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Author on Reedsy Prompts since Nov, 2019
I overheard Mother telling the maid to prepare the yellow room (that’s one of the chambers facing the inner courtyard). “Rowena is an orphan”, Mother said to me later, “she is my late sister’s only daughter and she is coming to live with us”. I had so many questions “So she is my cousin? How come I never heard about her?”, but I knew better than to ask Mother, whose lips were even more firmly pressed together than usual. My sisters have to be dressed up all the time. But Rowena ca...
It was a cold night and I was brooding. One childhood memory in particular kept coming back. Everything was white. The snow was oppressive, like a sinister white omen. (‘In some countries, white is the color of mourning’, I thought…). My father was driving. He braked too suddenly. The car hit a tree, an apple tree. My mother went through the windscreen. Suddenly there was blood on the snow. I still don’t want to drive. Just can’t. Nobody listened to me, to my feelings. Then as before as later…
My childhood was not a happy one. My parents were far too absorbed in their compulsive relationship cycle – quarrelling and making up in turn – to have any kind of energy left for me. I had to seek happiness elsewhere. I read Jane Eyre and David Copperfield very early and found comfort in the company of the eponym protagonists, whom I looked upon as fellow sufferers. We lived in a village called Oleron. Walking to school by myself, every day I went pass a small shop that sold sweets only. I woul...
It was Marcus’s turn to host our annual meeting, to which – it is a strict rule with us – partners are not invited. So I went alone to our family dinner, granted that we are not “family”, in the ordinary sense of the word. We are co-researchers, part of a respected community of scientists, though our sub-group of will lifters is less known. Our job is to lift people’s spirits, using sheer will (never with any will bending, of course, that is strictly off bounds), to help them find their way; so many people err… <...
Last night I dreamt that Daphne Du Maurier was here. Well, actually, that’s the way I phrased it afterwards for Peter – who had slept all through – and for most people. But to you, I can tell the truth: I know that it was no dream. She really was here! There was this flowery fragrance clinging to her, that ...
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