Private and public C&C is welcomed with open arms, and is kindly
requested. I'd really love to know what you think of this. It's
short, so it shouldn't be too hard to give me feedback, right?
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1 0 0 0 W O R D S
Vignette 01
"Maudlin"
"1000 Words: Maudlin" (c) 2000 Matthew Johnston.
All Rights Reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of the characters
to any persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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Sunday afternoon faded to evening, shifting so slowly, nobody
seemed to notice. Lamplight replaced sunlight, wool coats were
wrapped a little tighter around bodies, but nobody caught chill
and left the streets; they were as filled as ever.
The people were shopping for gifts tonight, Christmas wine
and New Year's champagne. But even for all their walking and
choosing, it seemed that everybody felt something was missing.
Nobody could rightly put a finger on what, but there was
something.
Ann Meriweather knew exactly what it was; it hadn't snowed
yet. Halfway into December, and there had been not been so much
as a flake to speak of. She sighed at the realization and
continued cleaning the Van Kestersons' dining room. Dinner was
just over; Mr. Van Kesterson was in the living room, preparing his
pipe, Mrs. Van Kesterson was settling back to her evening book.
Young Ann, however, still had dishes to do.
The Van Kestersons were a generous family, faces plump from
rich food and glowing in easy retirement. Their money was not
old, though. Mr. Van Kesterson's hands bore a subtle roughness
from younger years spent on work he felt comfortable simply
leaving in the past, never referred to more specifically than as
"the old job." Mrs. Van Kesterson had given birth to and raised
two sons, both of whom made their parents proud as they grew up.
Another tiny sigh escaped Ann's lips. Robert, the younger
son, had always enchanted her. But, he was already twenty when
the family had hired her, taken her in as a young girl, and years
had passed between then and now. He was married now, and she
barely old enough to start realistically considering courtship.
She had been an orphan of sorts; her mother and father had
died when she was 12, and she decided then to seek a source of
money to support herself. It was so unusual, but to Ann, the
uniqueness of her situation was a large part of the excitement.
Truth be told, Ann knew she had been lucky when the Van
Kestersons had taken her in as their maid three years ago. She
had met a younger boy during her first week in the city, an orphan
dodging the police and stealing from carts. She felt drawn to
him, but knew she couldn't keep down that path. Ann paused for a
moment, wondering what ever became of him. But she shook her
head; idle speculation never produced anything approaching the
truth.
Ann finished gathering the dishes into the kitchen and began
washing. The window in front of the sink held no hope for snow
tonight. Ann washed in silent disappointment; she usually enjoyed
her tasks in the winter, when she could look out the window and
see the flakes glowing in the lamplight, floating lazily to the
ground. In the winter evening, long after the sun had set, the
snow seemed just like stars swimming in the ether. They moved
like dancers, and Ann could hear music just behind their
movements.
She didn't know exactly why she loved the snow so much; she
had always figured it to be something from her childhood, a cloudy
memory of days when she'd play in the white stuff, making reliefs
of angels or building towering, bulbous snowmen. She longed for
those days, when her biggest worry was running out of snow in a
snowball fight, or whether or not one of the larger boys was
putting rocks in his.
She knew, though, that such sentimentality was only clouding
the truth: she was here in the city, working hard and living with
a caring family. She was almost a woman, and longing to be a girl
again was not the prudent thing to do. But it was such an easy
emotion to fall into. There was a certain seductiveness to
melancholy, something soft, gently touching a cheek or wrist,
caring even as it drew from you silent tears and hopelessly
maudlin words...
The dishes were finished even before Ann realized it; her
mind often wandered during the more menial tasks, but never to
such an extent as tonight. The dry clouds above had yielded
nothing to save her from her melancholy, and as she went upstairs
to her room, her chores finished, she felt suddenly heavy. She
wondered half-seriously if she'd ever see snow again.
"Such a silly thought," she mumbled to herself as she closed
the door to her room. "You shouldn't worry about such things."
She lit the lamps in her room, which was already warm from the
fire downstairs. The chimney lay just behind one wall of her
room, so she was never cold in the winter. She smiled at the
consideration the Van Kestersons had showed her and gathered a pen
and paper.
She didn't look out her window immediately, or she would have seen
the first flakes. By the time she had taken notice, a thin film
had gathered on the outside of the sill, and at the bottom of each
pane, just enough for Ann to see when she glanced over.
Her pen clattered on the floor, and her chair groaned as she
pushed it back. She half ran, half stumbled to the window, but
managed to keep some semblance of a clam about her. At least,
until she reached the windows. As she looked out, pressing the
tip of her nose to the panes, she saw it. It was no illusion.
She threw open the windows, the two halves opening like a
gate into the world. The snow collecting on the sill scattered,
joining their brethren as they fell. She looked up, to make sure
it was still coming down. She followed the fat flakes as the came
near, drawn by invisibility of gravity, silently waltzing. She
heard music, distant, soothing. She felt suddenly cozy and safe.
Her breath escaped from her smile finally, a thinning cloud of
steam mingling with the floating stars, falling softly, cold and
sacred, to the ground below.
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AUTHOR'S NOTES:
Okay, the title's pretty pretentious, but it conveys the spirit of
the project well enough: vignettes exactly 1000 words long, based
on anime-style pictures. It's a test of an old adage.
The picture, illustrated by Murakami Suigun, is available at:
http://www.alles.or.jp/~msuigun/Mcg/98,11,03.htm
It caught my eye immediately just because of its ability to convey
so much in such an uncomplicated picture. The rest of his stuff
is great as well (http://ww5.tiki.ne.jp/~msuigun/hp3.htm). The
page is in Japanese only, but the pictures are terrific.
As for the character of Ann Meriweather, I may revisit her in a
future vignette -- there are more than enough pictures of her to
warrant more.
I hope you enjoyed this little story -- I'll be sure to make more
if you let me know you liked it. This and other vignettes will be
added to my web site as they are written (my web page's address
is: http://www.cafe-pierrot.net/). You can find all my fanfics
there, from my first ("Boku No Marie: Music-Box Angel") to my
current original series, "It's a Rainy Day Sunshine Girl," to
"Bootlegged Self-Image," my music project, based on "Serial
Experiments Lain."
Hope to hear from you!