Back in my post in June about Deciding on the Right Format, I mentioned that I was working on a story that in its planning stages had been everything from a novel to a TV miniseries to a film to a short story. This is a version of that story that has ended up being a) sort of none of the above and b) having some slightly different story details to how I originally planned it. I suppose it's sort of a short story, but the form it's settled in is a dramatic monologue. Warning: I haven't really written anything like this before, so I won't make high claims about its quality! I just thought I'd share it here as a record to my future self, and to encourage myself to write more short-form stories. I won't introduce it too much in fear of spoilers, but the monologue is spoken by an eighteen year old girl named Louise Burton in a police station. Another warning: there are a few swear words here. “Her name was Margaret.
Well I wasn’t sure if you knew that. You said to tell you everything and not leave out any details and that's what I’m doing, alright? Anyway. Her name was Margaret. She… She was nineteen. Born in- God, what was it- 1845? I think? I might not have remembered that right. Somewhere around then. So it would have been 1864 when she got trapped. If I’ve remembered right. Ask Alex. Alex’ll know. What else do you want to know? There’s so much crap. I mean, I can’t tell you everything. Not because I’ve got some big secret, but because that’s three months of my life there. What, do you want to know what I had on my pizza when we got Domino’s? There’s a lot of details, now I think about it. The vague story… it’s not a nice story. I don’t mean that as in it’s sad, or it’s gory or controversial or anything. I mean, it is sad. I guess. But I mean there’s no plot, there’s no neat structure, no nicely constructed character arcs ending in a big climax. There was just when we met her, and then three months of… new normal life, and then the ending. Which you already know about. If you already know why do I need to go over it again? We met Margaret in November. We were in Alex’s dead great-aunt’s house, doing a clear out for his parents. So we’re in the loft, it’s cluttered, there’s dust, cobwebs, ancient photo albums, a Christmas tree, yada yada yada… And there’s this trunk. Like a big old-fashioned suitcase thing. Big enough for a Christmas tree. So okay, nothing too unusual, she’s got a lot of crap. But we open it, and there’s a girl inside wearing an old Victorian-style dress. Margaret, yeah. So we open the trunk, Margaret’s in there, and we’re like SHIT what’s going on. She’s asleep, she looks dead. Me and Alex totally freak out. But then the light like wakes her up, and she sees us, and then SHE freaks out. So there’s a bit of misunderstanding in that she thinks we’ve locked her in a trunk, and we’re wondering why she’s IN a trunk. And this is an old trunk too, like right at the back of the loft, under a bunch of other stuff, cobwebs all over it. Doesn’t look like it’s been touched in ages. But she’s weak, and she’s scared, and she gets downstairs and out of the house and we lose her. It was like six o'clock or something, so it was already dark. It was two weeks before we saw her again. At Alex’s aunt’s house again, we sort of spotted her in the distance- the house is sort of in the middle of nowhere, I guess it used to be a farmhouse- and we shouted to her. And she came near us, pretty slowly, and finally talked to us. And we find out her name and where she’s from and we realise that she thinks it’s the nineteenth century. So obviously she’s confused as fuck. You said detail. I’m giving you detail. Fine. So we talk to Margaret, introduce ourselves, take her inside for a cup of tea, and we all figure out what’s going on. And it turns out that Margaret isn’t… well, she was locked in a trunk for a century and a half, I’ll let you draw your own conclusions. It’s not as if you’ll believe me. Okay then. Margaret’s a vampire. Happy? That’s what I thought. Doesn’t matter, though. Me and Alex know. What then? We became friends with her. Took her in, helped her out. We still had a lot to do at the house so we left her there, went back pretty much every day when we could. I gave her some of my clothes. And that was three months. We didn’t have a plan. We’re teenagers, we’ve got enough to think about deciding on uni and stuff. We were just winging it. And then? Not a lot. Your lot got involved. She was caught trying to… catch a deer. And she was arrested. Then you killed her. Accidentally, I suppose, but you did. The sunlight. God, do you need any intelligence for your job, or did you just get in on muscle? She was a good person. No, I do mean person. She never killed anyone. She never hurt anyone. She was funny, and clever, and kind. And she’d been through some shit. We looked online, tracked down her family. Her brother has descendants in New York. Alex was her friend. I was… more than that, in the end. I can see your shock. Homophobia is really out of fashion, you know. I’ve been here for hours. Can I go now? Yeah. I do miss her. Yeah.”
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"After nourishment, shelter, and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world."- Philip Pullman Archives
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