Martine, 16, Framingham, MA
Character Description: This character is a young female writer. When the novel she has poured her life’s work into is denounced by publishers, she withdraws to a foreign country in attempts to kindle the flames of a new life and reignite her passion for writing. Rejection, coupled with extreme loneliness, causes her to sink into depression. She wanders aimlessly through her new remote town in search of a sense of community. She comes across this in the last place she expected when she discovers that the decrepit building in which she temporarily resides is inhabited by a troop of eccentric underground journalists. Alongside her intrepid neighbors, she tears into the controversies and secrets woven into the fabric of her town and writes like she never has before.
The sun peeked through the gaps in the verdant canopy above, but my journal pages were still mostly barren. My pen always seemed to still a few sentences in, flailing like a line unable to lure in a bite. I flipped back to the cover, sluggish in the evening heat. It was adorned with pressed indigo flowers on a cream-colored background. Some of the pigment in the flowers had escaped under the pressure, and each blossom was framed with a deep purple halo. The wind sent the pages tumbling in a delicate fan, and suddenly I was a vandal, a delinquent with the gall to tarnish such beauty with the aftershocks of a passion that had run its course.
A cloud crossed over the sun and the forest floor seemed to close itself off, a flourishing ecosystem in which I was a parasite, leeching off its natural resources to fuel my own unavailing pursuits. I felt the crabgrass clawing at the soles of my feet as I reread the fruits of my two hours. Oh. My breath thickened in my throat and the canopy of branches above shifted in the wind. I suddenly felt compelled to trek back to the little corner market and seek forgiveness for the heinous crimes I’d committed inside the lovely journal with the flowers festooned across the front. And then I’d make a pit stop back at my publisher’s to apologize for my persistence with that novel I’d probably packed with even more of my insufferable delusions. My pen felt leaden and foreign in my hand, and I let it fall to the forest floor in penitence.
I stood up and saw that a thicket of scraggly trees was eyeing me curiously. It could just be a hobby, I told them. They remained steadfast, bony limbs still contorted in thorny skepticism. I didn’t quite know what they sought from me, but I wanted to oblige them. Something to unwind with in the afternoons. The forest was drawing further and further away from me, the thrushes and jays flocking in the leaves of a far-off pine tree, the wind gently guiding the little saplings away on their scrawny legs. A shadow crossed over my bones, and I knew that it was a lie. I wanted to crawl out of the skeleton that had confidently put pen to paper every morning and leave the remnants to disintegrate on the forest floor. I scooped up the marred pages of the little journal and tucked it away. Just something to pass the time. If that.
❋❋❋
The town had fully transformed itself when I crossed onto Washington Street. The daytime freshness had long since evaporated from the air, a numbing sense of finality sliding into its place, a reflective epilogue on the day passed. The possibility that I’d felt on my trek to the market that very morning remained in the air, and, silhouetted against the cloak of night, it was mystifying and beckoned me through the alleyways and over the crosswalks. In spite of my spirits, my eyes were dazzled with it. I watched as my shadow, elongated by the streetlamps, tapered off into drains and crept up the sides of buildings, beguiling the eye with its disappearances and reappearances.
I arrived at my complex and allowed myself a moment to take it in at nighttime for the first time. Unlike some of the buildings that retained their daytime charm in the dark, 42 Washington Street took on an air of its own. The streetlamps threw long, delicate shadows over the siding, and the balconies seemed to withdraw back into the wall for the night.
I fumbled with my keys and let myself in. I was immediately enveloped with cool air that seemed awfully artificial, if the sputtering air conditioner on the far wall was any indication. The lobby had also fully adopted the nighttime guise, the broad armchairs appearing to purposefully hold their poses in the dark, as if they had once been dancing. Even the idyllic watercolor gondola painting mounted on the wall behind the front desk had shifted in the night, now depicting rafts traversing the inky river Styx.
“Your first night at 42 Washington, I assume?”
It took me a moment to locate the speaker, tracing over the corners of the room that the moonlight had claimed, my eyes swimming in the cool puddles of light on the wooden armrests and coffee table. It was only when I stepped back and observed the room again, allowing my gaze to look more deeply, that I found the source.
Completely submerged in shadow, a man was reclining on a velvet armchair. Even entirely cloaked in dark, I could tell that he was incredibly tall, almost larger than life. One of his legs draped over the side of the chair, and his foot still managed to touch the ground. His left hand curved over the other arm of the chair, spanning the entire width. He wore a plain button up, the hem of which fanned out onto the chair. I saw an object on his lap that I recognized, from my own fruitless pursuits, as a journal. His was almost bursting at the seams, the binding probably beginning to fray under the stress. I saw movement inside the shadow that overtook half the man’s face, swallowing up his likeness so that his features were still up to my imagination.
“It’s a completely different place in the dark, all transformed and the like. One might say we have two buildings for the price of one. It’s a bit of a joke around here.” He spoke as if he were scribbling on a page, the drawl of his voice trying desperately to align itself with the words in his head – as if I’d walked in on him in the middle of constructing his own universe and it hadn’t quite stopped for me. My eyes fell on the fountain pen dangling between his fingers that I’d dismissed as a cigarette, and I realized that was exactly what he had been doing. “But it’s best to keep it between us. If the landlord catches on, you can expect rent to double in price. All the apartments are the same around here, and the landlords are no different. They’ll take anything they can get.” He laughed faintly, and the shadow shortened as if the man had tipped his head back, lost in thought. There was a brief silence, during which I realized I hadn’t yet uttered a single word. “Are you a writer too, then?”
The question was wholly disarming, catching me right between the ribs. I hoped that the night would obscure the rivers of uncertainty it sent ghosting over my skin and coursing through my veins. My heartbeat rattled against my rib cage as I willed myself to respond.
“I’ve dabbled in it. So one might say I am, but ... no, I suppose I’m not, by definition, anyway.” I was again grateful for the anonymity the night provided, for my voice was telling a story of its own, one that I’d recently established was no longer mine. “What might give you that impression?”
The man shifted forwards, the contours of his face revealing themselves inside the beam of moonlight that fell at his feet. I rushed to dismantle the collage of shadowed features I’d loosely fabricated in my head, although it was not far off from what the moonlight illuminated before my eyes. I observed that, for as much as he liked to talk about it, the man’s face was not like 42 Washington Street. “We have a certain look about us, I s’pose.”
My hands wrung behind my back as he propped his elbows on his knees. I couldn’t help but wonder what else he’d detected during this shadowed analysis. I was sure the distress his question had instilled in me had not gone unnoticed, but he did not question it. He did not question me, and I did not question him.
The man skimmed through the pages of the teeming journal and produced a piece of brown paper that, from the looks of it, had been folded up to four times. “If I’m right in my assessments and you’re interested, there’s a group of us around here. I think we’d all be open to more writers in a town like this.” He placed the paper in my palm, and I nodded.
I unfurled the paper and scanned it quickly as I walked. I was already halfway down the hall when a blank space on the flyer piqued my curiosity. “Excuse me, sir, the address-- it seems to be missing?”
But the enormous man had already eased back in the armchair, hands closing around the journal as the shadows overtook him once more. “It does have the feel of a haunted house around here, doesn’t it?” He mumbled into the dark.
To be continued…
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