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I'm actually doing NaNo for once. [Segment 1]
The morning of their departure, Pete stared out the clean, clean windows of his old house – already stolen from the status of ‘home’ by the bitter, premature departure of his lifelong neighbors, the Marxs. It was not home anymore. He sniffed, wiping his nose with the sleeve of his jacket – light fleece, far too light for the crystal winter that gleamed beyond the window. The frost had fallen heavily in the dark hours of morning, making the leafless trees pieces of enchanted filigree on the tapestry of his homeland – this native country of his youth, dissolving into his parents’ business, their lives that bustled relentlessly around him and now stole him from everything he had ever known.
His heart was clenched like a fist in his small chest, his tearful parting with Angie had been made too brief by the hustle of the adults. The Marxs were moving to Greece, too, but Greece was a wide country and there was no promise that the transfer of the close families would land them in the same neighborhood, even the same town…
“Sometimes we have to let go of people, Peter.” His mother had said with stern resolution, trying too hard to be comforting as she knelt before him with her hands on his shoulders. “You can write letters to one another. Maybe in a year or so, after everything calms down, we can even take a trip to go visit them if they’re far away.” After a year? He hadn’t replied to her. Nine years old is far too young to learn the pain of love, or loss of love.
The sound of the door opening in the next room over was acute enough to make him wince – the brief keening of its familiar hinges, the touch of the doorknob to the stop on the adjacent wall. “Son!” Rang his father’s warm tenor, a pause of silence before he continued, “It’s time to get going”. Peter squeezed his eyes shut, tepid drops clinging to his lashes. He could see his father’s face right now, the man listening anxiously for his response… Dad was more sensitive than Mom about how hard it was for him to leave. He felt guilty. It was Dad’s job that was moving them out of the country. Pete had lashed out in anger at his father, days before… fighting out of a hug and telling the man, “You’re trying to kill me, I know you are!”. He’d taken the words back in the face of his mother’s pleading, but he hadn’t wanted to.
The car didn’t warm up fast enough. All of his heavy coats, down-lined gloves, knitted hats… they’d disappeared into boxes that had been relegated to the purgatory of his grandparent’s basement, probably indefinitely. Where they were going was going to be too warm for all those things… in feigned excitement, Peter’s father had tried to energize him.
“Won’t it be nice to not have all that weight to pack around when you go to school? You can leave the house in shorts, and a t-shirt, and not have to worry about losing your left glove or anything!” Peter had smiled for his sake, thinking all the while about Angie.
They bumped along the familiar web of roads surrounding their somewhat remote homestead for what seemed like an eternity. It was dreamlike, watching the trees – each asleep with wither, each frozen brittle against the stiff morning breeze – and the small ripples in the earth, hills the rose like ocean waves crested with frost, all flow by and by and away. Was this the last time, he thought to himself, that he would look upon this beloved land? Greece couldn’t possibly be as beautiful.
There loomed the aging Catholic church that their family had attended for scores on scores of years, wherein Pete could imagine the ancient pastor hovering, fearsome and condemning as he lit the sacred candles that set the dust and smoke alive above the alter. Creaking pews, the massive black rafters spreading above the huddled congregation like the wings of an angel with dark intentions. The heating in the building was faulty; Pete could vividly remember many winter Sundays being almost as cold inside as it was without. His fingers clenched tight together, body taut with his chill beneath his Sunday best clothing, his high, young voice a trembling descant in the swell of a hymn. It was in these things that the flavour of his land, his youth, was thickest… the old, decaying temple of moaning windows and a slanted crucifix glided serenely out of his vision. Angie wasn’t Catholic, but sometimes the Marxs would celebrate togetherness in his family’s holidays. The whole congregation, comprised predominantly of aging, widowed ladies with peaked faces and thinning white hair, fawned over little dark-eyed Angel Marx. “She is truly, truly a blessing…” Tabitha Brown would drawl in her deeply southern accent. “What a perfect little creature… your sister-in-law did well, Mrs. Marx, to name her Angel like she did.”
It all made Angie feel very shy, her round face down turned, blushing. They sat pressed close together in the pews, silent as children ought be, awed and fidgeting.
