A Short Story

I've been working for these past few weeks on getting my creative writing juices flowing. In the midst of daily writing exercises, I stumbled into this story, based solely on the word ivory. When I arrived at the end of the story, I realized that it was Ophelia who was the heroine, although perhaps an Ophelia of a different time.

Ivory

She stood in ivory. Drenched in ivory. The very thought of the color on her skin was absurd to her. Her skin, being the color of ivory, faded into the dress, into the wall behind her, and slowly she disappeared. All that remained were the fruitless details of her being: eyelashes, hair, a slight red in the lips, floating on an infinite ivory canvas.

Her skin was wet, trapped by the silk fabric, which clung to her with every step she made. The sweat was cold as it drizzled down her back, and suddenly she pictured herself as a Greek marble statue, condensation from the air collecting around the cold marble, fixed in place, in a position of victory or defeat, hollow eyes reflecting the face of the viewer.

She placed her shoes on her feet, not delicate pumps that pinched her toes, but the shoes she had arrived in, converse, three years old, held together by a hope. She grabbed her jacket, an old leather bomber she had borrowed from her father one year, and leaving her t-shirt and jeans behind, she edged her way out of the shop, into the brisk December air. The short train of silk shuffled behind her on the snow, and she laughed thinking that indeed the whole world had become one sheet of ivory, one sheet of silk, and that she could disappear into it all.

Before the shop girl could realize what had happened, she hopped on to a bus, headed home. She giggled to think of the girl stumbling into the dressing room to discover the discarded clothes, thinking she might suspect that her customer had melted away, part of the snowy landscape that disappeared in the spring.

Her stop came, but she did not exit. The bus was warm, her sweat was fading, and under the jacket she felt solid, firm. When the bus came to what appeared to be an empty field, she pulled the bell. “There’s no stop here, miss,” the driver said. “No matter,” she replied, “this is where I belong.” Reluctantly the door steamed open and she stepped out onto the field. Trudging her way through the snow, the bottom of the silk slowly deforming in the cold moisture, she felt the nettles in her body begin to fade. As her skin numbed, the pain she had been dragging along with her all these years was shed, one thorn at a time, until she felt the freedom of anesthesia. Relived, tears fell from her eyes in gratitude, and she sat in the snow indian style.

“I’m supposed to drown,” she thought, “but the famed river is nowhere in sight.” Instead she began to scoop up the snow with her frozen palms, and let it fall over her face. Slowly, surely, the snow built up around her until all she could see, all she could feel, all she could breathe was snow. Ivory everywhere. And she did fade. And she became part of it. She was part of it all.