#NaNoWriMo2019 #WritingLog: #writing a #firstchapter

Hello, friends! Yes, I’m leaving you hanging on that prologue. An idea struck me during a rather dull sermon today to leave that moment in time hanging for a spell, and perhaps return to it after we’ve been with our main characters inside the Crow’s Nest.

Writing Music: Nina Simone

Chloe slapped the lock pin down on her passenger door. The cassette of Nina Simone’s hits started its third loop, not that anyone noticed. They were too focused on the curtain of snow, and the man floating in it.

“Your mother say anything about this?” Chloe’s dad asked without looking at her.

Chloe’s mom shook her head. She’d hardly said a word since the phone call that had torn them out of Milwaukee and sent them up…wherever here was.

The man shifted, then fell a few feet to the ground before their headlights. His mouth moved, and it sounded like he was talking, but it was impossible to make it out above the engine and heater of their station-wagon.

Chloe squinted from her mess of blankets and books in the backseat. A truck’s flatbed–that is how the man had been floating. He kicked up snow as he walked to the driver-side window with long, sweeping strides. A man that big, Chloe realized he could kick a mean dent in their car door if he liked. But he only bent forward as if to keep his body away from the door on purpose. “I’m from the Crow’s Nest!” he shouted. “The old lady sent me to keep the road cleared for everyone. You another Perdido?”

“Yeah,” her dad said, keeping the window closed. He wasn’t stupid.

“Thank the Maker!” The man tipped his head back to laugh, revealing a small icicle clinging to the bottom of his close-cut beard. He wiped his nose with big leather gloves and pointed at his truck. “Follow me!” Chloe’s dad nodded, and the man returned to his truck. The snow was so high his trench coat dragged upon it like bridal train.

“Thoughtful of her,” he said to Chloe’s mom.

“Thoughtful?” Chloe’s mom pulled back, disgust all over her face. She leaned against the door, fingers on the handle like she wanted to get out.

Chloe leaned forward and grabbed her mom’s hand for the first time since the phone call. “Mom?”

She blinked, eyes darting as if to rewind the word in her head. Finally, her hand squeezed back, and she sighed. “Sorry, sweetheart. I’m just…I thought I’d never come back here.”

Chloe crooked her head to look outside, hand still tight on her mom’s. Wherever “here” was, Chloe couldn’t tell. The station-wagon followed the truck so closely its brake lights were all they could see—not that the snow helped. It spun in wide ribbons down from the tree branches onto the cars. And the trees, packed so damn tightly together it was impossible to see how this was a road at all.

If Chloe had grown up in a place like this, she wouldn’t be eager to come back, either.

Her father noticed, too. “This is paved, isn’t it, or gravel? Feels like we’re hitting rocks and brush under the snow.”

“Probably are.” Chloe’s mom stared ahead again, her fingernails tapping the door’s armrest with the same steady tick tock of the grandfather clock Chloe’s father had surprised his wife with for her birthday. Three months went into that clock, Chloe distracting her mother with extra trips to the library and college fairs while her father scrounged for parts at clock shops and donation centers. She was so happy when her blindfold came off, always amazed by little pieces of the past Chloe’s dad could bring back to life.

But now, Angela Perdido Watchman’s cheeks were drawn in like she was chewing them from the inside out. Her lips had chapped so that when she pressed them together it looked to Chloe like someone had sewn her mother’s mouth shut. She was always so powerful to Chloe whenever she visited her mom at her campus, addressing white professors as her equal, demanding respect from all her students, not just the colored ones. No one could crack her.

Until today.