Stillness is a Lie, My Dear

a_quiet_light @ 2006-06-03T18:07:00

2006-06-04T01:07:47Z

Slow Lane, University Pool

Opening my eyes underwater, I watch the bodies before me. Suspended in the blue element, they move at the speed of daydreams. They hold their breath. Their toes go down, and bubbles rise. I think of what, or how, the water means. Beneath the surface, you cannot hear unless you scream. That is how I told my secrets as a child in the neighborhood pool. I was seldom understood. Slowly, I began to speak the water's language.

a_quiet_light @ 2006-05-31T22:05:00

2006-06-01T05:22:22Z

Two prose poems.

May 29

All day I have seen images flicker across the television screen: not just the Memorial Day Parade, but the fanfare of bodies on runways, bodies on catwalks, bodies more beautiful than mine. The worst part is, you see them, too. But because we do not know each other, and because we are many miles apart, we cannot talk about them, what they mean to us. Tonight, we starve ourselves alone.

Scene from an Unmade Film

Cigarette in mouth, I step outside. The air has cooled, the confetti has settled in the street under the blue strobe of the moon. It crisps under my boots like fallen leaves as I walk. I am dressed all in black tonight. I hum the song playing on the radio of a passing car. The way I stand at the end of the driveway, slightly hunched and fingering the rip in my stocking I got from who-knows-what, I am a caricature of myself.

a_quiet_light @ 2006-05-29T15:03:00

2006-05-29T22:03:23Z

Memorial Day – a prose poem

The parade is over. Blue and silver streamers catch in the softly whirring fans on porches across town. From a distance, the sidewalk shimmers with puddles of heat. Dogs lie down in the shadows, scratch the flies from their ears. Backyard pools grow heavy with children diving for rings.

Later, after sunset, fireflies pulse from within the azalea bushes. Little girls in white dresses run barefoot through the uncut grass of their front yards, trailing sparklers and laughing. They flicker and disappear. Down the street, the ice cream truck jangles its bells.

I have lived here all my life. I grow weary of these familiar scenes, for one does not desire what one has. I light a cigarette and leave for the city.

a_quiet_light @ 2006-05-26T22:22:00

2006-05-27T05:22:22Z

Moving the House

Off the coast of the island, tangential
to the blast of the rockdrills
hollowing the earth for the house’s
new foundation, was a boat
unmoored. It belonged to the owner
of the house, a man of sixty, a recluse.
He liked to call himself
a misanthrope, and no one
would disagree. His shed was full
of wolf spiders that his two dogs caught
in their teeth and lay dead at his feet.
One day, on a whim, he decided
to move his house (hardly more
than a rambling shack) closer
to the edge of the cliff overlooking
the sea. The contractor called him
crazy. He did not disagree. The workers
watched him from a distance, the fragile
presence barking orders. The two dogs
were silent. Every now and then
a woman would come to his door
with a picnic basket, and he would
invite her into the yard, and they would eat.
Later, he would take her out
in the boat, sail clear to Connecticut.
Upon their return, he would again forget
the other anchor, and the boat
would drift all night as they watched
the moon from the backyard grotto.
They did not make love.
She told her friends otherwise. And when
the house was finally moved he did not
ask her to stay. A year later
he was dead, the boat lost to the water.

a_quiet_light @ 2006-05-26T21:27:00

2006-05-27T04:27:58Z

July 4

Through sand
and fog
the blast of fireworks

A shatter
of sparkles
in the night sky

a_quiet_light @ 2006-05-26T13:42:00

2006-05-26T20:43:11Z

The second-place winner of the Urmy-Hardy poetry contest:

My Father’s Tree

stood in the center of the yard
and bore crabapples in season.

He had ordered it months before,
but, due to some delay, it came

after he died. My mother planted it
that year, dug a moat around the roots

for ease of watering. We
didn’t know it was an apple tree

until the spring, when it burst with fruit
like the skies sparking the island

in fire weather. The apples, though,
were small, hard, and green—

impossible to eat. And I couldn’t
swing from the branches that began

several feet over my head.
In summer, the tree

glowed, sunlight filtered green
through the tower of leaves.

