Exercise on Story

This is something I wrote for my creative writing course, "Recall an experience that changed you. Write about it with a traditional opening of a story"

Let me tell you a story. It ends in a cold doctors’ office in the Royal South Hants Hospital, and it begins that very morning at a toy shop. A toy shop that my mother and father had taken me around and where two new dolls had been presented to me afterwards for my entertainment. This was the first thing about my life that changed on this particular day. I had been on at my parents for months to be given a doll like these, for these weren’t just any dolls, but dolls on which you could draw your own face, change their hair, their clothes, even the designs on their clothes! Ever since I had seen them advertised on TV they had been the objects of my desire. I named them Mary-Kate and Ashley after the two twins from the television that my best friend and I had idolised.

Anyway, I don’t really remember how we got from the toy shop to the dark office in the hospital, belonging to a Dr. Weedon, but that was where the day, and life as I knew it, ended.

As a six year-old, the conversation that Dr. Weedon was having with my parents didn't interest me in the slightest. I was hearing everything that was being said, but I took much more delight in giving my new dolls names and walking them backwards and forwards across the floor, pretending that the rainy city I could see through the floor to ceiling window was not, in fact, boring, rainy Southampton but the sunny and exciting LA where my two dolls lived. I dreamt up cars and parties and shops for them, everyone wanted to be their friend and they had everything they wanted.  I enjoyed colouring in stamps with different eyes and lips on in different colours and carefully pressing them against their blank faces, too much to care about the adults’ conversation. The excitement of changing their hair colours to long, purple hair with pink streaks to short blue hair took up all of my attention.

I was happy in my ignorance. I knew my dad was ill, but still, I was happy. But then the doctor used a word I knew to be bad. I didn't know what it meant but I knew no one liked this word. From here on, our old lives would be over. This is what Dr. Weedon said to my mother and to my father:

“I'm sorry to tell you this, Mr Curtis, but you have cancer.”