Astrid Magnussen (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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fandomtownies2020-05-26 07:29 am
white_oleander) wrote in fandomtownies2020-05-26 07:29 am
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Covent Garden Flowers; Tuesday [05/26].
One of these days, Astrid would come into work, put on the tea, put on her gloves, and spend her shift not being deep and introspective and even maudlin, but today was not one of those days. It was almost as if the act of making the tea when she came in in the morning itself set off a certain mood for her now, the process of it, the mildly ridiculous expectation of it, that became ritual, and ritual made her thoughtful. Like the cleaning of her brushes after a painting, like the laying down of the tarps over the furniture, and that thoughtfulness lead to things like slipping oleanders into people's floral arrangements, wondering if they'd notice, and spending almost all her free time hunched over the counter, over paper that she'd brought with the possibility of writing to her mother again, but she ended up using just for drawings.
She shouldn't write to Ingrid, anyway. Under her bed, there was a dark current waiting to sweep her under. Her mother’s unread letters, fluid with lies, shifting and heaving like the debris of an enormous shipwreck that continued to be washed ashore years after the liner went down. There should be no more words. From now on, she only wanted things that could be touched, tasted. The scent of blooming flowers, the buzz of wires before rain. A river flowing in moonlight, trees growing out of concrete, scraps of brocade in a fifty-cent bin, red geraniums on a sweatshop window ledge. Give her the way rooftops of apartments piled up forms in the afternoon like late surf, something without a spin, not a self-portrait in water and wind. Give her a random orchid playing electric guitar, or her temporary bed up in room 210, with the shape of Sabine in the bed on the other side. The hills of California under mustard and green, tawny as lions in summer....
Covent Garden was open!
[[ and still cribbing shamelessly from sections of White Oleander by Janet Fitch ]]
She shouldn't write to Ingrid, anyway. Under her bed, there was a dark current waiting to sweep her under. Her mother’s unread letters, fluid with lies, shifting and heaving like the debris of an enormous shipwreck that continued to be washed ashore years after the liner went down. There should be no more words. From now on, she only wanted things that could be touched, tasted. The scent of blooming flowers, the buzz of wires before rain. A river flowing in moonlight, trees growing out of concrete, scraps of brocade in a fifty-cent bin, red geraniums on a sweatshop window ledge. Give her the way rooftops of apartments piled up forms in the afternoon like late surf, something without a spin, not a self-portrait in water and wind. Give her a random orchid playing electric guitar, or her temporary bed up in room 210, with the shape of Sabine in the bed on the other side. The hills of California under mustard and green, tawny as lions in summer....
Covent Garden was open!
[[ and still cribbing shamelessly from sections of White Oleander by Janet Fitch ]]