Tuesday, January 14, 2014

The Girl in the Pink Floyd shirt (fragment)

Sophie, for that is her name, Sophia Nicole but really Sophie is what everyone knows her as, had just realized that she was wandering aimlessly down the street when something made her stop.
She looked back up the hill and saw a gray rabbit frozen in fear by some daffodils at the corner of the old abandoned church.
Was it the rabbit? Something about the shape of the shade of the tulip tree in back, towering over the graveyard? Was there someone.... familiar, looking out the window?
She checked for traffic and walked across the street; the face was gone. Who was that? A ghost? She walked briskly up the quiet street to the church. Mysteries never stayed a mystery for long around the girl in the Pink Floyd shirt.
Sophie walked up the broken sidewalk and noticed Five Points had just become very quiet around her. No dogs or traffic or trains or far off trucks humming up the distant road. The rabbit was gone.
She touched the doorknob, why was her hand trembling? But it was locked up tight. She started walking to the nearest window. Suddenly she felt like she was being watched. She looked around the street. Empty, just an unearthly, underwater silence hanging over the city. A cloud moved in front of the sun. She turned back to the the window and went to look inside.
The church was empty and she looked at the altar and imagined all the people, all the souls who had answered the call to give their hearts to Jesus, on their knees with the pastor reaching out to anoint their foreheads with oil.
She heard behind her the whirring of a dove's flight from a rhododendron bush and a sunbeam fell upon the altar. She felt her heart filling up with love like a choir of Angels singing, she lifted her hands to the heavens and started to turn around and, her knees buckling, she fell to the ground in a faint.
She blinked her eyes open in the sunshine and looked up. Was there a woman there, a man standing in the light? An angel? The figure lifted an arm and pointed at the church. Fresh waves of love sang through her body like a flood. She looked in that direction and the rabbit was waiting at the rear of the building. She looked back at the angel but no one was there. Love and a feeling of being in the middle of a great unsolved puzzle captivated her. She looked back at the rabbit, it was creeping through a space between two pieces of siding. Sophie got up to see where it went and looked through the crack. She saw a round drumhead, no -- a tambourine! There was a dusty tambourine lying far enough inside to be safe from the weather. She reached to the length of her arm, got her fingers on it, laughed at its tinkling bells and pulled it out.

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