Description Exercise

The house looms huge. Three stories, the house is an inky outline against a star filled night sky. It is a moonless night and it is impossible to tell what color the house appears to be in daylight, although you can tell it’s exterior is made of brick by the way the white mortar lines catch enough starlight to glow very faintly in crisscrossing cubed pattern. A hundred years old at least, the house is shaped like a square block and is covered by a traditional arched room. It has a screened-in front porch on the ground floor, and the porch runs along the entire front like the grill of a semi-truck. No one is sitting on the front porch now, but its screen door is open because whoever touched it last failed to hook it shut. With all this squat bulk the house seems to weigh heavily on the ground it rests upon, and it’s easy to imagine that it has grown roots, perhaps a winding, twisting array of aluminum piping, spreading out for several underground miles in all directions. A rectangular chimney juts out of the roof’s west end, titled at a slight angle. Gray blue smoke, visible only because it blots out a portion of the starry night sky, rises from the chimney.

Every window in the house is dark except one. This window is illuminated by a single yellow electric light, maybe a sixty-watt bulb, and in front of the window a young girl is sitting at a small wooden writing desk. A journal, or diary, sits cracked open on the desk in front of the girl, but she isn’t paying any attention to it. She is around thirteen or fourteen years old, and is dressed in a worn pink nightgown that is a size too small for her. Her red long red hair is tied back in a ponytail that arcs over the small of her back, never quite touching the fabric of hear nightgown as it dips. The girl’s small chin is resting in the palm of her hand, and her elbow is cocked and resting on the desk. She’s too far away for small details (like how blue her eyes are, or how she seems to be staring through the walls of her house at something that exists only in her mind) but it seems reasonable to assume she was writing a few moments ago and now a thought, perhaps triggered by her writing, has caused her to become lost in a deep reverie.

The brightness of this dazzling window only makes the rest of the house seem darker and somehow larger. The other, dark window are each a slightly different size from the others, as if the building’s architect had purposefully rejected symmetry in an attempt to create something more varied and interesting. Bellow all this asymmetry a curling line of shrubs runs along the base of the house, stopping only at the steps of the front door. It has been a long time since the shrubs were trimmed and now they have become overgrown, wild and tangled, like a series of small haystacks mussed by a strong wind. Two gleaming eyes peer out from beneath the shrubs and stare out into the night. It is a cat on the prowl.

The cat has stopped watching for prey, though, and is now more interested in the boy who is standing under the front lawn’s sole tree, an old oak turning skeletal with the loss of its leaves. The boy does not notice the cat watching him. His head is turned upwards, towards the brightly lit window on the second floor. His hands have fallen to his sides and become clenched in fists. The boy has narrow shoulders and long, pale neck. He’s dressed in baggy blue jeans with an unused hammer loop on its right hip and a dark, un-tucked T-shirt. The boy seems to be considering the window with a special reverence, as if the light pouring out of it contains the last remnants of something special he’d thought had been lost long ago. It’s easy to imagine him stepping out from beneath the tree and looking around for a handful of pebbles.

But he’s just standing there.

Looking up.