Hannah Prompt One

Lawn

In the grass, scores of new chipmunks leap and twist in their little jackets of flesh. I remember coming back from the ocean, or a lake, and seeing our lawn again as it really is: how small, how managed, how hemmed in by the neighbors’ fences and the side of our garage and the azalea bushes it is. We can hear dogs we have never met barking in nearby houses, the slamming of doors, other people’s phones ringing, a tumble of voices. I know all of these things, but I also, mysteriously, know a parallel sense of its infinite space.

One summer, my brother and I woke up early every morning to look in the Have-A-Heart trap our parents had set under the azaleas. There were frantic squirrels. A raccoon, once or twice. Two baby possums who had bloodied their snouts struggling against the wire cage. In the end, we never did catch the woodchuck. (Canny, grizzled, and placid, he never moved more than was necessary and, with his small black hands and his formidable incisors, meticulously demolished what vegetable matter there was surrounding him. He was never startled, but when disturbed, raised himself on his hind legs with slow deliberate gravity and looked at you fixedly until you took a single step too close, and then he ran).

In the spring, curled ferns march over their brick-bordered plantings and into the tangled grass. I dreamed once than in the little alley of overgrown cedars in the back, you could find a path of beaten earth that led all the way to the lip of a canyon overlooking, out a long way off, other houses, a sort of distant village I had never seen before, that certainly had never been there before.

It’s late afternoon. High above in the hazy distance, troops of clouds mass in portentous billows. I’m on the lawn, flat on my back, staring up at the sky and trying to feel buoyed by the shadow I know I’ve trapped beneath me. What I really feel is the way the heat flattens everything, drawing together the ground and the white sky, so that existence becomes merely schematic, two dimensional. But lawn and sky are drawn apart again by the bulk of faraway thunderheads piling up like pale nebulae.

It’s this vertiginous double movement that I can’t quite explain: the way the opening of this distance thrusts earth and sky apart even as the heat collapses the one into the other; and how what emerges is the dreamy impression that I may be falling or floating—and the neighbors, too, may be floating, each sprawled on their own green handkerchief-square lawn—across a blank void, a white hole composed only of vast distance and heat.

Rosette Prompt One

The house that my grandparents' lived in always did harbor dust. However, I think you're allowed a certain amount of dust in your house when you're older. And not because you, yourself are older, but because maybe your things are. These old, antiquated possessions deserve the seasoning that can quickly dignify them as objects that have perhaps seen more than the observer. And my grandparents' had a lot of those. This dresser, that clock, these lamps. I was used to being the youngest thing in that house for quite a long time. I never minded. No matter what I did or where I went, there was always more to see, do and discover in that old house. I would sock-slide across the exposed wood floors of the entry way and living room into the kitchen where the sunlight would pour in around me. It's then that she, my grandmother, would find me. Jingling into the kitchen from the creaking back door, she would be pinning her curly hair up, and smelling of french perfume baked into her from the summer sun. Everything was yellow in those moments, the kitchen, the singing canary, my grandmother. She would fetch me the coldest water. No ice, but mint. The water from the tap at that house was always so perfectly cold and crisp. I would sip my water as she fussed with my hair, smoothing, braiding, and pinning. Ever since my grandmother died and my grandfather moved out of that house, I've often dreamed of that water. It sounds ridiculous but I have searched and tried too desperately to re-create that perfect taste. There is most certainly a chance that I will never succeed. But I think there might be more to that water than the fresh mint and the mineral balance from the water ditstrict. And I may just have to collect some dust of my own to figure out what that is.

Waverly

I’d like to say "I’d never given it much thought before," because I like the way it sounds. It implies a sort of philosophical view and discovery: “I have not thought about it before, but now am willing to examine the full depth and beauty of this wonderful idea or thing and discover something that is ultimately life-changing.” But the truth is, I have. I’ve given it a lot more thought than would seem necessary to give a train station.

There are stagnant puddles that never seem to evaporate on the landings that break up the stairs to the rest of the town above. I am suspicious of these and avoid stepping in them, because the station smells slightly of urine, though I’ve never seen anyone pissing there and can’t imagine why anyone would.  To my knowledge, there are no homeless fellows that live down there; Belmont isn’t that kind of town. And since I have stood, on the platform, waiting, at 12:27 am, if there were any homeless people living there, I probably would have seen them. However, there is usually no one but me, or me and a friend who walked me there, and once or twice, me and a couple of teenagers makingout.

