- Posting Speed
- One post per week
- Slow As Molasses
- Writing Levels
- Douche
- Preferred Character Gender
- No Preferences
Pierre Gustave hadn't written in three weeks.
She walked carefully, mindful of the cracks in the rain-slicked sidewalk underfoot, and did her best not to be pensive about it. But it was a pensive day—a blanket of clouds had smothered the sun and enveloped New York City in morose grey, and it had been drizzling all morning, too—and she found herself counting back the days since Pierre Gustave's last letter.
Marie knew it wasn't necessarily cause for disquiet. A soldier had little time for letter-writing. The war was straying further and further away across the sea, inching towards victory and taking Pierre Gustave with it. And if she couldn't help succumbing to the urge to worry, then at least she could take a kind of cruel comfort in knowing she wasn't alone—she could see the same distraction in each crestfallen, rain-streaked face she passed, as grave and grey as the sky above, dark with thoughts of brothers and fathers, sons and husbands a world away. Perhaps the man who emerged from the Society Library as she approached the door, hat pulled low over his face like a wraith, was too busy thinking about letters from his brother to hold the door for her.
She slipped in after him before the door closed like water through a fissure in the hull of a warship. War, she thought as she stepped from the rain into the dimly-lit corridor, was no place for a starry-eyed dreamer like her brother; it made cynics of men, brought them low, ruined their faith in one another. Oftentimes Marie thought they had taken the wrong LaSalle sibling, that it would have been better had she gone to the front instead, woman though she was—she who had been born a cynic, born low, she who had never had any faith in people to ruin. She wouldn't come home changed, a stranger, the way she sometimes feared Pierre Gustave would.
It was warm inside the library, and she shrugged off her coat, thoroughly soaked from the half-hour walk in the rain, hung it on the rack by the door to the lobby to dry. She raked her fingers through the short, sodden shocks of her hair, less in an effort to fashion them into something approaching presentable—she knew that was a battle she was doomed to lose at the best of times—and more to keep them from matting against her forehead. Still, the gesture earned her a knowing smile from Helena as she approached the front desk.
"I'm not sure I've ever seen your hair looking tame, Miss LaSalle," she said pleasantly, leaning forward in her chair. Helena was a young New York native, happily betrothed to a man whose severe stutter had disqualified him from military service. She seemed eternally delighted with Marie's accent, and insisted on referring to her as 'Miss LaSalle', as though Marie were a kindly Dixieland matron in her twilight years. Broadly speaking, Marie detested her. Helena had yet to notice.
"If only I had so much time for hair care each day as you must, Helena," Marie shot back coolly, choking down the urge to reach up and rub last night's sleeplessness from her black-ringed eyes. She glanced around the lobby, and was not surprised to see it largely barren of life—the Society Library's clients generally made a beeline for the private reading and research rooms, where they could ask any staff who happened to be roving around to pull items for them. "Head upstairs, Helena," she suggested, in a voice that made a cursory effort at sounding sincere and then stopped bothering halfway through. "I'll take care of things down here."
The younger woman perked up instantly. "That's a wonderful idea!" she effervesced. "I was just thinking somebody should be minding the reading rooms." She bounded up to her feet like a little puppy at the promise of a walk, and circumvented the front desk. She'd all but skipped her way across the lobby to the stairwell when she paused, one hand resting on the lacquered mahogany banister, and glanced back at Marie. Behind her, a trail of works by Audubon flowed up along the dark green wall of the stairwell. She stood directly in front of a portrait of a great blue heron, rendered in Audubon's familiar, precise brushstrokes; it leaned down, long neck extended, as if it were trying to peer into Helena's ear and check—as Marie was sometimes inclined to doubt—if she really had a brain. "Won't you be lonesome down here by yourself, though?" she ventured with a kind of childlike genuineness.
Marie hardly spared her a glance. "I shall have to find some way to endure," she said as she took Helena's place behind the front desk. She heard Helena go gamboling up the stairs, and set her bag on the desk beside a stack of books Helena had presumably pulled for an earlier client. She paid them no mind. She opened her bag and reached inside it—shuffled through notes and scraps of paper, pens and sketchpads, and then finally managed to extricate a weathered Virginia Woolf hardcover, clutched in her hand like a hard-won prize.
She settled back in her chair and opened the book, its old spine cracking, as if it were an old woman getting up out of her easy chair and groaning with the effort. The rain scuttled softly, lazily, against the walls and the windows, and but for the occasional hushed sound from upstairs—a chair shifting against the floor, a door opening and closing—she could almost imagine there was nothing in the world, nothing but herself, the book, and the rain.
It wasn't as comforting an illusion as it'd used to be. It felt too much like those days in Ville Platte, those sweltering, rainy summers after her father had passed away and her younger brother had gone off to school. It felt too much like those days that solitude had ceased to be a comfort, a sanctuary, had day by day become a cross-- one Marie, if only out of familiarity, couldn't find it in herself to part with. But Pierre Gustave hadn't written in three weeks, and the cross had borne down heavier and heavier for every minute of them.
