Well, here's a big step for me.

As many of you know, I do write fiction from time to time. Following the example of Writer Rick I'm going to put up an excerpt of the story I'm currently working on in my "spare time" such as it is.

Right now, this is an out take from the story with the working title "Small Town Girl". Because I can't discern how important this dialouge is to the main part of the story, I may add it back in at a later time, or keep it out completely. The story is set in the near future, 15 years after a second Civil War in America. While the main charecter, Evelyn Finch, is orignally from Philadelphia, a city which remained in the U.S. she has lived first in the south and then in the New Confederacy, teaching secondary English and dealing with a crippling illness of unknown origens. The scene begins as Evelyn, traveling with Malcolm Jenks the Sheriff of the town where she lives, arrive for the funeral of her father. It is the first time she has been across the border or seen her brothers in 16 years.

This excerpt is in it's first draft. What I am interested in is how realistic, or unrealistic this scene is. I'm opening myself to the slings and arrows of literary criticism here, so feel free to hit me with whatever you've got. Here goes:

We weren’t even out of the parking lot of the train station, on the way to the funeral before my brothers started a fresh assault in their war against my “fuzzy thinking”.

I was exhausted from traveling, and my mourning clothes were hot. My pantyhose were sticking to the insides of my feet, and if the air was any cleaner in Philly than it was down home you couldn’t prove it by me.

“I guess there’s not a college in that little town you’re from, Sheriff.” My brother, Dan said to Malcolm affably, “It’s too bad, Evie tells us that she’s having to teach six through twelve, and everybody all over the board intellectually. No wonder why she’s so tired.”

“Personally, I think she’s tired from being on that damn train for five hours. But she’s right there, you could ask her.” He said, not sparing the bereaved his usual gruff manner.

“No, no, I mean in general, Evie. Doesn’t that exhaust you?”

“If I wanted to teach on the college level I’d go down to Westminster and teach on the college level.” I said, levelly, trying very hard not to take bait.

Oh, you’re allowed to move then, from town to town?” my brother Chet asked innocently.

“Of course I’d be allowed to move. I have a contract with my school board, it’s not indentured servitude.”

“Then you could go down to Atlanta and get a better job in a place where they have better technology and more infrastructure.” Dan said.

“I could close my eyes and take a nap,” I said pointedly, withdrawing a fan from my good black handbag and applying it to use. My brothers looked at both the purse and fan like they were artifacts.

“I’m not sure you gentlemen exactly understand Evelyn’s position of respect in our community.” Malcolm said, choosing his words carefully.

“For God’s sake, how much respect could she have? She’s a school teacher!” Chet replied.

“Well, then, I guess I rest my case” said Malcolm with a light smile. Chet turned red and I couldn’t help but smile too.

Philly was a crowded, dirty city. There were swarms of people waiting for public buses, which lumbered through the streets like mechanized prehistoric creatures: The Diesel, The Gasohol, The Streetcar. There were so many people on foot and on bicycle that the sidewalks were one way for pedestrian traffic, and places where automobiles had once parked had turned into the bike lane. People hawked vegetables, magazines, shoelaces, scarves, and cigarettes, shouting as they walked backwards through the crowds. Maybe it always had been confusing and loud, or maybe I had turned into a small town girl, and was now unused to the noise and the bustle. Because the train was so late, we had to take the taxi directly to the funeral service, which was held at an interfaith center near my father’s apartment.

I had promised myself that, no matter what happened, I wasn’t going to remark on any of the customs my family had taken up since I was a child or different from our routines in the south. Still, it was all I suppose shock showed on my face when I met my sisters-in-law for the first time and they were wearing backless floral sun dresses and no nylons to the service. I kept expecting Chet to change out of his tee shirt any minute after he paid the taxi driver with elaborate casualness, as if he could afford a gasoline powered cab every day.

The interfaith center was an octagonal shaped, sterile room. There were a few sparse flower arrangements around, done in an Asian theme. An urn stood on a damask draped table in the middle of the room, where people milled around drinking soda and coffee.

“You had him cremated? I thought you were going to do that…after the service” I said as evenly as I could. It was a shock to see my father reduced to what appeared to be a coffee table ornament.

“I know we said that, but, there was a problem. I’m really sorry, Evie. Here, there’s a chair for you near the front.” Dan said.

