Birmingham

MACON 1995

   Throughout her enrollment in Howard High School in the romantically nostalgic Macon, Georgia, she hadn't regarded herself as notably proficient in her assigned English coursework.  Albeit, admittedly, after becoming acquainted with Mr. Olliston, her exertions to be alloted profound gradings somersaulted down a declivous hillside. 
His burnished irises had been of a plenteous volume in contrast to the narrow bridge of his blanched nose and protruding jaw that was suffused with freckles―bistered pigment that exemplified his biological grandfather clock's rings of its timber. 
He harbored switchblades within his fingertips, his calloused plams the handgrip and his phalanges the metallic blade where, if one were to scrutinize it, fixated; centralized, a glimpse of their reflection would transpire solemnly.
In spite of this―the restless apprehension and the indisputable oppression that was imminently portending within the atmosphere―and in spite of his uncompromising, unforgiving disposition―the manifold poetry recitations, handwritten essay instructions, and Everests of midterm preparation that only proliferated this-she did, in fact, learn something.
Figurative language comprised of description exhibiting the English terms 'like' or 'as'; the characterization of her wistful, yet calamitous cosmos through simile where, if not in the yesteryear, but tomorrow, one would comprehend her and her bestirring metropolis of a mind.
Afterschool tutoring sessions devoted to Mr. Olliston would oftentimes be depicted as "like the bleeding tip of a lionness's ivory".  The leading snowfall of the wintertide witnessed whilst ambling Main Street, illuminated by the sheening moonlight and thoroughfare lamp posts, may be "like breathing; lungs filling; hurricane skies clarified into a sailing blue". 
She craved the opportunities for similes like a juvenile craves their mother's affection.  She awaited the hours in which she would attain the capacity to elucidate submerging into the ideology of "love" like a submarine into the melancholy abyss of oceanic adolescent heartsickness.  Or, something as minute as harvesting an emerald four-leaf clover on a springtime afternoon, the sun shone melodiously, subdued beneath hazed clouds.
Howbeit, she was not admonished that similes have previously been applied to dolorous bitterness and the natural wilting of the planet Earth from the blighted frost. 
And so when her nebula erupted into an insurgent supernova, her juvenscence―her pardoned ignorance pulverizing, she was capable of mustering only this: "It was like glass: whole until shattered.  Bashfully hopeful until brazenly hopeless.  Alive in the soil until gone with the wind."

