Hey there, all you fellow Dead Fish Afternooners! I too have a short story that I've been working on since the workshop, and I'd love any feedback you'd be willing to give me (especially the constructive kind!). So if you have some time to kill, please read and critique! Thanks in advance and hope you're all having a great summer!
On the afternoon when my mother was
found dead in her bedroom with a bullet in her head, I retreated under my
covers and read my copy of The Complete
Sherlock Holmes until five o'clock the next morning. By the light of my trusty Eveready
flashlight, with my head tenting the sheets around Sherlock, Dr. Watson, and
me, I took copious notes on every murder and attempted murder case: first, victim;
second, culprit; third, method; fourth, motive; fifth, and most important for
my purposes, how the case was solved. I
needed to educate myself in the science of deduction. If Sherlock Holmes had taught me one thing so
far, it was that the police could not be relied upon to solve a case properly. If you wanted it done right, you called on
Sherlock Holmes. In the absence of
Sherlock Holmes, a Sherlock-educated teenager had to be the next best thing.
Unfortunately,
upon reading my notes in the light of day, the irrelevance of the majority of
the cases became quite clear. My mother
had not been set after with a poisonous snake.
She had not been trapped beneath a cellar floor while searching for
hidden treasure. She had not received
any threats from any secret orders in the form of dried fruit remnants. She had been shot in the head. She had not even had any enemies, to the best
of my knowledge, or any dark and clandestine ambitions. She had gone off to work at the publishing
firm every morning, Monday through Friday, without complaint, and come home
every evening, Monday through Friday, with a sigh. She had written birthdays in neat handwriting
on the calendar and smiled for family portraits and baked gingerbread cookies
on Christmas Eve, and I imagined that her life was content and unexciting. Unlike those unfortunate Brits of Conan
Doyle's invention, she did not have any detectable accent and she did not die
an exotic death, thus leaving me unlike that consulting detective of Conan
Doyle's invention, without any clues to go on.
Luckily,
I felt sure that my intense study session had taught me something of Sherlock
Holmes' methods, and that therefore, if I could only get some data, I might be
able to put my newly improved deductive powers to work. However, my Sherlock marathon had also caused
me to miss the window of opportunity for data-gathering; by the time I was
prepared to begin my investigation, my mother's body had long been carted away
to the morgue, and all evidence had long been sealed up in sterile plastic bags
and removed. Consequently, over the
objections of my Sherlock Holmes purism, I was forced to rely upon the police's
data, as given me in several phone calls to the local police station.
"Hello,
my name is Elise Patterson, and my mother Lorraine Patterson is in your
morgue," I introduced myself each time I called, although I wasn't exactly
sure if they even had a morgue or if my mother was in it if they did. "I would like to know if you could give
me some data on her case."
Only
the first time that I called did the secretary sound taken aback by my request
and ask me to verify my identity. After
that, she would just say, "Hello, Elise," with a sad smile in her
voice, and then she would put the police chief on the line if he wasn't too
busy or out giving people speeding tickets.
The
police chief was strangely accommodating, considering how my investigation
rather strongly implied how little I trusted that his skills were sufficient
for the job. In his eternally tired but
sympathetic voice, he would answer all of my questions, and when I had
exhausted my arsenal of questions for the day, he would wish me good luck in my
endeavors and tell me to take care of myself.
He began including my father in his well wishes after one night when he unexpectedly
asked to speak to my father and then proceeded to do so for approximately
thirty minutes. I had been reluctant to
give my father the phone, as he was unaware of my investigation and most likely
of the mentality that I should let the police do their own job. However, I believe it is against the law to
disobey a police officer, let alone the police chief, so if one asks to speak
to your father, you hand over the phone straight away. He didn't seem the type to arrest a
fourteen-year-old for not putting her father on the phone, but I wasn't going
to risk it.
I lingered in the kitchen until the
phone call was over, absently eating jelly beans from the candy dish and trying
to predict my father's reaction. I could
see it going in any of several directions: angry, depressed, disappointed, or,
if I was particularly unlucky, reproachful.
I did not foresee tired as an option.
But when he entered the room to replace the house phone on its charger,
he looked like it was three o'clock in the morning and he had just awoken on
the couch to discover that he hadn't yet gone to bed and he had to get up for
work in three hours.
"Elise..." he addressed me
slowly, his tongue almost too exhausted to form the word. I waited expectantly for him to go on, but he
only repeated himself. "Oh, Elise." He sank down at the kitchen table still with
its three chairs, even though only two of them were used now, and dug the heels
of his hands into his eye sockets uncommunicatively. I took this as my cue to leave.
