Pinstripes

In the white empty space filled with floating specs of glittering dust, my head rises. I turn my neck this way, crack, that way. Windows are slanted so that it appears I am floating in the space the house was built in, hundreds of years ago. Though the glass I see clouds, fluffy and distant moving faster then they seem they should. Last night all I saw was stars. 

The room is flooded with cold light, setting everything clean and colorless. I pull the the white and blue striped cotton sheets around me. The rustle brittlely, moving from their position for the first time in years. I look around the room for the first time. Things I recognize are everywhere. Sketchbooks, colored pencils sitting in an old coffee tin. I see favorite books of mine, some classics I’d always wanted to read. A french dictionary,  a high school yearbook ten years old, a drawing of the family dog. I realize I had placed my red plastic cup on a stack of hat boxes the night before. My breath is sour and alive, muddying the stillness of the unused room.

I imagine what she must have felt like here on Christmas mornings, waking up with anticipation as early as I rose that morning with regret. I imagine her lying as I do, sitting up in bed with pinstriped cotton sheets pulled around her, ears piqued to the movement of others in the house. 

Author's Note

This is the beginning to a short story. Please tell me what you see happening later in the story and what you'd like me to keep.

Reviews

[Amanda]

This is an absolutely breathtaking peice of imagery. Your use of descriptive language is marvelous. I think this will make a wonderful start to a fabulous story. I would suggesting altering the format, simply because it's hard to read with it stretched so long across the screen, but other than that, don't change a thing. Where I see this heading? Well, I deal more with fantasy, delving only a little into creative nonfiction, but what I see here is potentially a story about a man suffering the loss of a spouse. Maybe she left, maybe she died. I would venture more easily to say that she has died. I would take this in one of two directions: First, you could elaborate on the story behind this man's loneliness, leaning heavily upon flashback imagery; where I would probably take this though is to tell the backstory, but from there make this story about a new beginning for this man. Maybe a new love, a new life, overcoming obstacles and moving forward. I say this only because I enjoy happy endings rather than sad, but that's not everybody's style, and plenty of good books end horrendously for the protagonist. Wonderful start. I hope this has been helpful. I look forward to seeing where you decide to take this.