and the number shall be three

Three things that are true - a meme from Kirsty at Galaxy.

One

Rain fell in the night, quiet and kind. I woke at six with a sense of something looming, the same anxiety I felt before a writing deadline: the inescapable requirement to find something new in myself. Nicola would arrive today. I lay there under the shadow.

Helen Garner, The Spare Room.

Two
In this excerpt from Helen Verity Hewitt's story, 'The Foxhole' in Island 115, Harry is an uncle with Down's Syndrome.

As soon as I could walk, Aunty let me roam around in the bush, so long as Harry was with me. I always called him Harry, I never called him uncle. He always smelt a bit musty, like old horse blankets. He knew the bush inside out, after thirty-odd years of sitting in it, looking at it, probing the dense fibrous bark of the stringybarks and the lichened rocks with his stubby fingers. In spring, he loved tickling the tiny pale pink flowers of the trigger plants with a twig to make them pounce. He was like a greenhood orchid with his bent head, hidden in the kindly bush. (my emphasis)

‘The Foxhole’ won the 2007 Alan Marshall Short Story Award – Local Writers’ Section.

No. 3.

The children of large families hardly ever learn to talk to themselves aloud, that is one of the arts of solitude, but they often keep diaries.

Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower, p.59

Note - Kirsty (hard woman) has set a rule: they must be from fiction. Pretty good rule, when you think about it a bit.

Comments

[LiteraryMinded]

Your choices are wonderful, Genevieve.

[genevieve]

Thanks Ange. I am thinking I will do a nonfiction one sometime. Or poetry.
Best collected slowly - I had already done it when I went back to Kirsty and saw she'd decided it was a fiction meme, so had to leave out some other things.
I wrote down the Fitzgerald when I read it a few months ago.

[ann o'dyne]

If you had a million years to do it in, you couldn't rub out even half the 'Fuck you' signs in the world. It's impossible.
J.D.Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield.

There are just some kind of men who - who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one,
and you can look down the street and see the results.
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Maudie Atkinson.

Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.
Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep, Philip Marlowe.

[genevieve]

OOOH lovely. Thank you!

[ann odyne]

I know that last one is true - a friend had her friend die on top of her. she phoned our other friend, and the 2 of them could not get him dressed. they just. could. not.
the whole thing is a fabulous story that can never be told.

[Kirsty]

Hi Genevieve, It's great that you took this up as a meme and ran with it. Re: the fiction requirement, I was just catching up on the comments at my blog and I've noted that it came about because of my experience of teaching literature to uni students. When you ask them what they like to read, many of them nominate 'true crime' or fantasy. I've nothing against the fantasy, even though it isn't my favourite genre of fiction, but I'm always slightly perplexed by the reasons they give for liking true crime. It nearly always pertains to their sense that they're getting a keen insight into humanity that isn't available in fiction. I guess I think exactly the opposite: that it's in fiction where we most often reflect on fundamental questions of being human.

I enjoyed Ann's three truths too.

[genevieve]

Nice meme, Kirsty. I am not a true crime fan, and prefer to reflect on some of those questions through fiction and poetry.

However I do run into some absurd tales of true life from time to time that one could not invent, or one would be accused of manipulating one's audience shamefully. As Bacon said, '"What is truth?" asked Pilate, jesting, and did not stay for an answer.'
I went to a local school musical last night and had occasion to reflect on these kinds of things once again. Some odd things can happen when you live in the same area for thirty years. The people, the stories, the sights. Uncanny stuff, more Carver-esque than crime though.

[genevieve]

And in that vein, Ann, maybe you should have a go at telling that story of the weight of a man (I know, Kundera has said that before).

[Mark]

What a great post, Gen. A particularly lovely take on the meme theme.

It's great to see the genesis of a meme, rather than just be prodded/tagged after who knows how long it has been circulating online.

By the way, does humming to yourself count? And muttering? Then again, I didn't grow up in a large family.