A Most Rapid Fall (BWWM)

Through the Looking Glass

Virginia Woolf, she's a quarter of the way through the essay by now, you sure know how to frame a sentence.

Mona was jealous of her in that way. Here she sat, staring out the window wearing her white gown as she gleaned a dark eye over this town of hers, plain and shabby, feeling nothing because somehow she, in the span of sixteen years, saw and heard everything; she had nothing to show for it.
There were ways Mona'd gotten through life: keeping a careful distance, toeing the line with a hushed voice, and staying bland all-around. Be unemotional, detached, but above all an observer. It was a noble vocation.

The nibble she'd taken from this essay- and she must say, hiding a faint smile of mirth, that it was well-prepped- confirmed it all well enough so she knew that she was on the right track to nowhere in particular. This was an obscure existence she was making for herself. She liked it.

Even when her parents, with their nervous little glances, chided her with subtle critiques, she still felt a small balloon of pride within herself at being clever enough to avoid the trap they were in. They were stuck here with an unplanned child, living in a standard loveless marriage. Closing the book quietly, she scanned the room, her dusty flea-market trinkets, her unsent notes. Thus was her whole life in a nutshell prepared to be packed.

Outside, on the branch of a crepe myrtle, Mona watched a small bird croon and as it sang its song she swaddled herself in silence. Silence, she inferred, is an omnipotent resource.

Just then, she felt a strain in her nerves like someone was stringing a quiver within her. This brought her back to winter break. She knelt down beside her bed and reached for that letter she'd crumpled. Strange, she thought, straining her shoulder taut, stretching it to the brink. She could feel a numbing tingle in the tips of her fingers at how hard she stretched now. With every craning of the neck, there was an expansion in the distance.

She gave up and wiped at her eyes and looked back at the spot where the paper rested only to see that it was gone. Sweat pricked at the nape of her neck and she sat squat on the ground, disgruntled and desolate, groping the ground for the wretched, loose-leaf sheet.

Ever since she'd come back from that long-run exile, everything in her house had seemed so small and uncompromising. Mona was in a fit of sickness. Her eyes were playing tricks on her now when they had always been so dependable. She couldn't clock a hummingbird from a hawk and now she was left wondering if she ever could.

Two months earlier

At dinner that night, Mr. and Mrs. Russell asked their daughter about her day like good parents would without holding their breaths for the answer. The point was moot but as Mona Russell skinned the undercooked green peas before splitting them between her front teeth, she said that it was fine like a good daughter would. They murmured their excitement for her college plans through their wine glasses seeing that their line of communication with her had been severed since she was a kid and was well past withering now. She nodded along and chewed the celery she was given. The Russell's home wasn't so hungry that night and the prospect of their daughter's college planning and thus exit of the house, to Mrs. Russell at least, had never been quite so savory. "You're grandmother wrote us."

"That's a first. When's the last time she's even spoke to you?" Me. Russell raised a brow, surprised.

"Not since I was six. She showed up at my foster parent's home up in Connecticut out of the blue, all misty-eyed and frail. She had this look on her face when I opened the door like she instantly regretted it..." Mrs. Russell's blunt features seemed to soften now. Her brows let up so that she seemed to feel something for once.

"Will you write back?"

Mona spoke quietly, "What did she want to say?"

Mrs. Russell frowned and turned back to her supper. "It was brief. She requested that you pay her a visit. Only for a week."

In bed, things whirled through Mona's head and it got harder and harder to confine the fluttering feeling. There was noise outside her window. Her only source of excitement. She closed her eyes and let her ears do the seeing: It came in the lazy rumblings of a truck on on their crumby road. It came in the irksome sighs of metal and the unkempt noise of an infant. She then slouched into a sitting position and wiped her dewey eyes, not because any sort of sleep had been on them, but just to go through the motions of doing so.
Next, she disentangled herself from the quilt and crawled forward until she was just close enough to the blinds to see straight through them and across the heat-cracked road where a new family stood. She, wide-eyed and awestruck, was pressed so near to the blinds that she could smell the heated plastic. A stoutly built woman, probably in her early-thirties, carried a crying toddler into the brick home and a man heaved a stack of boxes into the garage behind her. She opened her window a bit to hear them all the better. Music was playing. Blues, the good kind with the rough voices and jagged drums. It crooned all milky through the speakers and she felt it.

The petite brunette patted the small of his back with tiny hands as he edged the luggage down, "Almost done?"

The man, still angled out of Mona's sight and preoccupied with the goings-on of the other movers, toed with a mess of packages, "Yeah, we're pretty close to being done."

"It's late. Finish up with that stuff then come inside, yeah?"

"'Course, Brit. Give me a sec, though."

"Okay." She eased past him, cradling the cranky tot, "Dinner's ready when you need it."

Mona chewed her nail to the quick and waited for more words to be said but she just kissed him and went into the house. She had always liked that house, Mona could see. Putting aside the wailing babe, the two looked content. It seemed the perfect place for a couple like them with the swingset in the backyard that sprawled over with fields and tufts of grass. The home was big enough to keep them but not too big that it might overwhelm them with its potential. This was promising... or was this just a compromise. Two love-struck people longing for nurture so they slip up and end up nurturing a babe instead of each other.

Mona catalogued them in her mind's eye for later before crawling back into her bed and falling asleep. She rested well that night.