Sadness

Apologies for the long silence - wow, this week has been chaos! Aside from being ultra-busy, I didn't have much worth sharing - I'm not attempting to go for 'most boring blog of the year'. I have a couple of great things coming up shortly - for now, I just have another piece from my course to share with you. Again, it was something I felt a certain resistance in writing. Having spent the last 15 months writing pretty much what I pleased, being restricted to a theme and to a word count is certainly providing me with the challenge I sought. We were asked to choose an emotion and use it as the title, but to write the piece without abstraction ie we needed to 'show' not 'tell', something I've struggled with and that I have seen other writers suffer too. You can tell me in the comments if you think I succeeded or not!

Despite the drizzle, the open plaza of Culver Square positively buzzed with people. The fountain in the middle had been vandalised again with a heavy dose of detergent, foaming manically with the bronze figures at the centre hidden behind a mass of bubbles. The grey of the flagstones, of the circular fountain and the miniature carven temple at its heart matched the steely gloom of the skies above and the faces of the passers-by. Around them, a mixture of clothes shops, little cafes and the inevitable phone retailers marked the boundary. Alone on a stone bench that ran the circumference of the fountain, Marie roughly scrubbed the tears from her face with balled fists before hugging her raised knees close to her chest once more. Her hands, white against her black clothing, clutched at the fabric as if on the verge of ripping it apart. In deference to the weather she had drawn the hood of her Gothic coat over the lank tendrils of her hair, but it failed to cover her head completely so that the black make-up streaking her face was clear for all to see, if any had cared enough to look. For the most part she kept her head bowed, but occasionally she would glance up fleetingly and scan the faces of those in front, quickly looking away even if one met her gaze and tried to hold it. Again, she smeared fresh tears from her face, smudging the running mascara even further until it seemed as if she wept tears of shadow. Finally she rested her forehead on her knees, the odd sniffles turning to deep sobs and her shoulders shaking with the force of them. No-one seemed to hear her cries. No-one seemed to care. No-one came near.