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Silence

5 years ago

Silence

Lake Wenonga was large and near several sizable towns.  Everyone had an uncle or a mother-in-law or a best friend’s brother with a cabin on Lake Wenonga.  With clear water, a convenient location, and several lakeside restaurants equipped with docks for speed boats and pontoons to wait for their passengers at.  Every winter, Lake Wenonga was dotted with icehouses, fishermen, and the occasional snowmobile or skier from the time it first froze over until the day it became impossible to access ice strong enough to support human weight without the aid of watercraft. 

Bud Schneider never went to Lake Wenonga.  Forty years ago, he and his wife had bought a run-down cabin on a small body of water known as Leech Lake.  Most of the land surrounding Leech Lake was farmland, and even in the height of July, there could only be heard a handful of fishing boats.  Over the years, Bud and Myra rebuilt and remodeled their cabin until it was suitable as a house for year-round occupation, and they moved there after Bud retired from his job as an electrician.  Their children were not pleased with this and worried that they would be snowed in over winter or be unable to receive help in an emergency, but their grandchildren were delighted that they would now be able to go to the lake every time they visited their grandparents. 

Now it was winter.  There were no ice fishermen, no trucks, and no snowmobilers on the lake.  Everything was a blanket of pure, seamless white save the path of a cross-country skier that had come through that morning and the set of footprints that lead to Bud as he surveyed his property from the ice.  Some people would say silence is the same as quiet, but the stillness that Bud heard that afternoon as he stood there, surrounded by the gentle wind blowing across the lake unhindered, was true silence—not an absence of sound, but a new one altogether.  For an eternity, Bud Schneider stood there in the trance brought onto him by the silence until it was broken by the faint call of a chickadee.  He shook his head and turned around.  To one side of him was the mass of grey interspersed with occasional dark green that was the trees.  To the other, white.  Nothing but white until the large, red barn and accompanying silo on the other side of the lake.  It was this direction that Bud decided to walk that day. 

The snow crunched with every step he took, and when he bent his gloved fingers, he found that they did too.  He was facing the wind head-on now.  His nose and cheeks started to burn, but he paid them no mind.  It was colder than he would have expected it to be that day, but he had experienced far colder.  A little nip in the air never hurt anyone.  Besides, the fact that he could feel his cheeks burn in itself meant that he was not too cold yet.  As he walked, his mind turned to other things:  Myra, their children, and her illness.  He continued on until he was a third of the way across the lake.  Then he took out his gun and turned it around in his hands a few times.  It was a Smith & Wesson Model 19 Classic, an anniversary gift from Myra from a few years ago.  He took a moment before setting up some empty beer bottles he had brought and taking aim.  As he shot at his targets, his mind wandered to where he and Myra had first met.

 It was November, deer season, and he was at her family’s farm.  There was snow then too, but it was nothing like this.  It was a thin slush on the ground and was melting onto the heads of those who passed under the eaves of a building. Her father had allowed Bud and his friends to hunt on his land, and he had taken a liking to them.  He even asked them to stay for supper at his house and meet his family.  After that day, Bud and Myra’s father were hunting buddies until his passing, but that arrangement was not initially without an ulterior motive on Bud’s part.   Bud and Myra were married with her father’s blessing after Bud completed his apprenticeship as an electrician.  Bud’s family did not receive Myra as well as Myra’s had received him, but they still got along well enough. 

Bud’s reminiscences were interrupted by a need to reload.  He pulled some shells out of his coat pocket and started reloading.  Myra never had been much of one for the outdoors like Bud was.  She always supported his interests, however.  In fact, it was her idea to fix up the cabin for usage all year round.  While Bud went out on little excursions like this every day the weather allowed, Myra was content to sit in her chair facing the front window and work on her sudoku puzzles.  She loved sudoku puzzles.   This arrangement suited both of them perfectly, as Myra had a love for quiet time, and Bud always enjoyed hearing the silence.  Living on Lake Wenonga would have been unimaginable to them both.  There was just one rule Bud had to follow:  never make her wait for him to eat supper.  As he remembered this, on instinct, Bud glanced at his wrist to check the time before remembering that it was pointless.  His watch had broke two weeks ago.  He didn’t need a watch to know that it was getting late.  The sky was darkening, and a grey shadow was starting to saturate the, what had earlier seemed invincible, white.  He made another shot, and after a few moments, the silence had returned once more. 

Now there was just one target left.  Bud dug around in his coat pocket to find some more bullets for his empty gun.  Unable to feel any, he checked his other pocket.  There was only one left, but it would be enough.

Bud took aim one last time.

Then silence.

Silence

5 years ago

This is the first thing I have posted in, so tell me if I am doing it wrong. 

Anyway, that is a pretty good story/introduction/whatever it is. I thought it sounded pretty good and had a good discription. The only way I ended up here was by stalking on other peoples profiles. Not in a creepy way...

Silence

5 years ago

Thank you.  If it makes you feel better, I have clicked on your profile on several occasions.  You should go read Paradise Violated, by the way.  It's a million times better than this.  

Silence

5 years ago

Thanks for the suggestion. I will try it!

Silence

5 years ago

You shan't regret it.  

Unless something went very wrong with your head.  

Silence

5 years ago
I know this seems like a weird question, and maybe it's just because I read it quickly, but what exactly happened in this story?

