Neighborhood Fiction

Okay, so here's my neighborhood fiction draft. Still no title as yet...



     It was a beautiful summer morning. Clouds raced across the sky, and the wind rustled the trees in a pleasing manner, making a sort of swishing noise that made it plain to everyone that it truly WAS summer. And in Chicago, it's nice to have a confirmation of that. People were flocking to the Bucktown Arts Fest to look at tons of art, walk around, and listen to cover bands. I had walked over there early in the morning, at about 8-ish, and on the way there I noticed their bandstand taking up a whole sidewalk, with chairs littered all over the street, about 90 of them, almost all of them empty but for a few, mainly filled with jaded people looking for an escape from the crowd crush that existed even THAT early in the morning. I was sitting on a step in front of my house, reflecting on this, feeling the  gentle warmth of the sun, drinking in the swishing noise of the trees.

     Thus, I failed to notice the small wooden table making its way out of the door. I also failed to notice my sister was carrying it until she set it down with a jarring noise that made my head swivel in her direction.

     In order for you to understand why my sister was pushing a table out in front of the house, I need to explain something. See, my sister, (her name's Isa, by the way) had gotten into a Tinkerbell thing. Don't ask me how, because we hadn't rented Peter Pan at all, and we didn't have Disney Channel (or even cable) up until February, so I don't quite know how that happened. Come to think about it, there were a lot of commercials for some stupid Tinkerbell movie, but that's not the point. The point is that she was desperate to get a Tinkerbell costume for Halloween. I thought that spending $90 on a costume was a little outrageous, because it's a single-use item and she would outgrow it, but my parents decided to pay half if she paid half (the same deal that got me this shiny new MacBook Pro that I'm writing this story on, but I digress) in any case, she came up with the idea of the lemonade stand.

   The stand was to be positioned in front of the house, which was on a prime route to the Art Fest, so that many people would be coming through the area. You could tell that people had had the same idea for yard sales, because suddenly every other house had a sign for a yard sale. One even had a table full of stuff with a "free crap" sign on it.

    My sister had already made the lemonade, and was serving it to customers, when we spotted the first potential difficulty: another lemonade stand had sprouted like a toadstool across the street and around the corner from us, near the church. They had also placed chalk lines up and down the block, pointing to their lemonade stand. they had even put one on our stand while we were eating and not paying attention. My sister decided to take a bucket of water and slop it over all of the chalk arrows.

    I had decided about then that I was going to go and check out some of the garage/yard sale going   on, so I trekked around the neighborhood. There were a variety of yard sales that caught  my eye, but I was broke and had just had my birthday, so i couldn't beg for stuff as an early birthday gift. There was a DVR, several cool-looking mirrors and such, cookware, an office chair, and I think there were some videogames, though I can't be sure. It was later in the day when I returned to the stand, and I found Isa had another problem: cookies.

   See, the kids nearby had rolled out cookies, and were handing them out with every purchase of lemonade, or selling them individually. They had also raised the price of lemonade somewhat. However, their jacking up of the prices didn't matter, because people wanted the cookies. So Isa decided to use the power of advertising. She had downloaded Tux Paint, a free program for drawing featuring the Linux penguin as its mascot. She mad a sign saying "Isa's lemonade stand" with a picture of lemonade being poured into a glass. And of course, she had me hang them all up around the block.

   Advertising helped bring in some money, because it cost us nothing thanks to our laser printer. People saw the signs, and I like to think that that spurred them to go and buy my sister's lemonade. Eventually, she raised the $45 she needed, even though I took a cut for helping her with the lemonade. The neighbors probably got the same Isa did, though I forgot who they were, if I ever knew. The costume is probably sitting in the closets somewhere, forlorn and forgotten, a remnant of the halcyon days past, when our lives were worry-free. Even to this day, the Bucktown Art fair brings back vivid memories of the lemonade stand, and I sit and reminisce about the days gone by.

-- Noah

Word of the Week:

metonymy
n. - figurative use of a word for another closely associated with it, especially of attribute for its subject (as the crown for the sovereign or monarchy). metonymical, mentonymous, adj.