Chapter One

Excerpt from the first chapter of the unfinished novel, All I Left Behind.

Like the eye of God peering over the Ohio skyline, the golden sun fell beyond the rooftops and trees, silent in its descent, yet commanding with its unrivaled brilliance. The suburban streets slowly cooled and quieted to the coming of the night; the children disappeared from the sidewalks, the random pedestrians absorbed into the rows of identical houses as if water sinking into a thirst-driven pore. The groaning vehicles appeared and faded into the silence, leaving only the faint, dim glow of their headlights as evidence of their existence. The curtain-heavy windows gave way to soft light, hinting at the life beyond the glass panes, yet unimpressive against the subtle shimmer of the night stars, which now dotted the purple heavens like tiny shards of shattered crystal.

    Distant moans of the crowded city echoed the aging neighborhood streets like the wails of a love-stricken maiden, pleading to the coming night to once again reveal the face of her long lost lover. Ignorance, the bliss of the working class citizen, chilled the virgin night sky like ice, freezing the fatal sword blades of depression and angst into dulled razors which only nipped and pricked at the skin, relieving their feeble human victims to survive another dream induced slumber; dreams, the soul’s sweet morphine.

    A girl of only fifteen, her eyes the color of the night, her skin as fair and tender as the approaching night’s breeze, with her silk brown hair falling across her shoulders like carefully positioned lace, stared from her open window as if viewing the dimming of the day for the very first time. Wonder and excitement filled her dreamy gaze as she envisioned the seemingly endless days of summer which promised to consume her existence with the dawn’s birthing of the sun. Haunting memories of the school year's broken dreams and wounding disappointments seemed to fade with the daylight, exhaustively giving way to the hopefulness of the sleeping day, washed clean by the pure waters of the moonlit liquid of the Cleveland night.

     Daydreams became night prayers as her mind wandered into the distance, her eyes reflecting the twinkling of the celestial curtain, the ancient moon carefully caressing her milk white skin as it gracefully climbed the heights above the streetlamps; its sudden presence the humble opposite of the grand and captivating movement of the sun.

     Her lips, taut and tender like a winter’s pale rose, rolled and folded behind the darkness of her mouth as her thoughts raced in anticipation of what her first day of scholastic freedom would bring. Racing visions of sunlit days filled with the intoxicating inspiration of seamless poetry, classical music, rainbow colored portraits, and perfectly sculpted statues, joyously danced across the stage of her mind like a fame-hungered ballerina. The daylight would be her time of artistic exploration, the nights her open canvas of released expression and creative outburst of energy and anger.

     As if fallen from the flickering moonbeam of a film theater’s projector, her life as an aspiring artist would break the confines of mental dreaming and into the limitless existence of the conscious reality. She would return to school a world famous sculptor, or perhaps an internationally renowned photographer, fresh from the tireless travels of a worldwide trek for some unseen still shot of unworldly perfection, her career highlight finding fruition in the mere nine weeks of a school-forgotten summer. Her subtle and inexperienced hands carefully and naturally seducing an instrument, her gentle pale skin covered in the multi-color stains of a vacant canvas crawling to life with the gifted stroke of her simple paint brush, these detailed flashes of artistic ecstasy burned behind her eyes, etched with the ash covered embers that rose like the phoenix of her resurrected soul.

     An innocent girl lost in the illusions of her hopeful dreams of lifelong bliss and fulfillment, her mind still untainted by the bittersweet poison the nectar of hope and promise would soon bleed into her veins like the slow-moving venom of a serpent’s quick, yet fatal bite. Dreams would be her kingdom, yet sorrow and disappointment her rotting dungeon of eternity. The angels would one day mourn for the loss of her innocence, but for now, in the stillness of the early summer eve, she dreamed her dream of bliss.