Like Looking at Your Sister Bending Over in the Produce Aisle

In a recent class, I was asked to write two scenes, each describing the same accident from the point of view (POV) of different characters. I’m going to share with you what I wrote and try to explain the lessons I came away with. Oh, and I’m going to tell you an awkward story where I find myself looking in the wrong way at the wrong woman. 

Here is the first of those two scenes. Keep in mind the assignment was to write them each in 200 hundred words or less, which explains the lack of detail.

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“Shit, here comes those assholes again,” Steph said.

She was pointing across the intersection, where two teenagers on BMXs were coming fast down the sidewalk.

I looked over in time to see the one in the lead veer around some dude in a red sweatshirt and slam, with a thud, into the passenger side of a silver Buick making a left turn. The kid went across the roof of the car with his arms extended like he was trying to fly and then dropped down, out of sight, on the driver’s side.

The Buick pulled forward, dragging the bike, now wedged in front of its rear tire, across the concrete. The scraping roused the kid, who I assumed was pretty badly injured. He popped up, ran around the back of the car, and immediately threw his hands in the air and dropped to his knees. He let out a mournful “My bike” and slumped forward into a sloppy child’s pose.

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This scene describes an accident I witnessed. It’s told in the way I would tell it to you if we were having a beer together. It’s a little shorter in written form, although I think the one you would get at the bar would be better.

Now, on to the awkward part.

I’m aware I married up. Way up. Trena is attractive and intelligent and so far out of my league that I can offer you no explanation as to why she wants to spend her life with me. Strangely, that doesn’t get in the way of me noticing a pretty girl every once in a while.

So, a few months back, I was coming to take Trena to lunch. It was bright outside, and the door to the mailroom, downstairs from her office, was reflecting a lot of glare. Inside the door was a woman, an attractive woman, tall, with long hair and a pretty dress, who, through the glare, I didn’t recognize.

I noticed her, if you know what I mean.

And I’ll be a son-of-a-bitch if when I pulled open the door, it wasn’t Steph. Steph and I have been friends for close to twenty years. We worked in a truck together cleaning biohazards, sewer losses, and a bunch of other disgusting things. Dealing with all that nasty shit made us family. She’s my sister.

So, here’s that second scene.

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Val was going to be late. She was thinking there was nothing to be done about it when a hole opened up in the left turn lane. She hit the gas, swerved into the opening, and started to make the turn off Calhoun onto Barry. Maybe she could make it on time or at least be close enough not to get fired.

She smiled at a cute guy on the corner in an IU sweatshirt. Thump. The car lurched, and she slammed on the brake. It felt like something hit the passenger side. A weird kind of rumpling sound moved across the roof. There was a bike on the ground in the sideview mirror.

Her stomach wrapped up in a knot. “Fuck,” she said. No license, no insurance, I’m going to jail, she thought. The car pulled forward. Her foot was on the accelerator. Something dragged, and in the mirror, she could see the mangled tire of the bike protruding from the rear wheel well.

“My bike,” someone said, or rather someone wailed. There was a body face down with its knees pulled up beneath it on the street beside the car.

“Mother fucker,” she said and put her forehead on the steering wheel.

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Admittedly, there’s not much depth to either of these scenes, but the second, because Val is intimately involved in the accident, offers more information. We know she had no license or insurance; we know she was scared and probably trying to leave.      

The red sweatshirt guy is just seen as an obstacle by the unnamed narrator in the first while Val, noticing him, tells us something about her. Or, actually, we can infer something about her. That she was trying to pull away gives insight into her state of mind.

Even though the second scene is told in the third person, our view of the world outside the car is limited to what can be seen in the mirrors. This puts us, and Val, in a position where we don’t know exactly what’s happening. We have some idea, but it’s not as clear as it is in the first.

The limited perspective makes the scene work harder.

Getting back to my awkward story.

I’m loath to admit it, but Steph isn't too hard to look at. If we’d been in different places twenty years ago, I might have taken a run at her. But now, after all of the disgusting things we’ve been through together, if she has lady parts at all, I don’t want to know they’re there.

To make things weird for the both of us, because it’s no fun if it is just weird for me, I told her what I had been thinking. Well, not exactly, but enough that she got the gist. She said, “It’s like realizing you’re staring at your sister bent over in the produce aisle.” Writing that down makes me wonder if, at some point, Steph found herself staring at her sister bent over in the produce aisle. I guess that’s a question for another time.

Anyway, thinking about that good-looking woman standing there in the mailroom makes it clear that changing POV is more than just changing the camera angle. It is more than just changing what the character sees. You have to change how those things are understood through the lens of that character’s life.