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.

Mr. Brown

Mr. Brown, although he was of a slender composition and was always stubbornly underweight, was a person composed of circles and elipses; his wrists, poking out of the baggy cuffs of his mechanic's jumpsuit, creased in such a way that his hands almost seemed unattached to his forearms. His long, bony fingers twitched nervously now and again, and he never seemed to know what to do with them: if they were in his pockets they became bulges against his thighs, and if they were out they always seemed to be bumping into somthing, always in flight, as though someday the perforation between palm and wrist would snap clean away, leaving them wriggling uncomfortably against the floor. His face was strangely free of lines and slim and rounded at the edges. His nose was long and slender; his lips were tense and smooth and round, and he was always moistening them with the tip of his tongue, as though testing a barrier between the world and the words which, when they emerged, flew from his mouth like smoke dissapating into the greasy air of the airport where he worked, a setting which was hardly ever identified as incongruous--although it was--since nobody ever noticed quite what Mr. Brown said. They looked at Mr. Brown's eyes as through the bottom of a glass of milk; his glasses fogged his eyes so thoroughly that their original color, an insipid blue, could not be discerned even if any of his coworkers had been inspired to try. They saw the way his brown hair fell limply over his forehead and they disregarded what he said. Mr. Brown worked quietly and efficiently at the work to which he was assigned; he put his tools away when he was done with them and he took one hour to eat lunch when the clock switched numerals. Because of his nearsightedness, he tended to hunch slightly over whatever he worked on. This was the state in which he could be found most days, hands grease-stained.

Scraps

The theater is dim, even after the light that filters through the never-ending fog outside; the low ceiling over the main floor is lit by eight incandescent light bulbs. At least ten small fans whir quietly on the walls, which are papered with pictures of famous actors and the theater’s benefactors; the lights glint off the glass in their frames. The musty smells of the theater pervade the air: old curtains and seat cushions and the smell of wood polish.