They were both only children, growing up with fingers interlaced, running in the same fields with the same wind in their hair. They were close like siblings, and close like best friends. Howling fights and tears at the unfairness of childhood, the cruelty of a fellow youth, the discovery that one individual has the power to hurt another – and what a heady, potent power that is. Hand in hand, they learned to lie and be discovered, to lay bare the tiny, creature-filled darkness beneath a stone in the pregnant hours of dusk, when everything is discovery and wonder.
In the narrow, painful weeks between knowing that they were leaving the kingdom of their birth and Angel’s departure, each day had fallen into the pendulum-swing of solemn ritual. Totally separate, they’d gone out into the early winter fields and searched with frozen fingers for some commemoration of their birth, their growing, their abrupt and unwanted coming of age. After supper one night, Peter had trekked up the road to her house, a walk he was allowed to do alone for its familiarity – though he was forbidden to go further without one of the Marx adults in tow. His eyes had been fixed fast to his shoes as Mrs. Marx answered the door, inviting him in with habitual warmth and summoning Angie from her packing. They stood, abandoned, in the foyer, Peter rocking barefoot on the tile and trying not to look at her.
“I found something for you.” He said at length, her silence prying an answer from him. Angie didn’t say anything, and, almost in panic, he thrust open his hands between them, where lay a gleaming shard of ice-blue glass. He closed his eyes, trying not to cry suddenly, unsure of what this was all for. They’d never been the sort of children to give one another gifts – there was nothing to give, every discovery was made together. A few moments passed, and Angel’s fingertips were warm against his palm, the weight of the glass removed and replaced with something different. Peter’s hands closed around a river-worn piece of black stone, an almost-perfect disc.
He palmed the stone in his pocket, ebbing away from memory and looking around the back of his mother’s head at the road toward the city. Behind was nothing. A pair of vacant houses, staring obliquely at the future. Fields of frost and fairies, the rambunctious songs of children. Ahead, loomed Greece – this inhospitable foreign land – waiting to gobble him up with abandon, spitting out his bones onto the moorland of his future. It was all insatiably dramatic, but to Peter, this was death, and he felt respectable enough treating it as seriously. It made him hate his mother and father, trying to make this out like it was nothing. Angie was wordless, but Pete knew she understood completely.
From the long, taciturn car ride into and through the city, to the airport perched on its far cusp, the bustle of the massive transit center was harrowing. Peter, small beneath his luggage and the watchful eye of his parents, felt devoured…chewed and chewed on by the voracious appetite of the rest of the world, which he was accustomed to being slightly more sheltered from. Everywhere, there seemed to be infants wailing at the breasts of their tired mothers, glowering businesspeople cutting their way to their destinations. It hurt to look at them, Peter thought. He was never without the perpetual sting of tears in the corners of his eyes, blurring the fluorescent lights of the terminal to specters around him.
To escape it, Pete sunk deeper and deeper into his trance. The strap of his carry-on bag dug painfully into his shoulder, stuffed with books to read and a little pocket video-game to play, to pass the hours even though his parents kept telling him “Just try to sleep.” As if it was so easy. He barely perceived the boarding call, a frowning and silent shadow to his mother and father, who were already deep in discussion about business. About the place they would be living, about the work that had to be done, about the material effects they were having shipped. Would the wardrobes make it halfway across the world in good condition? The sofa, the china? Peter scowled out the window of the jetliner as they took off on the first leg of their journey. What ever happened to his precious cargo?
Halfway through the voyage, he began entertaining morose thoughts of a plane crash… a dramatic, and tragic, way to end it all. Dropping the stone on the anthill, he considered, until he dropped into a fitful sleep fraught with dreams of Angie and her family being lost at sea, drifting endlessly on the broken hull of an airplane. Peter woke in tears, only to be bustled off to another flight, and another.
“Angel…?”
Angie Marx looked up from the ruined architecture of half-unpacked boxes that littered the floor and built-in shelves of this room that she was being molded into.
“Dinner’s ready, sweetheart.” She nodded to her aunt, clutching an unopened box of colored pencils between both hands. There was no desire in her to eat, none whatever, but there was necessity in it… just that simple, basic desire that tells a human to consume for sustenance. Two weeks ago they’d flown to this country from America… from her natural life, her free life, from her friends and her house and the land that she knew. Peter was having such a hard time with it when she left, and it broke her heart to… but she was realizing, as the days wore on, that the earth was warm beneath the soles of her feet in this place, too. That there was still beauty, still magic, in these new, green hills to contrast the winter she had left. The air was balmy, the sky blue, Greece felt and smelled different than the comfortable fields of her native land.
