Work in Progress

It has been those long seven weeks since I could work at all on my novel in progress, this one for adults. I had left the book at a crucial place. I was afraid, frankly, that it would deny me access. Sometimes all you can write in a day is a scene. This one takes place in 1955, in a hospital for the mentally unwell. The photo above is the Alcatraz kitchen. It was the closest I could come to an institutional shot.

Down the long vat of the hall, the day is a scowl. The white sun through the streaked glass is a kind of unhappy. Beyond the windows the trees poke their naked branches into the underbelly of the sky. “Fresh air to do us good,” I tell Autumn, because she already knows, because I told her so through the hard itch of the dark night, that our goodness has earned us the outsides. “We’re privileged people now,” I said. I walk smooth and straight. I parade, no shenanigans, as if there is not, all around me, the bent smash of the Staters in their untied dress wraps and naked feet, their nowhere to go, their back and forthing. They walk and they sit, or they lump along the hall edge like rolled-up carpets, or they have been tied into the places they will remain all day, like dogs at the end of no leash. I walk like I walk, through the smoke and the stares, pushing my parcel, which is Autumn. “Wind is blowing,” I tell her. “Bushes are in rumble.”