"The Puzzle", a short story by Evo

[EvoWarrior5]

Hello Literature Network,

I have not written anything in a while. I got an idea for a poem yesterday, but when I started on it I thought the form of a short story to fit better. Without further ado, here it is:



The Puzzle

I

I hold the piece in my hand. I look at it in wonder. Why does it not connect to the other piece? I have done this before. Just a while ago the pieces would fit together just fine. What is wrong? I walk to Mommy in the kitchen: I show her the piece and I ask her for help. She says something I don’t understand. Is she not going to help me? Then I think of Daddy: he has done this with me before. I ask for him, but he is not there. He has not been here for days. I miss him. I start to cry. I yell for him. He still does not come. Mommy picks me up and walks with me, past where I was just sitting, and sits down on the couch with me. She holds me; her lap is soft, her arms around me. But I cannot stop crying and I keep asking for Daddy. Mommy says ‘Yes, Daddy will come soon’. She kisses me on the head, like she always does. But it feels different. She says he will come, but then why has he not been here for so long?

When Daddy finally arrives, I run to the door happily. Now everything would be alright. Mommy comes as well: they will pick me up and play with me now. But they start talking, and keep talking for a while. I wait until they are done so they can play with me. Daddy walks through the house and packs a few things into his bag and walks out again. I quickly run after him; where is he going? Mommy picks me up and walks out with me, to Daddy’s car. Excited, I suddenly realise. We are going out for a ride! When we are near the car and Daddy closes his trunk, he walks over to us and Mommy hands me over to him. I feel joy. But, why is Mommy suddenly waving at me? She is coming with us, right? Then Daddy walks me to the car, and Mommy is still standing there. I start to cry. I scream at Mommy: I’m sorry for not being able to connect the puzzle, please don’t be angry with me, please come with us. Daddy tries to put me in my seat, but I struggle and try to get to Mommy. He says a few things to me but I cannot hear it. Why is Mommy not coming over here? I don’t understand. We drive off.


II

I have never seen this place before. Daddy puts his keys on a table, and says we’re here. Where is here? It is not granny’s house. Where are we? Why are we here? I ask Daddy where Mommy is, but he tells me that I will go to her again in two days. Why should I go to her then? Why can’t she be here now? Why can’t we both go back home? I cry again, I don’t understand. Daddy picks me up and rubs my back, whispering to me. But it doesn’t help; it’s just not right.

After a while I feel calm. Daddy gives me the pieces of the puzzle and tells me to go on with that. I try to connect one of the pieces onto another, but they won’t fit together. I try to force them onto each other; try to make them fit. But it does not work. I don’t understand why they won’t fit together. I look at Daddy and walk up to him. I show him the piece as I see that he has started cooking: a pan is boiling on the stove and he is cutting up carrots. I get confused again: why is he cooking here? Why is he not cooking together with Mommy as they always do? Is it something I’ve done? Have I hurt them somehow?


III

We’re finally back. I don’t understand why Daddy and I had to stay in that place, but now we’re back home. And Mommy and Daddy and I would be together again. Daddy gets me out of the car and we walk to the house: Mommy is already waiting for us in the doorway. She picks me up and greets me happily. Everything is good again. Daddy and Mommy talk for a while again, I am mentioned a few times I hear. I anxiously await the moment we all go inside so that we can play. But that moment does not come. After they’re done talking, Mommy steps inside the house. Daddy walks towards his car. I yell after him: why is he going away? Mommy presses me closer to her, but it does not feel comforting. I cry louder and louder; Daddy keeps walking away from us. Standing by his car, he looks at me. He is not smiling, his eyebrows are raised. Mommy waves her arm at him and tells him to just go, she will calm me. No, why should she say that? Please don’t go Daddy, please stay here. But he gets inside his car. He drives off.


IV

I am sitting in my usual spot at home, playing. Mommy is watching TV; Daddy is not here. I ask her why, but she just smiles at me and asks me if it’s working out. Confused, I look back at my puzzle. The pieces are lying separately on the floor, and I wonder why Mommy and Daddy are not here together. I pick up a piece and slam it into another one a few times. But they just won’t fit together.



I feel like a bit of context is in order here: my brother and his girlfriend have just broken up. They have a kid together and he is not even 2 years old yet. I'm concerned about his experience of only being with one parent at a given time, and I wanted to convey this in a story.

I hope you enjoyed reading. Please tell me what you think; this is my first short story.

- Evo

[DATo]

Evo,

Your story is quite short. It does not attempt to enthrall the reader with technical brilliance in the form of metaphorical symbolism or beautifully descriptive passages. Other than the obvious puzzlement of the child over the events involving himself and his parents and the toy puzzle he is trying to solve there are no superfluous literary devices used. The story is told starkly and directly to the point.

