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Messages - Agnes Ogden

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Like a river rolling over rocks, his voice lulled.

Again, Agnes went stock-still like the motion of her might frighten him. In triplicate she blinked at him, holding the breath she had sucked in at the sound of him hard in her chest.  It strained and stung but she in her stillness persevered.

It had been a long time since she had heard the sound of home, and from it she put the sum of his parts together.  His voice held more rs in it, ending words they should where hers fell off, and the vowels of him, though round, were not so rounded as her own; that put him further up the coast, perhaps amid the snow-capped Smokeys or offshoots thereof.  There was something in the furrow of his eyebrow that painted him a creative, for only one who made art could have such a deeply defined worry line, and Agnes knew from his curls that he was a poet, for they were the sort of brown curls that poets always seemed to be possessed of--as if some far-off and largely absent god made all poets’ curls brown for their universality but also for their poetically defiant plainness.

And he was reading Faulkner, beside.

“Oh,” she said, and then, “well.

Somewhere in the glowing center of herself, she recognized that this was an Experience.

Her hands poured out a whiskey, rockless unlike his voice, neat and tidy unlike the thoughts racing through her head.  The cut glass clanked as she placed it against the bar, her fingers not leaving it until they had slid it almost to bump against the cream canvas binding of his book.  There they let go, and there too they started to itch, to tingle, to seek out--and when they did this, as such, they were only ever in search of a pencil with which to write.  The ancient grandfather clock set in the corner--a relic of the time The Hind had been a house and not the slip of a pub it was--struck out seven bells and, with nothing more than a nod to the man who had stoked it within her, Agnes turned and left the book, its man, The Hind to write.

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Agnes was washing her hands when she saw him, her hands wringing neatly together in the hot suds of the wash basin, sore slightly in the tips of their fingers from the scrubbing of the distant-relation glasses, now stacked together beneath the counter as neatly as she wrung her hands.  Her hands were thin little things but they were strong, as equally suited to books and letters as to soil and spirits, and it was a lucky thing, too, the way things were, and--well, she was washing her hands when she saw him, her hands that were thin as they were strong, and if it hadn’t been for Harold rolling through and her turning out of the way she would have missed him entirely.

So she had turned to the right, out of the way of Harold and his tray for Old Orel, and she saw it before she saw him--the title, just some words, stark and black on gentle cream canvas: The Sound and the Fury.  Like she might frighten the binding away, Agnes went very still, deer-like, her hands still too and still plunged into the wash basin’s warm suds.  Her gaze shifted slowly, skillfully up, brown eyes working over the arm that held it--wiry in musculature, salt peppered in with the pepper-colored hair that wove across it.  They skipped on, her eyes on his arm, to a blue sky button-front rolled to the sleeves, torn once and small at the elbow, on up to a shoulder that might have been broad in youth but was now somewhat hollow, a neck also woven with salt-and-pepper scruff, attached to a head with the usual mouth and nose and brown eyes that were, like her stillness, deer-like, all of it surrounded in brown curls.

Well.

She hadn’t heard the order because orders to her were background noise, especially in the presence of one such as William in a place such as, of all places, Bantry.  She moved again, also deer-like, which is to say in an unexpected and sudden burst: hands, dripping with now rapidly cooling suds, stopped wringing themselves in the wash basin and started to wring themselves once, twice, three times and fast on the bottom of her apron, and then legs lept also into motion, springing her forward until the middle of her rested against the bar just in front of and to the side of the book and the man to which it was attached.

“You know he got it from that Shakespeare play,” her mouth said before she meant for it to--an unusual occurrence, but she was overcome in the moment.  “The title, that is.”

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Past Workshop Prompts / PROMPT 1: The Hind, Revisited
« on: 12/22/2016 at 18:32 »
The Hind was only a slip of a pub--a pub because the people of the town willed it to be, poured their bodies and their small coin into it with the expectation that libations would, in turn, pour out for them.  At some point along the line, it had worked; space taken and money invested had transformed alchemically into liquor and so too had the house turned into not a house but The Hind and a slip of a pub it was, but that had been long before the girl’s time, certainly on this soil but on any other soil as well.

