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smith_and_jones:magenta_writes_to_herself

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Magenta, alone in her writing

Magenta Jones writes.

Cincinnati airport, the parking lot.

The phone hissed and lisped: “take out your notepad and start writing”.

Start? I was just ending.

Ending it all iIn thunder and confusion, leaving the children to wander without adult supervision in bloody fields of poppies under the angry moon. Children crusading in Ypres, mesmerized by visions of invulnerability

ring a ring of roses, pocket full of posies, ladybird, ladybird, fly away fly away.

Your house is on fire.

Ah-Choo! Ah-Choo!

All fall down.

She is coming home without the boys.

Home to the wolves.

Now is the hour of our discontent

will the governess relent

Mrs. Jones, Mrs. Jones,

can she come out to play?

Hope, all but lost among the Ludites (sic), heard the word of fairy thus:

Thoughts of politics and Gehennas and outside things make room to things of the inside. To long lost childhood memories, from when centuries were in their teens, not in their twenties, and from when age was countable on the fingers of a girl.

“In the desert you seek the Drops of Dew, while my Ocean beckons you.”

You can almost here the lisp, like you heard the words before, in a meadow, looking at the sun shining through a sparkling spider's web. The flooding memory fills you, and your writing - still slow, still devoid of intentional meaning - picks up.

“Pretty girl… Ready yourself. You are the house of the holy. The old must judge with eyes of new, setting us free is up to you.”

You feel, for the first time in decades, “in the zone”, writing-wise. It is getting harder and harder to tell whether you are writing this, or living this - the wind and the flowers in your hair, the blue of the sky in your chest and the buzzing of the fairies in your ears.

Hope squinted at the sun, furrowed her brows and said:

“Am I going to die?”

In the grass, Hope could hear Mister Whiskers rooting around in discontent, troubling the grass with its paws. If it were to find a fairy nestling in a bluebell or bathing in dew, she imagined, it would find it great sport. But the voice she heard, sibilant and playful, wore the sunlight and summer heat like a cloak, a deception over its old cold bones. These fairies would not be hunted by cats in the fields men know, she thought. In the glowing shadows that flitted across her heart, she imagined she could see shapes found in the emptiness beyond lost dreams.

“You want something,” she said, “for which you won't ask.”

Beyond fields and sun drenched grass, Hope sees Mrs. Jones' sad, stern face.

A lazy mountain of a cloud tumbled above, throwing shadows like thunder.

“Is the price of the asking too dear?”

The voice of the fairy did something that sounded like a sigh to Hope. A sigh made of little bells. “Yes, child. You are going to die.

smith_and_jones/magenta_writes_to_herself.1197479681.txt.gz · Last modified: 2011/05/22 07:29 (external edit)