What Happened After Lunch

Verity dropped dead one afternoon. Just after lunch.

the other sister

Verity graduated from her exclusive school and hurled herself into exclusive society. She got the job, the car, the boyfriend very quickly and moved with a fast set of people-who-had-yatchs. In fact, her own father had a yacht, but so he could spend the occasional sunday breathing the wind and winding the ropes into neat figures of eight. Not the friends that Verity made - they had yachts so they could be watched. So they could invite attractive girls like Verity along to sit on the stern, shriek as the spray soaked them and sip champagne on the deck. She was the sunshine ice-cream girl - spotted on the deck of a 12footer and photographed the next day. The money was nice, but certain friends became jealous. Her tan had been that much deeper, hair that much blonder and her eyes - they were unnaturally green.

More green

Sisters with the same eyes could choose such different lives. Wilhelmina chose to go to the other side of the earth - found communes and artists, people who celebrated the moon festival and gathered apples and lit fires and bees wax candles. They drank wine from the stoneware chalises that, if they hadn't made them they had a close friend who had. The harvest, handmade shoes and homegrown produce (even if it was worm-riddled and slightly sour). The smelt of patchuli and earth. They loved the dirt under their nails and often wore hats of felt that stood out in the villages they lived in. People called themselves artists with the ease and casualness that left Wilhelmina staggered. She only dared to mention her painting occasionally, fearing the label the inquisitive and well-meaning questions.

Give-away eyes

There were very few similarities between Elise's mother Wilhelmina and her aunt Verity; except for eyes so green they glowed. Even in black and white photos their eyes were remarkably green. Like the water at high-tide at the end of the pier. In both sisters these eyes could be adjusted to snaky squinting or flicked up at the corners to convey a sense on mischief. In both sisters it was the eyes that narrowed and widened, but never in a way to give the slightest insight, never to let anyone in. And perhaps that was the most similar thing about them. They were inscrutable – to one another and the world. Looking at her own eyes in the mirror Elise wondered where she got her give-away eyes - was it the lids that betrayed her every feeling? Was it the angle of the lashes? The flecks of copper and gold that mixed themselves into the green?

Paragraph a day

Challenge: a paragraph a day for the next 30 days.

The paragraphs will continue or build on the story already underway here.

They may be really short. Fridays and Wednesdays might be longer.

7.1

Every year in late November there are flocks of birds that drown along the southeast coast. Some years are worse than others. The birds are grey, but their feathers turn black in the surf where they are tumbled and battered. They wash up in the tide line, just where the soft sand gives way to the harder wet sand, and they lie there, trembling wings spread out looking too long for the small wedge of body. Once they are dead they are flamboyant in their postures, they leave their bodies spread open.
As children Elise and her brother would find the live birds along the arc of the beach. They would pick them out of the water, out of the sand and take them home. Sometimes one would live through the night, scuffling in the box, as if still trying to follow the wind and find its way to the others where they might now be resting on some rocky island to the north, pairing up, getting ready to nest. The instinct to fly never extinguished, just the ability to do so.
There was a smell to them, these birds, before they died, as they always did, with their beaks the perfect shape, their feet in order, their feathers still ruffling to the touch of the air. A musky smell, that stayed on your hands after you’d buried them in the deep sand burrows they would dig for the dead birds, even though they would both rinse their hands in the sea. It was almost like the sea magnified the scent, brought it out all the more strongly. A grey smell, even if it was only the way their feathers carried it.
Maybe it was the smell of great heights, as if the wind could settle on one scent when it got that high, and the birds soaked it up as they flew along the in the trade-wind between – well, where? It never seemed to matter too much, as they always died.

Thesis done!

Revisions are passed! Phew. Now I can get on with the story...