Recent Warm-Up
My writing lately has been feeling really forced, so tonight I spent most of my time on a page-long bit of freewriting to try to find my voice again. It didn’t really work out to well, but its good enough to share anyway, I suppose…
Marbles
Tucked into the corner of the park bench across from the playground, Danielle Bruegger pretended to read. Her feet tapped idly on the faded and peeling paint, matching the tune of the strains of a distant street jazz band she’d seen playing near the entrance to the park. Her eyes flicked indifferently across the page several times, and then raised, gazing in the direction of the playground. They cast about, soaking in the playing children and scattered parents in jerky images and snapshots before returning to the page in front of her.
Her feet, which had stopped tapping for these hurried glances, resumed in their echo of the distant tune.
Danielle lifted the book against her knees, flipped a page, and then reached to the bulging leather pouch that hung at her hip. Without looking, she undid the buttoned flap and wriggled in her hand. After some rattling and clacking about, she withdrew some of the contents, and, arranging her shirt in a tiny bowl about her stomach, deposited them.
The marbles rolled about in the cloth cup, gathering like droplets of water in a leaf. Once they had settled, Danielle plucked up three—there were six in total—and popped them one by one into her mouth like candies, rolling one under her tongue and the other two into the hollows of her cheeks where they wouldn’t attract attention.
She closed her eyes and lifted the fresh images of the playground from the sticky spider-web of the day’s other offerings. They were like little scraps of paper, some no more dynamic than a photograph—a boy about to catch a ball, two children hanging from the monkey bars, two sisters huddled in the sandbox with shovels and an incomplete sandcastle before them. Others captured a few seconds of movement—a girl pulling on a siva boy’s tail as he winced, a laughing boy flying aloft on a swing pushed by an exuberant older brother, a father coaxing his frightened daughter down from the top of the jungle-gym where she’d planted herself, arms outstretched for her to jump into.
Danielle poured through them, arranging them and rearranging them in her mind, examining them like puzzle pieces. Their colors flowed through her like the windblown seeds of fur trees through spring grass—catching this one, snatching that one, the rest rolling on by. Slowly, new colors began to form. The blues became more than blue, the sky-like qualities of their tones lifting beyond merely loftiness, the yellows brighter than sunlight, more vibrant than flames.
With carful hands, Danielle set each color into its place until at last all was in order. Then, she popped the marbles out of her mouth and wiped them against her shirt.
She looked them over. Everything seemed to be in order.