Mandala
Title: Mandala
Fandom: Original
Prompt: tamingthemuse #92, center
Wordcount: 516
Warnings: implied child abuse, very minor
Rating: PG
Summary: Cecilia creates her own sanctuary in the most unlikely of places.
Comments: Another freewritten story. It's still obscure and hard to swallow, and at its heart it's not even worth tasting. I'm going to rewrite on the prompt, scrap this. Any and all comments/crits are appreciated!
It was winter. Rain pattered on the high tin roof like a thousand skittering rats. The occasional drip plunked on the salt-rusted crossbeams and echoed majestically, or it oozed dark into flaking cement walls and graffiti obscenities in white, yellow and red. Broken glass sparkled like scattered diamonds on the spiderwebbed concrete. The air was thick with mildew, rot, and the coppery tang of blood.
Cecilia was seven years old, crouched like a frog in the center of the glass-strewn floor, beneath a six-point intersection of steel beams. She drew pictures on the damp concrete with thick chalk, occasionally dipping into a yellow plastic bucket in search of a different color among the pretty blues and greens and purples. There was a circle with hands and feet and a crooked smile, a tree wrapped in scribbles, an oblong dog with three blobby puppies, a house, a door, the outline of a little girl's hand. She stumbled backward to admire her masterpiece, grinned, laughed, and began to sing in a nonsensical language, twisting and hopping while her raw feet left bloody prints on the floor.
She swept up her yellow bucket and began to fix the graffiti on the wall: the pointed phrases, the block letters, the long-chinned old man smiling with empty eyes. They were too dreary, too angry, too much like screaming mouths and raised hands and dark corners. Cecilia chewed her tongue, mumbled a few words that she thought might mean "terrible" or "stupid" in the language she invented, as she turned a scrawled obscenity into a bunny with long blue ears and a green fluffy tail.
Thunder rattled in the tin roof and the foggy cracked windows, and Cecilia stood between the steel pillars marked 12 and 13, confident they would protect her from the warehouse's imminent collapse and from the evil spirits that came down with the rain outside. She waited patiently for the rumble to fade away before she sprinted barefoot to the opposite wall. Once all of these angry words were transformed into pretty ones -- once she connected the walls with squiggly lines to the mandala, the tree, the dog, the house, the door, the hand -- the warehouse would be her sanctuary. Everything bad would be immediately destroyed if it ever tried to cross the barrier of her spell. She could stay here forever, if she wanted. She could live here, between 12 and 13.
The array was finished, and there were butterflies among the chalky birds and trees and squirrels and rusted pipes and acid streaks. Cecilia danced on the glass in the center, among the drawings that bound the walls, and she clapped and sang in that flowing tongue as her tattered blue smock swung about her thighs.
Her voice echoed on the chattering ceiling, and it came back to her changed. The words, though in the same language, were different, sung an octave lower, in harmony with Cecilia’s song. The melody became a ballad, understood without coherent words, of Rapunzel.
The rain stopped, and sunlight filtered in through the aged windows, illuminating the empty warehouse.
Fandom: Original
Prompt: tamingthemuse #92, center
Wordcount: 516
Warnings: implied child abuse, very minor
Rating: PG
Summary: Cecilia creates her own sanctuary in the most unlikely of places.
Comments: Another freewritten story. It's still obscure and hard to swallow, and at its heart it's not even worth tasting. I'm going to rewrite on the prompt, scrap this. Any and all comments/crits are appreciated!
It was winter. Rain pattered on the high tin roof like a thousand skittering rats. The occasional drip plunked on the salt-rusted crossbeams and echoed majestically, or it oozed dark into flaking cement walls and graffiti obscenities in white, yellow and red. Broken glass sparkled like scattered diamonds on the spiderwebbed concrete. The air was thick with mildew, rot, and the coppery tang of blood.
Cecilia was seven years old, crouched like a frog in the center of the glass-strewn floor, beneath a six-point intersection of steel beams. She drew pictures on the damp concrete with thick chalk, occasionally dipping into a yellow plastic bucket in search of a different color among the pretty blues and greens and purples. There was a circle with hands and feet and a crooked smile, a tree wrapped in scribbles, an oblong dog with three blobby puppies, a house, a door, the outline of a little girl's hand. She stumbled backward to admire her masterpiece, grinned, laughed, and began to sing in a nonsensical language, twisting and hopping while her raw feet left bloody prints on the floor.
She swept up her yellow bucket and began to fix the graffiti on the wall: the pointed phrases, the block letters, the long-chinned old man smiling with empty eyes. They were too dreary, too angry, too much like screaming mouths and raised hands and dark corners. Cecilia chewed her tongue, mumbled a few words that she thought might mean "terrible" or "stupid" in the language she invented, as she turned a scrawled obscenity into a bunny with long blue ears and a green fluffy tail.
Thunder rattled in the tin roof and the foggy cracked windows, and Cecilia stood between the steel pillars marked 12 and 13, confident they would protect her from the warehouse's imminent collapse and from the evil spirits that came down with the rain outside. She waited patiently for the rumble to fade away before she sprinted barefoot to the opposite wall. Once all of these angry words were transformed into pretty ones -- once she connected the walls with squiggly lines to the mandala, the tree, the dog, the house, the door, the hand -- the warehouse would be her sanctuary. Everything bad would be immediately destroyed if it ever tried to cross the barrier of her spell. She could stay here forever, if she wanted. She could live here, between 12 and 13.
The array was finished, and there were butterflies among the chalky birds and trees and squirrels and rusted pipes and acid streaks. Cecilia danced on the glass in the center, among the drawings that bound the walls, and she clapped and sang in that flowing tongue as her tattered blue smock swung about her thighs.
Her voice echoed on the chattering ceiling, and it came back to her changed. The words, though in the same language, were different, sung an octave lower, in harmony with Cecilia’s song. The melody became a ballad, understood without coherent words, of Rapunzel.
The rain stopped, and sunlight filtered in through the aged windows, illuminating the empty warehouse.