This was part of a novel I was working on a while back, but my agent and I decided the story wasn't very publishable so I'm now working on something else. But I'm proud of this chapter so here it is.

(all my writing is copyrighted, of course. Not that you'd want to, but please don't steal it.)

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Gram started knitting in 1965, when my uncle Ricky was drafted to Vietnam. My father was eleven; he wore his brother’s old coonskin cap and ran around the kitchen with a Johnny Eagle toy rifle. The trigger clicked, he yelled “bang!” and Gram’s shoulders lurched. She would try to shush him, suggest playing outside, and Pop would say, “Jesus, Ellen, let the boy be a soldier.”

She would think of her Ricky with his hair down to his waist and his blue coke-bottle sunglasses and his brown suede coat, huddled in ditches while men with narrow eyes and yellow faces shot at him. She bought a homemaker’s almanac and size 10 circular knitting needles; she made him a sweater.

My father outgrew pretending to be a soldier. When he was nineteen he sprained his wrist laying bathroom tiles, and he fell in love with the light-eyed receptionist in the emergency room. They married and five months later had a child, a girl who was born without a pulse. They named her for the date on her death certificate, and promised no month of their lives would ever be so bleak as April had been.

My mother didn’t know what to do with her hands. Babies cried on television and in restaurants, and her breasts leaked. She would huddle in public restrooms and sob. Gram showed her how to knit, one loop of yarn sliding down the needle after another, a chain, a swatch of cloth, a scarf. My mother made dozens of these in the three years between the births of my sisters April and May; on our way to school we grabbed scarves from a cardboard box in the closet, and every winter of our childhood smelled like cold air and wool.

Before my sister June had mastered walking, Gram had forgotten how to knit. She dropped stitches, thought she was making a sweater and fumbled for imaginary circular tubes; she forgot what the needles were for.

Sometimes, wandering through the house, she still found find a ball of yarn and began to unravel it; her eyes would be dark and confused, her hands slow and careful, like there was something tangled in the yarn that she wanted to remember, but couldn’t.

Wow, that is amazing. Why did you think it's not publishable? It rocks!

Thank you so much! Well my agent was happy with the writing but she didn't think the whole story had enough of an edge so I'm writing something else now. It's okay, it was good practice and I had fun with it :)

You're welcome. I think it's a great beginning to something, though. I'm working on a novel that began as three separate short stories, and I found a way to combine them. Maybe that one will work as part of another one? I love the description you used, it reminds me of LaVryle Spencer, have you ever read her? She retired, but I loved reading her books because she painted with words, it was like the scene was in front of you. Rare to find.

I haven't heard of her but I'll take a look. I'm always looking for new reads..

Good luck with your novel! It's always interesting to know how they take shape. Did you know White Oleander by Janet Fitch started out as a short story, and it was rejected because the magazine thought it would make a better novel? And it turned out to be a bestseller.

I feel this wicked urge coming over me to steal this...

Because I know what was in the ball of yarn that she could not remember. The kitty!!

Great novel.

Thanks. Yeah, it's weird, I took a creative writing class and wrote those three stories as an assignment, and then we had to write a longer story for the final project, and they just worked together.

I've never read that but I saw the movie, I'm sure the book is better, it usually is. It's funny how one person can reject something that goes on to be amazing.

awesome write

Thanks!

Anybody out there?