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| The Weirdest Names Ever | |
| By Queenie | ||||||||||||||||
| 01 October 2006 | ||||||||||||||||
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Hi all, This is a story i'm writing.... doesn't have a lot of plot since this is the first chapter, it mainly introduces the characters. The title is pretty weak yeah... I'm partial to naming a piece after it's done. I'm hoping for advice and feedback:) Thanks! Names. I have often thought about them while staring at my name written on a paper for homework that I forgot to turn in, or on a math test that I failed and wondered if that was true. Of course, I wasn’t really talking about insult names so much as I was talking about my own birth name, and whether it was the fact that it was too ridiculous to pardon me for missing one homework assignment or failing a test because I forgot to write my name on it. Who would want to write a name that they hated on a test? I wouldn’t, and I didn’t. And when all the nosy teachers began asking why I hardly ever responded to my name during attendance or why I hardly ever put my name on assignment papers, I told them. “You’re just going to have to live with it,” Said Mrs., Krunker, my arithmetic teacher. “You’re just going to have to live with it,” Said Mr. Quigley, my social studies teacher. “You’re just going to have to live with it,” Said Ms. Knapp, my science teacher. “You’re just going to have to live with it,” Said Miss Mopps, my reading teacher, to whom I did not turn the homework into because it dealt with making an acrostic poem out of the letters of your name. Torture. “You’re just going to have to live with it,” Said the lady at the supermarket, as if it was any of her business in the first place. Sadly, it wasn’t until Ziik was killed until I finally came up with a good response to that. “Well, Ziik learned to live with it. Ironically, she died.” My parents were both bohemian style British hippies who belonged to some kind of odd religion that they called Zoastrianism, but what was actually Zoroastrianism. They would say that “We are not Zoroastrian, we are Zoastrian, because we do not follow all the beliefs of the religion, and therefore the name stands incomplete.” I was too young and therefore to stupid to argue or question that by removing the r and the o of a standing religion does not mean you can create your own and pick the rules of that standing religion that you want to follow and the ones you can just ignore. If that was possible we’d have Ristians who didn’t believe in Christ, Cathics who decided Mary was just some dumb attention seeking blonde, and Musms who considered Allah to be nothing but a guy on the Muppets. When my mother married my father, they were both strict vegetarian maniacs who, oddly, also made six figure incomes and possessed Phd’s. They claimed it was all “love at first sight,” meaning that at the supermarket, where they met, if my mother didn’t stoop down to help my father pick up the entire display of cassaba melons he had just knocked on the floor, neither me nor my sister nor my brother would have ever been born. And, if you heard our names, maybe you’d agree that might have been a good thing. Ziik came first. She was a healthy, rosy, bouncy and smiley little girl who always laughed and clapped her hands. Shortly after she was born, you could begin to see little black wisps of hair growing up out of her round head. At two months she said her first word, and at five months she was taking wobbly steps toward my mum’s and dad’s outstretched arms. “She’s walking!” They’d squeal with delight every time she took a step. “Our little Ziik is walking!” And for three years, Ziik grew into a highly intelligent, healthy, sociable toddler with whom every mother at nursery school was practically falling over to get a play date with their child. “She’s quite the big toddler on campus,” The nursery caretaker joked one day. Ziik was, of course, also quite a cute baby, with both of my parents being part Persian, and had thick black hair, big brown eyes, a round, plump face with high cheekbones, and golden, naturally tanned skin with a light glow. Not one lady who saw her in public could resist stooping down and smiling at her. You would think that with one perfect child, my parents had would be perfectly happy with Ziik and probably wouldn’t want to have another for risk of producing a rotten egg. But ah, no! Three years later, my mother gave birth to a baby boy. Zupp was nothing like Ziik, and to my parents, it meant no good. Due to complications in the womb, he was flipped the wrong way and had to be taken out by Caesarian Section. As a young baby, he had a yellowish complexion, the color of bile, and had that nasty, wheezing cough that always had to come around in the night when everyone was trying to sleep. Again, unlike Ziik, he didn’t say his first word until he was fourteen months old and didn’t start walking until he was two, which must’ve been hell on my parents’ backs. And what my parents did say when he finally took his first steps or said his first words? “Huh. It’s about time.” Zupp had black hair and brown eyes, but still looked nothing like Ziik. He had a longer, pale face with huge eyes, a serious little mouth and a small, straight nose that looked like a snowman’s. Unlike Ziik’s pleasantly plump baby-fat physique, he was a skinny thing, and all that put together hardly made him the lady magnet his sister was. On his first day attending nursery school, he was sent home only an hour after he was dropped