Their Voices Rattled on My Window Sill - Part 4 by Seb

Nothing, again.

I am going to cheat here. To give you some history of the principal characters in this here text, without making any effort to include it in the story. You know what I mean? I do like seeing (and commenting on) the different devices that cinema or television or literature use to give the characters background. I’m not talking about good cinema or television here. Oh no. It’s the poor devices that I be liking.

One devise is putting the character in a compromising situation, and then depict how a past experience/s helped them through.

For example: Tom was walking about one day, when he needed to take a dump. He jumped the fence into someone’s back yard. He looked around, and saw a small vegetable patch. He decided to shit in the vegetable patch. He enjoyed his little attempt at rebel rousing. It wasn’t until he was done that he realised that he had no toilet paper. He panicked, but then remembered that once he’d been camping, and had used some leaves to wipe his arse. He looked around, saw a pumpkin, and wiped his bum with the leaf.

See, his past experience helped him not ruin his underwear. WOW!

Sometimes you get history in dialogue, for example,

“Oh man, this reminds me so much of when we were ten. You remember, when we came home from camping, and no one was around. It was like Armageddon or something. Just empty streets and shops and homes and towns. Remember that? We never found out what happened.

Sometimes, history comes in the form of a new character, one a protagonist knew in the past.

“Ruby? You have changed so much?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you used to be so shallow, and self-obsessed?”
Ruby laughed, “True, but the world has changed. All this happened so suddenly. I had never even seen a gun until a few months ago. Now look at me,” Ruby laughed again.
“Shit, I know. You wouldn’t use the same tissue twice. Jesus.”

And sometimes, you get history through a new character. You know the scene, a So how was it for you? conversation. Or, How did you make it, how did you get by? conversation.

“So, then yeah, 6 months. We have only seen a few faces in the that…”
Tom froze up, he just realised his lie had been exposed.
“Hang on,” said the new person, “I thought it was just you and your friends for the last few months?”
“We ran into some dudes from the army once. I mean, they looked like they were from the army.”
“What happened? The army guys saved us. Brought us here.”
“It, it was fucked. There were two, in a jeep. One tried to touch Ruby. She slapped him. He hit her back….”
“…”
“And then Mike snapped. Fucking snapped. He smashed the army guy in the face with the butt of his gun. I was frozen, but then one of the girls’ screams shook me awake. But before I could try and help – I’m not sure what I would have done – Mike had finished it. As quickly as anything I have ever seen. After hitting the one who hit Rube, he turned shot the first guy twice, and then turned and did the same with the one he had hit. No pause or nothing, no contemplating. Bang, bang.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah. So quick. Both dead. I have never seen him like that.”
“Take a man our of his comfort zone, and see him fall apart.”
“Perhaps. But we haven’t collapsed. We have grown stronger. We have a few skills you know? I can camp, I can cook and shit, but I couldn’t skin a pig. After a few weeks, reality set in for us, and we just fitted in nicely to our new roles.”
“What there they?”
“We thought we were the last people on earth.”

Sometimes you learn about hopes and dreams.

“I’ll never see Paris.”
“Forgot Paris Tom, Rome. Rome is amazing.”
“I’ll never fuck Sophie Howard.” They all looked at Tom. That was unlike him to say such a thing. Mary laughed, but Ruby just rolled her eyes.
“Ruby? What about you?”
“I don’t know. I guess I don’t need to move out of home and moved into a sharehouse in Collingwood and live like a pig getting drunk every night and smoking too much. I guess I will never get to be reckless.”
“That’s sad.”
“I know.”