/lit/ - Literature

>>4205235
My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. In newspaper photos of missing girls from the seventies, most looked like me: white
girls with mousy brown hair. This was before kids of all races and genders started appearing on milk cartons or in the daily mail. It was still back when people believed things like that didn’t happen.
In my junior high yearbook I had a quote from a Spanish poet my sister had turned me on to, Juan Ramón Jiménez. It went like this: “If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.” I chose it both
because it expressed my contempt for my structured surroundings à la the classroom and because, not being some dopey quote from a rock group, I thought it marked me as literary. I was a member of
the Chess Club and Chem Club and burned everything I tried to make in Mrs. Delminico’s home ec class. My favorite teacher was Mr. Botte, who taught biology and liked to animate the frogs and crawfish
we had to dissect by making them dance in their waxed pans.
I wasn’t killed by Mr. Botte, by the way. Don’t think every person you’re going to meet in here is suspect. That’s the problem. You never know. Mr. Botte came to my memorial (as, may I add, did almost
the entire junior high school—I was never so popular) and cried quite a bit. He had a sick kid.

>>4205238
We all knew this, so when he laughed at his own jokes, which were rusty way before I had him, we laughed
too, forcing it sometimes just to make him happy. His daughter died a year and a half after I did. She had leukemia, but I never saw her in my heaven.
My murderer was a man from our neighborhood. My mother liked his border flowers, and my father talked to him once about fertilizer. My murderer believed in old-fashioned things like eggshells and
coffee grounds, which he said his own mother had used. My father came home smiling, making jokes about how the man’s garden might be beautiful but it would stink to high heaven once a heat wave hit.
But on December 6, 1973, it was snowing, and I took a shortcut through the cornfield back from the junior high. It was dark out because the days were shorter in winter, and I remember how the broken
cornstalks made my walk more difficult. The snow was falling lightly, like a flurry of small hands, and I was breathing through my nose until it was running so much that I had to open my mouth. Six feet from
where Mr. Harvey stood, I stuck my tongue out to taste a snowflake.

>>4205244
“Don’t let me startle you,” Mr. Harvey said.
Of course, in a cornfield, in the dark, I was startled. After I was dead I thought about how there had been the light scent of cologne in the air but that I had not been paying attention, or thought it was
coming from one of the houses up ahead.
“Mr. Harvey,” I said.
“You’re the older Salmon girl, right?”
“Yes.”
“How are your folks?”
Although the eldest in my family and good at acing a science quiz, I had never felt comfortable with adults.
“Fine,” I said. I was cold, but the natural authority of his age, and the added fact that he was a neighbor and had talked to my father about fertilizer, rooted me to the spot.
“I’ve built something back here,” he said. “Would you like to see?”
“I’m sort of cold, Mr. Harvey,” I said, “and my mom likes me home before dark.”
“It’s after dark, Susie,” he said.
I wish now that I had known this was weird. I had never told him my name. I guess I thought my father had told him one of the embarrassing anecdotes he saw merely as loving testaments to his children.
My father was the kind of dad who kept a nude photo of you when you were three in the downstairs bathroom, the one that guests would use. He did this to my little sister, Lindsey, thank God.

>>4205250
At least I was
spared that indignity. But he liked to tell a story about how, once Lindsey was born, I was so jealous that one day while he was on the phone in the other room, I moved down the couch—he could see me
from where he stood—and tried to pee on top of Lindsey in her carrier. This story humiliated me every time he told it, to the pastor of our church, to our neighbor Mrs. Stead, who was a therapist and
whose take on it he wanted to hear, and to everyone who ever said “Susie has a lot of spunk!”
“Spunk!” my father would say. “Let me tell you about spunk,” and he would launch immediately into his Susie-peed-on-Lindsey story.
But as it turned out, my father had not mentioned us to Mr. Harvey or told him the Susie-peed-on-Lindsey story.
Mr. Harvey would later say these words to my mother when he ran into her on the street: “I heard about the horrible, horrible tragedy. What was your daughter’s name, again?”
“Susie,” my mother said, bracing up under the weight of it, a weight that she naively hoped might lighten someday, not knowing that it would only go on to hurt in new and varied ways for the rest of her
life. Mr. Harvey told her the usual: “I hope they get the bastard. I’m sorry for your loss.”

>>4205253
I was in my heaven by that time, fitting my limbs together, and couldn’t believe his audacity. “The man has no shame,” I said to Franny, my intake counselor. “Exactly,” she said, and made her point as
simply as that. There wasn’t a lot of bullshit in my heaven.
Mr. Harvey said it would only take a minute, so I followed him a little farther into the cornfield, where fewer stalks were broken off because no one used it as a shortcut to the junior high. My mom had told
my baby brother, Buckley, that the corn in the field was inedible when he asked why no one from the neighborhood ate it. “The corn is for horses, not humans,” she said. “Not dogs?” Buckley asked. “No,”
my mother answered. “Not dinosaurs?” Buckley asked. And it went like that.
“I’ve made a little hiding place,” said Mr. Harvey.
He stopped and turned to me.
“I don’t see anything,” I said. I was aware that Mr. Harvey was looking at me strangely. I’d had older men look at me that way since I’d lost my baby fat, but they usually didn’t lose their marbles over me
when I was wearing my royal blue parka and yellow elephant bell-bottoms. His glasses were small and round with gold frames, and his eyes looked out over them and at me.
“You should be more observant, Susie,” he said.
I felt like observing my way out of there, but I didn’t. Why didn’t I? Franny said these questions were fruitless: “You didn’t and that’s that. Don’t mull it over. It does no good. You’re dead and you have to
accept it.”

>>4205235
Is anyone reading this thread? Should I go on?

>>4205297
No. The Lovely Bones is teenage girlcore shit for plebs. It's as if you've never posted here before.

>>4205309
>The Lovely Bones is teenage girlcore shit for plebs.
How would you know that if you hadn't read it?

>>4205297
>Narrating from beyond the grave

So pleb, I can't even handle it. You know, except when DFW does it. Then it's OK.

>>4205319
>DFW
who's that?

>>4205325
I rest my case.

>>4205325
0/10. Now you're just being obvious.

Did anyone else hate the ending of this book?

>>4205721
I watched the movie and I don't remember what happened at the end

>>4205745
thanks

>>4205745
Susie became human/alive again just so she could have sex with that guy she liked when she was 13. The guy is now like 20. It was the weirdest ending and that part was worse in the book than the movie.