Today's prompt: Write a story that focuses on the discovery/invention/ramifications of something that shapes your characters’ physical world.
Lying in the dark, Mary conjured up a memory of her Willow Street bedroom. It had been bigger than this room, or possibly it just seemed that way because it was square, instead of oblong. She strained to remember the color of the walls, but could not. Only three features stood out in her mind. There had been a long, narrow horizontal window above her bed, or rather a niche that had once been a window. It had been boarded up and painted over long before her family had moved in. Her mother’s suggestion was to use it to display Madam Alexander dolls, if she ever got any. Some of her friends had doll displays in their rooms, all the little figures lined up with their fancy dresses framing their bodies. Grandma had sent a fashion doll for last Christmas, but Mary had found it dull — only the arms moved, and the clothes were attached — so she had traded it to a neighbor girl for a pretty basket she’d fancied. So the “unwindow” had stayed empty.
The real windows in the room looked out from the front of the house, from the porch to the street and to Peggy’s house across the way. On summer evenings, she’d gone to bed when it was still dusk, and she would sit curled on the foot of the bed, her chin on the windowsill, imagining dinosaurs walking down Willow Street. It was a scary but delicious thought.
But her favorite part of the room was the French doors. They were covered with dark green curtains, and usually only one side opened. Still, when Mary was sick in bed — like the time she had the measles — both doors were opened wide and the room became part of the living room. Mary smiled, thinking of the lives her little room had once had. She imagined it as a parlor, with a tall piano under the high window, which perhaps had a pretty stained glass panel. The French door, without the drab heavy curtains, would be wide-open to the rest of the house, its dozens of glass panes sparkling. And there would be visitors on the front porch, chatting on a swing, which listening the sounds of the piano through the open window of the parlor.
“When I grow up”, Mary thought, “I will buy the house, and a piano, and a porch swing, and make the room happy again”.
The real windows in the room looked out from the front of the house, from the porch to the street and to Peggy’s house across the way. On summer evenings, she’d gone to bed when it was still dusk, and she would sit curled on the foot of the bed, her chin on the windowsill, imagining dinosaurs walking down Willow Street. It was a scary but delicious thought.
But her favorite part of the room was the French doors. They were covered with dark green curtains, and usually only one side opened. Still, when Mary was sick in bed — like the time she had the measles — both doors were opened wide and the room became part of the living room. Mary smiled, thinking of the lives her little room had once had. She imagined it as a parlor, with a tall piano under the high window, which perhaps had a pretty stained glass panel. The French door, without the drab heavy curtains, would be wide-open to the rest of the house, its dozens of glass panes sparkling. And there would be visitors on the front porch, chatting on a swing, which listening the sounds of the piano through the open window of the parlor.
“When I grow up”, Mary thought, “I will buy the house, and a piano, and a porch swing, and make the room happy again”.
RSS Feed