The exercise:
Let's bring the Random Book prompt back around. I mean, I know it's only been over a year since last time, but I thought maybe we should use it again?
Anyway. Grab a random book off the shelf. Poke around Amazon. However you get your book, use its first line as your own and go from there. Credit where it's due, as always, and feel free to recommend some reading for me in the process.
3 comments:
It has been a while since we've had this! Well, on the planes (it's not a direct flight) to Kiev and back I read a book called Quiet, by Susan Cain, and started reading Phil Knight's book on starting up Nike. Both have their flaws, and I haven't finished the Nike book yet, but I think you might like the Quiet book, so that's the one I'm using. But so you have a proper chance to decide if you're interested in it, here is her TED talk on the subject.
Happy New Year!
[Sorry, I got carried away again...]
Quiet
Montgomery, Alabama. December 1, 1955. Early evening. A public bus pulls to a stop and a sensibly dressed woman in her forties gets on. She looks around the bus, black people in the back and white people -- though there are only two -- in the front. She walks past the empty seats to the back of the bus, where a generously padded woman with tight, mean eyes sighs heavily and moves a canvas shopping bag stuffed with rags just enough that the sensibly dressed woman can sit down. The driver, a white man with broken red veins across his cheeks and nose and a lingering smell of ham about him, closes the doors and the bus pulls away. It chugs along the road and a murmur of conversation arises behind the sensibly dressed woman. Next to her, though separated by shopping bags and laundry sacks, the mean-eyed woman stares out of the window. At the front of the bus the white people look relaxed, but they never glance behind them.
After nearly an hour of trundling down broad, still roads where the houses are hidden behind fences, and cars are all parked secretly in garages and only the occasional cat indicates that there's life here at all, the sensibly dressed woman gets off the bus. She crosses the road and turns down a narrower street: the houses here are set closer together and the fences are lower. It seems slightly poorer, but it also has a community feel to it instantly. A child runs out of a gate, across the road without looking, and darts into a neighbour's garden. Childish giggling bursts from a bush and another game of hide and seek reaches its conclusion.
"Rosa?"
The sensibly dressed woman feels like she's been punched in the stomach. She maintains her calm face, and she turns to see who is speaking, but she is terrified. Her legs feel like all the strength has drained out of them and her stomach is an acid knot at her centre. She knows the voice, but the owner of it died. Two years ago.
"Auntie Jemima," she says. She wants to stay quiet, but something inside her prods her to speak up again. "That nice Reverend King put you in the ground two years ago now. Didn't you like it there?"
The world around her seems to stop, a gradual slowing down until nothing is moving, nothing is making a sound. The silence is so loud she wants to put her hands over her ears. She looks at Jemima, her mother's sister, a moderately bad woman who stole gewgaws and trinkets and sold them from her back room to people who should have known better. She was nice to cats and the sick though, and had once given Rosa a delicate carriage clock that chimed every hour. Jemima sighed, in a way very unlike her, and shrugged.
"I told him it wouldn't work," she said, and her voice was deepening. "War! Get out here and talk to her yourself!"
"What?" Rosa stared as Jemima's skin went from chocolate to bone white; her lovely hair fell out and was replaced by something as fine as spider silk that might not have had a colour at all, and her well-structured, if aged, face, became thin and elfin, with cheekbones that could cause you serious damage if you got too close.
"War wants a word," said Famine. "He wants you to sit somewhere and refuse to move. I said I'd do it for him, but he said it needs to be you."
"Yeah," said War, stepping out of nowhere. He smiled, a big smile with white teeth that made Rosa think of the tigers in the zoo. "I need a quiet war, sweetheart, and you're just the woman for the job."
Greg - ah, I remember watching this talk a while back. I think I will have to check out the book now!
This is both fascinating and delightful and unexpected. Thank you for this :)
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