My balloons to heaven stuck
in the apex of its bloom:

a harem of bubbles, all unfaithful
to their parent wind, yet

buoyed like flat notes
from a distant flute or clarinet.

Autumn burnished the leaves
to pure gold like the two chains

my father always wore around
his neck: twin mysteries.

The tree was a ghost in winter,
a pastiche of leaves at its root-feet;
it scraped the gunmetal sky
with its branch-fingers: the

bitter process of becoming
human. The first winter I

fixed my eyes, blurrily,
on the trees to the west—

the cluster of willows at the edge
of the cemetery, trying not to notice

the relatives shoveling dirt onto
the lowered casket. He was only

separated from the roots of trees
by a plank of wood. I thought

I might like to walk there, into the forest.

a_quiet_light @ 2006-05-23T17:43:00

2006-05-24T00:45:29Z

The Big, Beautiful House by the Sea

,where the sick children
all come to die,
sits on a sandy hill
high above the beach.
The land goes down
in gradations, like steps,
and there is also a wooden staircase
that no one uses. Below,
the sun is out, the umbrellas
in bloom. The adults unfold
their blankets, unfurl
their glossy magazines, rub
sunscreen on each other's backs
and their children's, at least
those who are well enough
to swim against the current.
Great finned sea turtles
make their nests among the dunes,
hide their eggs in weeds each spring.
The kingfishers swoop low over
the shallows and catch their prey.
Tidepools catch the light like eyes.

I told the little girl on the porch
that she was beautiful,
and she began to cry
and unbraid her hair.
She pressed her palm
to the screen and turned
her gaze to the horizon.
When I asked her why
she never went down to the beach,
she replied, "I am afraid of the sea,
the great roaring, unfeeling sea.
At least here, in this house,
they care if you die. Here,
they give you a funeral
and recite your favorite poem.
But out there"--she pointed--
"Out there, beneath the waves..."
(I watched the glassy waves,
the depths they concealed,
the depths that were always
a metaphor...for something.)
"...you do not become a part
of the buried treasure
of sunken ships. Oh, no.
Your eyes are not replaced
with pearls, and coral does not
replace your bones--
fish come to feast on them,
to suck the marrow out, and when
the sharks smell your blood,
they devour your limbs
whole. No one ever finds you.
This is how those divers disappear."
And then she turned to me,
her eyes the grayish color
of the sea, and about to overflow
again, but before they did
I pulled her close,
and together we listened
to the ceaseless crash and roar.

a_quiet_light @ 2006-05-20T22:25:00

2006-05-21T05:25:58Z

The night of the big dance
I watched the moon rise
at the end of the street,
the perfumes and bouquets
drawing me back to the shore
of the lake this morning, where I
laid in the grass near the marsh
and with one finger traced
the fragile, gothic beauty of the sky.

a_quiet_light @ 2006-05-18T19:36:00

2006-05-19T02:39:39Z

Lesley

After ice cream,
we went back to her cottage,
past the neatly trimmed yards
and white houses with their
trellises of bougainvillea.
Behind the cottage,
in the failing light,
was a rose garden--pink and white
and yellow and passion-color opening
like hands after prayer, hands that feel
the hour of worship ending
in enchantment. I can still see
her sun-browned hands (so delicate,
the tips of them) clipping the stem
of one with pomegranate petals
that, she said, would bloom
the next morning on my windowsill.
I gazed into the folds of the flower,
let its fragrance fill me
with a delight forbidden
by self-hatred, and I imagined
she had just given me
the map of her heart.

a_quiet_light @ 2006-05-16T14:39:00

2006-05-16T21:42:13Z

Your hair a tangle of seaweed.
Your clavicles of pearl.
Your eyes a mosaic of sea glass.

a_quiet_light @ 2006-05-15T16:27:00

2006-05-15T23:34:13Z

To My Reflection in a Cold Mirror

Your image is
an image I cannot touch--
the planes of your face
the sheets of ice that break
up on the river. How you never
ask questions, that puzzles me,
too. How you stare back from
behind the glass and smile out
into the room.

You do not see me.
I do not exist for you.

*

I saw you last night
at St. George & the Dragon,
your body pressed against
the old man's, your cheek
against his lapel. You are younger
than his third ex-wife.
He feeds you creme-brulee
with a delicate spoon. He falls
in and out of love with you.