• • • • •

The sparse corridors embroidering the Holloways' apartment complex emanated lonesome childhood odors that had been clobbered by must in a rousing boxing tournament.  The walls adorned with leaden paint―a welcoming azure while her bedroom stood individualistic in lavendar―were disrobed, bareskinned as they now disclosed despairingly monotonous tales. 
Alongside the curb of Berkshire Drive, where veering impressions blemished the concrete sidewalk from when six-year old Marisole had hasteningly braked on her bicycle, nearly swerving into the asphalt route of a sumptuous BMW, was a Penske moving truck, the automobile's engine resounding against the maple trees whose leaves had metamorphosed with autumn's amiable eupnea. 
She observed from her bedroom's bay window, her heart walloping, ricocheting a morose rhythm against the marrow of her rib cage.  It was professedly perpetual as it perservered from fleeting seconds to lingering minutes, and if one were to eavesdrop, they would decipher:  'I don't want to leave, I don't want to leave, I don't want to leave.'
Fragments of her reminisced to her bassinet where when she weeped, her mother and father scurried to her, expressions saturated in disconcertment at their disquieted newborn.  Unpropitously, that wasn't the revolution of the universe anymore―not for Marisole.
Consequently, when her prostrated mother, Gabrielle, barreled into the vicnity with a push-broom engulfed within her left hand and a feather duster in the alternative, Marisole nodded along to her concluding direction, and submitted, following the commands.
The atoms of grime were whisked into the air-conditioned heavens where they glinted against the decaying daylight cascading through the transparency of the window, no linen to armor the interior against the ultraviolet rays.  This provoked ponderments of chemistry as she thrusted remnants of her occupancy into the dust-pan, which eventually descended into the garbage basin.  'What do the chemical compounds of a sad person look like?  Is it all the same?  Are we all, in the end, drowning in misery like someone trapped in a pool of quicksand?'
The only essence that grappled her from her cogitation was the inanimate bleeping of the Penske vehicle's raucous horn, courtesy of her father, who was settled into the driver's fractured leather seat, the blonde padding distinguishable amidst an impaired stereo and dismembered glove box.
She upcasted her arm from the undertaking of sweeping and waved in the direction of the window, communicating that she'd be braced for departure within the hour.
'Leaving, leaving, leaving,' her heart unceasingly crooned as she twisted the vanilla-scented plastic of the waste into a convoluted knot she had attained mastery of in girl scouts, hindering time; the affair of going here and coming there, to a destination of the lion's share of foreign.  'Like an alien; an extraterrestial.  You're aware it's there, and you've heard of it, but you've never known it.  Not in the way you've known home.'
In consonance with Marisole and her epoch enshrined upon Berkshire Drive, her "home" was a dilapidated domicile of two diverging stories alongside Tumble Dry Laundromat and a convenience establishment that's possessor―Arthur Jenkins, who was a tsunami of antipsychotic medications for his sporadic manic episodes―renovated the title each year. 
The fundamental surface was a cherished conglomeration of the aroma of rising pastries of frostings and sprinkles molded into daisies, as well as furbished woodwork cloaked with eraser shavings from the neighborhood students who would nosh on scones whilst completing their algebra assignments.
Freya's Bakery―accessible to the bustling community of Macon, Georgia, circa 1942.  In spite of the warfare demoralizing countries plastered atop turbulent seas along the globe, Marisole's grandmother had illustrated it as something that withstood bellows of deafening merriment that evoked earthquakes within the foundation.  And still, the predjudical arson reducing it to Roman ruins, her grandparents outlasted, maintaining their asylum from adversity until the generations shifted.
Above it, upon the secondary level, was where their quilts had been entwined upon the mattresses and suppers simmered in boiling pots succeeding the barring of Freya's entryway.  Where the annual holidays were of uttermost festivity, with icicle lights that benevolently illuminated their living quarters anchored along the ceiling's timber beams, and instrumental vinyls of endeared chorales trumpeted upon the record player.
Each tier had crocheted Marisole into her personhood for seventeen transient years; weathered from her villianous scars, yet radiating from her heroine triumphs.
As she was posied there in the epicenter of her erstwhile bedroom, plastic rubbish bag chafing her moistened palms, her mother glimpsed beyond the oak doorway, and murmured, "It's about time you came outside, don't you think?"
Marisole bowed her head, ineptly quenching her unassailably dismal thirst to backpedal Time and the foreclosure of the lot at the presence of her desultory pitiless mother.  "You must think so.  Dad, too―he honked at me from the truck."
"Mari," Gabrielle tentatively commenced, reclining against the doorframe with her charcoal tresses cascading with anarchic wisps from the afternoon's drudgery. "you know your father: aggravatingly excitable.  Anyway, I'm sure he's just trying to make the situation more enjoyable for everyone."
"What about you?" she obstinately prolonged the controversy, her shoulders squared with argumentative fortitude. "Why are you so eager to leave everything in the dust―everything you've put effort into―without looking back?"
"I figure we could all use a fresh start," her mother resolved, inclining forward to attain the languishing garbage sack from Marisole's discontented clutch.  "Come downstairs when you're ready, Marisole, but for our sake, don't take too long.  The sun's setting soon, and I want to make it to the house before dark."
Subsequently, Gabrielle swielved toward the stairway and scuffled through the barren household, disposing of the scrappings in the outdoor dumpster rented for the Moving Day.
Marisole was vacated of association, but infested by the repugnant rodents of punitive words. 
'I figure we could all use a fresh start,' she reiterated within her introspection of the aforementioned conversing, her expression writhing in grimaces.  'Like a bullet through a foam target; a cushioned wound.'
