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- Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children Response
cbam!
On Tuesday, February 5, 2013
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.”
My two brothers on either side of my dad |
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.
The common locator rock |
Uncle ben and his proud shot |
“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.
His prized first one wheeled car |
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.
Me on the top right |
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.