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 Posted: Wed May 06, 2009 6:10 pm
two intro: melanie
three intro pt 2: melanie
four intro: hale
five solo
six
seven
eight
nine
ten
eleven
twelve
thirteen
fourteen
fifteen
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Posted: Thu May 14, 2009 4:53 pm
 She set the mail down on the counter and leaned against the dishwasher, arms crossed over her chest, blond hair falling into her eyes. There were two envelopes; it was the fifteenth; there would be only two envelopes until two weeks passed, on the thirtieth. No one sent her mail, except the occasional local catalogue. Even those eventually stopped arriving. That didn't bother her; she didn't need anything.
Just a year ago, her star had only been rising: Talented, beautiful Melanie Anselm, so good with her hands, such a great mind, doubtless destined to be one of the art legends. She'd been ready to spend the rest of her life with a brush in her hand and a pottery bowl of ink, blue cracked glaze inside and oxidized metal without, containing a pool of black water like a tunnel to an ancient city whose history only she knew and so only she could share it. All she had ever wanted to do was art, she had grown up around it and knew it was the sort of magic anyone could experience no matter how rich or how poor and it was her life. She never dated, never fought; art was everything. Her paintings were the most profound form of self-expression she needed.
The well in the ink-bowl and the ancient city beyond was gone; her easel, gone; her paints, long gone. After the accident she no longer had anything left of her art. The crippled right hand would never regain functionality, and that meant a complete recovery would never be possible- not in her eyes. This claw-hand, worthless and broken, was as good as she would ever be again.
So she had locked away the paintings. With them went the scrapbook, her degrees (all two of them). In a fit of rage, aimless, she'd broken every bowl in the apartment, porcelain shards in the sink, glazed a brilliant teal like robin's eggs and grass, it looked like the sky had shattered into the aluminum bowl and she had regretted it, but once the brushes were gone too she didn't care. Sacred fire, burn, and suchlike; keep around things which only cause you pain and you will be pained, or whatever her dear old mother used to say.
She was the recipient of two stipends and she despised them both, results of civil lawsuits brought by her father against the people who'd caused the accident and a prominent company. With the money in her new accounts she could live for a hundred years comfortably if she so desired but she doubted she'd live that long and so she wondered what the point had been. It would be faster to starve to death than to continue to try and rip out her own heart with the thoughts she had and the agony of looking at that clawed hand every day, it couldn't even hold a fork. What had happened to her was negligence, her father had said, malicious negligence that ended up costing a promising young artist her career, and the arguments were well-meaning but they were not true. The father had disappeared once the suits were won, angry because she refused to use the money to download herself into a mechanical body, but who could guarantee she'd keep this love for her art if she did? They didn't always. Melanie thought it would be worse to remember the passion of the art and not experience it than to feel just a tiny thrill when she made a new bowl with her disabled left hand, lopsided and ugly, thick and lumpy like a third-grader's art project, but undoubted proof that she could still try.
Systematically she had cut herself free of life, resentment for the wholeness of her family and friends tempered only by an awareness that they tried to help because they loved her and they did not deserve her ire simply for loving her. Someday she'd need them, someday maybe they would need the crippled artist, but for now she needed to be alone. She didn't want the pity or the company or the casserole or the worried phone calls.
She just wanted to be left alone.
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Posted: Fri May 15, 2009 8:33 pm
 She stared at the envelopes for a moment and then gave up, crossing the room in quick strides to unlock the door and she stepped out into the hallway. It was easy to ignore the other people in the hall; they had never expected her to talk much to them anyway, she had a way of making everyone in her area feel worthless just by looking at them. Now she lacked it, since her time was spent pitying herself as opposed to working on her next painting; it didn't seem to matter that now they ignored her because she cut a more harmless figure than before. Not to her; she felt like she was going insane from this, from being trapped inside that apartment every day, and she practically ran down the stairs. Her limp had never truly bothered her but today it was like she didn't even have one; she stopped on the bottom floor and clenched her left hand, the two fingers farthest to the left sticking up in a bizarre salute. Too many screws to really close as they should. Bracing herself- it always seemed to be raining when she stepped outside- she entered a desolate courtyard garden.
Anyone looking at the waist-high weeds would be able to tell that once this garden had been something splendid, and even in such an advanced state of disrepair there was some kind of wild majesty to it- the wooden arch, covered in wild wisteria that had gone dry and brittle for lack of care. A canvas canopy of indeterminate color with holes in the top allowing dapples of sunlight to fall on a skeletal swing that had long ago lost its cushions, as evidenced by bits of fluff scattered through the carcasses of daffodils and roses. An algae-filled pond occupied an entire corner, the stones covered in moss. Melanie crossed the weed-ridden path to sit on the skeleton swing. The rusted bars creaked as she slowly rocked herself back and forth on her toes, both hands limp in her lap; she rested her head against the bars of the swing's back, letting the dappled light paint shadows onto her face.
