Mom's Cousin Lenna the Lunatic - Day 594: 5 Minute Freewrite: Prompt: not normal

carolkean (66)in #freewrite • 5 years ago

It was not normal to keep a dead cat

in the house for decades, a mummified cat, yes, dessicated and sanitized, but creepy and no longer even remotely like the grand old cat it once was: Marlin, the horse-riding ginger tom.

Just once, Lenna had posed Marlin like this,

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but it lasted only long enough for the one photo, faded and blurry even in its prime, typical of a 1970s Polaroid. In reality, Marlin looked more like this, especially after he'd passsed his fifteenth year for sure (he could have been twenty by then for all anyone knew):

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Mom's cousin Lenna would send us these snapshots with her annual Christmas card, along with the exhortation to mail them back please and thanks. Sometimes Mom would photograph the Polaroids and send copies to Lenna, but most of the time she'd just say, "That Lenna always was a little different. By which I mean clinically insane."

Mom wasn't exactly "normal" or rational herself. Nice mothers wouldn't allow their only daughter to be branded with a name as unfortunate as Lenna's son. Rory Runyan, he's a fun one, reeks like a gory onion, the other cousins would tease. They got their mean streak from Mom's mother, Grandma Gleason. Talk about your little tart. She scored points with the grandsons by telling them how they taunted Henry Meyer in grade school: Meyer, Meyer, shit in the fire; the fire's too hot, so shit in the pot.

Everything is the mother's fault,

they say, and the grandmother's--but really, where were the men? Fathers and husbands got off the hook too easy. Consider this: Her own name was DeLorean. Not Delores. And not for the car, which (duh!)didn't even hit the market until twenty years after she was born, but for Dad's grandma's maiden name. Everyone just assumed she was named for a stainless-steel gull-wing sports car designed by a man who at the height of his fame and fortune was caught in a drug-trafficking sting operation. News footage showed John DeLorean holding a bag of cocaine saying it was “better than gold.”

The car was awesome, and DeLorean knew she ought to own one, but where would she get the money?

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A woman named DeLorean had to be awesome, right? Well, Dwayne was the only man to pursue her relentlessly and persuade her to marry him. Nobody else wanted to be saddled with a spunky little woman, by which they always meant "bitch," or bossy, or too hot to handle.

That little tart, Delorean (Mom's label for her --"just like that little tart Lenna") --was never tart as in sleazy or promiscuous. Just, she was not a hundred percent sugar and spice and everything nice. DeLorean Gustafson came with snips and snails and puppy dog tails. Until she became Mrs. Dwayne DeWitt.

Dwayne and DeLorean DeWitt. It sounded like a punchline to a lame joke from a half-wit.

Not Normal

was the story of her life, but Sandy said a person could "change the narrative" of her life. Sandy, that prying nurse who should be fired for bugging her at church, not just at Dr. Shandler's office, violating all those privacy laws, asking too many questions. Yes, DeLorean DeWitt got those bruises when Dwayne slammed her head against the window after smashing their GPS, but it was none of Sandy's business. Books like "Smart Women, Foolish Choices" made it sound so easy to just say "enough, already" and reclaim a life that was set in gold with "until death us do part."

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The old minivan, now hastily painted burgundy, carried her on the road to" Lenna, the little tart," whose mummified cat was not anyone's first clue that she would later be known as Lenna the Lunatic.

DeLorean DeWitt should have known better, but Sandy had driven her to this decision. The cat was really more of a "manifestation," Sandy might say, as opposed to a "catalyst," ha ha, for Lenna's hermitude and lunacy.

She checked her purse for her pistol as the landscape shifted to dry sand and red rock.

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This is an ongoing freewrite,

inspired in part by @Felt.buzz and his clever series using the daily prompts. I'm freewriting these daily posts, not composing the way I would if I had set out to write a novel or novella. They read like backstory because that's what this amounts to: backstory, "info-dump," telling versus showing. I set out with the knowledge that the heroine's "present predicament" began with a cat, but as her story unfolds, the reader gleans that it goes back a lot farther than that.

I'm working my way toward this cat mummy, and what all it engendered, and how this becomes part of a present predicament. Frame story? That's a device I never cared much for. And yet it arose in my response to the "tart" prompt.

This may or may not be part of the same story that began with a woman on the run ("Danny's mom, Laura Jensen," she lied). But hey, these are freewrites, and if I piece them together eventually in one document, who's to say which scene will be the opening?

Thank you for reading and commenting!

As writers, we all know how hard it is to find time to write AND to read other people's freewrites. And books. And novels. And tweets. And, and, and....

Part One: She Came in through the Kitchen Window - Day 577: 5 Minute Freewrite: Monday - Prompt: window

Part Two: "You Little Tart" - Day 585: 5 Minute Freewrite: Tuesday - Prompt: tart

Part Three: Day 588: 5 Minute Freewrite: Friday - Prompt: rodeo
https://steemit.com/freewrite/@mariannewest/day-588-5-minute-freewrite-friday-prompt-rodeo

Part Four: Mom's Cousin Lenna the Tart - Part 3 or 4 -Day 591: 5 Minute Freewrite: Monday - Prompt: Rule

Part Five: [Mom's Cousin Lenna the Lunatic](