Winter Descriptive Writing Project

In the backseat of my father's sedan I stretch the backs of my ankles against the leather passenger seat. If I lean my forehead against it, I can smell the floral crispness of Mother's hairspray sticking to the back of the headrest. She twists around a white bangled arm to pat my hair, black and dully warm with the filtered sunlight of the backseat window. Outside the sky is pockless blue, gelatinating in idignant clumps against the deadness of the bald November forests. With my head cocked against the headrest, I see the outline of my father in the driver's seat-- I search the red-checked rim of his cuffs for a stain, for a patch of rubbed-out fabric, and in vain-- and behind his black head, out the window, a vast expanse of grey. 700 unread pages of anna Karenina lay in my lap, ignorant that the world outside has died.

Alyssa Duck (1:22 PM): It's grey and grey and grey outside here today.
Kathleen Sims (1:22 PM): Must be symbolic or something.
Alyssa Duck (1:23 PM): Yeah.

Rows of worn depleted cornfields pass, stripped brown of green and yellow. Clots of blot-red bushes curl domestically against the edge of the field, as if something on this empty road were blooming, like a forehead-ring of red teethmarks against the dead brown stalks. At the edge of the highway a fox sniffs interestedly at a dead rabbit. The cornfields look exactly as if some sweet celestial mother had oiled them and attacked them with a comb.

I lean my head against the wind-chilled windowpane and let it bang along with the potholes in the road. The backs of my ankles are sore from underuse; my eyelids close around a vague and empty blankness--

In the fuzzy post-rain haze of a 3 o'clock sun I sit on the edge of the sidewalk, shoulders scrunched into the folds of my neck, and flex my ankles against the thin crease where the concrete meets the asphalt. If I lean my neck far enough to the left I can smell Matt's clean musky crispness; he is warm and soft-smelling with the particular comforting meekness of men's deoderant. The sky is split thinly into folds of grey and blue; splotches of indignant blue patch the sky like cerulean eczema on the bones of an old hand. Coolidge Park sprawls incongruously cheerful and blue against the punctured wreck and tangle of spit-dried winter trees. My thoughts begin flitting laboriously, like an injured bird, between concrete/musk/philosophy; to be riduculous, I imagine some ancient existentialist philosopher in love, alarmed for a moment at his own animal physicality, quoting J.S Foer's Brod: Nothing (was) more than it actually was. Everything was just a thing, completely mired in its thingness. I watch the clouds shift in the infinite grey, and come to the conclusion that I am quite all right with thingness; that, in the end, eternity is and can only be captured in the contact of skin or in bee stings; that neither Emerson nor Brod was seated physically, in no vague proverbial sense, on a park curb beside a lank-limbed boy with aster-colored eyes, who smelled of musk and young affection.

I squeeze my eyelids closed until white and purple stars appear and Handel begins ringing in my ears; when I open my eyes, the highway still slides greyly and languidly by, inch by fractured brown inch, uninterestingly enough; 4:30 gathers its defenses, the sky is grey, and it is still not beautiful.