Marie + Magnolia

and here they are

Some more Red House writing

Some more writing for the characters Magnolia, Marie, and Cora, who I've posted other pieces about. Drawings of Magnolia being grumpy to come.......

Two railroad lines ran west along the outskirts of Tipperary Village. Only one was still in use, the other track had long since been choked with scotch grass and weeds, a looming pile of rocks and cement chunks spilling onto the ties. No trains stopped in Tipperary.

Magnolia liked to walk to the rock pile in the evenings, after leaving the Red House from the back. Marie would accompany her, and they would kick off their shoes and sit on the big smooth boulders with their backs to the scraggly woods.

There were  the weird rusted remains of something strewn by the tracks, a strange metal frame just taller than their heads with a rotted-out platform sitting there, plus pipes and corrugated sheets and other generally dangerous and sharp-edged scraps;.

The girls weren’t stupid. They didn’t stand beneath the falling-down platform (it was only a matter of time before it really did crash down, hopefully not on anyone’s head) or cut their bare feet on all the rusty metal. “You girls’ll get lockjaw from playing down there, with all that rubbish by the train track,” Colleen, the cook, had warned them. They were careful after that, especially careful, as the dictionary had led them from “lockjaw” to “tetanus” to a very unpleasant sounding description of that disease.

Of course, Ms. Caddigan had no knowledge whatsoever of Magnolia and Marie’s nightly escapes. Cora knew, but Magnolia had blackmailed her into silence by telling her if she told that witch Ms. Caddigan, she’d do what she’d done before and put a snake in her bed and toad’s eggs in her nightgown.

It was the evening of the first day of August, just before the cousin’s second month at the Red House began. No escapes to their secret spot had been possible for over a week, and Magnolia had already complained to Marie three times that day that she was losing her mind.

Marie believed her. It would be hard for anyone, and was even harder for Magnolia to be cooped up in a stuffy old manor house where the amount of people she didn’t like far outnumbered the people she did.

 When Marie told her there were good chances of making a break for the secret spot that evening, Magnolia was so relieved and excited she believed maybe she would go insane after all waiting for dinner to be over.

But nothing of great drama happened—their cousin Cora continued to be a brat, Ms. Caddigan continued to be a condescending, expensive-clothes-wearing evil witch, the steak continued to be tough and Magnolia didn’t explode or start throwing silverware. This was a definite good thing.

The two girls quietly put on their sweaters and slipped into the kitchen, while Cora glared at them from the upstairs landing.

“Tell Ms. Caddigan we’re taking our baths if she asks.”

 This was what Marie always whispered to Colleen through the screen door as they were leaving. Both girls were positive she wouldn’t tell on them: Colleen was sensible and had been kind to them since they’d arrived, and was also possibly the exact opposite of Ms. Caddigan, which said good things about her character.

The walk to the railroad tracks was short, perhaps six minutes at most, and involved walking to the end of the rambling gardens on the south side of the house and cutting behind the groundskeeper’s hut, where a man named Charley Day lived. The girls had yet to hear him speak a complete sentence, but he seemed friendly enough.

“It’s August first, right?” Magnolia was trying to braid three pine needles together as they walked. Marie nodded.

“The day after tomorrow, we’ll have been here exactly two months. Can you believe it--?”

She glanced over at Magnolia, who had dropped the pine needles and was scowling. Marie stopped walking.

“You hate it here, don’t you.” It wasn’t even a question. Magnolia sighed deeply and plopped onto the ground.

“I appreciate the Red House itself. I still want to explore those attics that Colleen told us not to go in…and I like looking at that tapestry of the elephant impaling people on its tusks. And I like our secret spot…” She stopped and looked Marie straight in the eye.

“But Marie. I despise Ms. Caddigan. She’s made of plastic, I’m positive. And Cora is being more insufferable than ever and I so want to punch her most of the time and HOW am I going to last another two months in tiny little Tipperary village where the only thing the townspeople talk about is how cloudy it is and who the postman last had an affair with! AHHHHH!” She lay down on her back in the exact middle of the path and closed her eyes against the darkening sky.

Marie sighed too and held out her hand. Her cousin was very obviously at her wit’s end, and honestly she was worried as well as to how Magnolia was going to get through two more months here. She was fairly sure her self-control was all but used up by now.

“Come on. Get up. This is halfway over, you know. Now, shall we?” Marie heaved Magnolia to her feet and they walked away in step down the packed-dirt path.

untitled sketch

Character design

The best way for me to think of new characters is drawing people I like the look of...who knows when any of them will actually come into a story.

and here's a bonus doodle of Supermaeve.

harajuku

painted these girls using reference photos from tokyofashion.com and had SO MUCH FUN

Maeve

that, or she's blushing. I don't know which.

and another disgruntled Maeve.

people in history

Paintings done on pages from an old book called People in History....

portrait

spirited away

 a bit of Spirited away fanart of Chihiro and Yubaba. done with the help of MY FAVORITE BOOK EVER, aka The Art of Spirited away.

writing piece + happy 2013!

Happy new year everybody! Hoping everyone has had a great beginning of 2013. Also, this is the beginning of this blogs third year, so....cheers!
And here is the beginning of a new untitled, unrelated (and slightly gloomy, but oh well) story I've just started.

I didn't walk five blocks in the pouring rain that afternoon by choice. I need to make that clear. Just so you can understand.

          If things obediently mirrored the lists I’d been writing in this notebook, titled Best-case Scenarios, nothing would have gone the way it did and I’d be happy. I suppose that’s obvious, though.

          I didn't make any worst-case scenario lists. It’s the same sort of idea of how hard it is to retell the worst nightmares aloud—no one wants to relive that kind of terror. In this case, I was worried putting my fears down on paper might make them come true more easily. If I let them go from my mind to my notebook, they are one step closer to where they go next, which is, unfortunately, reality.

          I didn't become friends with Celeste by choice either. I never wanted to go to her apartment, never wanted to see what I did and somehow become involved with the last thing I wanted to be involved with. Some things you can’t help, I suppose. Never mind the fact that now I’m sitting in the old hospital at the top of the hill, the one that caught fire shortly after it closed down. They never really cleaned it out thoroughly, and at the moment I’m sitting atop a rusted metal gurney. It’s high enough so my shoes don’t have to touch the floor, which is black with dirt and soot and other things I don’t like to think about, much less put my feet on it. The walls are worse. I don’t even know what kinds of things they must have seen in their lives.

It’s chilly here, since there’s no glass in the windows anymore. Now that it’s late November the wind is starting to bite and I keep forgetting my jacket.

I don’t have a watch. Even so I know Celeste is late. Late or not coming. Late is what I’ve been telling myself now, even though she’s been perfectly punctual for weeks. Weeks…That’s what’s been nagging at me. It’s been four weeks since we first started meeting at the hospital. Four weeks. My time’s run out, and this time she really isn’t coming.