The conductors, of course, have a tendency to think that I was up to something, because there’s no good reason to be going home that late from Waverly to Kendal Green. And maybe rightly so, for it did gave me the independence a teenager from boring white suburbia wanted-a way to hang out with friends that lived a couple towns over, and a venue to photograph them, on the rooftop above the bench and stairs, at night. Fun, and maybe even possibly illegal (oh the thrill of barely doing anything wrong, ever!)

The walls are salmon pink, which is a much more interesting color than any of the other stations I get off at. Sometimes, if I stay the night and am waiting in the morning, I study the wall on my side of the tracks in greater detail: I can see the crackles, the orange sparks and red veins, and where the paint has been chipped away, the blue gray of the cement underneath.  On the opposite side, there are streaks of lighter pink (or…more accurately, they exist on both sides but I can see them more clearly from a distance,) formed from the greater flow of water due to the way the hand rail above is structured. The water collects on the metal rectangles, runs down to the corners, and washed down the wall. In two places this pattern is broken, where fresh paint has been applied to cover up graffiti. For a very long time it said “yoonder” on the left hand side of the station, underneath the road-bridge. More recently, in big letters, left to right, bottom down, above the roof that covers the stairs that go up, it said:

from     save

heaven me

                -which is one of those flexible things that can be interpreted by me for myself. I can think….here, this town, is my heaven. My haven from home, an accessible taste of independence for a person without a car, and here I am waiting for the train to save me from it and bring me to a good nights’ rest. Though somehow I seriously doubt that the writer meant anything like that.

                I don’t mind the drunk sports fans on some nights, but I do mind the throw up that is caused by them. I like eavesdropping on conversations, but I hate looking for a set of seats that’s empty and finding none. I don’t enjoy shelling out money to the conductor, but I like it when they don’t bother to come to collect the fare. The worst is though, when fresh snow is lying all around and still coming down, seeing the tracks are clean, and trying to convince myself that, maybe, perhaps, possibly, I have not missed the train, have not lost a sliver of independence, and don’t have to irritate my parents by asking them to disrupt their plans and pick me up after the last train has gone.That there is still a 'next train' coming to this pink, stinking platform.

Prompt One Margaret

Hallie's room couldn't have existed this way for more than I few months, but I only saw it in this one state. Her room was off the long hallway next to the staircase on the second floor. All along the wall were the Woodhead-Nutting's three daughters school photos. They grow before your eyes in a cheesing smile kind of way. Hallie's emotions ranged from angry to ecstatic, not in that order. Her door had a “Caution” sign that she took from a construction site.

Madeleine and Hayley had led me into her room with quiet voices. She was out, they didn't know where, they told me that it was not uncommon for her to disappear on weekends. Her door opened to, what seemed to my nine-year-old eyes, a pit of clothes. Piled up on her futon, flung on her desk and it's chair and all over the carpet. There were piles of books, some text books, some novels circling her bed and all along her walls. The air in her room was still, like her one window had never been opened and the central air had been blocked. The walls were light blue, but were covered in the ravings of a fourteen year old girl. Madeleine informed me this was so her parents would finally let her paint her walls a different color. Black sharpie sketched out curse words I'd never heard or seen before, mainly dealing with her parents, or her sisters. The sentences varied in size, in an arbitrary sense. Her fucks ranged from one inch to a foot tall. Hayley told me they'd read all her walls several times. The writing grew scarcer as I looked up the wall, eventually stopping at 6 feet up.

I only saw Hallie's room like that once. The few other times I went to Madeleine's house we didn't venture into that chamber, and by the time I was in high school they'd moved to a different neighborhood. I couldn't have stood in there more than ten minutes but the strong, unadulterated adolescence that was contained in those walls were a new idea for me. Anger being open was something I had never seen before. The fear of Hallie's return coupled with the dark urge to keep reading, was something that stuck with me. Like I find myself wanting to go into stranger's homes, not to steal anything, but to rifle through lives like a deck of cards.