Last fall, she had painted her walls the color of heavy roses and the room had glowed in the thick, late autumnal light and kept her warm throughout the winter, encasing her like a pleasant womb, the buried burrow of a small, furred thing. Standing in the paint shop in October, dizzied by columns of softly gradating colors with names like "Damask Dream" and "Tea For Two," never, never could she have anticipated this summer...
She couldn't have known that the heat that swelled the air would swell her walls too, that breathing in a color could be a slow death. She imagined the paint coating her insides, like the commercials for Pepto Bismol where the pink goes down the cut-out man's esophagus to his stomach, but with none of the supposed relief.
(Standing in some sort of shop, a diner?) R looked at her with the same eyes that he used to look at the article on his father. His eyes twitched and seemed to change color every few seconds as if they just couldn't decide. Right now they were twitching on her but he was talking about Ms. Sandhurst and her new baby and would they have a another principal this year and M couldn't tell whether the twitching was for her or for the article on Mr. W or for Ms. Sandhurst and her baby. After a while she decided it was for her because the newspaper was tucked away under R's arm and he was describing his recent trip to Pittsburgh.
"They have this old prison just outside of the city where they used to keep Rebel soldiers during the Civil War and a bunch of them died of gangrene and things. And they were buried right there, 'cept you can't tell exactly where 'cause they didn't mark them or anything. So you could be standing on a dead body and not even know it." His voice trailed off and M was no longer certain whether he was talking to her or to himself; his eyes, now unmoving, were fixed on the ground before him as if straining to discover any corpses quietly sleeping beneath. Involuntarily, M lowered her eyes too. The stained parquet floor of the [ ] shop looked harmless enough, but you never knew.
1 comment:
i'm liking what you've got so far, t. R intrigues me. but i'm wary of getting attached to any of your characters. i suspect that will only lead to heartbreak. i think it's maybe time to start tying all the fragments together. you may not have the plot quite so, but it might come along naturally after you get things more linear and fleshed out.
beautiful writing (as always!) but some bits take me out of the moment. the "never, never" part... the placement of it gives it a syrupy vibe. for me, it took the description from lush to overblown. made me think of romance novels... but the ones in the teen section. where the girl dies from some disease. (i loved those books!) but i doubt that's what you're going for. perhaps a simpler phrasing?
i like the body imagery you're using in the first paragraph. all the swelling and warmth and womb and burrows. all heavy and humid. good stuff. the last pepto bismol bit is jarring, but i think that's partly because the setting's got a vintage feel and that pepto bismol reference seems like an anachronism. i like the "none of the supposed relief" but the description of the pb going down is a little clunky. i don't think you need to reference the commercial. just describing the pepto bismol going down is enough for me. and i know what you mean by "cut-out man" but it's odd here. a little too matter-of-fact? i do think an adjective describing the texture/thickness of the pb could be used to carry on that heavy humid thing you've got a-going.
the twitching passage is awesome. the last half especially. hardcore. it was a little oogie and funny at the same time. hemingway's influence? heartwrenching humor? delish.
when do you think you'll create/reveal the names? i have an intense burning desire to know. i'm old-skool dickens. for me, names are clues to the characters and i feel out of the loop not knowing what M and R stand for. but know that in my head, M is starting to look like em. and as a result, R is starting to look like beau.
Post a Comment