Invincible Summer - Cosette (Challenge #2!)
Working back from - forever... response to challenge #2, "Someone is sitting on a rooftop. It is either high noon or midnight."
--------
Invincible Summer
At noon, the sun is blazing, and the summer air feels like a nun's habit - too heavy, too hot, too oppressive. The girl (not a girl anymore, for the ring on her thin finger shows the lie in what people still see) sits like a lizard, basking in the heavy sun.
Here on top of the world, she finds the solitude she has been craving. Here on top of the house she now lives in, she can get away - get right away - from the chaos within. Here on the rooftop, no one expects anything of her, no one asks anything of her, no one clucks their tongue in disapproval and looks disappointed when she fails - again! - in some small, wifely task that she never knew she was to manage.
She is sitting cross-legged, Turk fashion, her back as straight as only a convent girl's could be, eyes shut and head tilted just barely back. She is sitting almost without movement of any kind; only her hands, small white hands, in her lap, move, as the fingers of her right hand twist the wedding band on her left with steady, heavy, sun-slow motions.
She still hasn't got used to that wedding ring - she is unused to the weight of it constantly on her thin hand, and the weight of the marriage constantly on her thin shoulders. At heart, she is still a skinny, unbanded convent girl, sitting in the sun by the convent wall, with her back to the sun-warmed bricks and her face to the heavy noon sun.
Back then, she would escape from the chatter of the other girls and the sombreness of the nuns by fleeing to this back garden corner and its unassuming warmth-- now, though grown and wed, a woman in all but her own rebellious will, she escapes once more from the chatter of servants and the sombreness of marriage to hide on top of a sunny, summery, slow and steady world.
--------
Invincible Summer
At noon, the sun is blazing, and the summer air feels like a nun's habit - too heavy, too hot, too oppressive. The girl (not a girl anymore, for the ring on her thin finger shows the lie in what people still see) sits like a lizard, basking in the heavy sun.
Here on top of the world, she finds the solitude she has been craving. Here on top of the house she now lives in, she can get away - get right away - from the chaos within. Here on the rooftop, no one expects anything of her, no one asks anything of her, no one clucks their tongue in disapproval and looks disappointed when she fails - again! - in some small, wifely task that she never knew she was to manage.
She is sitting cross-legged, Turk fashion, her back as straight as only a convent girl's could be, eyes shut and head tilted just barely back. She is sitting almost without movement of any kind; only her hands, small white hands, in her lap, move, as the fingers of her right hand twist the wedding band on her left with steady, heavy, sun-slow motions.
She still hasn't got used to that wedding ring - she is unused to the weight of it constantly on her thin hand, and the weight of the marriage constantly on her thin shoulders. At heart, she is still a skinny, unbanded convent girl, sitting in the sun by the convent wall, with her back to the sun-warmed bricks and her face to the heavy noon sun.
Back then, she would escape from the chatter of the other girls and the sombreness of the nuns by fleeing to this back garden corner and its unassuming warmth-- now, though grown and wed, a woman in all but her own rebellious will, she escapes once more from the chatter of servants and the sombreness of marriage to hide on top of a sunny, summery, slow and steady world.