Tuesday, November 29, 2005
The Black Maiden, Chapter One, Part One
May turned black sometime during the night in the middle of her first week as Artist in Residence to the Fairwell Artists' Guild, in the southernmost part of the state, in the first weeks of hurricane season. At first there was panic; she woke up and rubbed her eye with one finger, saw that the finger was a different color, saw that her whole body was now a deep rich shade of black, better than any paint-box. She ran to the bathroom to see herself full-length in the mirror, and then there was a brief and terrible incident with a pair of nail scissors as her half-awake mind thought that she could peel the black away.
She lay on the narrow, creaking bed the Artists' Guild had provided, her foot wrapped in an old shirt that smelled of turpentime but was clean enough to catch the blood the nail scissors had released. She lay there for a long time, feeling unfamilliar in her new skin, and realized that she was holding herself stiff, with her legs turned in when they ached to turn out at the hip, and that her back was straight when it would have liked to sink into the mattress. She let go and recognized herself again.
Feeling a little better, she got up, the little bed swaying dangerously with her shifting weight, and went back to the bathroom mirror. She was entirely black, lips and hair and the rims of her eyelids. When she opened her mouth the red color of the inside looked meaty in the middle of her face. Her irises were still green, the whites around them very white and faintly veined in red.
She decided that the change was something she would have to wait out, and went into the living room to resume work on her Saint Sebastian. She opened the curtains on the long windows and felt the heat pour in.
Fairwell was quiet always, but particularly on weekday mornings when everyone who worked was away and anyone who didn't was indoors, avoiding the heat that had already settled in. In the one high school in town, Charlotte Morgan stood at the front of her class of sophomores and asked someone, anyone, to please say something about 'The Lord of the Flies'. They leaned back in their seats or lowered their heads and were as quiet as the town outside. Very faintly, from the direction of the gym, music filtered in. Square dancing lessons were in progress.
Charlotte gripped the scarred sides of her lecturn. Two weeks left, she thought, and they think I won't do it. When her vision lost its black edges and she felt she could speak again, she told her class that there were forty-three minutes left in the period, and that they could all sit in silence until something worth discussing came up. They settled in and no one said anything at all.
The quiet of Fairwell was so valued that laws were routinely passed to preserve it. Leaf blowers had a single day out of the week to roar. If a car came through town with no muffler, everyone looked up from what they were doing and knew that it could belong to no one who lived there. Motorcycles were looked at pointedly as they ripped apart the air with their engines.
She lay on the narrow, creaking bed the Artists' Guild had provided, her foot wrapped in an old shirt that smelled of turpentime but was clean enough to catch the blood the nail scissors had released. She lay there for a long time, feeling unfamilliar in her new skin, and realized that she was holding herself stiff, with her legs turned in when they ached to turn out at the hip, and that her back was straight when it would have liked to sink into the mattress. She let go and recognized herself again.
Feeling a little better, she got up, the little bed swaying dangerously with her shifting weight, and went back to the bathroom mirror. She was entirely black, lips and hair and the rims of her eyelids. When she opened her mouth the red color of the inside looked meaty in the middle of her face. Her irises were still green, the whites around them very white and faintly veined in red.
She decided that the change was something she would have to wait out, and went into the living room to resume work on her Saint Sebastian. She opened the curtains on the long windows and felt the heat pour in.
Fairwell was quiet always, but particularly on weekday mornings when everyone who worked was away and anyone who didn't was indoors, avoiding the heat that had already settled in. In the one high school in town, Charlotte Morgan stood at the front of her class of sophomores and asked someone, anyone, to please say something about 'The Lord of the Flies'. They leaned back in their seats or lowered their heads and were as quiet as the town outside. Very faintly, from the direction of the gym, music filtered in. Square dancing lessons were in progress.
Charlotte gripped the scarred sides of her lecturn. Two weeks left, she thought, and they think I won't do it. When her vision lost its black edges and she felt she could speak again, she told her class that there were forty-three minutes left in the period, and that they could all sit in silence until something worth discussing came up. They settled in and no one said anything at all.
The quiet of Fairwell was so valued that laws were routinely passed to preserve it. Leaf blowers had a single day out of the week to roar. If a car came through town with no muffler, everyone looked up from what they were doing and knew that it could belong to no one who lived there. Motorcycles were looked at pointedly as they ripped apart the air with their engines.
// posted by Amethyst Vineyard @ 7:49 PM 
