Prologue

Prologue

 

The Girl feels warm, secure; her veins run slow as if with chamomile and a familiar song plays to her from somewhere far away.  Is she in her bed, swaddled in her plush and nearly threadbare Hello Kitty comforter?  Maybe that’s why the music sounds so muffled; maybe she is hearing it through a pillow.  What is that song?  It’s nice.

. . . she hears only whispers of some quiet conversa-ation . . . the moonlit wings reflect the stars that guide me towards salva-a-ation . . .  

The Girl lifts her head: heavy and sluggish with cozy feelings.  Thoughts come to her but one at a time.  Her first thought is . . . yellow.  Yellow.  Yellow plastic laminate.  Hmm.  Yellow plastic laminate table.  She is looking at one of the yellow tables from the Palisades snackbar. She rubs the imprint of the table’s textured surface from her pinkish left cheek and looks blearily about. 

Bright rays of light fall in through the clerestory windows, describing sharp columns in the placid air of the roller rink.  Dust specks scroll secret geometries within the shafts.  The Girl has never seen the rink in the daytime, and to her the great volume, still and illuminated as it is, takes on an ecclesiastical air.  “O Palisades, my Palisades, you blessed sanctuary, you blessed overseer of our adolescence, blessed be thy name.  O Palisades, you who guide us through our awkward phases with nachos and top 40 until our parents come to pick us up, blessed be thy name.  Keeper of first kisses and backward skates, you who hold the Teddy Bear in one hand and the driver’s license in the other, no adulthood shall enter thy gates.”

The Girl leans lazily back in her chair and lets her head fall back.  She sees above her the Disco Ball.  Ah, yes, the good ol’ Disco Ball.  She and Alyssa had come here together.  And of course Alonzo was here, and Mike Navarro, who was super-hot.  But she liked someone else, and she wasn’t telling who.  Alyssa had told her to skate with him for ladies’ choice.  But the Girl had been too shy and made an excuse of having to go call her mom.  But she did sit on Harrison’s lap later, so that was exciting.

As the girl gazes at the Disco Ball, she sings along softly a bit with the music:

It's gonna take a lot to take me away from you-u-u
There's nothing that a hundred men or more could ever do . . .

Toto!  Yes, that was it of course.  She loves this song!  Mom always plays this song, especially on Saturdays while she vacuums.  The Girl really belts out the chorus,

I bless the rains down in Africa-a-a !

The Girl nearly jumps out of her chair when another voice else begins to belt the chorus out along with her:

Gonna take some time to do the things we never have! 

The Girl snaps her head upright and looks over to where the singing is coming from.  A gangly silhouette is playfully singing back to her, holding an imaginary microphone in a pantomime performance.  The Man is wearing a ball cap, from under which scraggly shards of hair poke out.  He is tall, but bony.  The Man ends his chorus, lights a cigarette.  “Well good morning, Sunshine!  I have been waiting all day for you to wake up.”  The man takes hold of a snack bar chair, just like the one the Girl is sitting in now, and drags it behind him as he begins to walk towards her.

The Girl is awake now, suddenly, and at last.  She scans the rink and the peculiarity of her situation begins to dawn upon her.  Yes, why was she at the Palisades in the daytime?  Nobody ever went to the Palisades during daylight hours.  And where was everyone: Alyssa, Cookie, Alonzo?  Most importantly who is this man walking towards her?  The Girl realizes that she is seated at a snack bar table, but that the table is in the dead center of the rink.

The Man continues to sing as he sidles the chair up to the table and straddles it backwards,

The wild dogs cry out in the night, as they grow restless longing for some solitary comp-any . . .

The Man is close now, but the Girl cannot see his face; it is completely hidden in shadow, save for the dim orange glow of the cigarette’s cherry that hints at his features whenever he takes a drag.  To the Girl, with his scraggly, straw-like hair, and long, seemingly joint-less physique, the Man looks like a scarecrow.  He sings softly to her, as if the refrain were a lullaby:

. . . I seek to cure what's deep inside, frightened of this thing that I've become . . .