There was a solace in change, in new explorations, and the first day after they closed the deal on the house they’d be living in she had avowed to make the best of the situation… do as she would have been doing
[This is a chunk of it. I've got just over 3000 words written.]
His heart was clenched like a fist in his small chest, his tearful parting with Angie had been made too brief by the hustle of the adults. The Marxs were moving to Greece, too, but Greece was a wide country and there was no promise that the transfer of the close families would land them in the same neighborhood, even the same town…
“Sometimes we have to let go of people, Peter.” His mother had said with stern resolution, trying too hard to be comforting as she knelt before him with her hands on his shoulders. “You can write letters to one another. Maybe in a year or so, after everything calms down, we can even take a trip to go visit them if they’re far away.” After a year? He hadn’t replied to her. Nine years old is far too young to learn the pain of love, or loss of love.
The sound of the door opening in the next room over was acute enough to make him wince – the brief keening of its familiar hinges, the touch of the doorknob to the stop on the adjacent wall. “Son!” Rang his father’s warm tenor, a pause of silence before he continued, “It’s time to get going”. Peter squeezed his eyes shut, tepid drops clinging to his lashes. He could see his father’s face right now, the man listening anxiously for his response… Dad was more sensitive than Mom about how hard it was for him to leave. He felt guilty. It was Dad’s job that was moving them out of the country. Pete had lashed out in anger at his father, days before… fighting out of a hug and telling the man, “You’re trying to kill me, I know you are!”. He’d taken the words back in the face of his mother’s pleading, but he hadn’t wanted to.
The car didn’t warm up fast enough. All of his heavy coats, down-lined gloves, knitted hats… they’d disappeared into boxes that had been relegated to the purgatory of his grandparent’s basement, probably indefinitely. Where they were going was going to be too warm for all those things… in feigned excitement, Peter’s father had tried to energize him.
“Won’t it be nice to not have all that weight to pack around when you go to school? You can leave the house in shorts, and a t-shirt, and not have to worry about losing your left glove or anything!” Peter had smiled for his sake, thinking all the while about Angie.
They bumped along the familiar web of roads surrounding their somewhat remote homestead for what seemed like an eternity. It was dreamlike, watching the trees – each asleep with wither, each frozen brittle against the stiff morning breeze – and the small ripples in the earth, hills the rose like ocean waves crested with frost, all flow by and by and away. Was this the last time, he thought to himself, that he would look upon this beloved land? Greece couldn’t possibly be as beautiful.
There loomed the aging Catholic church that their family had attended for scores on scores of years, wherein Pete could imagine the ancient pastor hovering, fearsome and condemning as he lit the sacred candles that set the dust and smoke alive above the alter. Creaking pews, the massive black rafters spreading above the huddled congregation like the wings of an angel with dark intentions. The heating in the building was faulty; Pete could vividly remember many winter Sundays being almost as cold inside as it was without. His fingers clenched tight together, body taut with his chill beneath his Sunday best clothing, his high, young voice a trembling descant in the swell of a hymn. It was in these things that the flavour of his land, his youth, was thickest… the old, decaying temple of moaning windows and a slanted crucifix glided serenely out of his vision. Angie wasn’t Catholic, but sometimes the Marxs would celebrate togetherness in his family’s holidays. The whole congregation, comprised predominantly of aging, widowed ladies with peaked faces and thinning white hair, fawned over little dark-eyed Angel Marx. “She is truly, truly a blessing…” Tabitha Brown would drawl in her deeply southern accent. “What a perfect little creature… your sister-in-law did well, Mrs. Marx, to name her Angel like she did.”
It all made Angie feel very shy, her round face down turned, blushing. They sat pressed close together in the pews, silent as children ought be, awed and fidgeting.
They were both only children, growing up with fingers interlaced, running in the same fields with the same wind in their hair. They were close like siblings, and close like best friends. Howling fights and tears at the unfairness of childhood, the cruelty of a fellow youth, the discovery that one individual has the power to hurt another – and what a heady, potent power that is. Hand in hand, they learned to lie and be discovered, to lay bare the tiny, creature-filled darkness beneath a stone in the pregnant hours of dusk, when everything is discovery and wonder.
