Another:
Ghost Story
The door into summer is laced with growing things, creepers and small roses. Sometimes, you'd swear you could smell jasmine.
The garden stretches out on either side of it, verdant in June, sodden in November. Sheep move on the lawns; in the eaves of distant houses, rooks curl heads beneath wings.
No one admits to having seen the girl, heard the rustle of skirts or the snap of her parasol. There's nothing to admit; she casts no shadow. The dead don't.
Unable to leave, too insubstantial to remember, she sways in the garden doorway like the summer wind passing through.
My doorway drabble:
It may be my clearest memory of college, more so than my few moments of festivity, or insight gained in lectures, or all-nighters with friends. Sitting in the doorway of my instructor’s office because my butt...my chair’s butt was too wide to fit in the tiny offices designed for a student to be the Karen Carpenter of Munchkinland. I was used to feeling obvious, of course, but that felt different. It was private business that brought people to office hours...a misunderstanding, public relations, confessions of slack, and my deep and misguided desire to be the most brilliant student my creative writing teacher ever had.And I was having to bare it all at louder than normal volumes so that my target could hear me... I suppose it was good I never brought in any outrageous lies...just a hyper-persistent skin condition and a domestic life I hoped to upgrade to chaotic, bus drivers that wouldn’t stop for me, and an overeager heart, eager to share my secret identity as a woman with a brain.
Was it too much to ask that I could close one damn door?
Write-ma and knock-em-dead-ma to Allyson.
Meet the deadline-ma, Allyson!
Write, Allyson! Write like the wind!
(And also? Yay, you!)
Yay, Allyson. You can do it. It's in your brain. You just need enough sugar and caffeine.
Go, go, Allyson!
erika, I love that drabble. So much that those of us who have complete mobility take for granted. I enjoy having my eyes opened by you every time.
Thanks...uh, with the vet bill your check will be a bit late this month. ;)
Allyson, of course you'll get it done. Which sounds facile, but you go the rest of it done, so why not this?
Just write the thing.