I watch, most open-mouthed.

*

A sudden distance.

I have opened the medicine cabinet,
looking for you behind.
Only painkillers. Aspirin. A cracked thermometer.

Where is she, the beholder of the eye,
the eye of emerald, of Venetian glass,
the eye of the nautilus--
any eye but mine?

a_quiet_light @ 2006-05-10T18:41:00

2006-05-11T01:41:22Z

The temperature dropped when she entered the room.

a_quiet_light @ 2006-05-05T22:41:00

2006-05-06T05:44:00Z

Mall Girl

I followed her into the Roosevelt Field Mall in Garden City, New York. She was fairly tall and thin with wavy brown hair and bangs. She told me she had this dream of the normal life. She said, “There's a moon over Bourbon Street.” I knew she was alluding to the Sting song of the same name. The mall was important to her. It has always been this way. There was something suburban, yet cosmopolitan about it. She didn’t particularly like clothes, but she did like the cheap numinous art in the galleries, the people-watching, the languor of the food court, the way the sunlight came in on a gray slant through the skylight above the second floor. She liked the fact that Roosevelt Field used to be an airfield. She identified strongly with flight, as both her parents and her semi-stepfather worked for the airlines. I’m talking like she or the parents are dead now. They’re not. She is only twenty-two. I haven’t even told you her name. Her name is Tree. That is not her real name. I know what her real name is, but I’m not going to tell you. This is her legacy nonetheless. She can rotate 3D objects, like chairs and statues, in her head. But then again, so can most people. This skill was greatly influenced by the Surrealist paintings of Salvador Dali. She feels that the symbols of her youth are the fish, the broken eggshell, the flat harbor, the gate, the garden, the moon, and the bubble, from those Ferjo paintings at the mall that remind her of Dali, the paintings of his from her book Essential Dali by Kirsten Bradbury, which, incidentally, she bought at the mall, in B. Dalton, on the first floor near KayBee toys, if it still exists; or perhaps the lithographs she saw once in a collector’s shop in the Forum Shops at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, where she now makes her home. Sometimes Tree would swear she saw Dali’s vision of Hitler, a wet nurse with a strip of flesh cut from her back, sitting near the entrance of Macy’s. Tree used to (or maybe still does) have a thing for Thomas Kinkade, the so-called Painter of Light. She went to his gallery in the Fashion Show Mall in Las Vegas when it first opened and got a private tour, though the gallery was smaller than the downstairs of her house in New York. The tour guide dimmed the lights to show the effect of the paint; the little windows of the bungalows glowed. Tree sighed. She liked the values they symbolized, the family and siblings she never had. His world, for a time, became her world. His aesthetic became important to her, wound itself into the helices of her artistic DNA. It was a cozy, suburban world, a world of rainy days and the excitement in the bottom of the stomach, when you just want to go hide inside a hamper and whisper your secrets to the clothes that smell familiarly of human skin, your skin. And suddenly you have that burst of recognition, like when you’re in the parking lot of the mall, up three or four stories, and you look out at the gray office buildings with their panel of windows and imagine yourself all grown up and working there. Tree had these ideological revolutions, these “planetary Baghdads that rose and fell in [her] mind." Her inner life was a bit burdensome at times, but she mostly enjoyed it. She liked walking around the mall on a Friday afternoon (and it had to be a Friday afternoon, before the weekend and almost-back-to-school-on-Monday depression sank in), not even needing a Discman because she could put Sting’s Ten Summoner’s Tales on repeat in the echo chamber of her brain. Sting sang from the depths of her soul. She looked up to Sting because he was this cool urbanite, his voice so steady and sure of itself in a way that hers was not. She did not think she was extraordinary at all. Occasionally she would listen to the smooth jazz muzak, like from CD101.9, coming in from the speakers in the department stores, or she would go down to the first floor of Nordstrom and listen to some old man playing the piano in the lobby. It was only happy music, so sometimes she replaced it with Moby’s “Porcelain,” a sad mall-song, on an album called Play, which she bought on July 3, 2000. She liked to be mostly left alone. She was not your typical mallrat. There was some kind of hubris in her, some kind of dormant but pervasive self-confidence. It was more of a survival instinct than anything else. The mall had as many rooms or stores as her imagination—it was a “mansion of many rooms,” as Keats said. Except Tree’s was external and later assimilated into her psyche. The mall was, in her words, “psychically radioactive,” or perhaps “poetically radioactive,” borrowing the words of Dante Davis in She’s Come Undone, by Wally Lamb. It was like a great puzzle or mathematical equation she couldn’t and didn’t want to solve, a place from which to draw inspiration and go back and live in when the world got too real. Everything about the mall suggested the way she wanted to live her life as an adult. Capitalism and pretentiousness really had nothing to do with it. Heaven, for her, would be a mall, not a library as it would be for Jorge Luis Borges. The smells at Body Shop and Bath and Body Works stimulated her imagination, though the actual lotions and sprays often irritated her skin. She does not consider herself a sensualist, but at the mall I’d argue otherwise. Or maybe not. Her chief instrument of perception has always been her mind. She once wanted to be known as the furniture poet. She arranged and arranged furniture from the lower level of Bloomingdale’s, or her mother’s favorite home furnishings store, Domain, on the second floor; anyway, she arranged that furniture in her mind in an English house with a garden in back. The gates were always locked, and it was always raining. The gates would part of their own accord. The rains would stop. The sun would come out and a rainbow appear. The grass would glisten like a green jewel. The birds would start to sing. It would be like a great Ferjo or Dali painting, and she would be living in it.

