'Remember This!' 1: Isaac McKillin'

So, for the past two days I've been cleaning my room. It's usually what I do in the summer, since I have nothing else to do and my room's a mess, even though by the next summer it usually ends up looking pretty identical to the way it was before I cleaned it, but hey, just imagine how bad it would be if I didn't clean it every summer. Yeah, so I call it 'Summer Cleaning' (as opposed to 'Spring Cleaning;' I know, it took me a really long time to come up with that).

Anyways, so I've been looking through old stuff (I don't remember all of us looking so young when we were 5th graders!), including my old English binder from Mr. B.'s class and I actually liked most of what I wrote in that class. So, I thought it would be fun to start posting some of my old pieces (as long as I'm not writing anything new anyways and I need something to keep this blog going, besides part of the point of my blog is to post my writing) in my new series cleverly titled, 'Remember This!' So, I'll be taking old pieces I've written, posting them on here, writing what Mr. B. had to say about the piece (if I wrote it for his class), and then what I have to say about it, one year later (because some of them have parts that just don't work at all, and I'll be the first to admit it, but have something I like in there - that's usually the case with my writing, as opposed to my movies, because even if there's something I didn't do quite well, there's also something that I can find I liked, or why else would I have wrote it, and captures some idea I'm interested in, which you'll find is what most of these pieces are. God dammit it, I hate how discursive these blogs are. I don't mind talking like this, but I hate writing like it). Also, most of these pieces will be within the last two years (because yeah, I'm not posting the stuff I used to write in 4th grade - wow).

Phew - got that all out of the way. Anyways, posted below is the first piece I'll be starting the series with. I thought I'd start the series off on a high note and this is one of my more acclaimed pieces from last year and it spawned one of my trademark characters, so yeah. You may remember it as the story we had to write which took place within 6 seconds. I actually just realized that I don't have a title for this one. Should I call it my 6 second piece, or I guess 'Isaac McKillin'' would be a more appropriate title, so I'll use that. And here it is:

'Isaac McKillin''

by

Marc Hansen

Only five more seconds, I think to myself.

Only five more seconds until he takes off my blindfold and I can see where he has taken me. Him. Isaac McKillin’.

“One...” He whispers.

I wonder where he’s taken me. I can’t see anything with this blindfold on. For some reason I have a feeling I’m in an alley. I don’t know why he would take me to an alley, if he’s planning on torturing me, but it just feels like something I would see in the movies. I don’t know. Maybe he’s not going to torture me. Oh, come on! Of course he’s going to torture me. He kidnapped me, blindfolded me, drove me in his car somewhere, probably in the middle of nowhere, and now I’m down on my knees. Besides, it’s Isaac McKillin’. No one messes with Isaac McKillin’. Could it get any worse?

“Two...” He counts down.

How did this happen to me? How in earth did I get into this god awful trouble? I think about how I had gotten here. So that’s how. I guess it’s reasonable. I deserve whatever’s coming to me, which I would feel a lot better about if I wasn’t me right now. This is gonna be bad. It is Isaac McKillin’. The infamous Isaac McKillin’.

“Three...”

I wish I was a baby. I wish I could start all over. Try it again. Redo. I wish I was just a baby again. I wish that my father and my mother could create me all over again, on some other afternoon, one where they hadn’t been so angry at each other. Maybe then I wouldn’t have been such a screw-up. I wish that I could once again be growing from a fetus into an actual human being, inside my mother’s womb, with eight more months to go. Maybe I wouldn’t have been such a screw-up if she hadn’t been drinking. I wish, that for one more time, my mother could have her water break, take the bus to the hospital, push, scream, cry, have contractions, tell my father to stop watching the game in the waiting room, get overemotional, and finally push my tiny, slimy, wonderful baby body out of her body. I think that’s the way it went. Too bad I don’t remember what actually happened that day. I was so young, naive, innocent, childish. I didn’t know what I had coming in for me. Maybe if I was born differently I wouldn’t be here now. But I am here.

“Four...” One more second. Almost there. Why does it feel like these five seconds are taking forever? How much can really even happen in five seconds? A lifetime. Maybe our whole lives just take place in five seconds? Over before you know it. How do we not know that our complete lives just go by like that in a flash? Five seconds. Time is only relative, you know. It doesn’t even mean a thing. Just a way of keeping track. Just numbers. One, two, three, four, five. Five seconds could be forever. Seconds, hours, lifetimes just depend on your scale. Time is relative. Maybe I wouldn’t be such a screw-up if my life was longer.

“Five...” The words come out as I suddenly feel the cold, black, hard, metal end of a gun touch the tiny shaved hairs on the back of my head.

“Oh god,” I cry, like a baby. I guess he’s not going to torture me after all. Now I know why they call him Isaac McKillin’.

In the sixth second he takes off my blindfold and before I know it, it’s all over too soon. Like that. In a flash. 1 second. I never even get to see where he’s taken me. He just takes off the blindfold and pulls the trigger. Isaac McKillin’. The bullet enters my brain. I wish I could just give it another go-around. I promise I wouldn’t make the same mistakes. Really, I do. But it’s too late. It’s over. It’s all over. I see a flash and blue butterflies fill any last sight I have. I don’t even live long enough to write about a seventh second. All thanks to Isaac McKillin’. As if one more second was all I needed. One second could last a lifetime, you know. I’m repeating myself. That’s what dying people do. Repeat themselves. That’s me. If it wasn’t for Isaac McKillin’ I could have had one more second. One more lifetime. But I don’t. The bullet enters my brain. All noise stops. All smell dies. All sight is gone. No more feeling. Where did the taste go? Wait, how am I still narrating? I’m dead!

Play dead, Brian, play dead.

What Mr. B. said: 'Nicely done - weird + dark, but also it somehow makes a lot of sense + works well.' He also said 'great ending' and really liked the blue butterflies imagery, as well as the entire baby paragraph.

What I have to say: Well, I actually don't really have anything bad to say about this piece. I really like it and am pretty proud of it. Reading it again is kind of a 'Wow, I can't believe I did that. That was good.' experience and I don't have any regrets. Every detail works towards the benefit of the story. I like how I exclude how he actually gets there, the fact that I did a play on Isaac's name (that was pretty creative - and another reason why some of these pieces only make sense for our class, I mean this does regardless, but it's a nice, added touch), the style in which I wrote the piece, the narrator's thoughts, and the ending as well. I also really like the last three 'big' paragraphs a lot. I can't believe I wrote that, because I like it more than I should. It's weird, because I don't think I really knew what I was doing the entire time, but it ended up working out for the best. Anyways, next time, I'll choose a piece where I can be more critical and I haven't decided if this is gonna be like a weekly segment or if I'll just post them whenever I feel like it.

Your thoughts?