four hours to finish the stack of essays. I felt sorry for the students on the bottom of the pile. In the beginning, I wrote thoughtful evaluations: Good use of narrative and reflection; strong descriptions; well organized. By the end, I was writing things like, Yawn.com, Could this BE any more boring? And, There’s 20 minutes I’ll never get back.

Fortunately, the students will never read my comments. These are just notes for the other editors to help us when we get together next week to decide which few will make it into the book. But maybe that’s the kind of honesty students need from their teachers. Maybe next semester I’ll take this more candid approach, with notes in the margins like, This paragraph makes me really sad. I don’t know why. Or, Really? That’s the big epiphany you had when Cocoa died of a brain tumor, that friendship lasts forever? Really?

On my way out of my office, I decided--after all--that the white-board quotes weren’t really that funny. So I erased them. But I didn’t erase the one with the copyright info. My colleague will probably think it’s a poem and spend an hour analyzing it.

Fiction 101: Gone Fishing

He fished the swamp because it was all he had, never catching anything but grass and leeches. He walked across a log and stopped at a wide, inky pool where he thought a fish had jumped. But before he could cast, he slipped. He was hip-high in mud, chest-high in water. He grabbed the log, but the harder he pulled, the deeper he sank. The warm mud crept up his torso; the water reached his lips.

He forced himself to relax. He marveled at his coolness under pressure.

Somewhere, another fish jumped, but the water around him remained silent and undisturbed.

(For those of you new to Fiction 101, these are stories I write that have exactly 101 words.)

Post-Semester Jitters

It takes me a couple weeks to work through my Post Traumatic Semester Disorder. I have a hard time relaxing and just doing nothing—I feel the incessant need to be productive, and I keep getting mini-panic attacks where I think I’m forgetting to do something. An episode or two of Buffy is usually enough to get me through the harder moments, but sometimes the only remedy is to find an old seminar paper and revise it.

One thing I’ve discovered that helps is reading online movie and television screenplays. I’ve started reading them at work. Last night I read a pre-production script for Truman. It’s fascinating to see how much of the script makes it into the movie verbatim, and how much is changed. For example, in the original script, Truman shoots down a helicopter with a flare gun. He also escapes the dome and hijacks a tour bus. He also has some “private” moments that I’m glad they didn’t put into the movie.

I also read a post-production version of Big Fish, but I was very disappointed. Post-production scripts are rewritten to take into account all the changes that were made in the movie—so they would be good to read if, say, you haven’t seen the movie yet. Who knows, maybe the next Harry Potter script is online.

If you have a couple hours to spare and want to read something fun, I suggest putting down your novel or magazine and find a screenplay. They’re available at a lot of sites—just google “screenplay” or “movie scripts.” One website I like is www.imsdb.com. It has a good selection of pre- and post-production scripts, including a lot of television shows. I suggest the Seinfeld pre-production scripts. They’re brilliant.

And the Award for Outstanding Teacher Goes to…

I don’t know how it happened, but I ended class a week and a half early. Last Wednesday I collected my students’ final papers, graded them, and posted their semester grades online. This Monday, when I went to clean up my office for the summer, I noticed that all the classrooms were still full. Students were milling the halls and teachers were conferencing with students in their offices.

I asked one of my colleagues about it, being careful not to admit my mistake. She said Wednesday would be her last day of class and then she’ll give her students this Friday off to finish their papers.

As I thought about it, it did seem odd when my students were turning in their final papers while I still had two weeks of graduate classes left. But I had too much on my mind at the time to play Sherlock Holmes with the schedule.

I finished cleaning up my office, but then I felt like I should pretend to be grading papers or something, so folks wouldn't realize I had already started my summer vacation.

My New Teaching Assignment

I’m teaching technical writing to a class of engineering students next semester, which has me concerned for two reasons: I don’t know the first thing about technical writing, and I’m terrified of engineers. I’m thinking of assigning Engineering for Dummies. I won’t tell them it’s a joke. I’ll just put it out there and ask for a report on it, standard format, and see what they come up with. Then I’ll write on the top of each report, “I’m not sure I like your tone.” It’s good to keep them on their toes. Plus it might divert attention from the fact that I’m teaching in a distance learning lab but can’t figure out how to work the projector.

Ride Along

I started out my shift on a ride along with the Durham police. I couldn’t find the regular stuff, so I ate a box of children’s Dramamine and then sat for three hours with my forehead pressed against the passenger window while the sergeant drove around in circles pointing out frat houses and stop signs. Durham doesn’t have much going on, especially on a Wednesday night. We pulled into the parking lot of a run-down apartment complex. “You should see this place on a Friday night,” he said. “Or a Saturday. Or even a Thursday. It’s crazy.”

But it wasn’t a Friday or a Saturday or even a Thursday. It was Wednesday, the town was deserted, and I was starting to see things.

We headed south toward Great Bay until the air became thick and smelled like week-old egg salad. It made me hungry. I thought I saw a heard of buffalo sleeping in a pile. The sergeant pulled over and pointed beyond an electric fence. “See that herd of buffalo sleeping in a pile?”

They have farms for that sort of thing in New Hampshire.

As we headed back to town, we saw a deer who apparently wasn’t affiliated with a farm standing on the side of the road. And a bunch of trees. A rock. Another stop sign.

We ended the night by stopping at Dunkin Donuts. I peeled my head off the window and got out of the car. Three hours of sitting and staring mixed with Dramamine and sheer boredom resulted in a bad case of the jelly legs. I tried to walk to the front door, but stumbled in a large half-circle to the middle of the parking lot. I thought the sergeant was going to make me touch my nose and walk toe-to-toe before continuing on. But he was already inside, slightly leaning over the display case, rubbing his hands together, considering the possibilities.