Zack Dill
January 13, 2006 2:45 PM
writing home by Zack Dill
Under normal circumstances, Zack Dill would not be doing was he was now preparing to do. But then, under normal circumstances, he wouldn't have to. Even under these extreme cold conditions, however, he wouldn't have buckled down to do this without outside pressure. That day's Astronomy class had provided the pressure. Professor Dione had ordered him to write home and ask for a winter coat.So here he was. Writing home. For a jacket.
He scowled at the blank page of loose leaf paper as if it had deeply wronged him. He hated this. Hated it.
Mom, Dad, he wrote, and there ended the easy part. Because he just didn't write home. Any sort of pleasantry that he started with would be recognized as filler. He was writing to them because he needed something, and he glared in fury at the salutation as if it were at fault for putting him in this position.
The heat is broken, he wrote, because that was easier for them to understand than to say the weather was acting weird. They don't know when the boiler is going to be fixed. This part of Arizona is suffering a really bad cold spell right now.
He sat back and glowered at the paragraph he'd just written. He didn't care that he was lying to his parents. He saw it merely as putting the situation in terms they were cabable of comprehending. The problem lie in what he had to write next.
He snarled a curse at the page in Klingon, then set pen to paper once more, My coat is inadequate for the temperatures I experience even indoors, he wrote, using a higher level vocabulary than normal in his distress. I require a suppliment to my current resources at your earliest possible convenience. He reread the last two lines and crossed them out. His parents weren't the sharpest people; that they could read at all was something they were proud of. Zack swore again, using Orcish this time, as he crumpled the paper and threw it into a pile of other balls of discarded attempts.
Mom and Dad, he started again on a new sheet, just before noticing he was no longer alone. "What?" he demanded when they didn't look away from him fast enough. Asking his parents for anything always made him snappish and defensive. At least this time it wasn't to their face. He wouldn't have to stand there in front of them while they made him feel like a bug for suggesting they weren't doing a good enough job of providing for the family. Even if they weren't.\n\n
1
Zack Dill
writing home
40
Zack Dill
1
5