The following is an excerpt of my latest project with the working title, “Invasion”. The premise is taking one event in our history and turning it watching the effects of a new history develop; like dropping a stone in a lake and watching the rippling effects. It’s a first person setting inside an East Coast town of a man, his wife and three-month old son.
Louie, Frank and I ran the streets together as young boys, skipping through bleeding fire hydrants, making girls giggle and frustrating our overbearing mothers. I was only ten years old when a moving truck turned into our neighborhood and a young Rose leapt off her mother’s lap from the truck’s cab. I’ll never forget the moment when our eyes locked together. She smiled, like she does now wide and lovingly, and floated her right hand in a nervous wave. I begged mother that night to take the new family a cake, or a stack of chocolate chip cookies, as an excuse to see her. But when the door opened and she smiled at me, I lost my words and wits, gave her the white frosted chocolate cake that mother baked and sprinted home. She knocked at my door an hour later thanking me and we haven’t gone a day without speaking a word since.
Often wrapped around my arm when we walked from dinner to the local theatre every Saturday night, Rose’s newfound addiction to sadness grieved me. Not because of what was, rather because I failed her as much as her brother. No longer do we share a bath together, take strolls in the park during sunset or spend the night dancing drunk with wine. My Rose turned into a shell of what I came to love. “You still have me,” I pleaded. “We share a son, a life that brings us hope,” I begged. Sometimes that spark in her steel gray eyes would flicker, but often it would dull into a blank stare.
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