I assume a suicide, or possible murder/suicide at the end because it was written by a teenager and edgy and emo is your natural state, but it's not made very clear even though the tone definitely went a little ominous there at the very end

Most of the rest was kind of a slow buildup, felt like too much passive language but in a longer story or one where it all led up to more the pacing would've been fine.

Silence

5 years ago

I am grateful! I beat the great Mizal in a post!

Silence

5 years ago

I wanted to leave it semi-ambiguous, but you got what I was going for, as I am edgy and emo like that.  However, if you want to imagine a nice ending where he shoots another bottle and goes home to eat a sandwich, that could also work.   

The pacing was definitely a little slower than what I wanted.  I had the story where I wanted to finish, but then I realized I needed a couple hundred more words.  So I shoved them in before the end.  XD

I'll keep that in mind about the passive language too.  

Silence

5 years ago
A good indicator you might need to jazz up the language a little to be more active is when 'was' and 'had' are popping up in a passage a lot.

Silence

5 years ago

Takes notes.  Thank you, ma'am.  

Silence

5 years ago

I actually didn't mind the slow pace, I think it fits the story and the character pretty well. Of course I usually prefer something quicker but here it didn't bother me that much.

The ending was really ambiguous and so were his motives for suicide; maybe it was a combination of his wife's illness and the desolation of their surroundings.

There was only one phrase that sounded a bit weird to me: "... the, what had earlier seemed invincible, white." The aside there cut off two bits that in my opinion should have stayed together, perhaps like this: "... the white, what had earlier seemed invincible." You could have separated the phrase out like that because of poetic reasons, i.e. showing the vastness and isolation of "the white", but reading it first time it did sound off.

Silence

5 years ago

Oh, that's a good point there.  I see how the sentence doesn't flow too well as it is.  In general, I probably use asides far too often, now that I think about it.  Thanks for reading.  :D

Silence

5 years ago
I agree with the other posters that the pacing was too slow. Nothing much seemed to happen until the end; and yet, that managed to be the worst part. When I got there, I thought "Wait ... is that it? After all these words, all this pointless information, that's what I get?" Kind of disappointing, you know?
You could easily shorten this to a 100 word story and it'd tell just as much. Then the guy dying at the end would eel less disappointing, at least. Here though, just as I was starting to sort of care for the protagonist and develop interest despite the slightly boring writing style, he just ... just died. That's it. The end.
I didn't even get much of a feeling he was depressed before that. Sure, he seemed sad because of his wife. But nothing pointed to him being so sad he'd want to blow his brains out. Some foreshadowing might've been good here.

Silence

5 years ago

Definitely agree on the pacing.  I would have liked 500-800 words myself, but that would have not been enough to absolve me.  

Eh, him blowing his brains out is not necessarily how it ends.  He could also just be shooting another bottle before going home.  So if you didn't think he should die, he didn't.  

Anything you have in mind that contributed to it being boring, excluding the pacing?  Mizal mentioned too much passive language.  

Silence

5 years ago

I don’t mind the pacing either. Been reading a lot of Dostoyevsky in the past year and that guy didn’t write a simple action without including several chapters of description. It reminds me of the pace you’d tell a story. Perhaps it was the name “Wenonga”, because I was imagining and old, weathered Native American man telling the story. Old people can’t help but include long drawn out details. Also, I’m glad we talked a bit on Discord earlier because it made me appreciate the setting even more as this probably takes place near your neck of the woods, yes? I like the contrast between Wenonga and Leech Lake along with the differential between silence and quiet and how that relates to Bud and Myra. Briefly skimming through the other comments, it looks like there was some debate over the ending. Contextually, it seems like he just shot the last bottle, but I understand how the formatting looked like he might have just killed himself. I think shooting/hunting is how he felt close to his wife and his decision to go shooting that day was so he could think about her and their good times. Everything we learn about Bud, points towards a hard-working, loving husband and father. Suicide isn’t in his nature. I think he is simply seeking silence so he can feel closer to Myra.

The only place I’d revisit is this section:

“Some people would say silence is the same as quiet, but the stillness that Bud heard that afternoon as he stood there, surrounded by the gentle wind blowing across the lake unhindered, was true silence—not an absence of sound, but a new one altogether.”

It’s not bad, but this section is probably the most important part of the story. It’s the main idea (silence is more than the absence of sound). I think that segment could be improved a bit to be more impactful. I think it was a good piece of writing and I can’t wait to see what you submit for Corgi’s contest!   

Edit: Deleted a random question mark.

Silence

5 years ago

I'm glad you liked it.  That's a good way to see it.  XD

Wenonga was actually the name of an Ojibwe chief from central Minnesota.  I don't think he has any lakes named directly after him, but he's a semi-well-known figure in some areas.  Leech Lake I just chose because there are a million Leech Lakes in Minnesota.  

The setting is definitely somewhere in central or maybe southern Minnesota.  So pretty close to me, yes.  I actually lived on a lake through winter there for a few years.  So I was thinking of that a bit.  

I like that interpretation.  It's very wholesome.  

Noted on that section.  I probably could have expanded there rather than adding stuff elsewhere.  

Thank you. 

Silence

5 years ago

This looks great! I'm almost certain that Bud shot the narrator who was interrupting his silence and that's why the story ended.

Silence

5 years ago

*Looks down at gunshot wound before covering it with blanket*  

That's, uh, definitely not it at all.  Nope.  It was...not that.