Bet you five bucks my father mocks me for racism after he sees this.
all_unwritten prompt: When dreams become...
Alice is a dark-haired, dark-skinned, dark-eyed and serious girl. She was maybe named for a dreamer - her mother's gift, learning English while pregnant, eager to forget the old country, the spicy triangle-shaped food and the soft banana leaves and the language too, and she read children's books, yes she did - but she doesn't dream much and when she does the dreams come halting, like lines on the inside of her eyelids, not images, never in color.
She can't visualize things, she has to sketch the shapes out if she wants them, and it's hard, hard: she wants to be an engineer and she's good, she knows she's good, her father was good and his father before him, this is America, she is no one's father but she's good too, good good good: but if only her mind worked another way, everything would happen easier. She's studied it, her father told her to, after all, and she knows how it happens, how the visions could blossom if only the wires ran crosswise rather than lengthy. But no. An Indian girl in Engineering at a good college who wears overalls: her dreams come like lines. They are useless, flimsy, ash on her teeth, she bites down, and, nothing. No arcs, no tangible meshes of thought to stretch and carry as if they were fishnets. Just the lines, the scattered words, fading abstractions.
What she wishes. The story. Her name, a dreamer's name. Her talkative dead mother, her silent living father. The drafting paper wasted. She leans over until the edge of the desk is digging into her brown wrinkled elbows and her hands are flat against blueprint after blueprint, having to start afresh, in three dimensions, without the preliminary courtesies of thought because she can't hold it together in her mind. Nothing holding. They are tied, somehow. But she hasn't even a way with words and there's nothing she can use to moor her frustration in the soft mud of consciousness, no hold. The dreams like lines on her eyelids, becoming ash in her mouth. The sharp translucent-edged teeth of her brain, lined with ash. No hold.
Alice is a serious girl with an undefined lack, and she dreams of dreaming reality.
Alice is a dark-haired, dark-skinned, dark-eyed and serious girl. She was maybe named for a dreamer - her mother's gift, learning English while pregnant, eager to forget the old country, the spicy triangle-shaped food and the soft banana leaves and the language too, and she read children's books, yes she did - but she doesn't dream much and when she does the dreams come halting, like lines on the inside of her eyelids, not images, never in color.
She can't visualize things, she has to sketch the shapes out if she wants them, and it's hard, hard: she wants to be an engineer and she's good, she knows she's good, her father was good and his father before him, this is America, she is no one's father but she's good too, good good good: but if only her mind worked another way, everything would happen easier. She's studied it, her father told her to, after all, and she knows how it happens, how the visions could blossom if only the wires ran crosswise rather than lengthy. But no. An Indian girl in Engineering at a good college who wears overalls: her dreams come like lines. They are useless, flimsy, ash on her teeth, she bites down, and, nothing. No arcs, no tangible meshes of thought to stretch and carry as if they were fishnets. Just the lines, the scattered words, fading abstractions.
What she wishes. The story. Her name, a dreamer's name. Her talkative dead mother, her silent living father. The drafting paper wasted. She leans over until the edge of the desk is digging into her brown wrinkled elbows and her hands are flat against blueprint after blueprint, having to start afresh, in three dimensions, without the preliminary courtesies of thought because she can't hold it together in her mind. Nothing holding. They are tied, somehow. But she hasn't even a way with words and there's nothing she can use to moor her frustration in the soft mud of consciousness, no hold. The dreams like lines on her eyelids, becoming ash in her mouth. The sharp translucent-edged teeth of her brain, lined with ash. No hold.
Alice is a serious girl with an undefined lack, and she dreams of dreaming reality.