I've been branching out and trying new genres and styles; this piece was generated in a workshop I took recently called Writing and the Body, which I was taking for a second time because it is amazing, with Jen Pastiloff and Lidia Yuknavitch, two incredible writers and humans. The prompt was to write in a "narrative braid," a story told in strands or pieces with shifts in point of view, tone, perspective, etc. The themes given for this exercise were an intense relationship with the natural world, a difficulty you carry around, and an unexpected delight.
Me being a fiction writer at heart, it's made-up, but it has real-life inspiration. And: it's a work in progress! (These are only the introduction to the three "strands.")
~~~
The child reaches for another blue-gray rock by the stream, this one the size of her fist. Its rough edges gently scrape the lines of her fingers and it glints curiously in the sun, with hair-thin crevices reflecting in silver. It clacks against other rocks as she drops it into her sagging purple velvet pouch. She holds the bulging pouch in her palm, mainly to gauge how much room is left inside but also to hear the grind of the stones against one another, to feel the rhythm of rocks and velvet upon her hand.
~
The playground rocks at her school are duller and grayer, but she still likes to feel them in her palm. They are colored by the high-pitched squeals and laughter that intermingle with the clang of the tetherball chain and swingset squeak. These smoother, smaller rocks slide across her fingers differently than the ones in the stream; they don’t tug at her skin the way rocks should, like the rocks in the stream do.
She hugs the fence at the playground’s perimeter, as far away from the unpredictable noises as she can be. Crouching down as close to the rocks and the ground as possible.
There’s a dip in the air, a pause, when the recess children come to stare sometimes. Jabs in her back when they call her names. But she’s learned that if she stays crouched down long enough, they’ll fall back to where they came from, like pebbles from an uncurled fist. The teachers keep a special eye on the child at her always-spot by the fence.
~
The girl’s mother sits in the faded blue foldout chair cooling her feet in the stream, watching her daughter do what she always does. The movements of her child’s body are methodical and careful, a small and perfect machine.
“Don’t go around the bend where I can’t see you,” the mother reminds her. The girl looks up to nod and smile, a look in her eyes that her mother recognizes and trusts.
Figures emerge from the nearby path. The mother blinks, shifting so she is sitting up in the old blue foldout chair. It isn’t uncommon, but it isn’t common, to see people by this stream; it is so close to their backyard that it feels like theirs. It’s an occurrence infrequent enough for her daughter, whose back is to the path and whom she now watches closely. The girl tenses when her sensitive ears pick up the fall of the steps on the dirt, and her eyes widen and flick imperceptibly. The mother can see her breathing shift. Her daughter grabs an orange-red rock from the water’s edge and makes her way closer to her mother in the faded blue foldout chair.
The girl recognizes a boy from her class before her mother recognizes his father. A flare of anxiety rises within the girl, but before she can find a place to hide, the adults, having recognized each other, start talking. Their voices slide up and down with the ease of a breeze while the girl watches the boy, surrounded not by metal and plastic and crayons but trees and water and rocks. She breathes through her pounding heart and quivering hands like her mother taught her, working to process the foreign scene.
Her mother places a hand on her back as she talks for her, a signal, a reassurance, I’ll take it from here—and the child goes back to her rocks.
The water cools the sweat off her palms as she plunges them to find rocks that are purple. Her breathing has just returned to normal when she sees a shadow next to her.
The boy is crouching, watching curiously. She thinks about him and his small group of friends, how they play kickball every recess on the opposite side of the playground. How he answers every question in the classroom and talks to everyone and is on another plane.
The girl places a hand on her pouch to ground herself. She opens her mouth. What does she say? Hello? Hi? Funny to see you here, I live really close? The words build up inside her mouth and stop behind her lips.
But he looks at her and smiles a smile that tells her she doesn’t need to say the words. He reaches into the water and digs. In his hand is a group of rocks; he takes two that are bluish and greenish, adding them to a pocket in his jeans which, the girl is just now noticing, is bulging like her pouch. She hears a familiar clack of rock hitting rock.
He hands the other two in his palm, one orange-brown and the other gray with a streak of pink, to her, and she reaches out to take them.
