Johnson Decree Number Thirty-Seven

By Elana Faryll

Since her small towns beauty pageant began years ago, every female in Geena Johnsons family has won and the quirky inhabitants believe this winning streak to be the sole reason why their town flourishes. Now, it is Geenas turn but the youngest member of the prestigious Johnson clan absolutely refuses to compete. Geena soon realizes, however, that the more she works to get herself expelled from the pageant, the more everyone tries to keep her in it. Yet, after gathering her own group of misfit helpers, Geena defiantly vows to change destiny.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 22, 2009
• ISBN: 9781462839117

Elana Faryll

This is the first novel for Elana Faryll, the author’s pseudonym. The novel was a semi-finalist for a work-in-progress in the 2003 William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Award. The author also received a Samuel Goldwyn Writing Award in 2000 for another work. In addition to novels, she writes screenplays, short stories, stage plays and poetry. She holds an M.A. and an M.F.A. from The U.C.L.A. School of Theater, Film and Television. She is currently a medical student.

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Copyright © 2009 by Elana Faryll.

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Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

This book is dedicated to my family: my mother, father, sister and brother and my true friends who have always stood by me.

Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul. W. Somerset Maugham.

Listen with your soul, surprised and happy to be freed from a little of its shadow, to the charm of four mingled notes… Four luminous notes that talent gives to those who know how to be joyful enough, believing enough, sincere enough, strong enough… to be happy. [These people] whom destiny marks for the eternal mass of infinite love, form only a very small chapel of brightness, in space and time. Louis-Ferdinand Celine, The Life and Work of Philippe Ignace Semmelweis.

Wild Child, full of grace, savior of the human race. Wild Child, The doors.

CHAPTER ONE

Life was going along just fine. I mean, considering my familial situation of utter and complete lunacy, everything was as close to tolerable as I had ever known it until I dropped a bomb on them that, unfortunately, their small town minds deemed less than acceptable. And when I say small town, I mean small town: Arkansas, Indiana. Total population—three thousand, total IQ—three. If I had to put money on it, I’d say the extremely low brain capacity began with our town’s founder. Setting out for Arkansas (no one truly knows why), he believed that he had indeed reached his intended destination and, subsequently, named it as such. He didn’t find out he was wrong, however, until six months later, but by then had already established himself and his equally moronic family there. Nevertheless, he really didn’t feel badly about it and proudly hailed himself as the next Mr. Christopher Columbus.

Years went by and Arkansas slowly grew, all the while desperately trying to make a name for itself while the world, for good reason, just basically passed it by. At one point, several of the town’s most prominent citizens showed up outside state assembly offices demanding that Arkansas appear larger on the Indiana map. Not only were they turned down flat, but the Indiana state officials held a vote to take the name off altogether, only losing by the narrow margin of 15-13. Our townspeople were somewhat appeased, however, when one state official pointed out the actual state of Arkansas on a map and, upon seeing how big it was, they all nodded their heads with decisive approval. It was only when they came back to town that they realized the true error of their ways. Yet even though they were the ones to confuse the real Arkansas with their joke of a town, they still resolved not to waste any more time on those complete idiots at the capital.

Due to this, and the fact that the Indiana state board had hurriedly erected make-shift roadblocks to prevent anyone hailing from Arkansas from ever leaving its immediate vicinity again, the town was pretty much reduced to the task of glorifying themselves. Thus, The Spring Parade Pageant was born—the town’s attempt to find something about itself to actually celebrate.

Basically, the Pageant involved a bunch of insecure and incredibly un-talented girls battling it out on stage in order to possess a trophy of questionable worth and even more questionable taste. Competition was fierce and families have not been above cheating, bribing and, sometimes, faking a good old-fashioned seizure. Most girls began their training when they were in diapers and usually didn’t stop until they were back in them again, seventy years later. In a nutshell, you learned an entire show-tune repertoire by the age of five, were introduced to the art of hair accessories art of make-up by ten and, by fifteen, were thoroughly steeped in the wonderful and often mysterious world of make-up. Unfortunately, they never really learned to get it right and you’ll have to trust me when I say it’s not a pretty sight—by the time they finally make it up on stage, most of the girls end up looking like frazzled raccoons in dresses.

But I guess that really didn’t seem to bother anybody because before you could bat an eye, the pageant had grown by leaps and bounds until it eventually became the very focal point of Arkansas. Consequently, by 1962, the citizens were actually able to come up with something about the town which they could boast about: just on our outskirts, stands a bright, gilded plaque which proudly reads: ‘Arkansas, Indiana: All of our Spring Parade Pageant Winners hail from here.’ Although it is our crowning achievement, more than half of the town’s citizens still get the slogan wrong on the annual history test for graduating seniors. And, while many a field trip to the sign has prompted scores to rise, as our Mayor says, we still have a long way to go.

