edenjane
06-05-2012, 08:43 PM
This is something I wrote a long time ago and have recently re-edited. If anyone could give me some feedback on basically the voice of the writing.. I don't really have anyone to show it to and can't determine for myself whether or not it feels genuine. Thank you.
I looked at the pale body and could not choose a reaction. Staring at this empty canvas without a desire to be painted, the best I could do was try hard to feel nothing. After all, she wasn’t my mother. I allowed the tender flesh of my fingertips to trace the line of her forehead, the steady wrinkle set there by one too many hard decisions; one too many children outcast for the good of the family, as I was. I leaned my head to the side, buried my opened eyes into hers.
She had a look of calm about her, although her limbs were twisted
wretchedly. She had struggled against it, but was still resigned, still appeared confident that in the end she had won.
There were police. They were the ones who had called me in the night in hopes that I could identify a dead body. I had convinced myself at the word “dead” that it was one of the girls I knew growing up.
It could have been Lana, with her six month old child on her seventeen year old hip, who I walked with to day care so she could drop off her daughter and be free to turn tricks near a construction site, or Anne, the reason for a case marked fragile, who couldn't help but to forget to look both ways before crossing the street. Or even Cassandra, although she was the one of us I thought most likely to survive, since she was named for a prophet and could have seen it coming. I expected one of them, or someone else, a name with a two sentence story attached to it that grew weary in my mouth when repeated too many times. Just someone I had come into contact with once, someone who paid a little too well, who touched a little bit differently.
But I hadn't expected this woman. Not the woman who softly explained to me at the age of thirteen that there were too many children in the house, that the younger ones needed her more than I did. That everything would be alright.
I nodded for verification purposes when a man in a uniform asked me again. “Alice Randall.” It was a statement, not a question. He already knew who she was, she carried ID, but I guess I was the last step in a process to make sure a corpse was really a person and that a person was really a corpse. There were more statements dressed up like questions, but I didn't hear any of them. I could almost feel the dead woman's voice warm in my ear, her sweet and silencing lullabies that could once rid me of any problems, that would make me forget that I had to think about the bad to appreciate the good. I shivered at the idea that she would always be a dead woman to me now.
“That's all we need, thanks for coming out.” the man said. It seemed that his flat eyes spoke louder than his thin lips. I nodded again, grinning slightly.
I went home, back to the apartment where the sunflowers outgrew the dirt and died in the window sills. Back to the lover who only asked where I had been for the last few hours after I told him I had been gone at all. I shrugged, crawled into bed, and closed my eyes on the entire existence of Alice Randall, my first foster mother.
I looked at the pale body and could not choose a reaction. Staring at this empty canvas without a desire to be painted, the best I could do was try hard to feel nothing. After all, she wasn’t my mother. I allowed the tender flesh of my fingertips to trace the line of her forehead, the steady wrinkle set there by one too many hard decisions; one too many children outcast for the good of the family, as I was. I leaned my head to the side, buried my opened eyes into hers.
She had a look of calm about her, although her limbs were twisted
wretchedly. She had struggled against it, but was still resigned, still appeared confident that in the end she had won.
There were police. They were the ones who had called me in the night in hopes that I could identify a dead body. I had convinced myself at the word “dead” that it was one of the girls I knew growing up.
It could have been Lana, with her six month old child on her seventeen year old hip, who I walked with to day care so she could drop off her daughter and be free to turn tricks near a construction site, or Anne, the reason for a case marked fragile, who couldn't help but to forget to look both ways before crossing the street. Or even Cassandra, although she was the one of us I thought most likely to survive, since she was named for a prophet and could have seen it coming. I expected one of them, or someone else, a name with a two sentence story attached to it that grew weary in my mouth when repeated too many times. Just someone I had come into contact with once, someone who paid a little too well, who touched a little bit differently.
But I hadn't expected this woman. Not the woman who softly explained to me at the age of thirteen that there were too many children in the house, that the younger ones needed her more than I did. That everything would be alright.
I nodded for verification purposes when a man in a uniform asked me again. “Alice Randall.” It was a statement, not a question. He already knew who she was, she carried ID, but I guess I was the last step in a process to make sure a corpse was really a person and that a person was really a corpse. There were more statements dressed up like questions, but I didn't hear any of them. I could almost feel the dead woman's voice warm in my ear, her sweet and silencing lullabies that could once rid me of any problems, that would make me forget that I had to think about the bad to appreciate the good. I shivered at the idea that she would always be a dead woman to me now.
“That's all we need, thanks for coming out.” the man said. It seemed that his flat eyes spoke louder than his thin lips. I nodded again, grinning slightly.
I went home, back to the apartment where the sunflowers outgrew the dirt and died in the window sills. Back to the lover who only asked where I had been for the last few hours after I told him I had been gone at all. I shrugged, crawled into bed, and closed my eyes on the entire existence of Alice Randall, my first foster mother.