A Background: Pain Both Sides

Most of my stories (both novels and short stories) have a background or setting that is not included in the story itself, but forms a background to it. I thought I would review some of these stories and provide information where these stories were derived. Today, I will look at a recent story called ‘Pain Both Sides’, kindly published on The Specusphere. I rarely submit elsewhere, as short stories are a small project of mine.

If you haven’t read ‘Pain Both Sides’, then click here. If you have, feel free to read on.

One can clearly read from the story that it is derived from Alice Through the Looking Glass, by Lewis Carroll.That is why the girl’s name is Alice. The name Stephen Bottler is twofold: Stephen is the name of the editor at the Specusphere that I deal with, and Bottler is the second name of a school in my home town in England.

I used the names Mark and Amanda as a play on Mork and Mindy (ie, Mark and ‘Manda) and yes, I know it sounds silly but I do things like that. I wanted them to be unhappy with what they have, yet make it clear that they are not educated enough to think themselves out of their situation.

I used a silver medallion in the story because the novel I am working on has them as well. I finished my last re-draft of the novel on the same day I wrote the short story. Triangles are used because there are three person in this relationship: Mark, Amanda, and Alice. It’s a bit of a play. The fact that Mark remembered the symbol as being on his Grandmother’s gravestone suggests he frequents her site often.

I used the name ‘Woodgate Cemetery’ because I always imagine a cemetery to have either wood or cast iron gates, the latter being a cliché. Another cliché is the use of velvet curtains, especially with vampires. I thought wrapping the mirror up in velvet was good because curtains close out the world, just as the velvet cloth closes out the dimension that the mirror opens.

Some of the writing in the story tries to parallel Mark’s future, ie, I wrote “…weaker leaves from their branches…” to imply that Mark is a weak leaf. I used the word branch rather than tree to fulfil that train of thought.

Pushing the velvet curtain idea, when Mark arrived at the address from the bracelet, the windows were black. Why were they black? Even an abandoned house doesn’t have black windows. Why? Somebody blacked them out. Was it his grandfather, and why?

Alice is waiting for him. For how long? Who knows. Alice is standing in a field of buttercups because I wanted to portray how innocent she is without telling the audience. Buttercups had the effect I wanted, instead of poppies or sunflowers. Now, when they converse, it appears that Alice already knows that Mark is unhappy because she can make him ‘happier’. What if his grandfather had forewarned Alice that Mark would come to her?

The medallion, or coin, is the key to shifting between worlds and when Mark drops it, inadvertently, the portal – being the mirror – closes, splitting him into two distinct pieces, one in this world and one in Alice’s world. Yet she is not upset. She asks if he knows Stephen Bottler ‘in a soft voice’. The part about Mark being a ‘mirror image’ was a simple joke I wanted to put in.

Alice is unemotional, and as Mark dies, he realises one important fact of life: it doesn’t matter what you haven’t got. It is what you have that counts.

There are a sequence of complex issues Mark has to deal with before he dies. The moral of the story is that we are all seeking something, but sometimes, what we are seeking, is not what we are looking for. Simply by looking into the mirror, we already have everything we need. We need not go beyond what is already obvious and in front of us, regardless of our appreciation for it.