Dovecote

Here is a small bit of a writing piece I've just started....

          Channary was a city made from towers.

          Copper, mostly—ancient metal blooming with pale green as it oxidized in the sea air.

It was a famous landscape, depicted in countless paintings that decorated the palaces of the capital. The shining domes and spires poking at Kir’s ever-blue sky was an image like no other. Unmistakable.

But it was only the true people of the city who knew the truth, which was that the paradise of Channary was only an illusion, a veil of beauty hiding a place, which was, in fact, filled with bird droppings and corruption.

         It was the real Channary that Nolie had been raised to know.

         Nolie’s life, from infancy to her current age, thirteen, had been a story of loss, poverty, and grey doves—a story she shared with the wider population of the city, for they all led the same lives. The very same hard, fight-for-your-place-in-the-world lives.

          But Magnolia Harper had one thing that not a single other person had, and that was a very small grain of something unknown to the city, inside her.

         That something was called hope, and she thought of it as the same thing as a cloud of doves billowing out of a tower window, in the morning. Or as a purple and orange streaked sky, glorious backdrop for Channary’s skyline.

         It was her hope and her appreciation of beauty that had kept her from falling completely into hard, colorless reality. That was what separated her from all the others, made her, in truth, a very interesting person.

        It was a sad thing, though, because nobody really thought of Nolie like that. The fact that she was different had placed her immediately in a certain category, the category where all the people who were eccentric, or just plain crazy, or simply didn’t have anything in common with the others went in the Oddball category.

      Magnolia Harper being in this group meant that she was not someone to associate with. And that was a pity.

       So, for most of her life, she was somewhat of an outcast. Someone who no one knew well and no one wanted to know at all. And it stayed like that. Just like that, right up to the morning of October first. And that was when things started to change.

Cheers, and happy almost-Friday!

-A