It was also where the girl--the real girl, the corporeal one, who had no capitals other than the a and the m and the o of Agnes Marie Ogden--worked, the soil where today her feet rooted, or at least for the next five minutes until the clock struck seven and her shift was over.

“Head’s up, Harold,” she said, sliding past him--a slip of the girl not unlike The Hind was a slip of a pub, especially in comparison to Harold who was as wide and as billowing as a steam engine.  In her hands, she held a clutch of cups (and none of them seemed to match, not identically, as if they were all distant cousins and married-in aunt instead of the sort of central family one expected from glasses at bars) ready for the wash, and with those hands she plunged them into the wash basin--the sort of instillation every pub, slip or not, seemed to have, full of warm water and suds and glasses piling up and waiting to be washed.

There was nothing at all--not the steady and practiced and patient movement of her hands over cut glass in the wash basin, not the clatter of Harold coming to life to pull an order out for Old Orel in the corner nor the steam-like sigh he exhaled for having to do it, not even the sleepy, stretching-out Hind itself with its comfortable grays and warm, stale air--that hinted that the next five minutes might be anything other than ordinary.

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Freestyle Archives / Re: thicker than water | agnes o.
« on: 12/12/2016 at 18:12 »
Agnes laughed.

If she had been then one to write down the way she did it, she would have written it something like this:

The Girl laughed, and it pulled out of her like teeth--extracted, sort of cutting, a little short in the center and jagged at the edges--and fell onto the floor with a hollow sound like breaking porcelain.

But she wasn’t (Agnes never wrote around Tennessee; she knew better than that), so it was just a strange sort of laugh, markedly different from the regular round sound of her usual laughter or the snorting, half-frustrated sort that her brother usually prompted.

“Oh, Lord,” she said, and there was that same breaking quality to her words too.  “Bless Joycelynn’s heart.”

The eldest of the Ogdens on the train, for all Agnes knew, had skittered off somewhere to find her own well-appointed compartment, to lavish on her own plush seat, for in her opinion this was the sort of place Joycelynn might lavish.  It made Agnes herself feel a bit like she was being strangled, and she was still laughing beside.

And then the train, accompanied with the high thrill of whistles and a plume of white steam, lurched beneath her like some large and angry iron animal, and the sound (broken though it was) stopped in her throat.  Agnes sucked in a breath, brown eyes wheeling wildly to her brother.

“Tennessee,” she said, pleading and like prayer.

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Freestyle Archives / Re: thicker than water | agnes o.
« on: 12/08/2016 at 03:09 »
He was right, of course.  Agnes ended up with hand-me-downs that were handed down, not just from Ida but from Ida then to Opal and then to her so that her dressed were usually taken too far out in the bosom and hemmed too short above the knee.  The quality of their clothes was something they seldom spoke of, something even sitting there as she was that Agnes knew was off limits to pick at, something that was a testament to the roiling of the nerves in her stomach.

Instead of saying sorry, she curled her lip, cocked her head to the side, and stuck out her tongue.  Tennessee always brought out the baser sides of her.

Again, her eyes drifted out the window, idle at first then drifting over faces, looking for one to pick at the same way she had picked at her socks or Tenn's coat.  Nothing caught her eye in particular among the sea of parents and children kissing tearful cheeks goodbye or the older students and their infinitely maturity, eager to head off to wherever it was they were headed.

“To hell in a handcart,” she supplied to her brother.  Her words weren’t kind but they were a little softer, a little slower.

“It’s something of a big secret, ain’t it?”  Over the summer, Agnes had done what reading she could, but it wasn’t much and it certainly wasn’t informative.  Even her train ticket listed no end-of-route but Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, though for all the girl knew that could be usual; this was her first time on a train.  She shifted her gaze, this time to her brother, and then quickly again to where his boots flaked hard-caked mud on the bench.

