Ella Claire Gainsborough {Beauty} (bookshelved) wrote in bellumlogs, @ 2009-12-31 14:18:00 |
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Entry tags: | beauty |
Who: Ella
What: Narrative
Where: 905
When: New Year's eve day
Warnings: None
The apartment was a cluttered mess, and Ella looked around it with a smile. The movers had grumbled and complained about her plants and prints and books and bookshelves throughout the entire move, but she was now surrounded with everything she loved best. There was hardly enough room to move in the living room, but that's how she liked it. Clutter and mess was permanence and home, and as she thought of that word, she wandered into the kitchen.
She took Home, her sugar glider, from his cage beside the cabinets, and she tucked him into the front pocket of the cream-colored sweater she was wearing. She smiled when he turned, burrowed and settled, and she wandered into the guest bedroom to set things up.
She hadn't risked having the movers do anything in the 'arboretum,' as she called it, because everything here was too delicate and fragile, and she spent the next few hours carefully setting out terrariums and pots and plants and her gardens. When the room was warm and sunny and a little moist, she settled into the plush chair in the center.
Her hair was a mess, and her face was streaked with dirt, and she pulled the writing journal from the small table beside the chair and opened it to the first page, which was blank. Home complained, and he climbed up to sleep under her long hair, and she laughed softly, a happy sound, as she took pen to paper.
The building loomed, dark and unfamiliar on the New York landscape. Our heroine had never been near a building this old, and she felt the windows leer at her, as if they were sentient things. Their eyes upon her made her shudder, but she tipped a chin up in the chilly New York air as she strode through the gaping maw and into the beast that awaited her. Inside, the smell of old things and tragedy wrapped itself around her like a woolen blanket; it was too warm and too tight, but she didn't fight it off. This was to be her home, and she was trapped here. There was no lock on the front door, and no shackles at her ankles, but she was trapped just the same. She'd agreed to come to this place, to this prison in the middle of the city, to protect her ailing father, but that didn't mean she had to like it. The nameless Landlord, the one who'd made the proposition, was nowhere to be seen; she was thankful of that fact, if she was thankful of nothing else. The lobby was scattered with boxes torn open, a plundered tomb of goods and life, and she walked past them unthinking, not yet noticing the mummy encased in denim and leopard on the discarded settee that graced the atrium. |