Thursday, June 25, 2015

She, Hope and the City

7 lines (or maybe a little more) from my current work in progress



Juliette is a grown woman now and her memory of the house is clear, but her surroundings have grown.  The timber of the staircase she can still count with her girlhood footsteps, but now she lives in a city, not just a house.  Her brother lives in another city far away and her grandfather and her mother died years ago.  She thinks of freeways and roads like veins and arteries.  She sometimes wishes for the sidewalks of her youth, where the innocence of her relationship with the supposed inanimate things around her, was pure.  Those things were safe and couldn't hurt her, though they overpowered her a few times with the depth and breadth of their cold steal and concrete.  When they did she would turn to the other place inside her.  In that place there was sun and shadow, color and movement and the fragrance of life.  A seed had fallen and a crack opened in time and a yellow flower took to calling the rain and the sun its lovers.  She knew these things but still could not say them out loud.