Week 10 Storytelling: Exposé - Nephew Tells All

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Nephew tells all
Imagine if your uncle, a man supposed to care for you and love you, instead only wanted to kill you and you had no clue why. That was the life of a young boy we will call "Nephew," as he wants to keep his true identity hidden for privacy purposes. He has come forward to tell us all about his struggles and divulge the once strictly-kept secrets of his childhood.

Before Nephew was even born, his family was plagued with a curse of an Uncle who let his jealously get the best of him when it came to his nephews. The two boys born to Nephew's mother only made it to a few years old before their Uncle took their life to make himself feel better about his own. The man became known as the "Unnatural Uncle" to his village when people started to notice his unnatural ways and the fate of his nephews; the people of his village felt uncomfortable around him and knew that something was wrong, but never dug any deeper into their gut feelings.

Even Unnatural Uncle's wife knew of his ways, but was too scared to confront him or tell anyone of what had happened. Instead she went to Nephew's mother when she learned of her third pregnancy and told her to pretend that Nephew was a baby girl; this worked for a couple of years until the gender was finally revealed to Unnatural Uncle.

This is where Nephew starts to remember the events of his life and tells us of the first time his Unnatural Uncle attempted to take his life. "He wanted to go and get some wood from the forest and I thought, what could be weird about that?" Nephew begins. "But he kept insisting that there was better wood father into the forest and we just kept walking. He asked me to retrieve something that fell into this really big log for him and all of the sudden I was inside the log and unable to get out. Somehow, I knew that he had left me there and I knew that I needed to get out." Nephew struggles to get out. But he takes a deep breath and there is a resolve in his eyes as he continues, "I had some cranberries with me and I remembered how my grandmother had told me that plants hated their sour juice. So I took a chance and spread the juice all over the inside of the log and all of the sudden it opened up for me to get out."

Nephew manages to escape and head back to his Uncle, who is shocked by his very presence. But the Unnatural Uncle does not stop there. He is angry and his pride has been wounded when he learns that his young Nephew was able to thwart him. He attempts on his Nephews life three more times, but each time Nephew is able to outsmart the trap and escape. Unnatural Uncle grows angrier and angrier each time Nephew escapes and even angrier so when Nephew becomes chief of their tribe. Nephew, unable to forgive Unnatural Uncle for how treats Nephew's parents over the years, tells Unnatural Uncle that he will spare his life only if he can swim across the lake. Because Nephew is chief, Unnatural Uncle is unable to deny nephew and attempts to swim across the lake but, lacking the knowledge and skill on how to swim, never makes it across.

If you ask Nephew, Unnatural Uncle deserved everything that came to him. And if you ask the majority of the village, they would probably agree with him. There is an element of karma that people are just unable to escape, no matter how hard they try.


Author's Note: I wrote this story based off of "The Jealous Uncle" from the Native American Hero Tales Unit. I kept to the plot of the original story, shortening it in order to keep the entire plot in one story. In the original story, all four attempts on the nephew's life are described, as is the way that the nephew kills his uncle. I decided to just describe the first attempt in order to keep the length down and because I thought it was the most important.
This week, I tried a new storytelling style by creating a newspaper story about the events that transpired the story and allowing the nephew to come forward and tell the story from his point of view. I really enjoyed writing this way and it made reading the unit easier, knowing what I was looking for and being able to decide if each story would be able to be applied to the storytelling style. I kept all of the dialogue within the paragraphs because that it how it would look in a newspaper, however it leads to pretty big paragraphs to read.

Image Information: Newspaper clipping image I created with "The Newspaper Clipping Generator" on Fodey.com (10-28-15)