Margo

Margo crouches at the end of her bed; those two crooked mattresses stacked together. They are high enough to let her elbows prop and do the work of sorting through a leafy stack of frail pages. Scissors clip lightly at some of the sheets as they are lifted individually to the cool yellow light at the end of the room.

 

To describe the space would be to do so in terms that reflect the presence of heavy shadows in the sallow umber light. It is a small scentless room with a singly blank wall bearing switches and a mottled wood door. The remaining alabaster panels are clinging loosely, being aged and showing more as a bruised powder to the touch. Their subtle whiteness begets them as a matte texture; this is placed upon the still photograph of the particular evening.

 

Her clipping make a small pile aside an open and nearly blank notebook. A few stark letters of standard sizes stare up from between the baby blue lines. The rest is blank or indiscernible from narrations lofty angles.

 

Again, another quick set of squared snipping and a bit falls to the blankets. This is perhaps her favorite part, a stunning example of a single word in a sea of color. This moment, what falls and is seen amidst the red and green stripe and florations of the bedcover, the word “Faithful”.

 

The leaves fall like some slow autumn, each wilting from the last pinch of sharp blade. Lifeless they fall, tip toeing the humid air, collecting en masse in a glow like candlelight.

 

Each cut catches a meaning, a profound human emotion, how simple for our narrator to ascertain. Each descriptor as forlorn as perhaps its writer. The local paper, there is a multitude of needy nomenclature. The section where people sell themselves. The part that asks you to explain why you are good enough for someone else to ask you into their lives.

 

She wields endless phrases from the personals pages, endless drastically intimate words. With a surgeons grace and a hunters prowess she separates each eye misting descriptor from it’s hiding place. With the final snip that huffs like an exhaled breath…

 

Attention accrues towards those papers in the periphery. Here we notice the building blocks of prose; of fine discreet poetry forming from the assemblage. Each word once a pitiful cry for help and plea from the lonely, now a verbal vase filled with the breath of a new growth surrogate.

 

She calls it “walks on the beach”; but the tender title does not carry on without burden. It is a poem about a faithless man who one day forgets his life and marriage promises as the result of an amnesia he suffers. One day the man leaves for work and never returns. She finds him after a month of searching, but he lives in a motel with a questionable woman. The wife then tries to bait him with back personal adds that she creates out of scraps of others, each day giving more clues to his past and identity until there is an adventure within him to find this mysterious woman who shares his love and perhaps last memory of “walks on the beach”.

 

I can tell what brews within this girl. It might be distrust, but I will call it honesty, and it is a truth that is paid to love. Can you blame a child of a broken home for distrusting sacred vows; nor could you this young woman of her own broken heart.