She walked carefully, mindful of the cracks in the rain-slicked sidewalk underfoot, and did her best not to be pensive about it. But it was a pensive day—a blanket of clouds had smothered the sun and enveloped New York City in morose grey, and it had been drizzling all morning, too—and she found herself counting back the days since Pierre Gustave's last letter.
Marie knew it wasn't necessarily cause for disquiet. A soldier had little time for letter-writing. The war was straying further and further away across the sea, inching towards victory and taking Pierre Gustave with it. And if she couldn't help succumbing to the urge to worry, then at least she could take a kind of cruel comfort in knowing she wasn't alone—she could see the same distraction in each crestfallen, rain-streaked face she passed, as grave and grey as the sky above, dark with thoughts of brothers and fathers, sons and husbands a world away. Perhaps the man who emerged from the Society Library as she approached the door, hat pulled low over his face like a wraith, was too busy thinking about letters from his brother to hold the door for her.
She slipped in after him before the door closed like water through a fissure in the hull of a warship. War, she thought as she stepped from the rain into the dimly-lit corridor, was no place for a starry-eyed dreamer like her brother; it made cynics of men, brought them low, ruined their faith in one another. Oftentimes Marie thought they had taken the wrong LaSalle sibling, that it would have been better had she gone to the front instead, woman though she was—she who had been born a cynic, born low, she who had never had any faith in people to ruin. She wouldn't come home changed, a stranger, the way she sometimes feared Pierre Gustave would.
It was warm inside the library, and she shrugged off her coat, thoroughly soaked from the half-hour walk in the rain, hung it on the rack by the door to the lobby to dry. She raked her fingers through the short, sodden shocks of her hair, less in an effort to fashion them into something approaching presentable—she knew that was a battle she was doomed to lose at the best of times—and more to keep them from matting against her forehead. Still, the gesture earned her a knowing smile from Helena as she approached the front desk.
"I'm not sure I've ever seen your hair looking tame, Miss LaSalle," she said pleasantly, leaning forward in her chair. Helena was a young New York native, happily betrothed to a man whose severe stutter had disqualified him from military service. She seemed eternally delighted with Marie's accent, and insisted on referring to her as 'Miss LaSalle', as though Marie were a kindly Dixieland matron in her twilight years. Broadly speaking, Marie detested her. Helena had yet to notice.
"If only I had so much time for hair care each day as you must, Helena," Marie shot back coolly, choking down the urge to reach up and rub last night's sleeplessness from her black-ringed eyes. She glanced around the lobby, and was not surprised to see it largely barren of life—the Society Library's clients generally made a beeline for the private reading and research rooms, where they could ask any staff who happened to be roving around to pull items for them. "Head upstairs, Helena," she suggested, in a voice that made a cursory effort at sounding sincere and then stopped bothering halfway through. "I'll take care of things down here."
The younger woman perked up instantly. "That's a wonderful idea!" she effervesced. "I was just thinking somebody should be minding the reading rooms." She bounded up to her feet like a little puppy at the promise of a walk, and circumvented the front desk. She'd all but skipped her way across the lobby to the stairwell when she paused, one hand resting on the lacquered mahogany banister, and glanced back at Marie. Behind her, a trail of works by Audubon flowed up along the dark green wall of the stairwell. She stood directly in front of a portrait of a great blue heron, rendered in Audubon's familiar, precise brushstrokes; it leaned down, long neck extended, as if it were trying to peer into Helena's ear and check—as Marie was sometimes inclined to doubt—if she really had a brain. "Won't you be lonesome down here by yourself, though?" she ventured with a kind of childlike genuineness.
Marie hardly spared her a glance. "I shall have to find some way to endure," she said as she took Helena's place behind the front desk. She heard Helena go gamboling up the stairs, and set her bag on the desk beside a stack of books Helena had presumably pulled for an earlier client. She paid them no mind. She opened her bag and reached inside it—shuffled through notes and scraps of paper, pens and sketchpads, and then finally managed to extricate a weathered Virginia Woolf hardcover, clutched in her hand like a hard-won prize.
She settled back in her chair and opened the book, its old spine cracking, as if it were an old woman getting up out of her easy chair and groaning with the effort. The rain scuttled softly, lazily, against the walls and the windows, and but for the occasional hushed sound from upstairs—a chair shifting against the floor, a door opening and closing—she could almost imagine there was nothing in the world, nothing but herself, the book, and the rain.
It wasn't as comforting an illusion as it'd used to be. It felt too much like those days in Ville Platte, those sweltering, rainy summers after her father had passed away and her younger brother had gone off to school. It felt too much like those days that solitude had ceased to be a comfort, a sanctuary, had day by day become a cross-- one Marie, if only out of familiarity, couldn't find it in herself to part with. But Pierre Gustave hadn't written in three weeks, and the cross had borne down heavier and heavier for every minute of them.