A few feet from the bare dirt where her toes rested was a spot of greenery; with her eyes closed, she didn't notice it. Perhaps it was a good thing that she didn't see the cabbage among the weeds and bare thorny bone cages of roses, since she simply would have kicked it away, and that would have not been good for the child growing inside.
She sat there for a long time, just thinking, her good left hand fiddling with the sleeve of her sweater. It was hot out, but Melanie was cold, so she curled deeper into her heavy clothing just in case, opened her eyes to make sure no clouds had come between her and the swing. None had, so she closed her eyes again, fell asleep peacefully.
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Posted: Sun May 17, 2009 6:52 pm
She opened her eyes slowly to starlight between the leaves and the sound of a baby's whimper. The noise did not make her heart wrench; it didn't arouse long-buried maternal instinct. In fact it was simply irritation that bubbled up in the center of her chest- she might have slept outside all night if not for the baby that must be around somewhere... Melanie straightened, rolled her head to get rid of the stiffness that had taken residence in her back. The skin, burned and scarred, pulled unpleasantly as she stood up. Incessant, ever-louder wails accompanied the action and she looked down, seeing nothing.
I wish that kid would shut up, she thought, glancing around for the offending family. Nothing except the crying and the quiet sounds of night-time on the outskirts of a large city. Very distant she could hear honking horns. Perhaps it was just the new baby of her landlord, but she took two steps forward under that assumption and then to the left the wails fell silent and a baby's hiccupy, thick voice said, "Mama?"
Melanie looked to her left and down to meet the huge blue-violet eyes of a little boy in the remains of a plant, the species of which she could not determine in the poor lighting. His hair was the same shade as his eyes, or seemed to be; she glanced around for the parents. No one there but her; nothing to do for it, then, said the moral part of Melanie that she thought had burned away a year ago, she had to take the little boy inside and call the authorities to ensure that he would be taken to a good home. She started to crouch down to pick him up, but the useless claw-hand peeked out of her sleeve. Of course she couldn't pick him up like a normal person, she thought crossly. You need two hands to pick up a baby.
"Okay," she said, trying to coo and failing. She was not a relaxing person, nor much of one for children. Never had been, even before becoming a disgusting cripple. Miserably, she continued, "It's okay," and finally figured out how to pick up the baby. Once she'd had a little cousin, and she remembered to lift her elbow a bit to support the baby's head. Just because her hand was useless didn't mean the rest of her arm was gone, or something, even though sometimes it felt like it. She used her free hand to check for identification, found a sharpie marker scribble on the foot of a strange plush thing he was holding reading "Hale" where the rest of the writing was blurred out.
So the kid's name was Hale. That'd be one more thing to tell the authorities when she called them. In the meantime, she would make a little nest for the baby in her room. Just for now.
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Posted: Sat Aug 08, 2009 11:38 pm
 The next morning, Melanie once again woke up to a child crying. At first, it was only a minor annoyance; it wasn't her kid who was sobbing like someone had broken its heart. She didn't have kids. But then it occurred to her: the crying was far too close to be the landlord, and far too loud to be someone out on the street. When she had decided this and started to roll out of bed to locate the source of the noise, she recalled the blue-haired child from the night before. She sat up and saw him tucked into a window seat, too entangled in the blankets to move.
Hale was his name, she remembered, and she needed to find his family so she wouldn't have to care for the brat. Logically, the first thing one should do upon discovering a lost child was find the parents. Right? But the fact that she'd kept the kid might mean that people may think she'd kidnapped him and later suffered regrets. Her clean criminal record paused her train of thought, but she decided: Better to suffer a short time of being thought a criminal than to be stuck with a kid that someone may want back for a long, long time.
Melanie swung herself awkwardly out of the bed and, after a bit of maneuvering, got the child into her arm. Thankfully, he seemed rather content to just snuggle up to her; there wasn't any squirming for her to deal with. Since her other hand was already dialing the number for the local police station - just because two fingers weren't functional, didn't mean that the entire hand was gone - she couldn't exactly steady him if he had been trying to move about.
Oddly enough, when the receptionist heard her name, she seemed to already know what her complaint was; Melanie found herself forwarded through several departments until someone rather young-sounding came on the line.
"Hi, Miss Anselm," said the impossibly chipper voice. "I heard you found Hale?"
For a moment she was struck dumb. "Yes. I did. In the garden, outside my tenement." Tenement, she scoffed to herself, who said that anymore? It made her seem like a poor person, less than she was.
"Oh, that's good, the delivery went as planned! We'll have the adoption papers sent your way in the next few days, okay? Don't worry about getting them filed, they're already all prettied up and at the Liberty Center." The smiling voice giggled, then through what clearly sounded like a grin, it said, "Goodbye, Miss Anselm."
Melanie could barely get a word out before the line went dead. She looked at it, dumbfounded, for a few seconds before she sat down on her couch and looked down at the little tan boy.
No way could she be stuck with the kid.
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