“Where is everyone else sitting? Or is the service in another room?” I asked, feeling disoriented as people drifted past me holding drinks and laughing.

“No the service is in here. It’s going to be a short goodbye, so we didn’t feel the need to bring in chairs.”

Malcolm’s eyebrows were just about at his hairline, but he didn’t say anything. Almost at once, a young man stepped up to a small podium and began to make a few jokes as if loosing up the crowd for a performer yet to come. I tried to tune him out. Then, someone else got up and spoke about Dad. It was all funny stories from his co-workers, neighbors and friends. They were sorry he was gone. They were gonna miss him. They sounded like they thought they were on television. Finally they stopped. Someone wearing a black suit came in and carried the urn out and people began to drift away.

“I thought he said the service was being held here.” Malcolm said to me, in a low voice, mystified.

I looked up over the handkerchief in which I’d been hiding my face the whole time and said, “I’m pretty sure that was the service.”

“It’s a Tuesday, you know. People have to get back to work.” Chet said, defensively.

The inevitable argument happened at the restaurant afterwards. It was a Chinese place. The hostess greeted Chet like he was a regular, though they were at great pains to say that they had picked the restaurant out on my account. I had always loved Chinese food and there was not a Chinese restaurant in Hampstead. My new sisters- in- law tried to talk to me, but they kept gawking at my handbag and my fan. Their sundresses had elaborate pockets, in which I guessed it was now the Northern style for women to carry cosmetics, tissues, and necessities. They weren’t unkind, but it was clear that they believed everything they heard about the South being full of backwards stupid people. Chet’s wife, for instance, thought that nano-tech drugs were banned in the Confederacy.

On the other hand, my brothers went after Malcolm with a vengeance. How many horses did he have? How many guns did he carry? How many runners had he shot to death? Did he come across with everybody from the town to make sure they came back from every funeral?

“Sheriff Jenks was kind enough to come with me at my request. It’s a lot harder for me to travel than it used to be. You don’t have to insult him.”

“We’re not insulting him, Evie. We’re just trying to get to know him. We just got him to admit that you don’t see people up here getting around on horseback.” Dan said cheerfully.

“That’s right, I don’t. But I do see an awful lot of people getting around on foot.” Malcolm said with an aw-shucks grin.

Chet rattled the ice in his mai-tai aggressively. I could smell the alcohol across the table where I was sitting.

“What was the problem that caused you to have to cremate Dad’s remains early?” I asked calmly.

“It was more a problem with the Interfaith Center. The logistics of having a body in there….and he was going to be cremated anyway. So we just went ahead.”

“But, Chet, that’s not what Dad wanted. He left specific written instructions. And he didn’t specify the Interfaith Center. You could have had it at the Episcopal Church.”

Chet rolled his eyes. His wife put a warning hand on his arm.

“Nobody really goes there anymore, Evie.” Dan said, quietly.

“Okay. But you could have gone there this time, just this once, for Dad, couldn’t you?”

“It would have been much harder to plan. That church is so small, it’s hard to get to, we would have had to have dealt with somebody there….”

“Dealt with how? You mean made a donation?”

“Evie, it’s complicated. Things have changed since you lived in Philadelphia, it’s different here, in ways you probably wouldn’t understand.” Dan said.

“So explain it to me.”

“Try one of these, Malcom. They’re called won-tons.” Chet said.

Maybe it was the heat, the dust, or the six hour pain pill I had taken 8 hours ago wearing off, but I had had enough, “ Will you knock it off, Chet? Quit insulting the man! He knows what a won-ton is for Christs sake!” I said loudly and slapped both of my hands on the table top with enough force to rearrange the silver wear.

Everyone looked shocked, my family at my tone of voice, and Malcolm at the language I had used.

But Chet jumped right in. “Me knock it off? The hell! You knock it off, okay? What the hell do you think this is? A play? This is Dad’s funeral. You come up here, dressed like Scarlett O’Hara with some put on southern accent, looking at your home town and everybody in it like you’re holy and we’re not –“

“What!”

“Chet!” his wife said

“Scarlett O’Hara was wearing curtains. I’m only dressed decently, like I would for anybody’s funeral, not slopping around in whatever that is you’re wearing. And as for it being Dad’s funeral, that wasn’t like any funeral I’ve ever been to. Don’t tell me that’s how you do it up here, because we didn’t have cocktail parties as memorial services in this family when I was a kid.”

