3-Day Novel: The Prologue

This is a mere teaser of my latest 3-Day Novel (created over Labour Day weekend 2008).
More chapters available upon request. ;-)

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PROLOGUE

There is no such thing as memory. Not really. The jumble of random images and fragments of recollection that lingers through the passage of time is far too vague and hazy to bear the weight of such a word. Anything that’s sharper than that, any mental picture that has the clarity and crispness of a photograph, is inherently suspect – as likely to be a product of imagination as the residue of an actual moment of time.
Take this memory of mine. I call it such, although I know it cannot be, because it remains with me with a force that carries the weight of truth if not of fact.
It is a simple memory. Just this, and nothing more:
We are in the foyer of the church. The carpet is green, an odd choice that was once startling but has faded to an agreeable background shade. The walls are beige, and the spot I fix my eyes on is peeling and in need of a new paint job. We are huddling together. The June breeze isn’t cold, but we shiver when it blows in on us each time the door opens and another solemn-faced person walks in. Mom and Dad have gone in to the church already. So too, I think, have Mr. and Mrs. Donovan.
We are all there. Tara, tall and pretty in her long dark skirt and short-sleeved black blouse, her normally mobile face still, hazel eyes fixed on nothing in particular. Marsha, tiny and blonde, blue eyes a pool of liquid that has already smudged her carefully applied eyeliner. Robbie, face contorted with the effort not to let a single tear spill over, reaching out his arms to enfold us all in a comforting embrace.
This could all be true. But this is where my memory becomes more. A dream. Almost a film.
Because I see myself there too, as you never can in memory. As clearly as if a camera has me in its sights, I make out the unaccustomed paleness of my brown cheeks, the limp dark hair that refused to be teased into anything resembling a style, the dark under-eye circles that make my grey eyes look nearly as black as my choir skirt and the short-sleeved wool sweater I borrowed from Mom’s closet.
Connor is there too. Tall, broad-shouldered, his face unnaturally solemn, devoid of the ebullient grin and dancing blue eyes that usually cause heads to turn his way. Of course I know he wasn’t there. We didn’t know him yet. He didn’t come on the scene until much later. Yet in this memory of mine, he’s as real and substantial a presence in that church foyer as Robbie and Tara and Marsha.
And Cait. Who is there too, in this memory that isn’t a memory – pale and wraithlike as she had become by then, dark eyes huge in a white face, dark hair hanging simply over her shoulders, watching us all and saying nothing to anyone.
Cait, above all, cannot have been there. I know this, of course. If she had been there, we would not have been where we were, huddled in the foyer with tears in our eyes, avoiding the pitying glances of teachers and parents, seeking comfort in each other’s familiar presence.
Yet I feel her too, as I do Connor, so much a part of this memory-dream that it seems she must have been there with us.
Perhaps it’s understandable. For all our lives became bound together somehow, my own and those of the five figures who have shaped the story I need to tell you.
So remember us, all six – Tara and Marsha and Connor and Cait and me and Robbie.
This is our story. And it’s a story I need to tell you. It will be flawed, because memory always is. But even a flawed memory can carry truths that need to be told.