Basic Training, I guess?

Goal: Capture her image

Since I can not draw I write. That’s the dilemma I’ve faced on more than a few occasions. I have this wonderful image in my head but  I can’t draw so I must write. Recently I’ve been thinking of a High-school student  smoking a cigarette on the roof top but instead of a gritty or gangsta aura enveloping her its a warm inviting atmosphere. Like this is a person who just happens to smoke and not someone who clings onto the cigarette like a life boat. This is the third bit of prose I wrote exploring how to present this one image in letter format. If a picture is worth a thousand words then I just need to use less than a thousand words to create a picture in the readers mind.  Maybe I’ll pick up drawing someday but till then I’ll make do with letters. Hope you enjoy, if not feel free to share how you’d approach the problem. Peace out, Ransom.

Nicotine and ash scatter. Hair like the golden sun, tassel’s in the wind. Smoke spreading like a noxious flower its scent wafting away from her skirt. Lips tugging around the white cylinder. Eyes reflecting the blue sea. Sea salt, sand and fish mingling along the smoke. Summer converges along the roof top, melting in with the perfume of ashes. She smile’s glowing as the patch across her blazer ripples with her twirling. Her smile eclipses the sun, wider than a grinning moon over the crashing sea, her uniform flaps in the wind.

“How’s it going teach?” Youth blossoms around the makeup that whitens her cheeks, brilliant white teeth glistening between the white stick, golden hair bobbing in its ponytail.

Vibrant and alive with the perfume of stale smoke she glows like the morning sun. She is. A fairy. Dancing in a ring of smoke. Fancies her toad stools and her mind the meandering blades of grass.

“Need a light?” she pops a white stem out of her carton. Her finger nails bear the sheen of a manicure, smooth as the cap of a mushroom.

“I’m quitting.”

She laughs the sharps note like crystal bouncing of gold. The sun encapsulates her like a spotlight, light scattering along her hair. A gentle laugh.

“Never thought you’d say that… to your health then,” a pip of smoke floats through the fencing that encloses the roof, “Fly away smoke, fly away, fly away,” she says waving as it disperses amongst the air.

With only the dull lingering of her smoke, salt tingles my nose, fermenting fish lingers between the two cavities. It smells like summer, beads of sweat forming along my forehead. Air swells into my lungs like a cup of cold water.  I lean into the fencing, the summer heat beating between student and teacher.

“You coming over for dinner? Chika’s been pestering me about the dead eyed teacher, you coming?”

Crisp night air.

“Hamburgers right?”

Excessive yelling, screams from her two siblings clambering over house and furniture.

“Ya, got a problem with that?”

“I’ll be there.”

“I’m counting on it, Chika’s been a terror recently.”

“ I can only imagine.”

Dull heat from the summer night,  the sound of family tumbling in the foreground.

I feel over these past fifteen years, I’ve missed something very, very. Special.

“Hey, teach? You crying?”