I usually write genre fiction, meaning for those who are unacquainted, stories based around some fantastical element found in science fiction, fantasy, horror and magical realism. Although the latter is often a technique used in literary fiction, it is in actuality thinly disguised genre writing.
When I took creative writing in college, my instructor's only hard and fast rule for our first short story was to write what he referred to as "straight fiction." That meant fiction written about the real world sans magic or extrapolated technology and for the love of Faulkner, nothing with monsters in it. It did not mean fiction without gay or bisexual characters. Being the crafty little rebel I am, I naturally wrote a thinly disguised genre piece about the end of the world by changing the cause to an exploded chemical truck and the reality to a matter of perception. I got an "A" and wrote several well-received genre pieces after that.
I have written "straight fiction" over the years but have had no luck getting it published. My sensibilities are just too out there, methinks. So, I don't write it often.
I started one today, however, because of the death of my high school teacher. I had been searching for him online for years and finally found a death notice on Facebook posted by a relative. It hit me pretty hard. My relationship with him was complicated; I went from utterly despising him to being incredibly fond of him over the space of three years. I really wanted to know how his life was and him to see mine.
His "sudden" death has made that impossible.
I haven't seen him in decades and I'm not sure why I am so deeply affected by his passing. Is it because I only found him once he was gone? Is it because he was only twelve years older than me? I don't know. Maybe this piece of "straight fiction" will help me understand and deal with these feelings. It seems to be the only avenue I have available to me.
Here's an excerpt. Feel free to post your thoughts in the comment section:
Gerry.
The nickname makes me laugh. He never knew we called him that until I was about ready to graduate and when we found out it was his actual nickname, we had the type of giddy fun exclusive to teenage boys. But as I mentioned, that was much later.
My earliest memories of Gerry are vague and corporeal. He was a loud, angry voice in the next classroom over from the one where French class took place. His Billy Badass routine often punctured a hole right through the middle of our own teacher’s rather low-key delivery, causing us to all stop and listen as he berated the younger class for not being compliant while he attempted to teach them about the past.
There were times when even the French teacher joined in the laughter in our classroom as Gerry threatened his class with going to the principal’s office and other ultimately meaningless punishments. At one point, Gerry’s tirades became an expected part of our French class experience, our French teacher having lost the battle for our attention spans weeks prior. Frankly, her French was atrocious anyway. My mother, one of the few highly educated parents, was fluent in the language of half my ancestry and flew into a rage every time I shared with her the teacher’s horrifying pronunciations.
I had seen Gerry, of course. It was a small private school with a mere few hundred students. However, since we were graded sixth through twelfth, some of the teachers didn’t teach tenth and eleventh graders. His day would come though.
