30 Day Writing Challenge: Day 28
THE CHAIR
Tara finishes a paper and has Sam proofread it.
“Hey, Sam?!” Tara shouted from her desk in her room.
“Yeah?!”
“Can you come here?!” she answered, leaning back into her chair and arching her back to stretch the stiffness in it. She heard her sister’s footsteps come down the hallway and glanced over to her open door, where her figure soon appeared.
“What do you need?” Sam asked.
Her sister nodded to her laptop that sat glowing on her desk. “I finished my paper. Can you read over it for me?”
She nodded and came into the room to make her way to the desk, “Sure.” When Tara got up, she sat down and reviewed the layout. “When is this due?”
“Tonight, at midnight.”
“You realize that’s in 10 minutes, right?” Sam’s gaze broke away from the screen to glare at her. “Why did you wait so long to write it?”
The other rolled her eyes, “Because that was the most boring prompt ever! Just be glad I even made an effort to complete it. I was tempted to just turn in my outline.” She stretched her arms above her head with a gratified groan. “It’s not that long, it’ll probably take you, like, 5 minutes.” When she was answered with a scoff, she dismissed herself to let her paper be proof-read accordingly. “I’m going to get water now. Correct any grammar mistakes you see, because I’m sick of looking at it.”
Sam spent the next few minutes reading and making minor edits to her little sister’s essay, until she came back in.
Tara placed her water cup down and looked over her shoulder to monitor where she was at. “You’re only this far?” She was surprised.
“Grammar isn’t exactly your strong suit, Tara,” was the flat reply.
The younger Carpenter just huffed and moved to nudge the propped arm that Sam was leaning her head against. When she earned a confused look, she took it upon herself to briefly explain. “Move. I wanna sit with you,” she ordered.
Sam glanced down to the single-person chair, and then looked back up at her. “Uh, this chair’s for one person?”
“That’s fine.” Tara’s invited herself to slip between the occupied seat and the desk to sit down on her lap. “I’m small, so you can just hold me.” She grabbed her cup and took another sip, trying to hide the amused smile pulling at her lips while her big sister blinked at her.
“Are you serious?”
“Mm-hmm.” She nodded and put the cup back down on the desk. “Absolutely. Now, quit staring at me and stare at my paper, yeah?” she playfully reached behind to poke her side.
Sam smirked and rolled her eyes. “Hey, I’m the one doing you a favor, remember?” she teased and returned the prod. “I could make you read over it yourself.”
Her little sister snickered and twisted away at the contact. “Nooo, I’m too tired to do it myself,” she whined, dramatically.
Again, her sibling scoffed and shook her head, letting Tara lean back into her, to which she rested her chin on her shoulder to continue reading.
While she did so, Tara took the arm that wasn’t controlling the mouse and guided it over her torso to hold her in place. She tilted her head, studying the skin of her sister’s forearm. “Have you ever thought about getting a tattoo?”
“Mm– not really,” came the quick answer.
She began tracing random drawings and designs on her arm, continuing to space-off into the idea. “We should get matching tattoos. We could do, like, matching emojis, or each other’s birthdays, or our initials. Ooh, or what about a knife and phone—”
“Tara, I have 4 minutes to read this,” Samantha cut in. “I can’t focus when you’re talking.”
“Sorry.”
The younger Carpenter sighed and tilted her head back to stare at the ceiling. As she blinked at the shadows from the popcorn detail, she listened to the sound of Sam’s steady breathing and the occasional clicking of the mouse and keyboard. Then, she shifted herself to the side, draping her legs over the other’s and holding onto her neck, like she used to do as a kid. Sam shifted a little but didn’t seem to mind, which allowed her to nuzzle her head into the crook of her neck to watch the screen with weary eyes. “You’re almost done,” she pointed out, “This is the last paragraph before the conclusion.” When she wasn’t answered in any way, she asked, “Am I heavy?”
This got her a response. “No,” her older sister shook her head, the arm around the other’s waist pulling tighter to hold her close. She knew whenever Tara was tired, she became clingy and seemed to regress into her pre-adolescent behaviors—when she’d want her attention and affection. She never minded, though.
“But heavier than when we were little, right?”
Still, the older Carpenter denied it, “Nope.” She scrolled down the screen to move on to the conclusion. “Never has there ever been a time when I couldn’t hold you.”
This made Tara chuckle. “You say that like you think it’ll be that way forever.”
“It will be. I’d hold you no matter what, my love.”
“Even if I told you not to?” she tested.
“Yep.”
“Even if I yelled at you and made you cry?”
“Mm-hmm.”
And then her challenges started to become darker.
“Even if your arms were broken?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Even if the world was falling down around us?”
“No matter what.”
“‘Forget the world, there’s just us,’ right?”
Sam finished reading her sister’s essay and looked away from the screen to kiss her head. “Mm-hmm. That’s right.”
Tara then lightened the mood. “You’re so drama-coded, Sammy,” she teased.
“You’re the one who climbed in my lap, because you wanted my attention,” she countered.
The other turned her face to hide it in her sister’s shirt. “How do you know?”
She chuckled. “It was the chair, Tara…”
Because the chair was only meant for one person to sit in it, Tara chose to sit on her lap.
“It was the chair…”
Because of the chair, Sam was able to hold her like this.
And that was just the way it was.
short but giving soft!carpenter sister vibes so it checks out
All my best! ♡ - parker
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can u tell us more abt that chair tf piece u did a while back?? i remember u saying it was part of some project and ive been wondering what the context behind it mightve been
oh sure. I can talk a bit about the project and the piece
just to recall, anon is talking about this piece:
"What is a chair? there was a human there I think, now there's just a piece of wooden furniture, beautiful, well, not really, just useful at least. do you want to become one?"
As I mentioned on the original post, "the chair" was a extract from a bigger project I was working on one subject for my career, a subject that actually proceeds my thesis project. Ideally, the piece belonged to a group of pieces that used transformations to talk about certain social situations that are specially reflected on my city/country. And the medium I was going to use was street art: Stickers, Stencils, paste-ups and posters specifically.
"the chair" was supposed to be on sticker format, and it was supposed to be around the center of the city, where my college (art college) is
Of course while being outside on the wild, people could see the sticker and think whatever they wanted about why a chair is wearing clothes. The idea is that there was a human there, before it turned into a chair. Now what people took out of that is what could make the piece interesting.
My idea was letting it as ambiguous as it is.
But the original context on the sticker is actually a reference to an art piece called "1 and 3 chairs" by Joseph kosuth. where there's a whole analyses about concept and form, it also is a conceptual piece, which by itself brings a lot of discussion about he forms of art and such.
On a similar tone, the piece also is inspired on "this is not a pipe" by René Magritte
again, as part of an analisys about what we see vs what it really is in art.
Said references (to which I can technically say "the chair" is a parody off) are, most likely, something that just a small amount of people would get if they see the sticker on the wild. And It's why I like to let the meaning open and not try to pretend much of what the sticker is.
So, Why Someone turned into a chair?...
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As for the rest of the project, there was other 3 pieces that also went around the same idea of transformations. "the chair" was the one I found funnier and I think it really worked the way I wanted.
Saddly, my city and overall country has gotten VERY dangerous atm, and specially when I was about to vandalize set my pieces on the street, the violence escalated so high that face-to-face classes where suspended. So I just couldn't really finish the project as I wanted
But honestly, even if it's not for a subject, I do want to set at least the chair around my city, I think that would be fun.
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