a_quiet_light @ 2006-05-05T01:24:00

2006-05-05T08:24:36Z

Passersby

There is no time
anymore, it was used up.
All those days I sat
at my window and watched
the passersby, thinking
I could never be like them,
always in a hurry—
it was days like those,
when I did nothing,
that time crept by me
like sun on the water,
and I did not exist. Only
in motion can I resist
what catches me here,
in this room, as I
write: the endless
progression
to silence
and dust.

---

Nocturnes

From here to hereafter
there will be nocturnes—
slow, pulsating like the skin
of a river an hour past
midnight, when the boats
glide on tracks of silver—
nocturnes, like the ones my mother
used to sing to bewitch
stray cats that tore the tulips
from the small patch of earth
behind our house—
nocturnes woven into hedges,
into wild carrot and sea oats,
woven through pearls
around the necks of ladies
at the country club,
around the neck of my grandmother
who drank brandy
from Waterford crystal
on the lanai, on moonless nights
before the nocturnes
had reached her ears.

a_quiet_light @ 2006-05-05T00:34:00

2006-05-05T07:34:47Z

—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Od' und leer das Meer.

*

Coming back late
from the party
my hair in tangles
a few stray hairs
on some man’s lapel
I lie on my bed and wonder
why bother dancing
why bother doing anything
at all
if someday or even today
it matters to no one
but me

a_quiet_light @ 2006-05-04T19:28:00

2006-05-05T02:28:50Z

Riddle me this, Batman: Can I become a journalist without a journalism degree? That is, do I have any chance whatsoever of writing a column for a major newspaper if I don't have an MA or PhD in media studies or whatnot?

Second, here's a very brief scene from the story. Laine and Beth are in a department store trying on clothes.

"Remember how Miss Westin always used to tell us in health class that a perfect body doesn't equal a perfect life?" Laine said.

"Yes, I remember," Beth said, bracing herself for what she knew was coming next.

Laine posed in front of the mirror and smiled. "Well, I can say with absolute certainty that she was wrong."

a_quiet_light @ 2006-05-02T09:34:00

2006-05-02T16:43:55Z

you art a scholar, horatio, speak to it, by Olena Kalytiak Davis

You say you walk and sew alone?
I walk and sew alone.

You say you gape and waver?
I am most dizzy, most open-mouthed.

You say you taste it with each dish?
I drink it and I spit it up.

You say it lays you face-down?
I kiss the dirt.

Carved into your bone china?
Mine's more fine.

Folded into your laundry?
Dry. Dry. Dry.

Is it quite awful and unbearable?
Quite.

Is it most sweet and gentle?
Most sweet, most gentle.

Does it make you retch?
I am wretched.