In a beclouded smothering of cafard desolation, she had unearthed herself with one foot enveloped within her battered Chucks on the threshold of Freya's Bakery's painted stoop, and another tenaciously idle opposite.  Before she was privleged to an anew opportunity to recede to her void apartment, and succeedingly, her bedroom, a personification of the slander of the neighborhood grapevine―Arthur Jenkins―beckoned her to accompany him in his conversation with her father, who was snickering at a muttered quip.
Albeit Mr. Jenkins was intermittently onerous to correspond with when congregated amongst a maple picnic tabletop at community barbecues, or when she would assist him with equipping shelves with miscellaneous convenience items as a vivified child, he was an affable individual who had an undeniable enthrallment with humans and their intrinsic chemistry.
His silvered hairline was withdrawing to the core of his scalp whilst the spherical framework of his glasswear swallowed his facial features of a predisposed undersized scale.  His flesh that swathed a rawboned skeleton was asperously sunkissed from exhibiting secondhand polo shirts as he toiled on the exterior characteristics of his establishment. 
Cyclically, there were collective days within a month's week that Mr. Jenkins' resplendent hazel irises were imbued with obsidian thunderstorm clouds and the white noise of raindrops vehemently plummeting into windowpanes.  Ensuingly, howbeit, they would distill into a halcyon atmosphere―the electrical circuit of the compelling lightning having not yet been severed.
Throughout suppers consituting of succulent steaks and buttered vegetables, Marisole would, with an inquistive naiveté, prospect her parents' prudence of Arthur Jenkins, her pigtails spiraled and interlaced with lustrous periwinkle ribbons that she would routinely remove.  Her father would recurrently assert, "Don't mind Mr. Jenkins, Mari.  He's a good man.  Eccentric, of course―but good." 
If there was a singular configuration that she took as gospel, it was indeed that Mr. Jenkins tolerated no malevolent marrow within his crestfallen bones.
"Marisole―Christ, my dear, you've grown up too fast," He embraced her cordially upon greeting, ostensibly, yet unastonishingly featherbrained.  "Your ol' father here was telling me how you're turning eighteen next spring.  I mean, can you believe that?  You'll be able to vote and buy lottery tickets and cigarettes―but don't do that.  Smoking's―it's not good."
"You'll be happy to hear I don't plan to buy cigarettes anytime soon, Mr. Jenkins.  Not even with my impending adulthood," Marisole bantered, her voluptuous lips coiling, for it wasn't an arduous endeavor to siphon his unbalanced interminable conviviality and idealism.
"Oh, well...at that age, I had already been hooked on them for a couple'a years.  Surely, my doctor is never pleased with my check-ups because of the damage they did and all, but in my day, if you didn't smoke, you weren't worth talking to."
"I can also vouch to this, Arthur―which is why if I ever find my daughter's been lighting up nicotine behind the library when she should be in classes or studying, she'll be due for a talk," her father pronounced with a mischievously jesting glower intended for her flushed character.
"Please, Bennett, your Mari's a good girl.  Always has been," Mr. Jenkins advocated, albeit chortling as a companion to the jovial pestering. "Except, uh...do you remember when you were―well, you had to have been just as tall as my knees―and snatched that box of Gobstoppers from the counter over at my store?"
"It's a little fuzzy, sir," she acknowledged, her head courteously joggling in renouncment.
"As it should be―I mean, goodness, I remember you were still carrying around that doll of your's," he guffawed in reminiscence; a plaything of Marisole's, characterized into fairy royalty in a lemon tunic and star-shaped wizarding wand that perished in a washing machine catastrophe at her age of eight. "Anyway, you did, and you gobbled it right up before I could even notice."
"In my retrospective defense, I've always had a sweet tooth," she chaffed, tittering at her recollections of lapping frosting from a baking spoon and thieving snickerdoodles from the tabletop cookie jar. "Nonetheless, I can pay you back for it, if that's what you're asking, Mr. Jenkins."
"What?  No!  No, not at all.  I would, you know―I would like to think I've made up financially for it since.  I thought I'd give you this, though," Mr. Jenkins scraped at the rear of his skull whilst he straightened his arm outward subsequent to pillaging within his khaki pocket, unclothing a package of Gobstoppers.
"I―thank you, sir, this is―this is a lovely gesture," Marisole dimpled, the offering simplistic, yet labyrinthine with significance.
"Consider it a going-away present from your's truly," he pronounced nonchalantly before his countenance transmogrified into thoughtfulness. "Do me proud in Birmingham, Marisole.  It's different there; bigger and grander, but you've dreamt of bigger and grander since you started hauling picture books into my shop for us to read together, even with your attachment to Macon.  I think you'll like it, but you have to give it a chance to be liked."
"I understand; I won't let you down, Mr. Jenkins."

Upon withdrawal from the fissured concrete of the driveway―in which benign insects communicated with antenae as they assembled their topsoil abode to erect from the chasms, foliated in the resolution of summertide greenery―Marisole gesticulated a farewell to her neighbor, her bronze melanin suffused with luster beneath the setting sunshine. 
The unforbidden highways constituting of flaxen boundaries to disentangle roadway lanes and the redolence of automobile exhaust had never dwelled as a definitive "friend" to Marisole, for the ambiguity of the aftermath of advent was compartmentalized into troublesome tiers.  However, with her russet ringlets caressed by the rural cyclones of atmospheric wheezes; her parents crooning in concurrence with an aria of radio shortwaves with something of an acoustic guitar and temperate male intonation; the terrain flitting along with her fingertips straining from the retrenched window―she was bombarded by a feeling.  A sensitivity to impending simile.  A conceivable undulation in her loitering survival.
With downtown Birmingham glinting in midnight effulgence, it was becoming; it was tangible:
'Being is like a circle.  You are confined, yet infinitely.  There are places you may go, and people you may see, but the circle is resolute.  In the end, my circle will be demolished.  I won't be afraid of going anymore.  I'll be afraid of never leaving.'