She started looking around her for story starters
A man fell on his bicycle. "Oh, poor man!" A couple of bystanders rushed to his aid, so Belinda rushed by. "I wonder if the apothecary has still the old painkillers mommy used to have... those were really effective... they would be, made of opiates." Belinda laughed.
She run into a group of children playing shuttlecock; children had taken champagne corks and stuck feathers into them, and now they paddled these between each other. Some were really good at what they were doing. Belinda remembered her own childhood and the games she used to play at springtime... she lived in countryside, a couple of miles outside London, so she had played with water and rollband and jumprope... she had also had a little corner of the garden, where she used to grow flowers. Pretty flowers, flox, petunias and such.
She saw a new advertisement for a magic show and was slightly distracted by the immodesty of the lady in the ad... She could never work as a magician's assistant, though her childhood friend, Elsie, did... Elsie had always been a hothead, and done crazy things already as a child. She had ran away with the circus when she was 15, sent a postcard from Russia telling that she had married her magician, mr. Hopzirsky, and that they were happy... Belinda got postcards from all over the world and envied her friend a little.
Perhaps one should do grazy things with one's life... after all, one doesn't regret what one has done as much as what one didn't do. She would travel, one day. It wasn't easy to get the money, though... as a woman she earned half the wages a man did, and now, if she didn't come up with a good story mr Hickory would fire her, and then what. There wasn't much honorable work for ladies in London.
She caught a glimpse of a shadow and came to think about a poem she had read.
"Where in your life are you a shadow,touching the earth as lightly as a dandelion seed,
walking nearly unseen, yet fully present?
Where are the places in which you are pure idea?"
-- Jennie Brown Hakim
Women were mere shadows, ideas of flesh and blood... A proverb flashed through her mind, "Silence is a great healer". All the women she knew were living proof of this... having endured things impossible to be shared in mere words, things that would have broken any man, but still surviving... and she wondered about the words expressed in secrecy, behind closed doors, in tear stained letters, from woman to woman...
Women were seen as disposable, but still they were necessary for everyone...
She responded automatically to the smile of a delivery boy, and he looked at her a little too long, and was almost run over by a man with his cart. He managed to stop the horse, but the abrupt stop made him loose a basket full of apples he had besides him on the driver's bench.
Belinda started thinking about apples... they wouldn't take the fall that well, apples bruise easily and then they spread the bruising to other apples, weirdly enough. She liked apples. She liked hard bread and apples and taking her papers and pencil to attic and write short stories.
Her mother had a great recipe for hard bread. She was Swedish, and they ate a lot of hard bread in Sweden. It wasn't the usual hardtack, or bisquits, but crispy and thin bread.
And now it will do. :-)
