The Brocade below was written by Katto and used the words Courage and Surprise in connection with the photo below. You can write a Brocade too! Just open the Writing menu in the navbar above, and click Brocade: A Writer’s Exercise!
Liv fondled the empty pack of cigarettes once more, just as the sun began to burn through the bare branches of the wind break. Magically, there was one smoke left in the pack, and five minutes later, when she put it out in the overflowing ash tray, the sun had been hoisted onto the fingertips of the trees. She had a purple blind spot emblazoned on her eyes for having started at it so long.
Then, a robin, the first of the season, suddenly warbled from a perch on the corner of the wooden fence, and Liv’s heart beat a little faster with that same childhood joy she had always taken in counting the first one hundred robins she saw in springtime. She felt a rush of something within her. The fields had lain bare these past several months, and the baby’s funeral had only taken place three days ago, but Liv was coming back to herself. Sleeplessness only seemed to amplify the shimmering, steel-like feeling that was shuttled through her as the robin plopped onto the grass and began to toss and fetch things she couldn’t see. She could smell herself, the odor seeping up from under arms. She had not showered for a week and her clothes and unwashed hair breathed cigarette smoke. She took a certain delight in this now that there was a robin to watch. It was as though she had come into that bird as it wobbled through the grass, tilting its head to catch the subtle sound of a worm too near the surface.
Liv stood up, feeling a kind of stilled triumph as she moved close to the window, framed by the full light of the rising sun. And suddenly, without thinking about it, she took off her shirt and let the sun seep into her powerful breasts.