Literature & Media Studies

This is a short story based off of the style of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children.  I’ll warn you now this is not terribly good in the slightest but was more of an experiment in story telling.

“I couldn’t have been born into a more beautifully horrible family. Between living in Bumdrum nowhere Ohio and my parents I can’t arguably decide which I would rather jump out in front of a milk wagon to be away from.”

A young yet scrawny girl angrily wrote in the spaces of a freshly acquired dairy. I was about 16 and just shy of niave with statements like these only having some vague true meaning shrouded in a fog of teenage angst. As I had mentioned briefly I lived in Bumdrum Nowhere, OH where the closest landmarks people use to give directions would be “the large rock up by the hill” and “that there amish house.” Bumdrum small dirt roads often had a fine sprinkling of the annual grasshopper hunt. Not a terribly populated place with only about 147 real inhabitants which was last checked about a century ago. It was in this tiny place grew an extraordinary family. Mine in fact at the time.

“I hate them I hate them I hate them. They make the first one wheel car and hypno cabob hats with their own personalization yet they can’t fix me! Why can’t dad move faster or henry work quicker.  They say they want to help me but here I am, nothing changed. What kind of engineers are they if they can’t even help me from withering away.”

At that time I had started christening the dairy with my sorrow as tears crept off of my face and onto the page blurring the lines a bit. My father, Kaine Klause, was a brilliant man who was credited with being the fastest worker alive. Photographers came by when I was younger and followed his paths as he worked so amazingly fast.

The rest of my family consisted of two older brothers my deceased mother and me.

All three brothers were just like my dad and all had tremendous talent. Then there was me. Decrepitly skinny, pointy nose, no talent, and in general, opposite of what a person should look like or what any of my brothers turned out to be. Why was I such a sad person on this day of reckoning? Well after seeing a doctor earlier in the afternoon the gravity of my situation was shown true and packaged with a ‘use by date’ attached.  You see I had a rare autoimmune disorder that was causing my bones to shrink into nothing.

“There are no other towns in this state that are going to help you” exclaimed the doctor who was pretty sure medicine hadn’t caught up to my bazar body in the 1920’s. I immediately turned to my family for help. With such great minds you would expect one of them to have some idea. But in my ignorance I assumed the creators of mechanical whimsies and electrical marvels would be able to treat my illness.

I fell into a great depression and was made to do different activities such as riflery and soccer to try and get my mind off of things. Every time I stuck out like a soar thumb and twisted further to the back of my mind. 

My father soon fell pray to what I assumed was an illness. He would stay in his room or lab and wouldn’t let anyone in. Quiet mutterings and light clangs of teacups could be heard but I had not seen my father for nearly a year and a half.  It wasn’t until early spring did he emerge from his den.

Deep circles rimmed his eyes, pale as a calf’s milk and muscles withered down to his bones. He walked simply into my room as I had been writing in my dairy and kissed me on the head. “Come on Dahlia. I’ve done it… I’ve found the solution.”

We both silently walked into his study where it was littered with old food trays, teacups and piles upon piles of papers that were half hazardly tossed aside. He lead me deeper into his den as we finally came upon his study which had three large drawing boards in front of the tower of library cases. All had crazed writings and numbers that filled the boards to the brim and even went off onto his collection of classical books in places. The most prominent of all the white chalk markings were in the very center of these boards and simply read ‘Time machine.’

I looked confusedly up at him and he turned to me with a full expression of a proud parent while wrapping his arm around my shoulder.