First-Person Fiction Sample
Description
Vocal Characteristics
Language
EnglishVoice Age
Middle Aged (35-54)Accents
North American (General) North American (US Mid-Atlantic)Transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
introduction. It was only a duck pond out at the back of the farm. It wasn't very big. Lady hemp Stock said it was an ocean, but I knew that was silly. She said they had come here across the ocean from the old country. Her mother said that lady didn't remember properly that it was a long time ago. And anyway the old country had sunk. Old Mrs hemp Stock. Let his grandmother said they were both wrong and that the place that had sunk wasn't the really old country. She said, she could remember the really old country. She said the really old country had blown up. Prologue. I wore a black suit and a white shirt, black tie and black shoes. All polished and shiny clothes that normally would make me feel uncomfortable as if I were in a stolen uniform or pretending to be an adult. Today they gave me comfort of a kind. I was wearing the right clothes for a hard day. I had done my duty in the morning spoken the words I was meant to speak, and I meant them as I spoke them. And then when the service was done I got in my car and I drove randomly without a plan, with an hour or so to kill before I met more people I had not seen for years and shook more hands and drank too many cups of tea from the best china. I drove along, winding sussex country roads. I only half remembered until I found myself headed toward the town center. So I turned randomly down another road and took a left and a right. It was only then that I realized where I was going, where I had been going all along and I grimaced at my own foolishness. I had been driving toward a house that had not existed for decades. I thought of turning around then as I drove down a wide street that had once been a flint lane beside a barley field of turning back and leaving the past undisturbed. But I was curious. The old house, the one I had lived in for seven years from when I was five until I was 12. That house had been knocked down and was lost for good. The new house, the one my parents had built at the bottom of the garden between the azalea bushes and the green circle in the grass we called the ferry Ring that had been sold 30 years ago, I slowed the car as I saw the new house, it would always be the new house in my head. I pulled up into the driveway, observing the way they had built out on the mid seventies architecture. I had forgotten that the bricks of the house were chocolate brown. The new people had made my mother's tiny balcony into a two story sunroom. I start at the house, remembering less than I had expected about my teenage years. No good times, no bad times. I had lived in that place for a while as a teenager didn't seem to be any part of who I was now. I backed the car out of their driveway, it was time I knew to drive to my sister's bustling, cheerful house, all tidied and stiff for the day. I would talk to people whose existence I had forgotten years before, and they would ask me about my marriage failed a decade ago, a relationship that had slowly frayed until eventually, as they always seemed to, it broke, and whether I was seeing anyone, I wasn't, I was not even sure that I could not yet. And they would ask about my Children. All grown up, they have their own lives, they wished they could be here today. Work. Doing fine. Thank you. I would say, never knowing how to talk about what I do. If I could talk about it, I would not have to do it. I make art, sometimes I make true art, and sometimes it fills the empty places in my life. Some of them, not all we would talk about the departed, we would remember the dead. The little country lane of my childhood had become a black tarmac road that served as a buffer between two sprawling housing estates. I drove further down it away from the town, which was not the way I should have been traveling, and it felt good. The slick black road became narrower. Wine dear became the single lane track I remembered from my childhood became packed earth and nobly bone like flints. Soon I was driving slowly bum plea down a narrow lane with brambles and briars, roses on each side, wherever the edge was not a stand of hazel's or a wild hedgerow. It felt like I had driven back in time. That lane was how I remembered it. When nothing else was. I drove past Caraway Farm, I remembered being just 16 and kissing red cheeked, fair haired collie Anders who lived there, and his family would soon move to the Shetlands and I would never kiss her or see her again.