Phaedra Story Start

Just a 'Story Start' that came to me and wouldn't leave me alone. . . thought I'd share :)

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She liked to sleep by the window on winter afternoons, when the sun had warmed the cushions and bleached another shade of color from their years. She would bask in the light that broke through the clouds’ gray mask like the seals who basked on rocks at the harbor shore. The window held her ocean, clear and cold, at bay, and when her fingers brushed against the glass, the chill shocked her. How could her cheeks feel so flushed, her ears crimson and hot when the world beyond those thin panes existed only in ice?

Once, as she lay there, robed in wool and sickly shadows of lattice and vine, a song she had known as a child came calling in her mind. How many times she had scratched through that melody, her tutor looking on, as the gloss of her barely used violin nearly blinded the words and notes on the page from her eyes. . .

Go tell Aunt Rhody, Rhody, Rho-oh-dy

Go tell Aunt Rhody

The old gray goose is dead

She had hated that song. Not only because her fingers never seemed to find that wretched B flat, but who had paired such morbid words with such a cheerful little tune? Aunt Rhody, she remembered, had lived in her imagination as a rosy, plump, and freckled aunt. The aunt whose cupboards were never in want of peppermint or honey. The aunt who laughed at antics which parents would scold. The father’s –younger- sister, not mother’s- older- one kind of aunt. Aunt Rhody glowed golden and pink and cream. Why did her goose have to be old and gray and dead?

The song’s ambient contradictions fit the mood of her napping place, she finally decided. That’s why it had come out of nowhere into her head. Light and dark, warmth and cold, good- as she so inadequately judged it- and bad. Phaedra’s thoughts always ended up here, in the realm between contrasts, lost in the gray. Some mornings, when she showered, she would open the frosted window- just a crack- and let the frigid winter air slip in to mingle with the steam. She’d watch hot and cold meet and kiss and embrace, clouds rolling off her shoulders and surrounding her head until she knew only white fog and tasted only wet blaze. It was in the mating of the two worlds that Phaedra did not have to be either her mother’s child or her father’s; either normal and plain or not. In the haze of the middle, she could be both. . . she could be neither. . . she could be anything she wanted to be. And who she wanted to be most of all was anyone other than Phaedra Charmon.