Fifteen year cycle
22 May 2011 06:15 AM Categories: Writing prompts | Fiction
Or the disaster will be internal, an internal flatness, an inability to think or feel. When she looks out on the world, the view through thickness like a woolen blanket, she will feel nothing, not even contempt. Her muscles will grow slack and in the end, the animals will swarm her as she melts into the couch or becomes one with the floor – after the fall, after the collapse, her electrolytes running rampant or doing nothing at all, dying with her, pushing her across the edge.
Every fifteen years she pays more attention, looks four ways before crossing the street, checks the weather report compulsively before leaving the house. She scrutinizes acquaintances to see if they are the ones bringing the danger, the cyclical danger, because, come to think of it, it has never been the earth that has brought her down, it’s been other people.
There was her birth, the sad event in a house of transients, the handover a month later to a bland couple in a white house with two other borrowed children. There was her fifteenth year, the hard skull in her abdomen, the kicks and flutters that just stopped. At 30 it was a man who wounded, a smooth talker with a lizard tongue and soft hands. She hasn’t yet reached 45, but the year looms, only 18 months to go.
So she paints the walls a soothing deep purple. She grows her own food and cans it in the late summer. She’s taken to reading romance novels and eating plum jam spread thin on wheat toast. At night she walks and memorizes the sky, connecting the dots in ways that no one expects her too.
When the time comes, she will be ready, not with sharpened spear or with the arrowheads she once flaked out of quartz. She will have hot cups of tea and long conversations with former strangers. The cats will sit on her lap and she will feed the birds in the back yard with raisins and sunflower seeds.
From the prompt "Fifteen years."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos. This one could be improved, but I've got a busy day ahead.
Image: Playground with sky by me.
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