Ella Dean is a (chanteuse) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-05-15 20:50:00 |
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Entry tags: | white rabbit |
Who: Ella Dean
What: The 13th fairy plot ended!
Where: Ella's apartment
The door opened, unclicked and sunshine - thin and grey with a corolla of cobwebs but sunshine - streamed through cracked-glass windows and Ella stumbled, swayed against the handle and leaned it shut until it clicked once again, the tick-tick-tick of the gently-swaying gold pendulum, the hiss of the chain through her fingers as she pulled the key from the lock and left it locked.
It didn’t feel like a day, it didn’t feel like twenty-four hours. Dreams collided, tangled like damp silk, impossible to separate, impossible to think through. She leaned against the wall, hand a drag along worn-away wallpaper, the sooty smudge of dust along her palm, a streak of clean left like a ghost-trail behind. More than a day and the sitter had instructions, more than a day and the cash left out on the side, and the note, wouldn’t be enough; Ella didn’t think of hard-won cash, she didn’t think of the neat paper stack of bills, she stretched out blind, dirty hand and she flagged the first cab she could, thin-hunched worry on the sidewalk waiting.
Her heart was battered bird in a cage of ribs, her head jabbering; her fingers fumbled with the clatter of keys, one lock and then the next - she dropped the keys, Ella swore. The neighbor, passing, his trash in hand, looked at her curiously. She undid the door, pushed it open. It smelled like dust. It smelled like trapped sunlight and warm-muzzy emptiness. It smelled like dead flowers -- the sunflowers, jammed into pottery jar, long dried to sour unpleasantness. It was silent; the dance, endless spiral of dust motes the only thing moving.
Ella swayed, faltered on feet that would not keep her up - her stomach roiled, the apartment was crazy-kaleidoscope stumbling forward and the room, her room, Bethie’s room was empty, clean talcum powder and cream smell, soft and empty as outgrown clothes. She fumbled, the crib’s edge reassuringly solid under her hand, scaffolding to hold her as she sank, slid down its side to sit on sun-warmed carpet in empty apartment.
The book was secondary, frantic flit of a thought, a dream, bound up in cobwebs - try, she could try.