DeNene The Apple's Skin (WOW)

Dear all

Here is the beginning of my story. Having not written in this form before, I was a little anxious, but once rolling, I felt so free. Free to invent this person and this world. I could barely tear myself away.

The Apple’s skin

Pip sits on the bed. Waiting. At her feet is a blue pasteboard suitcase, the kind you get at the Goodwill. The dorm room too, is familiar. Photos of Katy Perry and Taylor Swift are carelessly plastered on the walls of eggshell white above each of the four girls’ beds. The floors are green linoleum, polished until they glow. In the corners of the wide room, dust bunnies rest under the steel beds where the girls have missed them in their daily chores. There is a nightstand and a footlocker by each bed. The hazy windows are cracked open to let in the warm spring air.

Pip taps her right foot restlessly, jiggling her knee and the saggy bed. God, I’ll be glad to leave this behind, she thought. I never want to see it again.

The other girls are still in class, but Pip has a reprieve. She is leaving today. Going home. Everything she owns is in the suitcase and the stack of journals tied together in a bundle on the bed. That, and the shiny red patent leather purse she picked out from the hospital lost and found.

The problem is that where she’s going is a mystery. Oh, she’s been told where she’s headed. She’s going home with her brother, Paul. Still, home has no meaning to her, she has no life or memory of that life. Nothing means nothing. Her memory before coming to The Swallows’ Nest Youth Home is blank, empty, zippo.

Unlike these drafty halls and windows, little has seeped into her memory.

Dr. White told her this might happen. But then he told her it could all come flooding back too. But still, nothing. Well, not nothing.

The one thing that bothers her in the moments before sleep is the feeling that there is something she is supposed to remember, something important. This thing stays just out of reach, and like the floaters in her eyes, when she gets close, the memory skitters away.

The thing that won’t be remembered does have an essence, though, and it’s not good. The forgotten thing is dark and frightening. Mostly, she thinks that it's just fine that the memory stays gone.

So, during the last 2 years, the therapists and counsellors have pried and prodded to help her retrieve that lost thing. Or things, she should say, because she remembers nothing but staying here with the girls in the dorm, who come and go, and the doctors. And Paul.

Paul is supposed to be her brother. He’s medium height and build with thinning hair that looks like it was red before. He has freckles splashed across his nose and arms, and the bluest eyes she has even seen besides her own. There are crinkles by his eyes and around his mouth that deepen when he smiles, which he does often now that she is leaving the Swallows’ Nest. In the beginning, when he was a total stranger, he always looked worried and solemn. Then, he didn’t make her laugh, because, she thinks, there’s nothing funny about a sister in the nut house.

She touches the bundle of journals tied with wraps and wraps of twine. They are bound in black and white marbled cardboard, splayed out by their bits of paper, notes, and Post-it’s in a rainbow of neon colors. This is her treasure. She has written for the doctors, sure. But mostly she has written for herself. She pulls aside a college-ruled paper corner to see her familiar scrawl on the pages. Poems, short stories and lists of ideas fill these journals. The doctors didn’t find pay dirt in them buy she sure did.

When she was given a journal and a brand-new gel pen to help her with her memory recovery, she found that writing came easily to hand. The words were all there, the meter, and the sense of falling into a delicious rabbit hole. She felt at home here, even if home was a black hole of memory.

Outside, the spring sun grows stronger by the day, and even through the clouded windows the late afternoon sun slants into the room where dust motes ride the currents of air.

(more to follow. . . )