“No one was drinking alcohol.” Dan said.

“Okay, maybe not, but that still wasn’t a funeral!”

“Evelyn, the boys wanted everything to be short and low key so that you wouldn’t be exhausted having to meet with strangers.” Dan’s wife said.

“Or maybe so their colleagues wouldn’t have to meet their hick sister! Dad left specific, written instructions –“

“Yeah, and that’s what you know about isn’t it? The Written Word.” He said, making air quotes, “You know what Dad wrote to you over e-mail. You were never here. You didn’t have to see him after his stroke.”

“Oh, like you did? You could have been there every day if you wanted. He wrote me that he didn’t know where you were. You got him some caregiver and that was it.”

“Suki was a highly skilled nursing companion! It was expensive, and nobody asked you to chip in. Somebody had to go to work to pay for it. How was I supposed to be there and here at the same time? And where the hell were you?”

“Well, wherever I was, you were closer! You didn’t have to get past a Checkpoint Charlie just to come over and see how he was doing!”

“Evelyn, it can’t be good for you to get this upset.” Malcolm said.

“Shut up, Malcolm. This isn’t your business. You can condescend to me because I’m a cripple when we’re home. Right now I have to deal with my family condescending to me because I didn’t get out of the Confederacy in time before the border closed.”

“You didn’t even try.” Dan pointed out without raising his voice, but sounding more bitter than Chet.

“That was 15 years ago! What are you saying? I was supposed to know that Dad was going to get sick back then and come charging up to Philadelphia as soon as the war broke out?”

“What?” Dan asked with mock innocence, “Did you think he was going to live forever?”

“I thought I could depend on you to take care of him! I thought you would be there for him, and not just do whatever was convenient for you. Our father was not an engineering problem, a logistics problem. You have no idea how he felt towards the end. I’m not saying anything about Suki’s medical skills, but she didn’t speak good English and she wasn’t someone Dad could talk to. And there I was, in my health, south of the border, getting his e-mails and trying to comfort him the best I could long distance. Then I come up here and find out that you just tossed him in a box because there’s not a bus route near the church and the only people praying for Dad are the Brethren down home.”

“We did NOT just toss him in a box.” Dan said angrily.

“We don’t pray all the time up here, Evie! In fact, we don’t pray at all any more!” Chet yelled.

“Fine, then, that’s your choice. But it wasn’t Dad’s. Or didn’t you know that? No, of course you didn’t. How could you know his faith became important to him as he got close to the end? Suki certainly wasn’t going to bring it up, if she understood what was going on with him, and who else was there? Not you two!”

“You wouldn’t be in the condition you’re in if you had come home when we told you to.” Dan said.

“You don’t know that. Nobody knows that. You think you can fix anything with your bioengineering and your nanotech drugs. But you can’t.”

“Oh, and Dad would have been able to send coherent e-mails up to the day he died if we didn’t have that technology? With his Alzheimer’s disease?” Chet said sarcastically.

“Who knows? Maybe he would, maybe he wouldn’t! He wouldn’t have been in the kind of agony he was in though. Every time he misplaced his keys, or forgot somebody’s name, he was in terror that the treatment wasn’t working out. What’s worse? Losing your mind or having the possibility of it hanging over your head like the sword of Damocles? He was in such fear of the damn treatment failing that he worried himself into a stroke!”

“That’s great, Evie. Is that what ya’ll believe down there? That people worry themselves into strokes?” Chet laughed.

He was drunk, or at least tipsy. I couldn’t stand to look at him for another minute. Everyone in the restaurant was looking at us. Malcolm had gotten to his feet and was looking around uncertainly. My sisters-in-law were looking into their rapidly cooling won-ton soups as if they could see the future and it didn’t look good.

I stood up. “I beg your pardon.” I said to the hostess who was hovering, nervously nearby, “Please forgive me for behaving this way in your fine establishment, and please forgive my brothers.”

“You are bereaved.” She said. She said it with such kindness, with such sympathy that burst into tears. I picked up my cane, my purse and my fan and walked as fast as I could out onto the street, into the stream of people, not seeing or hearing anything but my own sobs until Malcolm caught up with me a block and a half away.