Do you write it poems?
I compose on it daily.

Is it epic?
In thought and in treatment.

Do you cry upon it?
It is flat and wet.

Will you humor it?
Forever.

Will you forsake it?
Never.

You say you keep it in a box?
I've Cornelled mine.

You say you call it soft names?
I call it softly. I name it.

Clipped of fledge?
Clipped of fledge.

You say it sits up on your soul?
It has it licked.

A new religion?
Nay, a faith.

Do you take it to bed?
I've pillowed and I've laid with it.

Does it propagate?
I sharpen my chastity upon it.

I belt it. I go down on it.
I keep it down.

Have you done your best to bury it?
I have dug.

With half a heart?
With dull spade, yea, half-heartedly.

Has it a sword?
A long-tailed lion on its crest.

Would you unknow it?
I've called it bastard.

Bastard!
Would you divorce it?

Untie it, would you?
Have you

Done with it?
No. I will have more.

a_quiet_light @ 2006-05-02T02:40:00

2006-05-02T09:40:23Z

Beauty was my mother's law, her religion. You could do anything you wanted, as long as you were beautiful, as long as you did things beautifully. If you weren't, you just didn't exist.

From White Oleander, by Janet Fitch.

a_quiet_light @ 2006-05-01T19:40:00

2006-05-02T02:42:05Z

Two poems I turned in for my Women Poets class. The first is "gendered," and the second is "non-gendered."

The Golden Poppy

When I opened
this morning, it was
a beautiful thing. Perhaps
it was the heat in the room, the sun
burning through the Venetian blinds, or
the warmth of the hand
that picked me from the median,
an energy made visible
by these four orange petals pulling
back from my center of
perfect stillness.

*

A petal fell onto
the desk with some certainty.
Released from beauty, it made
a small sound.

*

What injury did you sustain,
my petal, when you fell from
grace? I did not mean to
drop you, but you whispered
to the stem that you were
ready. Who was I
to say otherwise? Still,
I must admit,
letting go is always
the hardest part.
But then I remember
there is wholeness
in heaven.

The Latecomers

The party is winding down.
A few guests remain, talking
or having a smoke by
the back windows. It has begun
to rain, a low gray drizzle. Inside,
the glasses are spotted with
fingerprints. The fan
trails blue streamers, nods
in its plastic cage. Half-
eaten crudités wilt between
crumpled napkins.

The latecomers enter through
the open door, wander quite
unnoticed to the bar, where
they help themselves to a couple of
drinks and maybe the last
of the cashews. They talk
in hushed tones about
the latest suicide, the silt
in the drinking water, the dogs
twitching in their sleep.

Drinks in hand, they walk
past the knot of smokers,
out onto the back porch. The rain
has stopped. The pool holds
its blue color in the evening
light, holds a single, translucent body
six feet above the ground.

a_quiet_light @ 2006-05-01T03:49:00

2006-05-01T10:52:44Z

Another scene between Laine and Beth. Beth and her family have just eaten dinner at Laine's house. As you probably can imagine, it was an awkward experience.

Beth called up Laine when they got home. Rory picked up.

“Hi, Rory. Is Laine there?”

“Yeah, she’s here. Hold on one sec and—”

“Hello?” Laine had picked up in the other room.

“Hi, Laine.”

“Oh, hello—Rory, please hang up the phone.”

The phone clicked. Laine sighed on the other end. “Let me guess. You forgot something here.”

“Oh, no. It’s not that—I have everything. I just wanted to thank you for the lovely dinner.”

“Oh.” Laine paused. “You’re welcome.”

There was a silence.

“Anything else?” Laine said.

There was so much that Beth wanted to say, but she refrained. She fiddled nervously with the cord. Laine was often more intimidating on the phone than in person.

“That’s it,” Beth said, and took a breath. “Thanks again.”

“You’re welcome again.” Laine hung up.

Beth was holding the receiver. She dialed again, and Laine picked up.

“What is it now, Beth? You’re really trying my patience.”

“How did you know it was me?”

“Who else would it be?”

Beth’s mind went blank for a moment. Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth.

“What the fuck do you want, Beth?”

Beth’s heart hammered in her chest. “Nothing. Forget it.” She hung up.

