Free your ride: #3
In the comments below -or on your blog with a link -or in your very very v. private pink diary, Write (Ride).
Start with the start — a photo, a quote, a word, a story. Produce words, one after another, until you are done. Spelling and punctuation, inconsequential. Grammar preferred but not required.
Editing strictly prohibited.
Start here:
“behind the greenhouse”
Write (Ride):
I don’t know who spilled gasoline in the rhubarb patch behind the greenhouse, but it was much too literal for my taste: the greenhouse gas, that is. I imagine it was Amelia and her penchant for fire, for setting fire, watching fire, roasting things in fire, for she was all things fire from the inside out. She was not redheaded, though, and I think we were all surprised by that; such flamability on the inside demands some kind of show on the outside, is what I say. But she did have a spiked ring of gold around each of her pupils. Could never say for certain that her eyes were exactly blue or exactly green or exactly hazel, but only that whatever color they were was only an approximation, and it was interrupted, of course, by the hot glow. That’s what I meant about fire on the outside, because it wasn’t for her hair, you see.
What I think happened is just before she shot west, just before she theived Rodney’s old Yamaha crotch rocket, she wanted to set the whole thing to blazes, but she was interrupted. Could have been anybody, but I’d put my money on Isabelle from next door, who was as nosy as anybody was ever nosy. Is what I guess, is that Isabelle saw what Amelia was up to, and clattered out the side door, crossed the gravel (when is someone going to finish that paving?), and waved a robed arm in the air. I’m sure that’s when Amelia dropped the gas can, straddled the bike, and took off.
I don’t know where she is now — Amelia, I mean — but I sure hope she’s stopped to wash her hands.
The piece unpuzzled, though, is why the greenhouse? Was she going to start there and work her way match by match to the house, past the shed, through the garage, and spray unleaded all over the floral print couch? I don’t know, except that it may have been the orchids. Leon loved his orchids, always his orchids, more than anything else his orchids. And of course the greenhouse was full of them. Maybe she just wanted to set him right and take down each delicate stalk by stalk.
Leon would have told her orchids weren’t as delicate as they looked. But they’d have burned anyway under all that heat.
