Vignette 2: Kate

When she sits in class, during the middle of an awful lecture about history or philosophy, Kate likes to set her chin on the desk in from of her and open her mouth until her jaw locks in place, and then wait for a few seconds and let it shut again so that her back molars hit with a dull click. She does it over and over. She flexes her toes in her socks in her sneakers, which are dirty and the left one has a rip in the side from the day when she thought she could walk on a thin wall and slid off, her shoe scraping along the jagged stone (it’s called conchina, a wall made of sharp hardened shells and sand in St. Augustine, where she lived as a child). she hit the wall with the inside of her left thigh, she had a bruise there for weeks that was yellow and made her afraid to wear a bathing suit (as if she needed another reason. There is not a single sixteen-year-old girl who has actual emotions that wants to wear a bathing suit), and she would forget it whenever she crossed her legs at dinner, knee over knee, and she winced but kept sitting that way anyway. She always liked looking like the martyr, like those men who walked away from duels victorious and approached their lady love with bloodstains growing under their waistcoats but a proud, pained smile. Physically, Kate looks like neither the Hero or the Lady Love. Her hair is limp and could be gold if she cared enough to let it glitter, and she keeps going between keeping it skull short and letting it fall across her back, so right now it looks very much like unplanned and indecisive hair that sits in choppy lengths between he chin and her shoulders. Her face is a pouting sort of face, and her eyes are tired, her ears are uninteresting. Sometimes she wears makeup and it’s a terrible mistake where her sea foam green eyes don’t match up and her lips look fat and out of place, like they were scotch taped on, and she resembles, mostly, a porcelain doll that was painting in the dark by a slightly drunk artist. When she does not wear makeup, she is likable, almost pretty, though when she smiles she tends to look more exhausted than excited. She wears the same pair of jeans that she’s worn for three or four years, and unstimulating but flattering tops that are comfortable enough for slumping, which is what she does when she’s around people who make her feel very small, which is almost everyone. The people who make her feel like herself, who is not small at all but moderately tall for her age, are the ones that make her want to walk atop walls, and go swimming in her clothes, or swing her legs in her chair and smile like she means it, and she goes running when she’s all alone, and she doesn’t bother to buy “running shoes” or “jogging pants” but goes in her school clothes with wrinkles from slumping still in her shirt. Right now, though, Kate isn’t thinking of running, because her legs feel like those big stalks of kelp that she saw in the aquarium in Monterray, where she lives now, because she is currently noticing for the seventh time this semester how handsome the back of The Boy Who Sits Three Rows And Two Seats To The Left’s neck is, because it curves like a hill in an Ansel Adams picture, and his hair is always trimmed so neatly. He’s the sort of attractive man that she’s sure she should fall in love with, the sort of man who should save her from getting hit by a bus or from falling off a balcony. Right now, Kate’s eyebrows are cringing with the realization that, if she were to swoon dramatically in class, then she would not be able to see the definitely devastated look of concern on The Boy Who Sits Three Rows And Two Seats To The Left’s face as she lay, her mismatched hair making an straw-colored halo around her suddenly much prettier and dramatic visage, one hand cradling her head and one arm back, her legs crumpled under her, all the room paying attention to the girl who, around Other People was quiet, but still proudly bore the shadow of a bruise on her inner thigh and had countless other scars from when she had dared to vault the small but frightening mountains of her life.

You say you want a.....resolution? Vignette 1: Proserpine

Okay. So I know that it's almost a month too late to make a New Year's resolution, and this isn't really a full year one so I don't know if it'll count, but I'm better at making immediate resolutions anyway (i.e.: Buy Some Q-Tips, Go To Sleep Before 4 AM). So here goes: since I'm supposed to be work shopping in my Creative Writing course constantly, and it looks like I'll be put on the spot pretty regularly, I might as well write often to keep in practice, like jogging before the New York City Marathon if you aren't already Katie Holmes. So, once a day if I can, I am going to write one Vignette. In this case, a Vignette is a short written piece that focuses on character and setting descriptions as opposed to plot, and is usually a part of a larger story. It can have a general Beginning, Middle, and End, but usually I'll write something short and sweet that doesn't really go anywhere, just exercises my language skills. They are all going to be approximately one page, single spaced, give or take, say, five lines. They can be about anything I want, but I'd like to create a new character or place per day, just to see how far I can get before I scratch my head and repeat myself. The Vignettes will be named after the character or setting that is most prominently described in the piece. Like I said, this might not last all year, since I'm in Creative Writing for only 5 months and by the time I get out I might be able to confidently and completely work on Archer full-time (meaning without any side projects or distractions), so for now this is just to keep me in practice.