The phone rang. Beth picked up.

“How dare you hang up on me!”

“I didn’t hang up on you, I—”

Laine hung up. This was getting ridiculous. Beth almost dialed her again, but thought better of it. She refused to be this childish.

But she couldn't help it. Her fingers dialed Laine’s number automatically.

Laine picked up, but said nothing.

“Listen, Laine, I’m sorry.”

She waited for Laine to say something back. She didn’t.

“Fine, don’t speak to me, then.”

She took a deep breath.

“I’m going to go now, Laine. Goodnight.”

Still nothing on the other end.

“I love you,” Beth said, and slowly pulled the phone away from her ear and returned it to its cradle.

a_quiet_light @ 2006-05-01T03:29:00

2006-05-01T10:33:40Z

New plan.

Setting: Old Greenwich, CT (?)

POV: Beth Lasky, Laine Spencer's older sister

Laine and Beth grew up in New Canaan.

Beth now lives in Old Greenwich, where the Harper family (Rory, Selena, William) lives- Rory is good friends w/ Caitlin, Beth's daughter (both are 11 years old when the story begins).

Laine lives in NYC as a writer; meets William, whose wife recently committed suicide.

Laine marries William and moves in with him; is glad her sister is in the neighborhood- realizes William's daughter Rory is friends with her niece- Laine institutes strict rules in household- Selena, in college, dislikes Laine right away- is sort of jealous b/c she's young and beautiful. Rory sees Laine as a mother figure, wants to be just like her, and so she begrudgingly follows the strict rules.

Two years later William dies of a heart attack. Laine gets the house, car, yacht, some money. Rory gets a substantial amount of money because she's still a kid. Selena gets nothing. Selena sues Laine and wants to become Rory's legal guardian. Laine wants to be in charge of Rory's money, so she also wants to become her legal guardian. A dramatic custody battle begins.

Here is a very, very rough scene between Laine and Beth.

Rory would come take shelter from Laine at Beth's house. She and Caitlin and Rory would bake chocolate chip cookies as it rained and watch cartoons. Laine came over, dripping wet, from a run, looking for Rory. Beth threw her a dishcloth.

Is it clean? Laine asked.

She could be so difficult sometimes.

Yes, of course it's clean.

After she'd dried off she asked, Where is Rory?

Rory and Caitlin came into the kitchen to get chocolate chip cookies, warm from the oven. Do you really need that? Laine asked Rory. Rory dropped the cookie.

Oh, Laine. Let her have one. And, for God's sake, have one yourself. Have you eaten today?

Do you know how many calories are in one cookie?

No, and I don't really care.

Perhaps you should. Come on, Rory. Let's go.

Rory hung back.

What is that supposed to mean? Beth said.

Laine didn't answer.

Come on. Your father's waiting, Laine said.

Rory looked down at the floor. Bye, Cait, bye Beth.

Laine, Beth said. You are not leaving here until you answer me. Are you calling me fat?

If the shoe fits...Laine said, and walked out the door.

Beth cringed. She was more concerned about Rory, though. Whether she was eating proper meals. Whether she cried whenever she stepped on the scale, afraid of the verdict. That was no way to live.

a_quiet_light @ 2006-04-30T14:00:00

2006-04-30T21:03:06Z

I won the $20K Anglo-California Scholarship from the English-Speaking Union for a year at Oxford! Sadly, I can't use it (I've already accepted BU), or even defer for a year. Maybe I will apply again next year if I still want to get my M.St. in English Language & Literature.

