Character

10/01 - 10/07 | Character Exercise:

Talk to someone, anyone, write a piece taking a 'detail' from that conversation. Focus on one moment, or write a mini biography of his or her life that allows reader to see and feel who the person is on the inside and out. The point of this exercise is for you to use details of the real world to INVENT a character in your imaginary world. Even what may seem like mundane details can reveal something compelling or truthful about a character.

500 Words or less.

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B I R D C A L L S

The day was about to break.
The boy woke up startled. Not because there was any sudden sound but for the lack of it at that hour. It's the kind of silence he has never known his entire 12 years of life. No, not that there is no noise of any kind. There was. The white noise of a typical High rise on the upper Eastside. The slight hiss of the central heat, the sloshing of the tires speeding through FDR mercilessly violating the last nights snow, the distant muffled horns of the sirens blanketed by the thick black sleet, and then the soft snoring of his dad sleeping across the hall-with the door open surrounded by a mob of brown moving boxes.

It took him a while to orient himself–as to where he was. He stared at the window, looking out on to the back of the building, at the tree, dead naked, framing the window like giant gnarled cobweb. He slowly turned around his gaze, counting the objects in the room, to do some magic math that would make him understand why he was there. He started with the hair on his forearm, honey blond from baking in the African Sun, then the mosaic specs on the small patch of the floor left between the boxes, and then of course the columns of boxes. All brown, with the same identical stickers. He could only make out the largest letters on the stickers in that pale light. The 'From' address read 'Nairobi'. He didn't want to read the 'To' part. He quickly scanned the rest, the lamp, –the table –a radium faced Fossil sports watch, 3 Coke cans, one with a straw sticking out, a pizza box with sticky cheese crumbs. By now he did a 360 degree survey of the room, and his glance returned to the starting point– The giant cobweb of the tree in the window.

More than the tree, the sky seemed dead to him. They gray square expanse without any green leaves punctuating it, and then he realized what actually made him sad and frightened. No birds! There wasn't even a single birdcall at that hour. In fact the total absence of it. The cacophony of the cuckoos, starlings, ox-peckers, kingfishers, guinea fowls, and the ruckus of roosters officially announcing the break of dawn. He couldn't understand, how could it be morning and yet be so deafeningly quiet. He felt as if he must have been in a terrible accident and lost a limb...gone deaf to be precise. He wanted to scream. Perhaps he did. But no sound was heard. Neither inside the room nor outside. The boy clutched the edges of the pillow with both hands, shoving his face into it, desperately wanting to blank-out everything, not just the light. He knew in that wet darkness swimming behind his eyelids, he lost much more than the birdcalls of Nairobi.

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This story drawn from a 15 minute chat with a chap, didn't ask his age but pegged him either late 40s or early 50s. Recent implant from Africa. Originally from UK. After his divorce, he moved to New York last January. Loves it here. He lives here alone, has a son in a boarding school south of NY. When I asked, where does he feel at home and what does he miss most about Africa, he said, he misses the lush colors and the daily presence of wildlife, but totally feels at home upper Eastside.

hmmm....so many rich details and so many different stories that could be written... Well, I picked the detail, 'presence of wildlife' and picked his kid who I don't know at all, as my character for the story.