And after doing two days of it and two weeks of Creative Writing, it actually feels wonderful. Since my Literature classes aren't very difficult this year, I can focus pretty much all of my efforts on writing fiction for the first time in a long, long time. That, plus the general discontent of being here, is pushing me to write often. So I'll post the first Vignette here, and then after this the vignette entries will be titled and have the excerpt and nothing else. Here we go:

Proserpine

Proserpine lights another cigarette. The lighter makes her face a tiny portrait of a round nose and the bottom of two unfocused eyes that water as a spiderstring of smoke curls under them. Then it is dark. The glow worm of the cigarette tip flies in long circles; mouth to waist to chest to chin, to mouth. Two long puffs of smoke come out of her nostrils. Proserpine (her mother had called her Proserpina, it was prettier but it made her feel like a cut flower) leans back in the stone chair. She is going to do something we would call magic, but this was a time before magic (I know what you will say, the cigarette is there because she wanted it and it became). She puts out the smoke-it was burning her two fingers in their middle joint-and pulls one long, pale finger through the air. Something that was not light but still glowed, deep violet, trailed it. If it was brighter in her room you would see the flicker of a smile, but this is hell and there is no illumination here. Wails try to permeate the stone, but she has learned to be deaf, and the stone is as thick as she wants it to be. The purple glow becomes a solid circle, like a mirror before her invisible face. The circle is hardly any bigger than her torso, but to us, who have minds smaller than proserpine’s smallest thoughts, it is larger than the world and holds life in its image. There is a field of wheat and wildflowers. Proserpine sits more comfortably, pulling up the legs of her blue jeans (they are like the cigarette, do you see now how that works?) and she watches. A girl walks through the field, her breasts still growing and awkward under her linen robe (‘why did i let her dress me like that’, proserpine mutters to herself as she lights another cigarette). Te girl is, what, fourteen? fifteen? It is really thousands of years, of course, but she was not allowed to age into anything more than she was. You are a lady of Spring, you will be young as a lamb and fresh as rain. That is the way of things. Behind her are ghostly maidens, in white, with baskets, pulling flowers out of the ground without hesitance and crowning themselves with them, digging them out and cutting off the unattractive roots and forgetting that the flowers will soon be wilting and dead and limp on their pretty golden heads. The girl with earthy red hair and a fourteen-year-old form leans down to pull up a delicate red poppy, but there is a man. Proserpine leans forward. There is a man, dressed in black that is almost blue, with proud pale shoulders and a long lordly beard (he is a King in his own world). The girl turns, her waist moving in a way that is obviously unfamiliar to her fourteen-year-oldness. He has reached out to her, there is a red stone on his finger. Proserpine twists the same ring on her own hand, now, unconsciously. She inhales harder on her cigarette, and the smoke mixes with the purple mirror-world for a moment, dissipating the scene, but Proserpine won’t let it fade, Not yet. She’s almost to the part she wanted to see. There. The man is looking at her. His eyes are impossibly deep, you could throw a penny into one and never hear it land. Another drag of the cigarette lights up her face. Proserpine’s eyes have become the same. There. He has touched the girl, and she stand straight, now she is three years older, at least, her back arches and her lips move forward expectantly. He is touching her waist and something that we would call desire sets the girl’s red hair on fire. Then the man does something we would call magic, and the ground opens and swallows them, the man and the girl who is now a woman are gone into the abyss of the underworld. The maidens who are nothing more than fancy and imagination are screaming “Proserpina! Proserpina!” but there is no answer. They drop their flowers back to the ground and the stems are scattered like bones. Proserpine waves her free hand and the violet smoke-mirror is gone and darkness clings to her again. She knows how the story will end, and for a moment, as she licks her lips, she tastes pomegranate and does not regret.