The House

The front room of the house, filled with the quiet scent of dried lavender flowers and the dignity the old velvet couches, in the style of the early days when the house’s striped gold and beige wallpaper and baroque portraits had been the mien, was a relief to Isobella; despite its cramped dimensions and the bleak lines of the withered winter trees outside the fringe of the drapes, it satisfied something in her. It was not that the room was neutral, although she did appreciate its muted fragrance as superior to the lunchroom’s blare and raucous camaraderie; it was that it was established; although she did not always appreciate the authority of her teachers and the adults who bounded her life like a barbed-wire fence, there was always that core in her that respected the silence of the room even beyond the short history she had in it as a child, one small hand clutching the leg of the coffee table. She recognized its age and the refinement it symbolized even if it had never entirely realized this embodiment.  

Autumn

I went outside, on the first day of autumn, to find a black triangulation,
a shingle on the ground, a piece of the sky fallen down.
Teenagers do not appreciate:
the sinking of a spoon in honey,
a poem by Stanley Moss,
the solitude of morning on a grey step.
In ten days 
I turn sixteen. 

Blonde in the Bleachers

Isobella is the blonde in the bleacher. The boys can't stay away; like moths to the pale flame of her hair they buzz around its flicker, and she rises above them, a queen they can't quite discern. In her, they learn that beauty shares some properties with heat, because no matter how close she is, no matter how hard they strain, they cannot quite make out her face. Although it is not in their natures, they do not complain when they can't break her facade, because Isobella stirs something in them and they can't bring themselves to mind.

Even so, behind her blonde hair and smooth blue eyes, Isobella is a mystery even to herself. Inside her mind, she is alternately perched on the edge of a perilous cliff and squeezed claustrophobically into an egg sac. Her greatest fear is the unarticulated sense that someday the cliff will fall out from under her feet and the egg sac will contract, leaving her weightless and empty. It doesn't show, but whenever she looks in a mirror she sees its broken edges and herself balanced on them. She is alarmed some days to find herself posessing such an aptitude for self-admiration; she knows that, one day, she'll look too far and nothing will be the same again.

It was on one of these days, when her gaze steadily avoided the plate-glass windows of the school, that she very nearly broke down. The boy to whom she was talking, an old admirer named Richard, detected nothing more than a slight contraction in her eyebrows before she made a very hasty excuse to him and rushed off to consult her analyst.