La Vie Boheme

Couldn't get to Blogger last

Couldn't get to Blogger last night, hence, no post. Yesterday was another low word count day, but the good news is I did some homework and got a good night's sleep for a change. I have a lot of writing to catch up this weekend. :P

Another short excerpt about Sara, who's seems to be going from minor character to major character.

Mealtimes were one time when the Retreat's real mission was most apparent. Meals were never perfectly ordinary times. The residents either ate in stultifying silence, or there was some outburst or another to remind everyone there that they were among the Unwell. And even when there were no outbursts, there were always the little plastic cups with their bright, colorful pills. When she first came to the Retreat, Sara had managed to palm her pills for the first several weeks, then Eleanor had caught her flushing them down the toilet, and the staff had watched her close ever since.

The images came, as they always did. A fat baby boy, mouth open in an angry wail, cheeks red and wet. His tiny fists were balled in his fury, the curves flowing from the tips of her pencils. Sara had seen him in her mind's eye a thousand times, and drawn him dozens of times. What her psychiatrists made of her drawings of this single unknown infant she sometimes wondered. Expressing her wounded inner child, they probably told each other. While the infant was the constant, his surroundings in the pictures were constantly in flux. The settings for these portraits varied from the mundane to the surreal, a playpen one time, the top of a bell tower the next. What mattered to Sara was not so much the pictures themselves, but the sense of connection she felt when drawing them. With her pencils in hand, she felt a part of the whole, a piece in a larger puzzle. That connected feeling never lasted long enough though, and while she was shading the background of the picture (this time the setting was a flower vendor's pushcart, angry infant perched in among roses and daisies like an Anne Geddes portrait gone horribly wrong), Sara felt the connection snap, the shift so sudden it was almost audible. With that change, any sense of purpose, any sense of the rightness of holding a pencil in hand, was gone.

This crying baby keeps showing up, in dreams and in Sara's pictures. I know who he is, but I have no earthly idea why he keeps showing up. Guess I'll have to keep writing to see! :)