Post by Talia Winchell on Dec 2, 2012 20:46:32 GMT -5
O HAI THERE. So, the other day I started working on a story. I have no idea how it'll turn out yet, but I've got most of the plot mapped out in my head. Yup, so far I have less than 1000 words, so it's practically nothing but whatever. C': If you want to know more, PM me. Constructive criticism would be appreciated!
prologue - April fourth, 1894
An invisible hand coated the small town of Kaling with sparkling dust, blanketing the rough, leafless bark of the trees and uneven gravel roads. The rising sparks of dawn were beginning in the distance, just a few streaks of color against an otherwise serene and dark sky; most of the souls that resided in Kaling were sound asleep. It was two in the morning, the hour where almost everybody had watched the sun go down like a falling bronze coin a long time ago. Now everybody was snug in their warm beds, unaware of the drifting snow and the screams and noises that came from the tan house adjacent to the orchard.
That house was the residency of Anna Rose Westing and her husband of a mere six months, Edmond Westing. The former was the source of the only noises that disturbed the early morning silence; piercing and terrifying shrieks of pain came out of her ruby lips at varying times and intervals. Dry gasps filled the pauses, candles were lit and glowing against the cracked walls, and nobody in that house was sleeping.
Anna lay pressed against her bed by some divine source; it was as though she was incapable of doing anything but make noise. Her chestnut hair fanned out against the pillow like a tangible halo. Her eyes were the same medium brown shade, wide with alarm yet sparkling with an acute alertness.
It seemed like the screaming and the gasping would continue until the end of time, but all at one point, the young woman fell completely silent. Her bow-shaped lips closed, the color dropped from her face like water tumbling down into something unknown, and her eyes troublingly lost their ever-present sparkle.
Though the sounds had left the room, the tension blanketed the air and charged it until it hurt to breathe. The still silence seemed everlasting, but it could not have been more than a minute until the desperate sobs continued to ring throughout the room. But this voice belonged to a different being than Anna Westing. A younger one that could be calmed by patting and soft, reassuring whispered words.
In those early hours of breaking dawn, one citizen of Kaling exited the world for heaven and a second soul entered, pinned with burdens and faults from the hour of her birth.
chapter one - ___ ___, 1907 (work in progress!)
I suppose I had always known deep down that I had been responsible for my mother's death. It was one of those things that you knew but didn't know how you knew it. It was just simple reasoning. The dates of her life were scribed on her gravestone which lay on the outskirts of our orchard. Anna Rose Westing, born January sixteenth, 1871, died April fourth, 1894. The day of my own birth. My father never mentioned the foggy circumstances of my mother's untimely death; nor did my older brother Connor.
The one person in Kaling who had ever said anything to me about my role in my mother's death was Evy Berry, the midwife. The creases in her skin, like wrinkles on paper, folded and unfolded as she spoke to me. Her hazel eyes were filled to the brim with concern. "Oh, Fawn," she had said to me as she paused her knitting to speak. I had picked out the deep, blood-red hue of the yarn myself. "It wasn't your fault. Our God has His own way of doing things."
Even Evy Berry's answer was cryptic and, as gathering answers went, fruitless. But I suppose it happened that I was the only one who wasn't opposed to speaking about it.
Perhaps I was being unfair. But wasn't it only natural that I would want answers? I had always wondered what it would be like to have Anna braid my hair into something dark and manageable. Sometimes, when I was younger, I made up stories about her and told them to my father until he finally commanded me to just stop. Afterwards, I never shared any of them and after a few more months, I stopped creating them completely. Without anybody to tell my stories to, they seemed less interesting and not at all real. But I suppose they had been very prominent and important to me at one point in my soon-to-be fourteen years of life, because sometimes the smallest things reminded me of them and of her. My projection of Anna Rose Westing. A colorful collection of flowers would remind me of a story where we went to pick some together, her showing me how to handle the stem so as to cause the flower less pain as it was torn out of the ground. It was sometimes as though these were memories of real experiences as opposed to imagined ones. In my mind they muddled and obfuscated into some indistinguishable being.
As I turned older, my mother became less important to me. I had constantly been told, by myself and others alike, that I should let go of her. I didn't even know what she looked like; according to Connor, her hair had looked nothing like mine. Mine had been strawberry blonde at my birth but quickly grown dark until finally, it was as black as the ink that was used to write script. Some days it was perfectly wavy, but most, it was as straight and boring as grass in autumn. All that it did was hang or maybe sway in the wind. It wasn't useful for much more which, if I were completely honest, was how I often felt myself.