The stand-in
19 July 2011 06:21 AM Categories: Writing prompts
Sometimes a young man shows up on the porch. The door opens, a hand reaches out, the house swallows him up. He might live there, the only male I've seen enter the sanctum. Presumably a husband/father figure exists. He works in Belgium, in Luxembourg, in Italy. He wires money to a joint bank account, sends letters home in a tight script, the words leaning back in resistance. The mother homeschools the children, teaching them about revolution, about biofuels and flouting convention.
We watch them from our living room window, from the gaps in the privacy fence gate. In the beginning, both girls were friendly, but now it is only the towhead who raises a tentative hand in greeting. A silent figure on a small porch littered with leather booties and biking shoes, she watches my son and me when we walk home from school, when we trace chalk robots on the sidewalk out front.
They travel with their own personal force fields. I do too, I do, and I want to disable the protection system, mine, theirs. I want to borrow a cup of sugar or toss the turbinado on their scraggly lawn in some sort of magical gesture: make me part of this place, bring me into your home, show me the books on your shelves. I will take broken eggshells and make them into a potion (add sourgrass and fennel fronds and blackberry leaves, crush them with honeysuckle) I will mix it into a pitcher of plum-spiked lemonade. I will pour the mother a glass and convince her to tell me their secrets, to take me in like a lost dog.
From the prompt "My mother."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. I edited this one from the original, though not much.
Image: View from our living room window across the street.
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