Narrow focus
14 May 2011 06:28 AM Categories: Writing prompts | Best of the blog
The bed is narrow, just wide enough for me, and on the floor beside it is a dog bed for Nora. Every week the farmer delivers a box of sweet summer vegetables and creamy cheese. Sometimes he takes me fishing, shows me how to toss in the line, how to be patient as dawn pinkens the sky and the sun makes the clouds boil away. He’s fine and tall, rangy, with work-bitten hands. His face is kind. He is quiet, but it is a companionable silence, one that doesn’t increase my loneliness, but lessens it, and the effect lasts until the next time I see him. I don’t want anything else but his occasional presence, his mineral-bittered greens, the misshapen tomatoes and peppers and squash (the pattypans, the zucchini, the crooknecks).
During thunderstorms I read books by lamplight and comfort Nora as she shivers on the floor. The cabin has a supply of classics, Dickens and Hardy, but I’ve also brought the latest fiction with me, the stuff that keeps a lifeline between me and the real world, so that I don’t forget the rush of cars and the stink of exhaust, the way people are divided against themselves by too much: too much screen time, too many ads, the magazines piled around them as they channel surf.
When the dreams come, when the scenes from a life that I’ve escaped enter my mind, I watch them dispassionately: this is who I was then, who I am now. Here are the people I loved, lined up, imploring me not to forget them. And there I am at 16, a girl alone in a house not so different from my cabin, telling me now, the future her: It’s ok. I’m ok. You can let me go now, because I am you and you are good enough and I am in your bones and blood, programmed into your brain cells. I die when you do.
From the prompt "This summer."
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.
Image by Extra Medium.
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