Still, my father had not expressly
forbidden my investigation or, indeed, said anything about it at all, so I
continued gathering data from the kindly police chief and recording it in neat
bullet points in a new marble copybook devoted specifically for this purpose. Sadly, however, the section titled
"Brilliant Deductions" was not filling up quite as quickly as those
titled "Reliable Data" and "Tentative Theories." In the deductive field, I had determined only
one point of interest: the fact that the murderer must have somehow gained
entry to the house by tricking my mother into trusting him or her and letting
him or her in, as, in my frequent and numerous expeditions about the perimeter
of our house, I had found no signs of a forced entry. So the murderer was someone my mother had
trusted and led, for some unknown reason, into her bedroom. Or perhaps, for some unknown reason, she had
been forced into her bedroom. Either
way, it didn't really make any difference, because I realized that I had no
idea whom my mother had trusted anyway.
To make myself feel more capable, I
filled an entire page of the "Brilliant Deductions" section with very
obvious facts, such as, "The murderer knows how to fire a gun," and
"The murderer had a firm enough grasp of the floor plan of our house that
he or she was able to escape." I
tore the page out a day later. It all
seemed a bit petty.
Once, for approximately three
glorious minutes, I thought that I had had a breakthrough. I hadn't considered the placement of the
bullet before, but in a flash of insight, it occurred to me that if it were on
the back of her head, that could indicate that my mother had trusted the
murderer enough to turn her back on him or her.
Conversely, if it were on her forehead, she saw her fate approaching by
the time her murder was inevitable. With
this revelation in mind, I called the police station for more data, breathless
with anticipation.
The bullet wound was on the right
side of her head. I had failed to
entertain this possibility.
I had been trying to keep the
details of my investigation under wraps, but at dinner on the day of my three
glorious minutes of enlightenment and subsequent eight hours of disappointment
and frustration, my woes needed a voice.
Perhaps talking through the facts and theories of the case, hearing
everything aloud, would jumpstart my deductive reasoning. With my valued notebook beside my plate of penne
pasta and meatballs, I flipped through the pages, discussing every detail, from
my mother's apparently too trusting nature to the murderer's possible motive. My father, sitting across from me at the
square wooden table, carefully monitored his fork as it stabbed his pasta with
increasing violence.
"I just don't understand what
it means that she was shot in the side of her head," I rambled, reaching to
turn to my "Tentative Theories" page and nearly spilling my glass of
iced tea. "Did she trust the
murderer halfway or what? It just seems
unnatural that someone would stand next to—"
My father's fist hit the table, catapulting his fork several feet above the table. It clattered onto my notebook, marring the page with spaghetti sauce blood. "She killed herself, Elise!" he shouted. "Her fingerprints were on the gun, the gunshot residue was on her fingers, and the bullet wound was on the right side of her head because that's where right-handed people shoot themselves." He closed his eyes and took a deep breath that rattled unsteadily in his lungs. His voice softened, tired. "I told you that a thousand times, Elise. I told you it was suicide."
A menagerie of
bright orange tigers, yellow lions, and blue elephants grins stupidly at me
from the verdant wallpaper jungle of the therapist's office as she informs me
that I have been deluding myself, creating an alternate reality because the
real one was too difficult to face.
"It's a common response to
trauma among children and teens," she tells me. "You shouldn't feel ashamed."
I don't. What I do feel is desperately confused. Nothing seemed unreal or deluded about the
time after my mother's death when I lived through it the first time, and it
still doesn't now, as I relive it day after day. The therapist's theory makes me feel like
some mentally unstable child who can't tell her daydreams from reality, but I
know that those weeks before my bubble burst saw me more rational and clear-headed
than ever. How could I have been
deluding myself?
I've been so preoccupied with
figuring out what's real that I haven't even had time to ask myself those
questions always asked by those swamped in the wake of a suicide: why did she
do it, could have I stopped her. I
haven't even had time to grieve.
"Your father says that you knew
that your mother killed herself," the therapist is saying in her practiced
sympathetic tone. "Did you?"
Did I? I lie awake at night, staring at the crack
snaking out from my ceiling fan and rifling through my mental filing cabinet, searching
for some memory of being told that it was suicide. I only ever turn up that night at the dinner
table. Was there some file before that,
some file whose contents I removed, shredded, and threw onto the fire? I don't know.
My own life, and I don't know what happened.
"When you have eliminated the
impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." So says the revered Sherlock Holmes. But when I eliminate the impossible, I always
draw up two conflicting and equally improbably truths: either I am insane, or everyone
else is lying.
I cannot afford
to sleep at night. I stay up and study The Complete Sherlock Holmes. My powers of deduction must be
razor-sharp to track down whoever killed my mother and began this conspiracy
against me.
