Olympia: Part 3

The day Valentine Abernathy was to marry Cooper Smith would be one of Olympia’s biggest to-dos in nearly a century, an excuse for everyone in town to celebrate a big occasion if nothing else. Nobody could pretend that Valentine and Cooper were a perfect match, nor were they a well-suited one, nor a completely consensual one. But for today they would dress up in their best suits and brightest smiles and pretend that they were there to share in the happy union of a couple who loved each other.

The ceremony was to take place on the sprawling grounds if Rex and Harriet King’s faux antebellum mansion on a mild and sunny spring afternoon, perfect for the rapidly growing crowd roaming about the lawn in search of the best vantage point. Everyone in Olympia was in attendance, though they were a small number in comparison to the amount of people who had travelled across the state for the occasion. Most of them were Valentine’s admirers, and their presence, along with the vibrant bouquets of white and blue roses, must have sent a clear message to the poor groom that he was quite out of his depth.

The bride and her entourage were tucked away inside the house, using one of the guest bedrooms as a bridal suite. Valentine sat in front of a mirror, eyes closed and lips tight, while her bridesmaids –who were more attendants than anything else– attempted to make an already beautiful woman even more so. They curled her blonde hair, applied her rouge and lipstick, and generally sang her praises in hopes of mollifying her on an already stressful day. Cora, the flower girl for the ceremony, sat on the bed with her legs crossed observing their skittering and half-listening to their talk until she finally spoke up.

Olympia: Part 2

To her mother, she was life. She was springtime. She was something new and unpredictable in an endless cycle of seasons that had started to look much the same year after year. To her father, she was a necessary secret. Naturally. It would hardly be a smart thing for one of the state’s most influential politicians to claim paternity of another illegitimate child and destabilize both a hard-bought political career and an already antagonistic marriage.

Cora Lee’s existence —despite the vague details surrounding her conception— was hardly considered a scandal by the inhabitants of Olympia township, at least not to the standards set by its more colorful inhabitants. At the time of her birth there was a war raging on the European continent, and all attention was intently focused on the not-so-discreet exchange of letters between Marcus King, the mayor’s only son sent overseas, and Valentine Abernathy, the town socialite newly-engaged to another man. The discreet delivery of a quiet girl to a single mother hardly raised eyebrows or caused ripples of gossip in comparison.

Olympia: Part 1

It was the state coroner’s official ruling that Governor Richard King had died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. A colossus of state politics priming for a run at the White House come the end of his term, his suicide naturally came as a shock to the larger state population who had worshiped him as much for his larger-than-life personality as for his over-arching social reform.

Of course, when shocking things happen, rumors always tend to spiral around like vultures to a fresh corpse. There were whispers that Richard King, Sr. was the victim of a finely executed conspiracy chiefly orchestrated by his three sons. The whispers even went so far as to claim that it was Richard King, Jr. who pulled the trigger. Of course, no one would ever be able to prove the speculation even if they dared to. The King family had an untouchable air about them; a fine balance of outward charisma and ambiguity that everyone just knew meant danger beneath the surface.

White China

She was a fragile thing, a fine white china plate covered in delicate cracks – the kind of plate that looked perfect on the shelf with her polite smile and soft hair. But holding her in your hands, you felt the seams in her façade, tense to the point of snapping into many beautiful porcelain pieces if you exerted just the right amount of pressure.

When I met her, she immediately stirred within me an inevitable hero complex. I diagnosed her condition as a fear of intimacy springing from an unknown past and from this, I was determined to save her from the inner warring forces which kept her rooted in the familiar and threatened to rip her tightly wound psyche apart.

Her salvation began with a simple touch of the hands at the kitchen table, a gesture which elicited a surprised and terrified squeal. Much later, it progressed to the wrapping of my arms around her tightly hunched shoulders as she fought the shivers running through her skin. Then it was a bare kiss on her cheek, followed by a tentative one on the lips. Eventually, I was able to fit our bodies together like two mismatched puzzle pieces in a small bed padded by old blankets. She never reached out, never came willingly, but that was always an acceptable truth to me in my experimentations.

Then, we found ourselves in the bathtub. Together we sat, listening to the splashes of water against the tile and the forced sound of our own quiet breathing. She put her head on my shoulder, focusing on the white tiles to ground herself in something more solid than our two bodies. She swallowed thickly. Her heart beat furiously along, ignoring the steady guidance of my own against her back. It pounded wildly and quickly in her chest, faster and faster and heavier and heavier, as a young rabbit in the grip of absolute panic. I heard its frantic drumming echoing against the walls and in my ears, rippling the water around us in an indistinguishable pattern. To touch her was to feel as if something was rattling on her bones in hopes of escape, beating and demanding attention so adamantly that I could no longer distinguish between the individual beats.

And suddenly it stopped.

She sighed one last time and closed her eyes as if in sleep. The water droplets lingering on her skin grew cold in the air. Around me it was silent and blissfully still.

At last. She was finally free, and my job was done.

My Process: The Outline

I’ve been very quiet. Words have been hard to come by for the past week.

That’s not exactly true, though. I’ve been doing quite a bit of writing, but most of it really falls into summary. My outline is coming along, though not having done one before (at least when it comes to story-writing), I’m not sure if I’m doing it right. Is it too detailed? Is it not detailed enough? Given what I think I know of the characters involved, do I think this scene is consistent with how they would act? Is this scene even necessary? Does it move the plot along or reveal anything important?

Quite a lot of questions for a story not even properly begun. I’ve never been an incredibly patient person. I also have a tendency to edit myself as I go through a story and I think these questions in some sense are related to that. However, that’s gotten me stuck before, so maybe I should stop second-guessing myself at every step of the process. Perhaps once I start the real writing those questions will get answered.

I just have to put something down first.

She covered herself with night

and drifted through the house on soundless feet. She went through all the rooms and in the dark her presence echoed against the floor and the walls and the ceilings as if they were all blank and empty. She danced naked in front of the windows and no one stopped to watch her because they were all asleep and thinking of nothing. She talked to someone who wasn’t there in the sitting room where all sorts of formal conversations took place, saying things she had never said aloud before. She pulled the sheets from her bed and stalked the shadows in makeshift garb, a pretty young thing whose veneer of strong calm had cracked and who was afraid to admit she could be anything less than composed. She hid away her memories in a box and burned them in the bathtub and washed the ashes down the drain. She collapsed on the stairs and sobbed for an uncountable number of minutes and the house in shades of blue wept with her.

When the sun came up the next morning she stood in the kitchen with a smile on her face.

(Inspired by this song.)