First Nonfiction Workshop Exercise (which took me many hours to write, sadly)

The assignment was to write two different paragraphs that deal with different kinds of "urgency."

I remember a story my parents told me once.  I was their first child; my mother had three children before she turned twenty-seven.  The story was: my mother birthed me, my parents brought me home from the hospital and put me down on a blanket laid on the ground of an empty room.  The window was a circle and morning had just quit.  They just stared at me.  Then they looked at one another.  Then they looked at me.  I never asked them what happened next.

*       *       *

Emily woke up between two and four a.m. after a long flight from Seoul during which she had drunk an inordinate amount of green tea out of paranoia for which she was sorry for now.  She had to urinate.  Emily lived in a three bedroom apartment where everyone had her own quarters but shared one bathroom, like the three Graeae sisters and their one eye.  Unfortunately, the one roommate who believed in dating had a boyfriend and he was sleeping over that night.  And he was showering in the bathroom, had been in the bathroom for at least one hour and thirty minutes.  He also lived on the same floor of the same building no more than three doors down from Emily and her roommates’ apartment.  Like any survivor in the wild, Emily did what any woman would have done.  She went straight to the kitchen and peed into a cereal bowl.