Let’s Get Fictional

This came to me apiece, with eyes closed and head back, complete as it stands. It was only for me to sit and slowly type it out and then, to slowly wonder where it was to go.

I enjoy writing on assignment. I have embarked recently on the writing of screenplays and spent a portion of my last li’l ol’ movie playing script doctor. I had such fun with it I decided to stop playing with it and start actually doing it. Although, frankly, it still feels like play. That is a great thing.

And great and fervent play it has been, too. Twice a week, and often far later into the night than I might have believed it was or i would normally work, I have sat with Melissa and her script. In my blue room with coffee, milk and moonshine, space-heater humming next to my books. At Van Gogh’s Café when I should be paying attention to acting class, concurrent and even cospatial. Writing has lately been time-bending. Writing screenplays has been space-warping as well and I work in a dimension within a dimension. Talk about fun!

And so I discover the joys of helping another person’s idea come to life. But, below, is my idea. Or at least an idea delivered to me. But where to bring it next?

And so I am looking to you to judge. You tell me. What should happen next? Should anything happen at all? Should I hit the delete key or have her find treasure in her spacious back yard? What is to be done with this unexpected gift?

And maybe it’ll end up an assignment.

Oh Joy!

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She woke in the early April dawn to do as she did nearly every morning during the growing seasons; to walk outside, into the air and look out over the acres, to walk lovingly, maternally, through the field to see what was sprouting, what was blooming, what was today becoming ripe.

She was a caretaker to this land, this small farm. Outside of Gainesville, a community garden, barely a farm, really, at five acres. She took care of the comings and going of the volunteers, the implements, the irrigation, and kept watch always. In return she lived here, with a few others, in this small house, took what she needed from the land, a bit extra to sell at the Saturday farmers’ market, and had her utilities and rent afforded by the monthly fee paid by those with plots to garden. And each morning, overall and each row, she surveyed the land.

And like every other morning, she pulled off her covers, pulled on her dungarees, her socks and silently padded out of the bedroom to the open front door where she put on her workboots and opened the screen door to walk out onto the porch, careful about closing it behind her by hand so it would not slam.

Standing for a moment on the porch she looked out ahead and to either side at the trees bordering the greened furrows. Three steps down from the wide porch placed her nearly at the foot of the field, to plant her outspread feet on the soil, stretching her arms wide, raising her palms, face and chest to meet the rising sun, open wide to the world.

She was surprised, as she nearly always was, by the warm moistness of the barely dawn air. Recognition of such air, at this time of year, was not in her genes. Back home, in the mountains of North Georgia, she would walk outside, just as she did here, to feel the cool air shrink and pull tight her skin at the same time the sun would slowly warm her, the air, the ground. All things. It was a curious but common juxtaposition of opposites she had grown not only accustomed to but comforted by; the quick contraction and slow expansion of her own skin, her body and the world.

It was on just such a morning I met her.