Well,” she said, half of the mind to scold him for it, but she couldn’t muster the fight.  From somewhere forward of where they sat, she heard a whistle sound and her heart took off, racing up to some place in her throat and tightening her next words.  “You reckon it’ll take long to get to...wherever it is?”

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Freestyle Archives / Re: thicker than water | agnes o.
« on: 12/06/2016 at 21:33 »
One foot planted on the floor, one foot planted on the seat, Agnes tugged up her socks in turn.  As she tugged the fine-knitted fabric up, her lips pursed--not in concentration for the act so much (it was a mindless thing, the tugging-up of socks) but for the motion of it.  It was a strange one, she recognized, and hard to describe; she focused on it, trying to suss out how to break it down into words, and settled on an image that was a bit like tying a shoe while sitting, only elongated.

It was strange way to pass the time, surely, and she had pulled her socks back into place at least four times already, but it gave her a measure of control she felt she deserved, with things the way they were.  She finished--again--and tucked her knees beneath her, brown eyes turning to look out the window.

A wadded ticket struck her temple, and the same eyes narrowed.

“Well, Tenn, you seem to me like a mess in his brother’s hand-me-downs, but I don’t rightly reckon they got a--” She tried the word out, testing it like toes in water.  “--house for that.”

Her tongue clicked feigned disappointment against the back of her teeth, and she turned her head to settle her brown eyes on her brother's hazel ones.  Out of all the pairs of eyes in the family, his were the ones that matched hers most closely--a fact about him that she appreciated and resented in equal measures.

“Might as well get off the train now, ‘fore we get to far out toward--”  Agnes paused.  Where, exactly, they were headed, she was not sure--someplace far off and likely cold, for all places here were frigid in her bones.  Tugging again at her sock, she let her words drop there.

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Freestyle Archives / Re: To Whom It May Concern (Agnes)
« on: 11/27/2016 at 01:37 »
Workers in bookstores were to her something of celebrities, especially ones her own age, which she judged Lawrence to be, or at least to be close to.  Employment in such an establishment meant a body knew something of letters, that he liked literature in a way that meant he felt he ought always be surrounded in it like roots surround themselves in soil.  She didn’t know this bookstore for anything other than being in the non-magical part of London (the reason she had set her course there; she judged that it might be more reasonable in price for authors the likes of which she was looking), but decided by the smell of it (must and tea with lemon) that it was a worthy sort of place, and that Lawrence must be, too, for working in it.

She watched him, therefore, like one watches a rare snowfall through a window--closely enough to catch every detail, but from a safe distance all the same.  Deliberately, she stayed always a few paces behind him and just as deliberately watched the way he scanned the shelves, which was as if he was looking for something beyond books there.  When he’d stop, hand on hip and hmming and hawing, Agnes, too, would stop, watching the line of his eyes or the way he stoked his chin as if it were bearded and not bald.  She made mental notes, capturing him like the character she’d rewrite him as sometime or another, adding other ideas that she supplied herself, like what titles might be vexing him so and how he felt about the women outside.  It slowed her, and a shelf grew between them as she turned him over in her head.

“Yes,” American. “From Kentucky, I reckon,” she supplemented to the voice of Lawrence.  “Sure,” fiction.  “He does some other things, too, some critical work and some short stories.”

Agnes stopped, letting the aisle stay as a barrier between them, a buffer between their words, which was lucky then because a rose color had come up in her cheeks.  It wasn’t her place and she knew it, to tell a bookstore clerk about such things, as Lawrence likely already knew and he hadn’t asked beside. This happened, sometimes; her mouth ran off without her when she knew better and when a body couldn't have cared less.

There was a muffled sound of a clearing throat from somewhere else among the aisles and she went on, pressing a hand against her cheek in attempt to quell the heat.

All the King’s Men’ll do just right, if you got it.”

And though she knew better, she couldn't refrain from asking.

"You read it?"

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Freestyle Archives / Re: Foundations | [all]
« on: 11/26/2016 at 23:47 »
It wasn’t soft.