The above having been said, I honestly believe that this is one of the finest examples of creative writing I have read thus far on this forum. It grabbed me from the first paragraph. The intuition you display with regard to the child's inner thoughts and feelings was masterfully rendered. I assume that English is not your first language but the words you crafted your story with were perfectly chosen in my opinion.

My compliments on this your latest effort and I hope to read more stories by you in the future; also, I hope things work themselves out with regard to your brother's situation. Based upon the story I have just read and the emotional power you bring to it I am confident that your nephew will be in good hands as long as you are there for him, come what may.

[EvoWarrior5]

Thank you so much for your reply, DATo. I'm glad you liked it.

I have to wonder, what gave away that I am not English? I can't really spot any mistakes in there, apart from a wrong preposition which I have edited now.

[YesNo]

I enjoyed your story. It showed a lot of realistic empathy with the child's position. Getting those two puzzle pieces together, like a couple back together, could be difficult for anyone.

[DATo]

Thank you so much for your reply, DATo. I'm glad you liked it.

I have to wonder, what gave away that I am not English? I can't really spot any mistakes in there, apart from a wrong preposition which I have edited now.

EvoWarrior5
University Student
[:-)
Join Date: Sep 2013
Location:The Netherlands
Posts: 75

You made no mistakes. Your English is perfect.

[EvoWarrior5]

Oopsie. Forgot that my information was right there.

[Calidore]

You made no mistakes. Your English is perfect.

That was the other giveaway.

[Ramona Tudor]

Hello, Evo :)

I should first congratulate you for your first short story - I didn't feel as if this is the first one you wrote, and so I think you've done a good job here. I also find it interesting that using a real context, you managed to write something relevant, coherent, and quite touching.

I did like your style, but what I found more interesting it's the perspective of writing from a kid's point of view: the child's confusion, the absence of certain details, and all the overwhelming confusion that mingles between the narration tone and the fictional facts. I've enjoyed this quite a lot, and didn't know what to think of it for a while, but realised that I liked it after all.
We don't know what might go through a child's head. I don't remember anything of what I used to think/believe when I was a child, and I assume most of us do not remember. However, children are fragile beings (both physically and mentally), and I think you've managed to transmit a very accurate behaviour, or a quite accurate instance of how a child would behave/ what he would feel, etc. I cannot know for sure, but I sure felt and understood the confusion, the confusion, and again the confusion of the child: what's happening? why is this happening? Without putting it in big words, the child is confused. I think that maybe this is the ”standard” way in which most children would behave if their parents get separate so suddenly.

However, even though I found your short story good, and enjoyed reading it, there are a few things I want to underline.

1. I understand the story, but I wonder... how can a child understand something if nobody explains to him what's going on? This is most of a ”supposition”, than anything else (and, in the end, it's actually quite subjective). Reading your story, I couldn't help but imagine those character-parents are very irresponsible - they don't seem to tell the child anything, and they just play around the broke-up couple, the ex-lover role. I found this sort of unreal, as I believe that most parents would say something about it: we will be living apart from now on; your father is staying somewhere else, etc (something, anything to ease the child's worries, I suppose... not the worries, actually, but the confusion). There are a few possibilities that arise here:
a) the parents are plain ”irresponsible”, or just young, and don't know how to deal with the child's reaction;

b) the writer missed to say something important about the matter, or did not want to do so;

c) the unresponsive aspect of the parents is part of a bigger picture. Here, I have two suppositions:

# either the writer wants us, readers, to imagine things further more (as ”his parents are so stressed, they don't know what to do!”, or ”they are irresponsible”, or ”they are into much pain”, etc)

# either the writer's supposition is that the parents did say ”things” about their breakup, but given the greenness of the child, he doesn't remember anything about it, or does not understand anything ”relevant” about it.

There is a certain passage where it says:

‘Yes, Daddy will come soon’.
This confuses me a bit: does her mother avoid the matter? Is she trying to put it kindly? I don't know. There is also a certain passage where the kid says his mother is saying something he doesn't understand -so I suppose we can assume anything.
The image I actually got about the parents is that they are both quite irresponsible, but also quite hurt and, therefore, unable of properly explaining things and behaving different.

