Writing Friday - Clementine

I have folders filled with folder saved on my hard-drive filled with years of stupid things I've written. I used to think that stuff was good. Anyway, every once-in-a-while on Writing Fridays, I'll post some old crap.

One of my old favorite past-times was to write quick character sketches for books. I would create a character - sometimes stock, sometimes original - and write about them. Usually a circumstance that would illustrate their personality. This one is about Clementine:

People sometimes associate names with personalities. The name Clementine might be associated with a whooping and hollering cowgirl with a smile and a lasso for a belt. But this Clementine, or Clem as she began correcting people, was not a cowboy. She was the exact opposite, dressed in a long black dress with a slit right up the front so you could see she was wearing dark maroon self-dyed jeans underneath. Her pail round face smathered with black makeup resembled a cold chiseled statue, and her short and spiky hair was meant to resemble the patience she wanted people to think she had. Her tendency to act like an anti-people-person came from her history of constantly changing orphanages and schools in her youth. But, there was that one foster family that bought her new bright colored clothes and enrolled her in a special school were the other kids didn’t know she didn’t belong. But that only lasted a couple months. Now she works in the plexi-glass cage on the night shift at the gas station downtown off of 16th. She brings her laptop, so when work isn’t busy, and it rarely is, she can keep in touch with the two or three people who commented on her poetry from her website. Her poems are occasionally about places she’s been, but mostly focused on the emotional trauma every person she comes in contact with inflicts upon her. The poems don’t rhyme. They are mostly just adjectives and metaphors. And sadly, the adjectives and metaphors feel overly used and unmotivating. Her poetry is stale – except the one about her landlord who she described as a moldy, sweaty donut with a face and armpits.

Clementine’s two cats understand her and actually like her. Her true personality glows through the cracks in the emotional stone walls she put up around her when she is talking to her cats. One cat is black and his name is black. The other cat is named Mo, but if she ever had company, she decided to tell them his name is Despair. One time Mo escaped from her apartment and climbed the tree into the unit above hers. Clementine shot up the stairs and knocked on the door to rescue Mo. The man, roughly her same age, answered the door and gave the cat back to Clementine. He commented that in all of their comings and goings, he had never seen her wear anything but dark colors and that her canary yellow T-shirt looked cute. She of course wrote a nasty poem about the jerk upstairs. A person’s underwear and pajamas say a lot about their superego. Clementine’s were sky blue, and yellow.