Deanna Hoak

Okay. So has declared International Embarrass Yourself as an Artist Day. We’re supposed to post the grottiest, oldest, worst piece of juvenilia we have.

Now, I suppose I could have typed in the one with the wise disappearing unicorn and the talking balloons, but lucky you, you get the philosophical angst of a sixteen-year-old Deanna.

JUNK DRAWER

The dish is running away with the spoon.

All manner of things are carelessly tossed in here. Open the drawer and toss it in; shut the drawer. People never really bother to look at anything in here. All useless gadgets or broken gizmos, old toys, tools, and rolls of tape. Ah well, it’s our world.

I’m no one important here—just an old toy lizard whose tail was broken off and I got thrown in here like all the rest.

They’re going to try to leave.

Yeah, it gets pretty boring in here sometimes. Mostly we just sit around and think. When someone new gets thrown in and starts talking, they’re always shocked enough to provide a little amusement for the rest of us for a while.

Or we love to listen to Clock. Clock was raking in a fortune, you know. Oh, we all thought we’d use the pennies for barter, but there’s quite and army of them in here, and they’d have nothing to do with it. The pennies are pretty amusing, too. All those little presidential heads marching around and telling us what’s good for our safety. That’s a laugh.

Clock has gotten a spare doll arm from his treasury and is lifting Spoon towards the slight crack in the ceiling. He bumps Spoon up against the metal spar of the ceiling and she starts yelling.

Everyone always wants to get out of here. It can be quite maddening, you know, a crew like us crowded into a place like this. That’s why Clock was making such a fortune—he had stories in him. He was an old children’s clock who would tell stories when you wound him up—they were beautiful stories, and we always wished they would come true. Clock’s winding knob had been broken off (that’s why he was in here, I guess), but there was always some tool in here that could turn that stump.

I think that’s why Dish took up with Spoon in the first place—he believed that it was his destiny that he would run off with Spoon and find the story places. One of Clock’s stories mentioned it, that’s all. His stories had to be real—we were real in them, just like here. We all knew we hadn’t been real before—that’s the first thing that hits you.

I guess Dish thinks that he’ll be real out there now.

We’ve all thought about trying it. We don’t have any idea what happens to one of us when we leave the junk drawer. We know that when they leave, they don’t come back here again. No one ever has.

There’s an old tape recorder here who counts himself as quite a philosopher. Tape Recorder says we weren’t real before we were alive, so we won’t be real after, if we leave. Life is the drawer. No one really knows, though, ’cause no one has ever come back. There are always some of us, though, who want to believe in life after the drawer. It does help to think that, you know, but most of us don’t really want to leave to find out. We’re not all that sure about it.

Dish is just an incurable romantic.

There have been ones who’ve left before—old Razor was mean and sour-tempered, but he really did want to believe Clock’s nursery rhymes. Not long after Razor didn’t return, several others left, too.

Dish has a doll using Spoon to lever the drawer open. The ground lurches.

Yeah, Dish would never have been able to do it by himself—he’s too scared. But Dish and Spoon made a pact together, and I guess they’re less afraid of both going at once.

We can’t see out past the junk drawer—it’s like there’s just space out there with nothing in it. That’s what’s so scary about leaving.

Dish and Spoon stand side by side on the edge.

There are a few trying to watch and see what happens to them, but I don’t bother. Once they’re off the edge of the drawer you just don’t see them anymore. This is our whole world, and when they’re not here they’re gone.

Dish and Spoon jump.

Ah, well. Life goes on.

Or I have this poem, from when I was eleven. (Yes, I had a hell of a vocabulary for my age.) More fun angst–I’d just watched a special on the Vietnam War and had asked my dad about what it was like to be over there. (My dad died from Agent Orange-related cancers four years ago now.)

OF WAR

If I had my way, there would be no cruelty, no offside arguments ending in death.

What of Peace?

Bright banners burning–the vanquished emblem of a country now won. The victory? The bones of a thousand proud men.

What of Hope?

All is lost. The war was begun before men’s minds had become numb to the killing. No one remembers quite what was fought for or what they won–all is forgotten.

What of Tranquility?

The souls of the dead forover roaming the corners of a round world, mourning the living for their useless lives.

And of War?

A senseless slaughtering of our brothers. War is naught but a sibling rivalry expanded until, all at once, all explodes like the bursting of so much schrapnel from a cannon shell and blows a million tiny fragments of lives into oblivion.