So you know that feeling when you're writing and you're just trying to get the exposition out and move the plot along and you have someone say something because someone has to say it and this particular person hasn't spoken in a while? And then you reread what you just typed and you're like, HOLY SHIT, I AM BRILLIANT? Yeah, that just happened.
I mean, it's a single sentence in a story that 1. most people probably won't read (since it's gen and a crossover) and 2. even people who do read it may not really think anything of it, but holy shit, I feel like I just did a ton of characterization in one tossed off, necessary sentence that most people won't even notice and will never get expanded on because the narrator doesn't know what it means either.
If it weren't already a Friday where I get out early from work, I'd say that made my day! *g*
***
Have a poem:
Fugue
~Cesca Janece Waterfield
I. My Mother Fires Pottery
She sets a pitcher
wet from her hands
into the blast of the kiln
and reminds me,
clay not culled of debris
explodes, detritus made savage
kindling.
Heat must brush the underside
of endurance,
not cross its razor-sill,
or the ware will fly apart,
its mouth
a firegold corkscrew.
Later,
she will shove me
out the door
as his muscled forearm tears
like a scythe across the space
where I'd stood,
narrow as a wick.
I will sleep beneath a sky
seeded with stars
and flex like tempering clay
that must first survive
what it needs.
II. My Father Keeps Bees
It could be his heart
is a hive; bright cob
humming under the sternum;
city honing gold.
How else explain
this lure of a swarm
moving over dark hills
like a pocked gibbous moon?
In the honeybee's brain,
each scent is a song,
a cable cast invisibly
to span cells in a bomb
of comb.
Set to flame, sumac
or needles of pine
fill the hive
with narcotic smoke,
sending bees
to a dizzying feast
at a luscious sump
of honey: light,
at her loom.
Twin wisps, thin slips
of shadow: wings
of the worker bee wear
out above a clear
jewel of nectar. Wet
with instinct's white
tongue, over fields ribbed
with useless blooms,
the shorn body is wind-
flung. Nectar still rings
its cells; exalting life
in death.
***
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