Thursday, March 15, 2007

The Challenge: A Second Attempt, a new story

The arsonists who walked into the library and proceeded to rip the pages out of the books on the shelves in the library, crumpling them into little balls and throwing them into a pile, and then pulled small red matchbooks out of their little arsonist pockets with small wooden matches with little red heads, like little boy pimples, and scraped the little red heads and they popped into little red flames which they threw on the crumpled papers and then lit more matches on desktops and in girls' hair and went giggling out of the burning building to watch.

They held hands, like regular people, and waited for the dust to settle.

4 comments:

MadisonGlass said...

"crumpling them into little balls and throwing them into a pile, and then pulled small red matchbooks out of their little arsonist pockets with small wooden matches with little red heads, like little boy pimples, and scraped the little red heads and they popped into little red flames" all the repition of little, "their little arsonist pockets" is very Ofelia, and something I've adopted as well. I find it very useful and amusing, and their is something very philosophical about it and I don't know what yet. Something like, every person is just an imitation of a person, and everything about them is limited to their little roll in life. Their little place in your little world. Arsonists have "little arsonist pockets with small wooden matches with little red heads," the "little" and "small" is almost mocking. Degrading. But lovingly so. And then with ofelia's work, it eventually digresses into self-mocking, then self-loathing, and depression. I don't know.

amber said...

i think i did want it to be diminuitive. b/c i imagined them as little boys. but i didn't want to say 'the arsonists are little boys'.

i dunno. i still feel like i've written this way for a long time. i enjoyed writing them and wanted to write a third but i ran out of time at the time so i haven't yet. but i will write a third. maybe tomorrow. my brain is tired now and i want to go home but i have kickboxing and will feel fat and lazy and guilty if i dont go.

i really liked 'like little boy pimples.' that was perhaps the part i was most proud of.

will said...

this title was my favorite

amber said...

me too. thank you.