Sleepfulness.

A few weeks ago, celebrity blogger Charles LaFave joined Justin and me in doing some serious character sketching.
I was pretty sleepy then; so sleepy, in fact, that I've been sleeping ever since we did these sketches and haven't been able to post them.

I also slept through the Dorothy Allison interview (this is a fact).

Standard sketch rules applied: 15 minutes a piece, each character was chosen by one writer for another, and no editing allowed.

Charles' Sketch

I wore the largest pink sweater I have. Joshua sat across from me, eating the Fountain of Chocolate Bundt Cake. Hot fudge was spouting from it like a volcano.

I sipped a scalding cup of house coffee, doctored with skim milk and Equal. Sumatra, bold flavor.

Joshua drooled chocolate, decadent rivulets down his chin that he caught with his tiny fingers. He sucked them clean. His palms glistened with saliva. He used his lower teeth like a rake to collect the residue.

The coffee was so hot it burned, and I could only sip and scald and blow through the tiny opening to cool it, making a hollow note like I was playing a jug.

His entire face is sticky and sweet like a candied apple. He smeared his fingers across the plate leaving only a light brown film. He dropped his thumb on chocolate crumbs, smashing them and collecting them in one bunch that he deftly licked away flicking his tongue across his thumbnail.

He clicked and popped to free bits from his teeth.

It was Tuesday. I had lost four invisible pounds. A process of Spartan starvation had resulted in my losing something as insubstantial as a chess game or a penny.

Justin's Sketch

Armando Sergi didn’t have any friends to hang out with on the weekend, but he definitely didn’t want to be at the library. He hated chemistry, and his father made him spend his weekends at the library studying. He didn’t study though. He drew instead. Sometimes he sketched pictures of ball players, houses burning, and cops being shot by gangsters. Mostly, though, he drew pictures of women. He drew the head librarian naked putting books away. He drew Sharon, the sophomore who volunteered in the children’s section, taking a bath in the drinking fountain. He hated the library; it was too quiet. Once he threw the stool by the reference desk down the stairs, then hid in the newspaper room for an hour.
He pretended his calculator was a phone, and had loud, obnoxious conversations until some red-faced nerd told him to can it.
Armando always planned to tell his father off, then run away and join gang—anything—but every time his father told him it was time to go to the library, Armando hung his head and agreed.

Phillip's Sketch

Chuck Singleton was content with what life had given him: a good job, a good house, a good woman. There was really only one thing he felt like life had shorted him on: a good story.

Sure, he had the story about his limp. People liked to ask about that. But there wasn't a story there. He'd just been doing a job, fell off the scaffold, and about shattered his leg. Not much to it, really.
He tried to embellish it, but people always caught on. It's hard to make a story about falling off a scaffold any good.
For a while, he tried to make up other stories, though; he even said he'd been in a war.

That didn't last long. He didn't know much about war.

Still. He tried. Each day of his life became an epic, dictated to the imaginary typist in his head. Every step became a journey. every word a wisdom, and every day, he was a hero.