That wasn’t the right word for it, not by a long shot, because it wasn’t a true word for it.  It was certainly on the softer side, but soft itself conjured for her images of stuffed bears or worn sheets, and it wasn’t either.  She toyed briefly with downy, but that had the same problem of conjuring a plush image, then with forgiving which was more of a personification than she was willing to indulge, then springy which felt a bit juvenile, and then velveteen which was so luxuriant even thinking of it made her brown eyes roll.

What she decided on, finally and with the end of her pencil dangling between her lips, was uncut, because it was true, first and foremost, and because she felt it did a good job of describing the bushy, scrubbing feeling against her palm, all while giving it a whimsical feeling of wilderness.  She collected her pencil and perked back up.

Sprawled on the uncut grass, the girl stretched out, Agnes wrote in her notebook.

Agnes wasn’t sprawled in the uncut grass, stretching out, but the girl she sometimes wrote about was, and that was the beautiful thing about fiction, she thought, that it allowed her to be two places at once. Presently, she was sitting on one of many logs situated on the grass and around a fire with a bunch of other bodies beside her own, but also stretching out in the uncut grass of a hillside in the French countryside, the smell of lavender wafting up from the fields below.  She penciled in this detail, stopping when her pencil scratched across the lined page.

“Easy there,” she mumbled to herself, smoothing her cardigan out where a boot had nudged her aside and watching the retreat of a redheaded culprit who reminded her strongly of her brother.  It was enough to pull her from the countryside and back to the campfire, and she slipped her pencil into her notebook as a bookmark, waiting her turn.

“Spectator,” Agnes answered, taking the stick up in her hands, shooting a wry look to the boy, Zak, whom had given it to her.  She recognized him and the other older boy as members of their respective houses’ teams, but the breakneck sport had never suited the Ogden girl, whose hands were better suited to shuffling tarot cards, pruning plants, and, it went without saying, writing.

“Agnes Ogden.”  She raised her right hand, bony and thin but blemished with the calluses of hard work and of pencil-holding on the inside of her middle finger.  “I’m from Bantry,” she said, and the sound of her words betrayed that she was from another place entirely, but she left that out.  “And I’m fifteen and half-blooded.”

They were overly concerned with blood status, here, but she was polite.

“Right, then.”  Agnes shifted on the log seat beneath her.  “What’s the last book you read?”

It was a bit mundane, but so was the yarn-wrapped stick she held extended to the next willing victim.

(She wanted to know the answer, beside.)

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Freestyle Archives / Re: To Whom It May Concern (Agnes)
« on: 11/26/2016 at 17:09 »
Freedom clinked in her cardigan pocket, burning a hole.

Her fingers pressed to the warmed metal, the collection of copper and silver quietly clanging there.  It was not a remarkable sound, certainly not enough to attract the attention of any passers-by, but to her it was like a symphony, a great luxury paid for by last year’s hand-me-downs, a willingness to scrimp on parchment, and a knack for darning.  A smile, hers only, swelled as she ducked past a gaggle of hens chittering over their tea and into her first and only stop.

The smell of bound paper, fresh and fading both, swirled up around her as the opening door disturbed the dust of the place and the smile went deeper.  She picked an aisle, pressed her back to one row of shelves, and stood, arms crossed over faded blue floral, reading spines.

How long she had been there when he approached, neither of them could really say.  She read his name tag.

Lawrence.

“Sir,” she greeted, head nodding down.

She thought of something The Girl might say, smooth and easy like the afternoon: ‘Lawrence, I’ll take a cup of your strongest tea, sugar, no cream, over ice,’ because her pocket was burning, after all, and she could afford a small amount of self-indulgence for once.  She thought, too, of saying something like ‘show me your first editions, Lawrence,’ thought it might be fun as a sort of vacation she could take, her hands (nails more meticulously cleaned and buffed even than usual, today) trailing over the the worn leather or linen covers in a discerning way, in a way that would make Lawrence think she had touched a thousand first editions before and would go on to touch a thousand more.

What she said instead, in alto:

“You got any Robert Penn Warren?”

He had just won a Pulitzer a few years past.

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