a_quiet_light @ 2006-04-29T18:25:00

2006-04-30T01:27:47Z

I'm thinking of taking a new turn in the "Disinheritance" story. At first, I wanted to have Laine bribe Rory to convince Selena to drop the lawsuit. Then, there was going to be a confrontation between Selena and Laine at William's funeral, and Selena was going to take Rory back to the hotel with her immediately. That night, Rory was going to leave her sister a note and sneak away from the hotel and go back to the house. Selena was going to find her there the next day and try to take her back, but she was going to be adamant about living with Laine. Selena would then say, "You two deserve each other," and take off. The rest of the story was going to be about Laine and Rory learning to live together as mother and daughter. But I think what I really want to write about is the perfect American family/step-family, headed by a tyrannical matriarch (i.e. Laine), which looks perfect on the outside, but is really miserable on the inside. I want to take my inspiration from American Beauty and Spanglish. I want to write something about the American Dream. I want to call it All Things Return. I'm not really sure what it's about yet, but I think it'll begin with the picture-perfect Laine and William and their kids/step-kids and then zoom in to their troubled lives behind the facade. I've been trying to write a story like this forever. Something devastating will happen that will change the way they interact and view the world. These characters will be my most dynamic yet. William will have two daughters, but they'll live with their mother. Laine will be their stereotypically wicked stepmother. Then, their mom will die or commit suicide or something, and Laine will be stuck with them. Oh, no, how will our beautiful, self-absorbed heroine manage?

(later)
I have a new plan. Will describe soon.

a_quiet_light @ 2006-04-28T19:29:00

2006-04-29T02:29:44Z

Tilda Swinton (the White Witch in The Chronicles of Narnia) came to campus today for a talk with a drama professor. Someone in the audience commented, "Tilda, you have such incredible depth in all your movies. How do you achieve that? What do you do?"

Tilda replied, "I do nothing."

She is my hero.

a_quiet_light @ 2006-04-26T21:46:00

2006-04-27T04:50:18Z

They were on the freeway now. It was growing uncomfortably warm in the car, and Rory was beginning to feel drowsy. Last night her eyes had not closed, not even for a moment; she had watched the clock steadily spin through the hours until dawn, when she rose to pack for her trip and take a cab to the airport.

Gazing straight ahead, Rory numbly felt for the button that opened and closed the passenger window. She pressed it, and the window began to slide down.

Inexplicably, it began to slide up again. Rory looked over and saw that Laine had her finger on the master window control.

“But it’s so hot in here,” Rory complained. “I’m burning up.”

It was only mid-April, but summer came early in Florida. The clouds were opening to the west, passing across the humid face of the sun. Rory imagined the swamps beginning to boil through the knot of mangroves on the other side of the freeway.

“I feel fine,” Laine said.

Rory did not believe her. Laine could be so difficult sometimes. Rory glanced at her delicate face for the telltale beads of perspiration, but then she remembered that Laine Spencer did not sweat: she glowed.

Rory leaned her head against the sun-warmed window and sighed, remembering what Laine had said about Selena contesting the will. She wasn’t exactly sure what it meant to contest a will, but she didn’t dare inquire. Instead, she asked, “Is Selena here yet?”

“Her flight is arriving later this afternoon,” Laine said with a slight edge to her voice. “She will come to the house to collect you.”

“Where is she taking me?”

“How should I know?” Laine said.

“Why can’t we both just stay with you?” Rory couldn’t see any good reason for not being able to stay in her own house. She hoped that she hadn’t done anything in the past twenty minutes or so to anger Laine to such an extent. Laine was not known for her patience—or forgiveness.

“Under no circumstances will that sister of yours set foot in my house.”

“It’s her house, too, isn’t it?” As soon as Rory said it, her hand flew to her mouth. There was no talking back to Laine.

Laine raised a thin, arched eyebrow. “Not anymore.”

The car turned onto Gulf Shore Drive. Blinking back tears, Rory gazed down the familiar street at the rows of white and pastel beachfront mansions. Though the windows were tightly shut, she could hear the slow pulse of the Gulf in the distance and smell the salt air.

What did Laine mean when she said the house was no longer Selena’s? Then, by extension, it was no longer Rory’s, either. Maybe she had misunderstood...

Of course she had. Why would Laine throw them out of their own home after they had just lost their father? William would not have stood for it. Besides, it simply did not make sense.

They pulled into the garage, and Laine turned off the ignition. After the garage door shut, Laine sat motionless, her hands still gripping the steering wheel. Rory’s heart raced, but she willed herself not to move, not until Laine did.

“Life is nothing more than a big room,” Laine said quietly, “and we must all try to stay in it as long as possible. Do you understand?”

Rory nodded, even though she didn’t. But there was something about Laine’s tone, something definitive and authoritative, that made her sound like she knew exactly what she was talking about. As always.