Tuesday, March 16, 2010

75. The cupboard was bare (2)


The mesh of the screen door bit deeply into her forehead as she leaned heavily against it with each wave of nausea. She heard the chair scrape the cold tiles as Simon pushed back from the obscured monitor. He did not move toward her. He did not make to speak.

She turned to face him, and saw the answer written on his face, reflected in the flat black of his eyes.

Gone, their wages all gone. She closed her eyes and eased the flat of her fingers across the indentations in her forehead. She swayed. Simon remained across the room.

“This is beyond the two of us, Sal.”

She stared at her cupped hand seeing nothing but darkness. She could not find her way in that darkness. There was no memory. No swirling fog that might lift, just solid dark. ‘There came a big spider that sat down inside her.’

3 comments:

Joan Elizabeth said...

I like it ... nice to get episode 2.

diane b said...

Sad story but a good one.

Julie said...

See, even when doing the first Riff, I just knew that the woman was "going to be the one that dun it". There were a couple of tricky things to this one. Firstly, the story came before the image and that left me looking for something specific. I went walking yesterday morning for an old-style screen-door but zilch around here. They are all wrought iron security doors! So then I wanted this symbolism of "trapped".

With 150 words I am not able to "take" the reader far. Rather, I paint at the easel. The two hardest words to write were "their wages". It needed to impact them both, and if I used "saviongs" it indicated that they had more resources and I needed them pushed to the edge. Besides, this had happened before.

Ah, woe is me ...