halifax

Alli, a sculptor, small and smart, who is my younger sister, loved a man from Halifax once.
I thought to myself, What kind of fucked up sentence is that? No one writes like that. No one. I could have just as easily wrote,
Alli, my younger sister, is a sculptor. She is small and smart and once loved a man from Halifax.
See how much better that reads? How much better it sounds? It rolls of the tongue as they say. The first sentence is short and strong and states the point of it all. The subject. Alli. She is my sister, my younger sister obviously, and she is a sculptor. A fantastic sculptor. She had made me this amazing miniature statue for my 25th birthday. But you know what, we?ll come back to that.
She is small and smart and once loved a man from Halifax.
This is not entirely true. I mean, to her maybe she thought she loved him. Maybe she even had this perfect idea of loving him. But most of us knew that it wasn?t real. I knew. Marilyn, her best friend, knew as well. There were little hints when we first met him, hints that set us off to his beguiling ways. For one, he didn't open the door for her. Any door. Car door. House door. Building door. I suppose for some maybe that's not the biggest deal. We seemed to think so, me and Marilyn. He's bad news, she'd say, bad news bears. Actually, I didn't even know that was the name of a movie until 5 months later when Gail, this girl I had been seeing, mentioned it to me in the video store. Bad news bears, she said. But I reacted unknowingly, drawing myself to the first thing I thought her to be talking about - two large, black men who had just walked through the motion sensor slide doors. Jesus, I said to her, that's kind of fucked up.