December 29, 2010 - Annabel Lee

Prompt: Use the name of a famous literary character (examples: Helen, Ishmael, Elizabeth Bennet) for one of your own characters.

Source: None

Response:

She was a solemn child, with her eyes the color of the sea and her skin the texture of ocean sands. She watched things, with her too-intent eyes, and her fingers brushed her own hands absently, ceaselessly. She watched people, her gaze following their tics and movements, and she watched the hands of the clock as the seconds ticked by. But more than anything she watched the rain that nearly always rain its drops down the windowpanes and splattered on the dirty buildings outside.

Annabel Lee was a small child, slight figured and short for her age. She brushed through life like a whisper, as if she was invisible. She asked little and received less, unintentionally ignored by all around her, her soft voice often too quiet to be heard.

She collected clippings, little bent-up pieces of paper gleaming with pictures of plates of food and eyes and cats that smiled unnaturally. They lay all about the floor, fit together by their mishapen, mismatched edges. Someone might have stopped her or protested if they had seen her digging in the trashes on her walk to school, in her classrooms, in her grandfather's study, but no one noticed. Annabel Lee would peer into the cans and arch her arms to reach in and snatch the thrown-out magazines and crumpled pictures.

Her grandfather grew old and reckless, his trash filling with magazines about far-away places, and Annabel Lee looked at every one, but she never cut them out until the day that she found an article about the sea. She read the entire article, drinking in the description of the salt air and the sands. It was so real that she was tempted to sniff the paper and she could not resist raising the paper close to her face with her tiny hands. The new, shining photopaper of the magazine smelled like home.

Notes: I couldn't resist drawing some aspects from the original character, I like Edgar Allen Poe and his Annabel Lee far too much not to.