2. There are certain sentences that seem to have too much depth, or to be rather complicated for a child. Given the fact that the kid is the narrator, the story ought to have a childish character of some sort (or so I suppose). While I think you've managed to do this while using the confusing tone, the confusing atmosphere, I also believe that you introduced some sentences/passages that aren't fitting this profile.
I'll give you two examples:


After a while I feel calm.
This passage strikes me as being too... ”self-aware”. Is a child supposed to be so aware of his own behaviour? I don't know, maybe children are, but as far as I've seen, when it comes to little children (and I suppose this is the case in your story, as the child wasn't able to understand certain things), they aren't really able of such powerful introspections.


But it doesn’t help; it’s just not right.
I found this a little too profound for a child. Maybe it's purely subjective, but the burden this sentence puts on my shoulders is immense. I just can't imagine a child to be able to put it so profoundly, ”it's just not right”. It seems rather too complicated to me.

These passages, and maybe some others, struck me as inappropriate to a childish tone.

However, I don't think these things I've stressed are that essential, but I still wanted to point them out. What's more important to your short story is the feeling one gets after reading it. And that's a great feeling: only because it's real. I often wonder how children feel when they parents fall apart... and I believe it must hurt, as other family circumstances hurt (moreover when you are a child and don't understand the rational reasons behind the acts). I think you've pointed out this very well in your short story, and you managed to transmit powerful feelings by it.

[EvoWarrior5]

Hello Ramona, thank you for your kind and detailed reply.

I feel like I should go into the writer’s intentions regarding the points you brought up, hopefully to clarify:

When writing the story, I kept my nephew in mind throughout. I did wonder whether my brother and his ex talked to him about it, but since he is not even two years old I doubt that he would have understood it – language-wise. Even to me, whether they talked to the child or not is ambiguous in the story. Maybe they did talk to him about it and he didn’t understand or forgot, or maybe they didn’t talk to him because they thought/knew he wouldn’t be able to grasp what they say. Though, it’s not like I left that out because I did not want to mention it; it's mostly because the story was meant to start after the father has moved out. Meaning that if such a “conversation” had happened, it would already have taken place. I could have mentioned it somehow, but I left everything out that is not present in the child’s mind. To put it this way: he wonders about the ‘what’ and ‘why’. If he had realised and understood that his father had moved out, it would only have been the ‘why’ that would really be present, because he would already understand (in a way) what was going on. But he never gets to learn even that in the story. Hope that makes sense.

It could perhaps be that the parents do not really know how to deal with the child’s confusion, which could, I suppose, be seen as one of the major points of the story: the fact that sometimes you just can’t help your child and it just needs time to get to understand things as it grows up. To get more concrete though, I never meant for the parents to come across as irresponsible, although I do understand how you read that in there. I am not sure whether this is something to be amended, as I think ambiguity only amplifies the message and emotional force in a story about confusion. At least in this particular case.

Ah yes, sometimes it gets difficult trying to live something that is so distant from the self. I completely see what is “wrong” in the sentence “After a while I feel calm” with regards to self-consciousness of his own emotions. I might want to change that one. About the other example you gave, though: yes, this sentence poses a contrast with the language in the rest of the story. It is stronger, if anything, than the rest. I don’t think this line is something bad, though, because whereas the self-awareness that the first example you gave brings into the story is something atypical, a child can easily feel it when something does not feel right. It wouldn’t know “right” or “not right” in a very conscious way, but I have to convey these feelings through common language, and I found this sentence fitting. To look deeper into it, it could be read as a direct statement from the author: “it’s just not right”. All in all it poses an interesting contrast with the rest.

Look at me wondering about my own intentions and the possible meanings of my own story. I know you said that they were minor points, but I still wanted to respond to and speculate about them. Thank you again for your feedback, I will keep the more complicated tone in mind when I look over the full story again sometime. If you would like to respond to anything in this post, please feel free.

Evo

[Ramona Tudor]

Evo,

Thanks for your clarifications. Now that you've said all these things, I see that your story is clearly closer to reality than fiction, and I believe that there's nothing else I can possibly add. It is true that taking it separate, the ”it's just not right” sentence, doesn't seem so inappropriate. However, when I read the text, I got this feeling (that I described in my last post), and couldn't but tell you about it. Even so, I respect your opinion, and am very glad to see how straight forward and confident you are about it. For that, and for other things, you have my admiration and respect.

Something I forgot to say the other day is that, well, I am sort of jealous of your capacity of turning something real into something fictional (in such a fine manner). I think that if this is what motivates you (real facts and circumstances, things that bother or make you excited in reality), you should follow this path and write about it. Having imagined what your nephew feels, and having put it into words afterwards, I think this to be quite appealing. Or, well, maybe it's just me, but I would encourage you to continue walking on this path.

Good day, and best wishes. Hope to see something new soon! :)