Gloves Off

Thanks, John!

Apr 28, 2024

Funhouse Proxy

A Story by John Raisor

A little girl in a hospital gown with a bald head, well, not bald, it's a buzz cut. She’s devouring Cheezits in a blanket fort. The girl calls the fort her funhouse then calls it a munch house and she loses interest in food. The girl grabs a bucket of legos with orange fingertips. She builds shapes without names, and tears them down and does it again. Her mother coos and compliments her from behind the camera. The girl puts together a large mass of every variety of block she has. She makes a smaller blob of random blocks, then taps the small block blob into the big block mass.
She says “It's a Mama whale eating a little fish.”

My Input: All good, but be careful of your pronouns. Instead of “Her mother” consider, “A woman’s voice talks to her from off-camera…” When the quote occurs, reiterate, “The girl says, ‘It’s a Mama...’” to avoid confusion between two female characters. The orange fingertips are wonderful, but I’d hoped to see that orange transfer to the Legos. Also, if the child licks her fingers, and maybe licks the Legos, that will buy you a big sympathetic physical reaction in the reader. To introduce the mother more slowly, consider introducing her as a voice. Then have a long, manicured fingernail flicker through the shot—we all get our fingers in front of camera phones. Once you demonstrate the voice and the excessive fingernail, the reader will make certain judgments before you define the cameraperson as the mother, later.

Her mother holds a mirror up to her daughter and tells her how pretty she is. The mother smiles, but her cheeks don’t move. Her eyes are wide. The daughter smiles with her eyes at the reflection and rubs her hand across her own head. I rub my own. Everyone likes to rub a buzzed head. The mother talks about hospital bills and thanks everyone who already helped. The mother’s eyes are wide. The outside corners don’t turn down. Her voice is flat.

My Input: At some point the mother must’ve come on camera, but I missed it. A fix might be as easy as: “The jittery shot snaps into place as if fixed to a tripod now. A woman with chopstick-long lacquered fingernails steps into the shot. With one hand, she reaches toward us, the viewer, toward the camera, and adjusts the shot…” Also, an old piece of advice from comic books: Introduce your objects before you need them. That said, “In one hand, the woman holds a mirror…” Define the mirror by how she holds it. Only then use the mirror.

The danger of only introducing an object at the moment it’s used is that the reader might still be too busy assimilating the new object—and miss its actual use.

I’m an actor. People can’t lie with their faces, or the tone of their voices. Actors are proxies for emotion, we’re mirrors, and we can’t fake it. No one can. We have to draw upon previous experience to actually feel the feelings we need for the scene, and roll that emotion dredged up from the past into the present. But actors have tells when they don’t pull this off. Tom Hanks likes to blink his eyes repeatedly. Kevin Spacey’s lip turns down a little. We all have tells.

My Input: The details about Tom Hanks and Kevin Spacey establish great authority. Consider submerging the “I” by changing “I’m an actor” to “Ask any actor. People can’t lie…” Moving to the imperative second-person “ask” would give you a different texture for a beat.

The little girl is in pajamas, a onesie. She’s at home, laying in bed, silent. Her hair is a little longer, but there aren’t any patches missing. I rub my own head because I’m watching her in a video. There’s an entire pharmacy on her bedside table. Her mother is angry, she says that the doctors can’t figure out what’s wrong. The mother says that the doctor treated her like an idiot because she’s a woman. Her tone doesn’t change. Her eyes stay wide.

My Input: The orange fingers worked so well, would you consider an echo, such as: “This time her fingertips are the rainbow of Skittles…” Doing so, you can morph the finger colors each time we see the girl. This implies a diet of garbage and makes us dislike the mother more. Again, Minimalism isn’t about adding new elements, it’s about keeping and morphing the objects you introduce early on.

Also, consider using the child’s teeth to imply time passing. Baby teeth that disappear, leaving gaps, would echo with the mother’s teeth at the climax.

The video switches to a close up of the mother’s face. Eyebrows aren’t too thick or too thin or too dark or too close together or too far apart, just enough eyeliner to highlight her eyes, her makeup is subtle and seamless. People in the comments give her compliments and she gives an aww shucks response and her tone heightens and she smiles with her eyes and bites her tongue.

My Input: All good, but can you unpack “an aww-shucks response"? For example, “Her cheeks flush, and she ducks her head. Her manicured fingers fan her face in an aww shucks response…” This would allow us to decide the response before you state it outright.

The mother looks off camera into a mirror and fluffs her hair. My neck wants to twist on its own. The feeling makes me roll my head around, but doesn’t alleviate the tightness. I don’t donate.

My Input: Consider “I don’t hit ‘Donate.’” Just to give a more physical sense to the abstract, and to underscore the context. As for objects, if you step on the mirror with one detail when you introduce the mirror, the object will accrue meaning as it’s used for a new purpose here. If the mirror now has a crack across it—don’t say why—that implies violence, or bad luck, or maybe a big lipstick kiss on the mirror to demonstrate off-scene vanity. Morph your mirror. Also, what else might the mirror show us by accident?

