Violet: a sample of some of my writing

I'm always talking about writing, so I thought I'd post the beginning of one of my stories. I wrote this last winter.

Violet Anuree would most likely have gone on to be an excellent professor of English literature. She would have been well-loved by her students, well-liked by her colleagues, and well-rated in peer-reviewed journals. She would have written a great many exceedingly boring articles and spoken at a great many only slightly less boring literary conferences. She would have married a clean-cut gentleman whose intellectual pursuits complemented her own, and they would have raised three exceptional children who excelled in art, music, and sports. She and her professor-type husband would have grown comfortably plump and old together and gradually faded away, visited to the end of their lives by a prolific number of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

But Violet Anuree never found out what her life would have been like had she pursued this venue of academia. Some days – when the sun was too hot, or a particularly large bug crawled into her purse, or she was just really longing for one or another of the hygienic amenities that were once an ordinary facet of her existence – on days like those, perhaps she fancied that she regretted never becoming a professor and raising a family. But deep down, Violet Anuree knew that what she was meant to be was what she was becoming.

Violet would have never discovered this simple truth had it not been for a series of ordinary and extraordinary events. She was in her dorm room in Edmonton on a very snowy night in December. The name of the university she was attending is not important to our story. Neither are the names of her best friends, or her ex-boyfriends, or even that professor whom she liked so much and longed to emulate. I am only telling you that she was in university in Edmonton, because you need to know where she was when her life changed.

I will, however, tell you about Maxine Topher. Maxine gets a spot in the story, because although she is dead now, she played a very important role in Violet's story in the moments before Maxine's untimely death. Maxine was one of those people who make the world just a little bit more interesting. Her friends would have described her as a unique, although somewhat abrasive, individual. Violet would have described her as loud. Violet lived below Maxine, and she wondered how such a skinny girl could make such heavy thudding noises at such regular intervals that one could only suppose that a heavy-weight champion was having a casual wrestling practice on the floor. Furthermore, it seemed as if Maxine woke up when Violet went to bed. Violet was always calling upstairs to crabbily tell Maxine that the loud noises had to stop. Violet prided herself on not being scared to be blunt.

However, Maxine had other interests besides dropping large objects on her floor. Maxine also enjoyed playing with fire. Her room was filled with many flammable objects that were meant to be lit, and many other objects that weren't. She had stacks of matchbooks and every kind of candle imaginable. On this particular evening, Maxine was enjoying a rather dirty romance novel while she sat beside a long row of lit, scented tealights and absently sipped a martini.

Downstairs, Violet was writing a paper that she really didn't want to write, and thinking about Christmas holidays, and how she wished she was anywhere but here at school. She was almost ready to start another game of solitaire when her phone rang.

Violet answered it, spoke for a few minutes, and then pulled her coat on over her pyjamas and went outside. Her boyfriend had parked his car in the loading zone by the front door of her dorm. He was just swinging by to drop off her wallet that she had accidentally left in his car the night before. He also wanted to ask her if he could borrow her Sociology of the Family notes from yesterday's class, which he had skipped. Violet had reluctantly acquiesced, and she had a photocopied stack of notes for him. She had a faint idea that he was using her; however, he was very good-looking and Violet liked keeping him around.

On this particular evening, Violet's boyfriend was in a very impatient mood. He was late for a movie that he had promised to meet a friend at, and although stopping to see Violet was mutually beneficial, he couldn't resist honking his horn rather loudly as she stepped outside.

Upstairs, Maxine, who was deeply engrossed in the throes of a particularly romantic love scene in her novel, started at the sound of the horn. Her elbow jerked slightly...

...tipping over her martini glass...

...which spilled onto the tealights...

...causing the entire table to erupt into flames!

Maxine stared at the scene, transfixed in horror. The flames were licking at the bottom of the window, ravenously devouring the ancient drapes. The angry tongues of fire climbed quickly...now they were at the ceiling...now the ancient tinder of the roof and walls had caught fire and were beginning to crackle dangerously. For someone who normally reveled in fire, Maxine was paralyzed with fear. She ran into the room across from hers, shouting intelligent things like “Oh my God! Fire! Fire!” Then, she lifted the window and jumped out.

Maxine's shouts had brought the rest of the girls into the hall. Then, the fire alarm finally went off, screeching shrilly at the smoke that was now coming from Maxine's room. Chaos, panic, and general pandemonium ensued.

Half an hour later, 150 girls were standing outside the dorm, watching all of their earthly possessions perish in the now out-of-control blaze. The asbestos and dry wood of the dormitory had erupted in flames almost instantly, and by now the entire building was consumed. There would be no salvage. The firefighters had hardly even bothered to try to douse the raging inferno. Schindler Hall was, in the words of one of the firemen, “a bonfire waiting to happen.”

Violet, watching in a kind of a dreamlike trance, didn't feel any emotion. Her first thought was for her new hoodie, trapped in her room and by now surely destroyed. She'd probably miss her computer... her music collection... and there was a slice of pecan pie in her fridge that she'd been looking forward to eating... but this hadn't really been her home.

The question burning (excuse my pun) on Violet's brain was actually whether or not she would have to complete that paper she had been working on before the fire had so rudely interrupted her.