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Faculty - 08/09
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Examples of Creative Nonfiction
A Moment of Impact
By Alex Morris
Riding my bike down the biggest hill on campus I could see the entire way down so I wasn’t worried about braking. The speed lifted my hair from my face and I shook my head to swoosh every stray one off my neck and forehead. As I neared the bottom of the hill I heard a noise and realized a guy on a skateboard was flying out of the parking lot I was heading straight for. I watched him zigzag on his board, trying to avoid me, like a fish. He was flipping back and forth, maybe thinking it might make him go backward.
I don’t know if he did go backward, I don’t know if he stopped. All I knew was that something was about to happen, and I was probably going to bleed.
I don’t remember my hands clenching my brakes, I don’t remember exactly how I flew and I don’t remember where my flip-flops landed. One moment he is trying to stop the collision and the next moment my hands are numb, I am facing down, and my nose is centimeters away from the sparkly pavement. My body sprawls out before him, and he too is down, but he has landed on his backside, one knee on either side of my head.
I feel around for my glasses which are just within my hands reach. I put them on and look into the stranger’s blue eyes. Both our eyes are wide.
Overcome with sudden feelings, the next minute and a half we have known each other our entire lives. Maybe he is my lover, maybe he is my brother; hands are clasping arms and touching face. He is asking me questions like anyone would: “Are you okay?” “Is your face cut?” “Let me see your hand.” But the body language is different, his hand is on my bare foot and my hand is clenching his so tight I know it hurts.
We realize we are not invincible.
I regain some of my composure, and he helps me up. We hug and the feeling starts to come back into my body. He looks at the cut on my hand and asks if he can pull off the piece of flesh that is dangling from it. I think it will hurt and close my eyes as he does it, but I don’t even feel it.
As our personalities start to return I remember I have no idea who this guy is. I see that he has been treating me like a baby. He is trying to take care of me. I acknowledge that this should be something I disagree with, yet I still play the role of the helpless kitten. I assure him one last time that I am fine, we exchange names, and he lets me go.
“See you around,” I say and he laughs, and so do I.
I walk my bike down the rest of the hill, taking slow deep breaths.
Entrepreneurs
By Laura Dison
“A lot of my friends were,” he paused to find the word, “entrepreneurs.” And I knew what he meant. He didn’t think they would actually do it, but those cops loaded them into armored cars, the way folks crunch into pews awaiting their destiny, three cars at a time until my father and twenty-four other businessmen checked into one night’s sleep in an Alabama county jail.
It was 1971 on a night I imagine to be crisp but not cold. A trail of cars wound through country roads to some farm or barn or empty field to what I am sure was going to be one hell of a night. The Dead blared from each automobile’s stereo, no doubt, and the darkness must have smelt like patchouli, or manure, or freedom. I can see my father, a chicken bone, anxious for what the moon would bring. He was probably fresh off the clock, not expecting a night inside metal slabs and swinging fluorescent lights. Besides, it was 1971 outside of Birmingham, and my father and his friends had business to tend to.
On their friend’s large plot of property, they didn’t think they were really disturbing any one. They rarely disturbed anyone, but kept to themselves for the most part. Well, my father and the three he had accompanied had barely been there long enough to pop the tops off their beers before blue lights came from around the bend and set the partiers into a panic. The officer was polite enough. He told them they had received a noise complaint and that it might be best that they go home now. The officer must have been a little more assertive than that, or it seems they would have just waited for him to leave. All in all, they must have seen the signs and so they gathered their things and got out of there.
There was only one way into the property and it was the same way out. The officer had been long gone in front of them by the time the trail of cars made their exit. I imagine they made plans for meeting elsewhere as soon as they got out of that mess, and I don’t imagine those carloads were of people that were sober. Like a sudden chill in the pitch-dark night crawling up from spine to neck, the crowd saw blue lights in the distance. There was no way around them and there were more than just one—there were dozens.
The pursuit ended before it even began, and before long my father and all of his friends were being individually searched as well as their vehicles. It’s hard to imagine what this would have sounded like; were he and his friends quiet and obedient or did they resist, and yell, and call them pigs? I hear the dangling of keys and handcuffs and faint swears under the breath of my father and his friends. When they came to him, sure enough (he was the designated driver that night, he assured me) someone had left their own stash of marijuana in the cracks of his backseats and he was busted.
It’s hard to imagine a scene more likely but less enjoyable than a bunch of tweaked out hippies in the back of a cop car. Turns out, they got away free. Well, not completely free—some of the boys’ freedom was traded for snitches. The boys would give leads on drug busts to the police and the police wouldn’t press charges, or at least that was the deal. “There’s nothing quite like spending a night in jail,” my father told me, and he had told me before, only now I knew what he meant, and what he took from experience. “And I’ve sure done a lot of things.”