Silvertongue reading

I read a very short story tonight at this reading series called Silvertongue. It was about my cousin Jennifer's autism and how it's dealt with in the family. Surprisingly, I managed to keep my nerves under control until I was up at the podium. Then my face turned red and my voice started shaking a bit, but I finished it! Then afterward, a couple of people said they liked my story, which made me very happy!

Silvertongue was combined with Verbatim tonight, which is a poetry reading thing. The only other guy reading a short story instead of poetry was very good. He pulled off a difficult form, and his words almost sounded like poetry. Much better than me and my purely straightforward writing style. I wish I could muse more beautifully.

Here's a piece of what I read. The topic was "keep it in the family."

When I was a kid, I always got pissed off when Jennifer and her family came to our house to visit. It meant that I had to put all of my important things at the top of my closet or bookcase so Jennifer couldn't get to them. It meant that she would eat my mother's tall, beeswax candles, although that was more funny to me than it was to my mother. It meant that I had to constantly stay in my room, or keep an eye on it at all times. If I left, I would come back to the door cracked open.
"Jennifer," I would growl, bursting in. And there she would be, on the floor in the middle of a mess of my clothes and toys and CDs and secret stash of makeup.
"Sorry!" She'd screech. Then she'd run out, muttering in a voice garbled with other half-words, one of my family's video tapes in hand.


Then I went to this photography gallery opening thing, and it turned out that it had been canceled and there were very few people there. It was kind of awkward, since I brought wine to share, and ended up hiding it and keeping it for myself. Now I'm drinking it and it's pretty good, so it all evened out. It's Hirschbach and Sohne Riesling.

Until next time!