scene from a novel in progress, a novel two long chapters from done

 

            The
day was breaking.  There was still
the tooth of the moon in the sky and that black fringe of storm, and she could
hear the high slosh in the creek, the endless running forward to the sea.   When she reached the footbridge,
she stood for a moment and looked back toward the house—the big rectangle and
the small one, the twin chimneys, the unsunk roof sloping forthright in two
directions, the garden like a moat. 
Slick and stone and root.

            Steam
had come in, a funnel of gnats and mosquitoes, the sudden gray heart of a squirrel
on a limb above her head.  Becca
imagined the boy fishing for marlin in the stream, or sleeping on a bed of
hawk-tail feathers.  She imagined
him alone in that room, that empty mirror, that barrette balanced on the
apple's glass stem, that jar of honey.  The trees unfurled, a belligerent green.  The crows were thick as thieves.  On the prickle of the forest floor, Becca
saw the wet back of a single beetle catching a nick of sun.