Saturday, January 21, 2012

once upon a time

once upon a time, not so long ago, and a land that is not so far away, there lived a girl whose father had made bad choices. A lot of them. She would have rather been living with her mother but her mother had seen fit to go on a mission to another land one which was not ideal for small girls to grow up in. Once the girl had known which land but it had been so long since she had seen her mother that she had forgotten where it was she had gone. Her father had remarried a very beautiful woman who was vain and envious of all around her. This new mother was indeed wicked, indeed she was a wicked stepmother.
Well that was what Darcy White thought of her anyway, because it made Darcy feel better about being abandoned. The truth was not something that Darcy liked to think about. Truth was ugly and cruel and Darcy wanted no part of it. She wanted the fairy tale and the comfort it provided. She wanted well crafted lies to explain why she was so unhappy. To Darcy, her father who she had adored had remarried a wicked and selfish woman who would not let Darcy have everything as her father had let her have and was controlling to the point of setting definite bed times.
Her father, had lost all hope at happiness when her wicked stepmother had made him get another job. He had become little more than a shadow in Darcy's life as his new job took him out on the road and farther away from the daughter he loved for longer and longer stretches until one day Darcy could not remember seeing him two days in a row.
Her wicked Stepmother was self-employed and made Darcy do all the chores and cooking while she herself sat around all day doing her nails and talking to her magic mirror who would assure her stepmother that she was still beautiful and desirable. Everyday, her stepmother would sit down at the mirror and type it messages and listen to it tell her how pretty she was and the day would go by with her stepmother making her do all the work. She was never commanded to do the work, but her stepmother would ask so sweetly to disguise the threat that Darcy was sure was really there.

Friday, January 20, 2012

this came from an experience on an english train and influenced by Celestial Navigations


            She slept as the darkened hills slipped by the windows into a blur. Silent breaths pumped out to fog the glass under her pillowed head. I watched her silently as my busy hands sketched her image into the paper.
            The train coasted out of the lights of  small towns into the golden hues of sunset. It was there into my silence, came a murmur. From her lips murmured the name of someone lost in pronunciation in the clickity clack of the rails. She trembled and clutched at the short rough blanket that had mostly fallen from her body.
            She woke suddenly gasping, then fell quickly silent and flushed as she saw I was staring. The blood rose to my face as I  guiltily looked away out of my own window.
In the reflection, I could see her now staring into nothing over quivering lips hugging her pillow like a small child. The moon rose and shed waning light off its crescent as the mist wisps turning white swinging wide of the rush of our train.
            A murmur of misery brought me back to her reflection as she bit her lip hard in order to hold back the pain. Her shifting eyes betrayed her letting loose in rivulets of tears on her cheeks. I found myself walking across the swaying car to sit down by her now
hunched body. She had hidden her face behind her hands muffling her sobs. She jerked and shivered as I put my coat around her and held her to me. She looked at me in apology and said "I miss.." but couldn't finish, I said "I know."
            We sat there for an eternity saying nothing, looking somewhere else. She suddenly cuddled against me and drifted off to sleep, serenity slowly returning to her face. I smiled and held her closer and looked out into the night knowing that neither of us were alone or strangers.
            I awoke in the warming sunlightstill holding the coat. She was gone and so was my sketchbook, but there was a rose-crushed in its place and a note...
            She wrote, "I don't even know your name and there is no way I can repay your kindness and love. I hope I can find the strength in your pictures, please take the rose as a trade. Thank you, Vanessa."
            It was at that moment I felt on my cheek a faint impression of a kiss.

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