peering straight through me- november short story contest (rough draft)
I live on the street the alley cats avoid and the trees lean their leafy branches obscuring my hollow hole of a mailbox. This is Luxembourg, a land of priceless Renaissance architecture, and unfathomable prizes nature behold. Every winter season the snow falls, sprinkling every European mountain peak and the headstones to the centuries-old graveyards and Catholic chapels, but I’m spared from it all, behind these windows I’m a prisoner of a prissy, darling, icing-on-the-cake reality. I have soured into a miserable witch, dreaming about the day I have the strength to run far away maybe to the Motherland of Belgium. But in the meantime, I take a long stare at the face through the vanity mirror and turn back down to my blank sketchbook paper. I started this dance countless weeks ago, trying to illustrate the human portrait, but I occupy the version nobody else seems to recognize. I don’t understand what makes an Image so exceptional. Now my bedroom is tinted with the outside darkness. It m...