Scene1

A scene exercise, written for my Fiction class at Brown

    There was once a poor little old man who lived in a poor house on Poor Street in the poorest quarter of the City. His profession was that of begging, though he wasn’t the most successful beggar—instead of being truly committed to his daily pleading for alms like a good bum ought to, he had a tendency to stare off into the distance at the stark church steeples and hard shining windows of the cold downtown and dream…
    He would often dream of a time long ago when he was a young man in the Navy, when his arms were supple and brown and his body was strong and full of life. When he could stand at the helm of a ship and feel the wind in his bones and the sun in his skin and when he was the master of the world.
    And occasionally, the poor man dreamt of the day he met the woman who would one day be his ruin. It was in a sun-drenched bazaar thousands of miles from home that he caught sight of her cappuccino-skinned hands; twin bronze spirits swiftly arranging many-hued beaded necklaces and bracelets across the table of her stall. He remembered quite distinctly that it was her hands that had drawn him so, as he wandered that silk-draped foreign marketplace, his ears drunk with the sounds dozens of babbling tongues and the music of pipes and drums that stirred the golden dust of the square into clouds with their rhythms. And though there was a universe of gaudy color and sweating humanity between them, somehow, their eyes met—and the poor man walked toward her like a man bewitched.
    For bewitched he was, and bemused by the enchanting thickness of the spice-filled air and dazed by the hot afternoon sun beating down upon his brow. But most of all, the poor man remembered, he was entranced by those gleaming brown hands and the all-knowing grey eyes that peered curiously at him from behind the dark folds of a veil.

Author's Note

A scene exercise
Comments on imagery?