off. “I was just checking on everybody at naptime and I saw he had this white foam all over his mouth,” the caretaker said, “I had no idea what it was!” After taking Zupp to the hospital and having all sorts of unnecessary tests done on him, the head doctor came to a conclusion. “Ma’am, your son has digested a large amount of paper paste,” he said to my mum, who was sitting in the waiting room, and waiting for a verdict. “We were able to pump his stomach out, but not his intestines.” “What’s that mean?” “Well, it means... it means that you’ll probably have to cancel any plans you have for tonight, because he’s going to turn out with a frightful case of diarrhea,” he concluded. And a frightful case it was, not that anyone needs the details. It wasn’t Zupp’s last mishap either, for two weeks later he was back for eating holly berries and fox gloves that were growing in the backyard, and then for choking on one of my mum’s thimbles, and getting into a tube of sun block one day and spreading it all over him, getting the stuff in his eyes, mouth and nose. Hardly the kind of child a mother and father dream about having. After having Zupp, if it was considered kosher to give up your child and sell him at the corner market, I’m sure my parents would have done that. But that was obviously out of the question, and instead you’d probably just assume that they would just make sure they wouldn’t ever even think about having another kid. Well, if that had happened, I wouldn’t be here right now. It was seven years after Zupp was born, and ten years after Ziik was, and both of them pretty much had the same personalities they’d always had; Except Ziik had finally grown out of her phase where she had considered herself too good for doll babies and Barbies, and would simply put makeup on Zupp and shove him into frilly dresses and pantyhose, never giving up on trying to stuff his wide duck feet into those round-toed little doll shoes. She had went through a period where she couldn’t stand her name and wanted nothing more than to be called Jessica or Amanda or Elizabeth, but eventually matured to the point of where she loved her name, became obsessed with it and now you could find every door, object and wall in her room labeled, “ZIIK’S BED,” “ZIIK’S DOOR” and “ZIIK’S CLOSET.” Zupp was seven and still as quiet and skinny as he’d always been, and now had a notoriety for developing weird little quirks and oddities that just made him weirder than he already was. At first he’d chewed his fingernails, then he picked his nose, then he’d dropped both of those and began having wrist tics, then elbow tics, then neck tics, then dropped all the tics and began refusing to eat anything but soggy Wheetabix cereal with sugar dumped all over it. Anyway, my parents were celebrating their wedding anniversary with a glass or two of bubbly after Ziik and Zupp had been long upstairs and asleep, and then one of them got the great idea to pull out an old, unopened bottle of Lepper Khan’s spiced Irish rum and together they had a liquor fiesta. And the rest is history. All I know about what happened because of that is that my mum got pregnant and there was never another drop of liquor in the house after that. When I was born, there were no baby showers or gift poolings or anything like that. I was taken out by C-section just like Zupp was, only I was premature and tiny because for some odd reason, my mother went into labour too soon and suddenly there I was-on the kitchen floor (Yes, the kitchen floor), screaming my head off. I looked a lot like Zupp: small, skinny and pale, with a weird serious face and a small mouth, and had a weird habit of cocking my head to the side and making a cracking sound with my neck the way anyone else would crack their knuckles. “What an interesting little baby girl!” People would say, not the way they would talk about how gorgeous Ziik was and not the way they’d just quickly smile at Zupp, but I was interesting because I really was interesting. Or maybe it was just my name. Zogg. Let me say it again: Zogg. Zogg! Allow me to tell you what comes to mind when I hear the word “Zogg”: Aliens. Extrastellar planets. Geeks. Coke bottle glasses. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Boogers. Pimples. Buck teeth. Kids who consider solving equations to be fun. Purple polo shirts with smeared bits of dried snot on them. I did not find myself to be a Zogg. I, unlike Ziik, have and will not ever get used to my name, especially when kids at school decided to make it worse by holding their nose and saying “Zogg,” which is a pretty stupid thing to get annoyed at, but it got old after a while, and eventually died out. It was only to come back one year later when a kid held his nose and shouted, “scones,” which reminded everyone of what they used to do with my name and all of a sudden “Zogg” was back in business. When I was a toddler, I seemed to have bonded better with Zupp than anyone else in my family, perhaps it was the mutual weirdness or just that we looked alike, but I learned it was more than that when he began to stick up for me at school, only to get teased more himself, but he didn’t seem to care. While I interacted normally with my parents and Ziik, I never connected to them like family. I guessed that I never would be as tight with them as I was with Zupp, and never would be, either. That all was confirmed one cold, snowy day in early January.
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I am working on another chapter now.
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