Maybe Not an Urban Cottage - (c)2009 Sally Reesman

Sally took the freewrite challenge at the Summer Dream Festival in August 2009.
Prompt was: You (or your character) have moved into a new house and while lcenaing you find an old photograph (or an old diary) in the basement or attic…


Maybe Not an Urban Cottage

It was a full time job, pulling and clipping the vines that clung and surrounded their way between the clapboard of the old house. At moments the delicate tendrils would loosen their cling and curl in search of another surface to clasp and grasp their clinging length. While suffocating in their growth, they still loosened their hold with a god swift tag — the edge of grass—stopped short of a wall — of old tree stumps covered in vines like green and growing fountain of vines – ripping these loose – a gray gargoyle plaster—like an Angel of Death—Black wings behind strong sinewed eyes lifting skulls from its feet and rolling them up in its knees.

At first thought it's a garden – gnome — a winged garoyle that is lying among vines that is inconsequential. The more the vines were pulled aside — revealing — more bones — ham bones, mutton bones, chicken bones… It was when I saw —r ooster claw bones … cat bones … and large bones like the haunches of a horse or a large ribcage of what could be a bear or a horse. They had been covered in lime, bleached white, with bits of the marrow exhibiting — yellow and black interior not yet gone back to nature.

It was then — what sort of activities went on in this house of vines—covered in vines so thick that the vines had entered to the interior of the house through the cement foundations — to the eaves of the second floor, burrowing through the chinks of lathe — these suffocating clinging vines — entombing crushing the house – and the limbed bones of small and large animals—removed my impression of an urban cottage.

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