Jenny Master Copy

This is a master copy of short sketches written about my character Jenny. I will add additional sketches that I write about her to this deviation.

[Dancing Dust] --------------------

Stretched out on her bed, Jenny lay as still as a cat snoozing in the sun. Through her half-open window streamed a delicate river of light, and suspended within it were hundreds of tiny dust particles riding waves of air through the room. They were always there, of course, but normally you couldn’t see them so vividly.

Jenny studied them. Each glimmered, danced, like you’d imagine a handful of stars would if you could gather them up and scatter them through the air. At a simple movement from her, the particles would react violently, spinning and swirling in intense patterns that Jenny couldn’t believe they hadn’t rehearsed. They were so tiny and fragile, and yet untouchable because of their size.

Turning over onto her back, Jenny studied the ceiling: white plaster, etched with random designs. The paint along the edge where the wall met the ceiling was an uneven line. Obviously, the people who’d lived in her house before had decided that the walls needed to be painted, then they did a rush job. Jenny sighed, and closed her eyes.

She remembered sitting in her father’s old, dark green van, parked in an almost empty lot, waiting for an event inside a nearby building to start. Her Dad sat in the drivers seat, his big hands resting on the steering wheel. It was snowing. Jenny leaned forward in her seat to look up at the big, white sky and watch as the snow poured forth. It was ballerina snow… lighter and softer in its movements than the dust swirling in Jenny’s room.

“Where does snow come from?” Jenny asked her Dad.

The big man paused--he never rushed to speak--and said, “at the center of each snow flake is a particle of dust.” Jenny blinked in a calculating way and continued to watch the pirouetting white. “This dust starts off floating around in space. When condensation attaches to it and freezes, you have a snow flake.” He shifted in the seat, readjusting his feet. “Rain starts as a snow flake--but instead of staying frozen, it melts.” Jenny nodded, acknowledging that her Dad had spoken, and noticed the building starting to come to life. She opened her door with a metallic pop. The snow immediately began to cover her, catching in her wool jacket and hair like butterflies in the net of an avid entomologist.

Back in her room, Jenny rolled over again so she was back on her tummy. A few particles spun about angrily still, but most had calmed down.

[Glistening Ink] -----------------------

It’s funny how quickly something or someone can become part of your daily life. It’s also funny how quickly something or someone that was once a part of your daily life can disappear. And then there’s the guilt.

Jenny scrawled these three sentences on a page from her spiral bound notebook in her bumpy, unpredictable script which sometimes acted like it didn’t want to be cursive, then lifted the nose of the regular looking black pen with wet ink that would smudge if you accidentally brushed your hand over it away from the paper to think for a moment.

The pen nose came down. She dated the entry. She didn’t believe in hard and fast rules about keeping a journal every day or something, but she did believe in keeping a record of things. She often felt her memories were rather disconnected and disjointed and that she ought to keep better track of them. So she dated the things she wrote, in the hopes that it would be enough to stir those other things, those forgotten things that we can’t consciously remember, while simultaneously keeping it all in chronological order.

At this point she was just really musing, though. Some indie rock in the boom box and the sunset across her red blanket, softly traced with faded yellow patterns of flowers, sent her thoughts lazily spinning, contemplating that which she did not understand in spirals of invention. When Jenny didn’t know what something was, she imagined meanings for it until she was pretty sure what it might be, but would ask someone to verify it before she attempted to explain it to someone else.

Her thick black glasses were tripping down her nose. The index finger on her right hand came up of its own accord and fixed that as she blew softly on the journal page. She closed one eye, gave the ink an appraising look, and decided it was dry.

[Sketching Sound] --------------------

On her way down the stairs--which were a relatively unknown shortcut to the basement of the school--Jenny froze in the middle of a step. She whipped off her head phones and carelessly struck her mp3 player in the hopes it would turn off. The deep, resonant sounds of a cello splashed up the walls of the stairwell and washed them with beautiful stylistic color, mesmerizing the girl who hid behind her rich black hair and thick, dark-rimmed glasses. Jenny would’ve stayed frozen where she was except that she couldn’t hear very well. When the musician paused, she practically leapt down the stairs until she caught a glimpse of wood, metal, fabric, and swaths of bright red hair. Then the bow was soaring down towards the strings. Jenny froze again.