As you can imagine, boys have always been considered absolutely worthless in Arkansas and deemed necessary solely for the stunning privilege of producing future Spring Parade Pageant contestants. In fact, rumor has it that one unfortunate family which had ten sons in a row actually became desperate enough to attempt to pass off their ninth as a girl in the pageant, thus creating a life of serious confusion for both the boy and one of the male judges who had fallen hopelessly in love with him. But, regardless of such incidents and others which have been mercifully swept under the proverbial carpet, the Pageant continues on, permeating the entire questionable consciousness of our town and continuing to exaggerate both the beauty of the girls and the importance of Arkansas.

Yet, it almost seems pointless for others to enter as, since its inception, every Spring Parade Pageant winner has been a member of the Johnson family—my family, and if I need to explain just how prestigious this is, you haven’t been listening to a word I’ve been saying. But I was about to end this rather embarrassing family honor, for I, Geena ‘Spring Parade Pageant Winner’ Johnson, the last female on my diseased-ridden tree (although my cousin Herman is debatable) was absolutely, positively and definitively not going to compete. And if you can’t believe this will be easy for me to get out of, you surely won’t believe that my middle name is actually ‘Spring Parade Pageant Winner.’

I guess there is never really the right moment to spring something like this, but I figured the sooner the better. So, I marched out of my room, down the stairs and into the living room. There it was: our shrine to the Spring Parade Pageant. Shelves upon shelves were packed full of trophies, dried flowers and perfectly dreadful-looking crowns. Everywhere I looked, goofy-looking photographs of previous winners gawked at me from behind meticulously framed mountings that plastered the length of our wall. Beneath those were sketches that had been lovingly drawn in the days before photography (which Arkansonians maintain was invented solely to capture the beauty and majestic grace of the pageant on film). And beneath those sat an even older set of relics: my family—Mom, Dad and Grandma, as if worshippers at the altar of a sanctuary.

Trying my best to ignore the vicious assault on my senses (including the obnoxious pageant music that was blaring from the record player), I cleared my throat and finally got their attention. They all stared up at me, a look of pure un-conditional love in their eyes—or maybe it was a win this pageant or die look. In my family, the two of these were very often interchangeable.

Hi everyone, I announced, Listen, I’m not going to compete in that stupid, idiotic pageant, okay? See ya.

The record player skipped a beat and everyone just looked up at me and stared. Then, like a scene from a bad accident, everything appeared to be happening in slow motion but, then again, with my tragically boring life, everything usually did.

Grandma lunged towards Mom, grabbing for her arm.

What did she say? Grandma pleaded. She didn’t say that, did she? Tell me she didn’t say it! Tell me she didn’t say it! She then passed out.

Mom teetered on both the edge of her chair and her sanity and proceeded to drop the jell-o mold she had just made with care. And Dad, well, Dad merely looked up and grunted. After all was said and done, I bounced back up the stairs and retreated to my room. There, that wasn’t so bad… The neighbors had to call the cops an hour later.

Within days, my family had taken to full denial mode. I guess pretending they didn’t hear me was really the only thing they could do. Grandma eventually regained consciousness, Dad grunted a few more times and Mom just went back to making jell-o molds. Everything was status quo. After all, as Mom put it, this is the Spring Parade Pageant we’re talking about. Tradition was tradition. What would our town founder think?

The very idea of our town founder thinking about anything was humorous enough for me, but I doubted that anyone else would agree and, looking back on it, I turned out to be more than a little correct. Unfortunately, I didn’t even know the half of it yet.

See, my family was one thing, school was definitely another. Despite every effort to the contrary, I was the official high school celebrity. Girls with two-syllable names that rhymed like Kiki, Mimi and Didi were always trying to befriend me. I’m not sure if it was because they wanted to be the best friend of a Spring Parade Pageant Winner or if they were just trying to find out what secrets my family had. But except for Uncle Elmo’s doll collection we had very little, and that’s just about the amount of interest I had in befriending them. Besides, I figured what went on in Uncle Elmo’s basement at night was his business, and I didn’t want any girls with two-syllable rhyming names getting into mine.

Thus, I needed to take the appropriate action and had prepared accordingly. But just as I was about to put my plan into motion, Richard Ganglion slithered up to me in his usual slimy fashion. If there is only one word I could use to describe Richard it would be this: worm. He is the complete epitome of one. I found that out last year when we were dissecting one in biology class. I kept looking from it to Richard and then back again until the realization suddenly hit me—they were one and the same.

Unfortunately, Richard was completely obsessed with me and I can’t chalk this up to anything but pure, unadulterated stupidity. Yet, even with his limited amount of brain cells he somehow managed to figure out how to use a telephone and began a hopelessly inane daily ritual of calling me. I don’t know why he did it really, I mean, he never let me get a word in edgewise. He just went on and on about dirt and something about tunneling to the center of the earth.

Eventually, my mother finally shouted at him to stop calling us or else, which Richard turned into as many horrible things as his worm-like mind could think of. And although he did cut down on the amount of calls for a while, he eventually