My photo narrative, to me, carries a lot of emotion. It can be interpreted in so many different ways, and I love that about it. There is no wrong way to see it. You may see it as a family, I may see it as a couple. It is what it means to you.
For my short story I chose to turn something that might not be so dramatic, like a fight, into something that was absolutely horrid and irreversible. A fight within a family can be very common and often traumatizing but when re-told to friends or whomever it seems like nothing. I wanted to show that the trauma created by something so “insignificant” could leave ripples of pain everywhere. I purposely left it open ended. Leave the outcome up to the reader.
My iMovie was based on the same idea. I wanted to leave a lot to the viewers imagination. I wanted them to fill in the blanks. In a way, create their own soundtrack to this drama.
Empty Space
[you can scroll down to view iMovie]
There seemed to be something slightly off to the left. Everyone was staring in that direction with a smile on their face. The white background didn’t help.
The perfect family: Mother, Father, Son, Daughter framed in an antique wooden frame, hung above a red couch.
They were entertaining themselves, reading a book, playing videogames, watching TV. Two teenagers occupied themselves on a free afternoon. She was a wallflower, innocent to the bone, her dark hair splashed gently down the side of her face never reaching her petite frame. Her clothes were of a dark nature. Her shirts adorned with colorful patches, pins, whatever struck her fancy that day. He enjoyed his sister’s company, sharing the same style and taste in life. His red curly hair streamed around his strong face, always falling into his eyes. He managed to keep it back with a hair tie or caging it underneath a hat.
A clattering of furniture was heard in the room adjoining theirs. Screams echoed hollowly through the house. He and she had never experienced anything like it. The sounds crawled across their skin into their ears, depositing an itchy pain into their brains.
Mother and Father portrayed themselves as the perfect couple. High School sweethearts, married after dating four years, bearing children shortly thereafter. They maintained the illusion that problems were things that did not exist in this family.
But everyone has skeletons in their closet. Sometimes full cemeteries. And if this family was good at anything, it was disguising cemeteries from the world.
The screams became louder as the fight crept into the living room. The parents could only see each other. Everything else was blurred. Skeletons were rising and that is all that remained. All else had bled into non-existence.
The TV was turned off: the books laid aside, videogames stopped.
Son and Daughter observed as the insults became absorbed into their parents. Screams turned into blood, creating a pool. There was no way to escape it.
The sounds from the fight seeped through the floor up to the windows, stealing away into the houses of the neighbors. The veil that hid the cemetery for so long was finally lifted for all to see. Neighbors raced to their doors, eavesdropped, if you could call it that, on the perfect family.
The next day, nosy neighbors invaded the house.
Had a homicide occurred? Were they alive? Well? If not, who was to go check?
The scene that confronted the unsuspecting volunteer:
The vital blue light shone dully upon the scene where it all happened. Of course now it was blank, almost despairingly so. The pillows lay exactly in the same place, neatly arranged, to the point of measurable exacting. A blanket was violently heaped in the left corner of the room. It seemed the only thing out of place. The wall that bore the support for the couch was bare, utterly bare.
There are two kinds of bare, one littering the fantasies of pubescent boys: the other sends shivers down your spine, makes you quiver with a cold that invades your bones.
The cold oozed in this room. A pure white square stood out on the beige wall. The square jumped on your eyes, attacked them. Something was missing.
♣♥♦♠
© Copyright Rebecca G. 2006
