Week two- Setting, even if it's just implied or hinted.
Here's an exercise that came out of that.
Does she mind him
being home all day?
He hasn’t deleted all
of her from the den…yet.
Her stained glass
mosaic of a woman holding the moon still leans against the window, daylight
flooding moon and woman rapt in the figure of infinity, her purple skirt caught in the throes of
flamenco.
But her old books with their musky scent of wood and vanilla have
been replaced by his swimming trophies, gilt faded, silver tarnished, oxidized,
rotten to smell, sandpaper to touch. Liffey Swim Team Prize 3rd 1986.
Seiko Men’s Open-Swimmer of the Year 1990. O’Brien’s Water polo Tournament-Most
Valued Player 1978.
And the roll top of the desk beneath the trophied shelves no
longer flutters and clicks, expanding and contracting like an accordion. He
prefers it left open.
On the filing cabinet a stapler, a paper puncher and calculator have
supplanted her tin box collection, Farrah’s Original Harrogate,Valroble Extra
Virgin, that used to waft out the aroma of nougat and olives and travel.
And her postcards of El Cordobes, bicycles arched over the
Herengracht, laundry strung from balconies on a Venetian canal, posted to
herself from European mini-breaks, no longer bolster the filing cabinet’s gable
wall- stripped back now to reveal scratched metal and adhesive strips, remnants
of earlier takeovers.
Her walking shoes and dog paraphernalia are no longer stacked in
the grate of the cast iron fireplace, flanked by art nouveau ceramic tiles. It
is deemed obsolete, ecologically endangering and currently on auction on E-bay.
But the sky behind the mosaic woman-moon is cracked. The type of
slit that could slice the top off unsuspecting flesh and it’s a question of how
long… before he decides that a brazen woman is the last thing he needs in his
retirement.
Does she mind him being home all day?
This is beautiful. Very evocative.
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