He begin to play once more. Jenny felt herself slowly sinking into a sitting position while her eyes never left the cellist. Her hands were then opening her shoulder pack and getting out her sketchbook and a pencil. She watched the musician while listening to the sweeping, shuddering vibrations he sent through the air--and through her. She closed her eyes, and felt the music soothing, warming, softening her. Then she opened her eyes, and began to sketch.

She started with his magic bow, rigid with tension across the strings of his magic box. She drew his fingers clasping the bow, the shadows on his wrist. She drew the silhouette of his eyebrows draped above the hidden orbs, etching the deep concentration there into the paper. She added all the other details, losing herself in the picture--then suddenly noticed that there was no longer music in the hall. Her eyes subconsciously raced to the player’s face--and met his own.

They were green. Not pure green, though. They were like peering into a jungle, with light glinting off leaves here and there and everywhere, so that you don’t know where to look, and then you think you see a leopard, prowling through the darkness; a fierce streak of total concentration suddenly focused with the brightness of a spotlight into Jenny’s face. It didn’t burn. It was mesmerizing. But then, his eyes suddenly shifted, becoming completely dark, still, and mysterious. A forest where a fugitive lurked.

Jenny didn’t know what to do, so she ran. Thrusting her sketchbook into her pack, she turned, shooting up the stairs like a gazelle bolting from a big cat.  

[Sketching Sound 2] -------------------------

Wrapped around a rolling chair, with loose limbs escaping here and there, Jenny stared analytically at the desk before her. On the smooth wood surface, bruised here and there by typical teenage wear, lay the sketch of the stairway cellist. A lamp shone down upon it, illuminating incorrect perspective here, too much shading there.

Abruptly, the young woman stood. A strand of her hair flew out like an angry blackbird from behind her ear, but Jenny didn’t seem to notice. She strode across the room… and promptly flung herself on the red-robed bed. After the first impact, she bounced gently a few times, cupped her chin within two pencil-smudged hands, and gazed listlessly out the window. The evening was resolving into darkness, like a canvas just inked over with black paint that glimmers, still damp, with stars and the reflections of streetlights. A pedestrian or two passed by, but Jenny didn’t study them. She was busy gazing listlessly, not focusing.

Then she sighed and rolled so that she was facing her dresser and her clock. Glancing at the black box with lurking red coals, she made an exasperated sound and was suddenly standing again. She wandered over to the desk, slow but ever moving closer like the widening revolutions of a spinning top, and looked down at the sketch once more.

She’d look at it, then try to impose the real image from her memory on top of it, then restlessly look up at the wall to think--only to find her eyes back on the sketch of the cellist. His face, in particular. His eyes. She wanted that purposeful, driven look to appear in his eyes--she wanted the jungle tiger, not the frightened fugitive. His hair seemed a little flat, as well. In person it had been as if his hair was playing the cello too. It had swept this way and that, alive, as if in the middle of a horrendous windstorm.

She never thought about how she drew. She just put pencil to paper… and it happened. She couldn’t explain it. She didn’t know how she could tell that a shadow here, right below the dip of his chin, would fit--it just felt right when she put it in. But now she was confronted by needing to know how she did it, so that she could improve this sketch. In fact, there was a quiet little thought lurking in her mind that the sketch might make a nice painting.

Jenny gave up--for the present. She flicked off the lights and climbed into bed.

[Jenny and the Music] --------------------

The first echoing notes on the piano were like timid, uncertain steps.  Blossoming like the shadows of kites, they grew more and more confident, gliding along until they began to dance, joining with the violin, dipping into the music like cutting into water, smooth as a knife through butter; sailing.  Sailing with Jenny’s soul in the stern, feet planted, arms wide ...  flying.  

It was always like that.  It always swept her up, swinging her through the air like a Father and a child.  

The cello comes in, deep and mellow, steady, stable, the base--the wooden deck, the security.  Everything is layered atop it, the icing, the candles, the sails that get all the attention because they let the ship move.  

It’s the familiar things that you forget first.

“Why are there things about ourselves that we don’t know the reasons for?”

“Why are there small children who like to ask big complicated questions before bed time so that they get to stay up longer?”

Jenny dreams that she’s soaring.