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.