Don’t neglect off-screen sounds. Consider how it’s the puppy barking off screen, or the baby crying in the other room during Only Fans, that gives you emotional authority. It’s those sounds elements—the chirp of a neglected smoke alarm—that can add a deeper element.

The chirp of a neglected smoke alarm would be a nice setup to suggest the disaster to come.

I can’t send money out into the world just to feel good about myself, to balance the times when I’m selfish. I always want to help, but sending money into the unknown mostly helps the person who controls where that money goes. I can’t tell anyone. No amount of kindness and understanding prevents the rage that comes from a warm, soft lie replaced with an ugly truth. We all want to be mirrored, but only by the distorted funhouse kind, preferably with some smoke. People smash honest mirrors.
The mother doesn’t have to poison her to make her believe that she’s sick. Mom just plays the part, and the daughter mirrors her. The placebo effect can treat or injure, and it works by proxy.

My Input: You’ve gone to Big Voice here, that’s fine. But what other aspect of this system can you present in this sequence? A text? An Instagram notification? Just a nagging buzz or a ringing in the narrator’s pocket would add a physical context that he’s trying to ignore.

I watch the videos again, my neck tightens and wants to twist. I look for anything to tell me where they are. The medicine says what pharmacy it's from.
Create an anonymous email and use a proxy server and search for their local investigative journalist. Tell the reporter what I see in the videos, tell her that I hope I’m wrong. The journalist says that she will have her assistant look into it, a proxy journalist.

My Input: Just as a bit of weird texture, can you drop in the name of the medicine? Just a single-word sentence fragment. Don’t define its use, just give us a weird medicine name as an Easter egg. It’s those nonsense-like proper nouns that pop when dropped into an on-going story.

A video of the mother crying, getting loud. Her face bunches up. Her eyes and tone don’t change. The mother’s face is dry. I roll my head around, but my neck knots. I drive the side of my hand into it, but nothing relieves it.
The journalist sends me a video. It starts with a shot of the mother and daughter carrying bags that say Chanel and Sephora in a parking lot. The reporter approaches them. They load the bags into the back of a Range Rover that still has the maroney sticker in the window, it gets 19 mpg city and 24 mpg highway. They get in, and the mother pulls out her phone and talks to the screen.
The reporter approaches and the window rolls down. The little girl holds her lego shapes without names up for everyone to see.

My Input: Consider that the child’s hair has become a sort-of clock. Is it longer here? The length of the hair can imply how much time has passed. Or the length of the fingernails. It’s “Monroney” sticker, but that’s a great detail. I loved that.

It's a Mama whale eating a little fish.
The mother puts her phone on the dash, and the journalist asks about the new truck and the donations for the hospital bills.
The mother’s face is still. She stares at the journalist. The mother opens the door and exits and stares at the camera.

My Input: Be careful. This new sequence is seen via the journalist’s camera. You might skip mentioning the mother’s camera/phone because that could confuse things. To revisit the mirror in a new form, consider the mother pulling the rearview mirror to one side and using it to examine her teeth or reapply lipstick. As always, it’s about keeping limited elements present but morphing them.

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The reporter asks how she affords Chanel and Sephora.
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The mother’s nose scrunches up and she shows her teeth and her brow dives down onto her nose and her cheeks push up and her eyes squint when she lunges and takes the camera and the lens reflects her genuine rage. The camera smashes down into the side mirror of the new SUV, lens first.

My Input: If you particularize the mother’s hand when it’s introduced—fingernails, rings, tattoos, bangle bracelets—this is when all those details will go to chaos. All of those small details will lunge at the camera lens and obliterate the view.

Also, have you noticed how (shall we say “limited”) people tend to overbleach their teeth? It’s always a little heartbreaking to see someone with snaggle teeth that they’ve bleached to a glow-in-the-dark whiteness. Bravo, “brow dives down onto her nose” is wonderful. Put a big jeweled nose ring in—or not.

Grunts and shrieks and heavy breathing. The video is distorted. The mirror inside the camera is broken, only small pieces on the screen are clear. It cuts to the journalist with scratches on her face and a swollen lip. An engine roars. The SUV carries smoke and a broken mirror away with it. My neck releases. Only funhouse mirrors.

My Input: Be careful of passive voice, especially in your biggest action sequence. Maybe make “is broken, only small…” into “breaks, shattering the scene into small pieces on the screen.”

As for the narrator’s neck, you’ve worked so hard to establish this setup. Can you hit it twice at the payoff? For example, “My neck pops. The muscles release.”

As always, I hope this helps. If I seem dogged, it’s because I’ll always cleave to rules of Minimalism. Even classic Modernist stories like Breakfast at Tiffany’s benefit from limiting elements—the ring (a St. Christopher medal in the book)—and morphing those elements as they’re hidden and reintroduced throughout the story. Fingers crossed that your reading of the story went well tonight. Thank you for letting me dissect it.