In the narrow, painful weeks between knowing that they were leaving the kingdom of their birth and Angel’s departure, each day had fallen into the pendulum-swing of solemn ritual. Totally separate, they’d gone out into the early winter fields and searched with frozen fingers for some commemoration of their birth, their growing, their abrupt and unwanted coming of age. After supper one night, Peter had trekked up the road to her house, a walk he was allowed to do alone for its familiarity – though he was forbidden to go further without one of the Marx adults in tow. His eyes had been fixed fast to his shoes as Mrs. Marx answered the door, inviting him in with habitual warmth and summoning Angie from her packing. They stood, abandoned, in the foyer, Peter rocking barefoot on the tile and trying not to look at her.
“I found something for you.” He said at length, her silence prying an answer from him. Angie didn’t say anything, and, almost in panic, he thrust open his hands between them, where lay a gleaming shard of ice-blue glass. He closed his eyes, trying not to cry suddenly, unsure of what this was all for. They’d never been the sort of children to give one another gifts – there was nothing to give, every discovery was made together. A few moments passed, and Angel’s fingertips were warm against his palm, the weight of the glass removed and replaced with something different. Peter’s hands closed around a river-worn piece of black stone, an almost-perfect disc.
He palmed the stone in his pocket, ebbing away from memory and looking around the back of his mother’s head at the road toward the city. Behind was nothing. A pair of vacant houses, staring obliquely at the future. Fields of frost and fairies, the rambunctious songs of children. Ahead, loomed Greece – this inhospitable foreign land – waiting to gobble him up with abandon, spitting out his bones onto the moorland of his future. It was all insatiably dramatic, but to Peter, this was death, and he felt respectable enough treating it as seriously. It made him hate his mother and father, trying to make this out like it was nothing. Angie was wordless, but Pete knew she understood completely.
From the long, taciturn car ride into and through the city, to the airport perched on its far cusp, the bustle of the massive transit center was harrowing. Peter, small beneath his luggage and the watchful eye of his parents, felt devoured…chewed and chewed on by the voracious appetite of the rest of the world, which he was accustomed to being slightly more sheltered from. Everywhere, there seemed to be infants wailing at the breasts of their tired mothers, glowering businesspeople cutting their way to their destinations. It hurt to look at them, Peter thought. He was never without the perpetual sting of tears in the corners of his eyes, blurring the fluorescent lights of the terminal to specters around him.
To escape it, Pete sunk deeper and deeper into his trance. The strap of his carry-on bag dug painfully into his shoulder, stuffed with books to read and a little pocket video-game to play, to pass the hours even though his parents kept telling him “Just try to sleep.” As if it was so easy. He barely perceived the boarding call, a frowning and silent shadow to his mother and father, who were already deep in discussion about business. About the place they would be living, about the work that had to be done, about the material effects they were having shipped. Would the wardrobes make it halfway across the world in good condition? The sofa, the china? Peter scowled out the window of the jetliner as they took off on the first leg of their journey. What ever happened to his precious cargo?
Halfway through the voyage, he began entertaining morose thoughts of a plane crash… a dramatic, and tragic, way to end it all. Dropping the stone on the anthill, he considered, until he dropped into a fitful sleep fraught with dreams of Angie and her family being lost at sea, drifting endlessly on the broken hull of an airplane. Peter woke in tears, only to be bustled off to another flight, and another.
“Angel…?”
Angie Marx looked up from the ruined architecture of half-unpacked boxes that littered the floor and built-in shelves of this room that she was being molded into.
“Dinner’s ready, sweetheart.” She nodded to her aunt, clutching an unopened box of colored pencils between both hands. There was no desire in her to eat, none whatever, but there was necessity in it… just that simple, basic desire that tells a human to consume for sustenance. Two weeks ago they’d flown to this country from America… from her natural life, her free life, from her friends and her house and the land that she knew. Peter was having such a hard time with it when she left, and it broke her heart to… but she was realizing, as the days wore on, that the earth was warm beneath the soles of her feet in this place, too. That there was still beauty, still magic, in these new, green hills to contrast the winter she had left. The air was balmy, the sky blue, Greece felt and smelled different than the comfortable fields of her native land.
There was a solace in change, in new explorations, and the first day after they closed the deal on the house they’d be living in she had avowed to make the best of the situation… do as she would have been doing
[This is a chunk of it. I've got just over 3000 words written.]