The Scarecrow Man stops singing, looks the Girl straight in the face, and says nothing.  Only billows of smoke creep forth from beneath the brim of his filthy cap.  But with his silence, Scarecrow Man is telling the Girl everything she needs to know about how it is, and how it is going to be.  He is not here to make sure that she gets home ok, or to call her Mommy for her.  There is a toll to be paid, and it requires that Girl grow up quickly.

The Girl looks around, looks towards the exit, and she knows that it is just too far.

O Palisades, My Palisades, why hast thou forsaken me?

The Scarecrow Man grits his cigarette between his teeth in order to reach in to his back pocket.  “Just to be clear . . . ” he says through his teeth, and produces the largest pocket knife the Girl has ever seen.  He unfolds it and with a single finger balances its point on the yellow plastic laminate table.  The handle and blade are intricately designed, textured, serrated - clearly the property of someone who really cares about knives.  Scarecrow Man finishes his thought, “This can go easy, or this can go hard �" but if something’s got to get done, then it’s just got to get done.”

For the Girl, time stops; she is out of her body.  She can see that childhood’s end has come upon her in this moment, and something within her begins to instinctively pack away all of those girlish parts of herself as deeply as possible into some small, secret place.  The Hello Kitty comforter, watching cartoons all morning on Saturdays, singing loud with her girls to that favorite song, the feeling she got when Cookie called:  these were of no use to her here. 

Scarecrow Man reaches for the Girl.  She is surprised to find that she resists.  The Girl smashes Scarecrow in the face with poorly executed punch.  In a split second, a flurry of swipes and kicks are exchanged.  And just as quickly, Scarecrow Man gets a hold of the Girl’s left hand and slams his blade completely through her wrist, nailing it to the table.

He stands up abruptly, turning his back to her as he inspects his face for any bleeding.  “I told you,” says the Scarecrow Man, “this can go easy, or this can go hard, but it’s got to get done.  It’s just, it’s got to, you see?  It’s just the way it is.”

The Girl is holding the handle of the knife, sobbing now.  Blood is beginning to stream in thick rivulets across the yellow plastic laminate table and onto the hallowed planks of the Palisades roller rink.  Scarecrow accompanies Toto in serenading the Girl,

It's gonna take a lot to take me away from you
There's nothing that a hundred men or more could ever do . . .

 

Reviews

[Matt Pellegrini]

Enjoyed your prologue quite a bit. I'm a big fan of your use of interspersing song lyrics and the chorus-like prayer.

The language, word choice, sentence structure is pretty consistently well-done. Even in the more descriptive parts, it's not too flowery or wordy.

It's a bit hard to believe how long it takes The Girl to sort of come to her senses after she wakes up, but this is fiction, so I don't think that many people will have trouble maybe suspending disbelief. I certainly didn't find that it really affected me when I was reading the story, it was only sort of an afterthought. I understand that what she thinks and realizes does happen to people in reality. So many quick thoughts and memories in a few seconds before we realize what's going on, but it's almost impossible to put how fast these thoughts must've occurred in words. Perhaps a sentence before she realizes things are off like, "And as fast as all those thoughts had gone through her mind, she realized the table was in the center of the rink," or something along those lines. My example probably isn't too strong.

The 4th paragraph reads a bit funky tense-wise. I think it is the sentence, "But she liked someone else." It maybe should be, "But she had liked somebody else."

The struggle at the end, I thought, was done very well. Nothing too dramatic, and the ending left to the imagination. For now, at least. I haven't read the next chapters.

Probably coincidental, but also interesting that you have a song playing/being sung by Toto and the man is described as a Scarecrow, both Wizard of Oz references. So I kind of ended up imagining the girl looking like Dorothy.

I do really like what you've done here, and I like your use of language a lot. Hopefully I'll be able to read more.