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Reem Zaitoon

Karen Tucker

ENC2135

17 September 2015

A Dark Day Indeed

I could see my family car in the distance from the hilltop of my middle school. The

school stretched alongside a driveway in which parents could drop off their kids at school and

also wait for them to get out of school so that they could be taken home. There was a long

awning that covered the children from sunlight and the rain. We all called it “the parent loop.”

However, my dad never waited there for me. He said that it got too crowded for him. So, he

would park a little ways away down the hill from where my school was. I started walking

towards our family car now, a silver sedan.

As I approach the vehicle I see that it is not the usual company of just my dad and my

sister coming to pick me up. My mother awaits me in the front seat as well. I pause for a minute

to take this occurrence, as I don’t react well to change. I pull on the black handle of the side

door and climb into their company. I immediately sense the air to be tense, stressed. Nobody

moves, nobody talks. It was an atmosphere of silence. I sit in my seat, unmoving. Then, “Hey,

sweetie.” My dad. He’s always the one to break an uneasy atmosphere. “Your grandmother.

Your grandmother died.”

It didn’t take me what seemed to be any time at all to understand what he had said to me.

It seemed as if my mind already knew what he was going to say before he said it. I looked away

and stared out of the window, which was smudged with the thumbprints of a curious child. “Did

you hear me?”

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Silence.

“Yeah,” I said curtly.

“She died this morning. Her liver failed, there was nothing anyone could do.”

He said this matter-of-factly, as if it was a mundane fact known by the general population.

“She was young,” my mom chimed suddenly. She still had a lot of time left. So young.”

Of course she would say that. That’s the type of thing my mom would say, state the obvious and

let it hang there, like a toxin in the air.

I didn’t wait for them to start explaining to me what happened. I couldn’t.

“Take me home.”

My dad revved into gear and headed for home. Meanwhile, I looked over at my sister,

who hadn’t said anything. She looked complacent, indifferent, almost.

I turned away and looked out my window again. I watched passerby, kids walking home, people

walking their dogs, and elderly sitting on their porches enjoying the heat of the springtime.

They were completely unaware of what had just happened inside our car, the news that was

released and made known to the four of us sitting here. That’s the thing about words. You can’t

un-hear them. You can take them back all you want, but they’ll never be erased from our

memories.

I envied the people on the street that didn’t have to hear the words I’d just heard. I

wished I wasn’t sitting in the car, in the cold and inhospitable air of my family’s discomfort.

I didn’t want to think about what my dad had just told me. So, I just stared outside my window,

waiting for time to pass.

We arrived home and my dad pulled the car into our driveway.

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I got out of the car and walked down the street to the playground that was in the center of my

neighborhood. No way was I going back to my parents and their sadness that seemed to engorge

everybody around them. So I went to the cheeriest place possible, the place with children in it.

I sat down on the curb by the playground and listened to the silence around me. There were no

children at the playground, as the elementary school children had not returned home from school

yet. Leaves in the trees started rustling in the wind. They reminded me of a piano piece I had

learned and memorized once, called The Rustles of Spring.

A few minutes later I heard someone walking in my direction. I turned around to see who it was;

it was my dad. He took a seat next to me and put his elbows on his knees, the way a lot of dads

do.

“It was her time. It was her time sweetie. And that’s okay.”

His presence stuck onto me like a leech. I didn’t want him or anybody there with me; I’d come

alone for reason: to freely exist in the loud silence of my quiet thoughts.

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say. I was just angry. I was so, very angry. I didn’t

get to say goodbye to her, and I thought that that was the most unfair thing that could happen to

someone.

“Dad, stop,” I interrupted him before he could go on. “I don’t want to hear this right

now. I don’t even know what to do.”

He looked away and started to cry. He was a silent crier, he didn’t heave, or sob, or

choke on his breath the way most people do when they cry, which I appreciated. He just sat on

that curb on a humid spring day and wept for his mother’s passing.

I was a bad person to be around when someone was crying. I just didn’t know what to

tell a crying person. “Don’t cry”? I can’t tell them that, they’re already crying!

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I sat next to my father and let him weep. After a little while he got up, told me he loved

me, and then started for home.

I followed suit a half hour later.

I walked into our suburban, modest home of three bedrooms. It had a tall, wide, green tree in the

front yard and surrounding bushes on its outskirts.

I walked inside to my bedroom and closed the door. I went over to my bookcase that held a

collection of DVDs. Underneath the DVDs were a collection of historical fiction books that

filled my time and captivated my much-needed attention when the DVDs couldn’t quite keep me

sane and away from whatever I was trying to get away from. Most of DVDs were documentaries

and films of my favorite genre: historical fiction. There was something so riveting and

fascinating to me about history that could have happened, but didn’t necessarily happen. The

characters were all fictional and their stories never happened, but they very well could have.

There was a certain kind of requirement for this type of genre, and that was imagination.

Historical fiction required of the reader to imagine the lives and events that the characters were

going through and make their stories come to life as situations that had a historical importance to

them. Not to mention, the concept of pretending something to be real was entertaining for me.

I looked at the collection of books that I had on this wonderful genre and picked a

timeless favorite: The Queen’s Soprano by Carol Dines. It was a fantastic piece of work that was

about a common girl that grew up in seventeenth century Rome. She was born with an

incredible gift to sing; everyone around her would say that she had the voice of a true angel.

However, because she was growing up in Rome, the pope had forbidden women to sing or

entertain in any form in public. In order to be able to sing freely, seventeen-year-old Angelica

Voglia rushes into the safety of Queen Christina’s court, where she can sing for the queen and

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become her well-loved soprano. Her escape away from her society was similar to how I escaped

into the solace of historical fiction. While in the queen’s court, Angelica finds that she is not

completely safe and that she will face many conflicts in her time there. The Queen’s Soprano

happens to be one of my all time favorite books for the reason that it has so many explicit

instances of displaying auditory imagery. Dines carefully and successfully enables the reader to

actually hear Angelica’s pure and bright soprano voice through her descriptions of it. Reading

this particular book has opened my mind up to the gleeful world and genre of historical fiction.

In it, I can see whatever I want to see, and I can most importantly be away from anything I want

to be away from. It was the perfect genre for me to be engrossed in at a difficult time in my life,

and therefore I was attached to it, and often even relied on it to be there for me in times of hard

trials and tribulations.

The introduction of the genre of historical fiction has really helped me in my times of trouble,

and I think that it is a very special and powerful thing when a genre can do that for a person. For

me, it helped distract me away from the hard times, like a toy is used to distract a crying baby.

In times of sadness, hardship, tragedy, or even celebration, I have always turned to the historical

fiction genre in order to help me through the situation.

I think a particular reason of why I am attracted to historical fiction so much is because of

its importance in setting. Historical fiction has to be set at a certain time in the past, hence why it

is a historical aspect of a story. The fact that the stories, narratives, and books that are written in

historical fiction are set in a time and a place that is completely different from my own lets me

feel like I am in that time and place as well. I tremendously appreciate that historical fiction has

transported me into different eras, countries, and regions of the world, because without it I don’t

know how I would have dealt with the difficult times in my life.