This is an english assignment i had, to create a character who relied on his environment for his characters shaping. You may like it, may not, but i thought it was really fun!


Sitting on a stool, waiting beside his stove, McDonough sighs out to the window fogging it up, on a rainy day. He’s an old man, with grooves worked days into his palms, and sweat sunken in to the grips of his mop. He works it everyday, throwing his body around, no one ever gets the halls dirty anymore, but he still does it. He uses the same brand of cleaner every time: Comet “goes on nice, smooth like ice” is written on the peeled side of the canister. The chicken noodle soup finally warms on the single heater stove, and his hands clench around the metal bowl, the kind of bowl a dog eats out of. It pours down smooth and hot, burning his throat, setting him warm. He chugs it, like he is in some sort of hurry. The tears of steam go on to his face, and it feels warm. He wipes it off with a hand that looks dead, caked with dried skin.
McDonough drops the bowl into his tin sink, and looks around the place. It’s unlit. There are no lights. It’s still day-time out, but the sun is clouded over and the room looks pale blue, weak, faint, and sad. “Might as well get to work!” he says. The room has been filled with that sentence for over 8 years of miserable solitude, since the school closed. The words slouch reluctantly towards the walls but speed back at him like hell-hounds. It seems too loud. He could still hear his words pounding down the halls of the science wing, dispersing into the clammy cracks in the floor, to the concrete base, dripping through to the tear-soaked earth and then muted. He grabbed his mop and bucket and went out into the pale blue halls, plunked his bucket down and sniffed that “burn half your brain in a second” smell, he had come to recognize as home for the last 8 years; Comet.
He sloshes it around in the purple water, wet, cold, and ready for action. It smacks down onto the untarnished tiled floor like slab of meat, a brief smack, but a loud one. It was a little bit too loud though. When sounds were made in that building, it proved that McDonough could still hear. That there were no heavy rays beating down on screaming young’uns, no chalk scraping across the black board, clapping sneakers. It proved that the silence was real, that he was terribly alone. In the cold pale blue light he stood silently washing the floor with his Comet and his mop.

I'm rather proficient in the industrial mop area and while some of your ideas are pretty cool there's some that just don't jive. First thing I'm not sure about is whether it's "legal" to use Comet since it is a trademarked name. Since it isn't for a monetary gain it might be perfectly fine. I mention it more as a caution. For actual mopping, I can't think of any Comet product that's that color. Any I've had experience with has been white and is a pain in the butt to rinse off anything. It could be a product I don't know about, too.

I liked the sound of the mop compared to meat. That was right on. The burn your brain thing reminded me of the girl at Strawberry's house in "Up In Smoke" when she snorts a line of Comet and makes all sorts of weird noises enjoying her buzz. So that made me smile.

The soup stuff was pretty cool in showing his loneliness and yet all the familiarity that he's done this same routine for so long.

As far as the structure, in the beginning you might have a few too many commas there. At least to me there was. Maybe a little compression of some of those ideas might make it less cut up there. It was later on in the piece, but the first part did.

I thought this was a pretty cool thing to do. I could see the character and his actions, but maybe that's because I was a mop slinger at one time, too. Squeaky wheels and all.

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hmm...

Comet is blue we use to wash cars with it at my part time job when people pissed us off ahh the sratches that shit leaves.....and as for his paper its perfectly legal....

wo0t

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as for purple water i meant cuz it was always dirty

He use purple power?

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Okay. I gotcha now. Yeah, that water could be a variety of colors, but a grey-purple would be feasible.

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