TWO-EYES is a story I wrote as a modern riff on an old Grimm’s fairy tale by the same name. You can get a taste for the Grimm version in the opening paragraphs of the story. Here’s my own, updated plot:
Smart, sarcastic Emiline Butcher is the odd-girl-out in her family: a good student, a good girl, nobody worth noticing. But Emiline notices everything about them: her messed-up, conniving sisters; her secretive mother; her silent, passive dad. How can a normal girl escape the abnormal–especially when she’s the only one who sees it?
A lot of times I write short stories as an experiment in voice: If I like the way a particular character sounds to my ear, I might write a whole novel from her perspective.
The star of TWO-EYES, Emiline Butcher, was a girl I really ended up liking. So I did write a whole novel in her voice, but gave her a completely different name, family, storyline, etc. And who knows–some day you all may see it! You never can tell . . .
In the meantime, you can download TWO-EYES from Smashwords, and even better–you can download it for free all weekend long. Just use coupon code AV48G. Coupon expires April 25, 2011.
Enjoy!
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Some sisters aren’t bound by blood.
After school I hunted for Lizzy down every breezeway of Franklin High School. I pulled out my cell and saw how late it was. She’d be halfway to Hanford by then. Every inch of FHS reminded me of us. Like the time we blew up the frog we were supposed to be dissecting in Mrs. Henderson’s Biology Lab when Hector swapped the formaldehyde for gasoline; and how Lizzy told me I was crazy for wanting nothing but babies after working at the high school day care for a week as punishment for skinny dipping in the school pool on a dare we took at Danny’s sixteenth birthday party and how Coach Clemmons was there at midnight to catch us; and Lizzy sitting under the oak tree in the courtyard every day after school waiting for me and our daily hot-or-not talk; and how we sat under an oak on the last day of middle school and made fortune tellers in eighth grade because we had to know what would happen in high school and the fortunes we wrote for each other all came true. You will marry Bobby. We’d gone from tricycle friends to riding-on-the-handlebars friends and that day we’d become sitting under the oak tree friends. But she and I hadn’t sat under our tree for months. Our lonely tree collapsed on itself with a sadness. Everything collapsed in on itself without Lizzy. The heat was hotter.
Dedicated to my wonderful sister. Happy Birthday Suz!
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Answer: Sister Stories as of 1/1/1900
