This is really just the beginning of something, please could I have some critique, or even some ideas of how it could develop? Anything you feel is relevant.
The first time I ever met Monica, she was knee-deep in water. She stood in the river next to the old bridge, and stared at me, caught out, a long sharpened branch in her hand. A large silver fish was floundering at the end of the branch, its blood falling slowly and thickly into the water, and its tail hopelessly beating the air like a wing. Around Monica’s neck hung a pair of worn out boots, tied together by the laces, and in her left hand, in a generous lacy bundle she carefully held up the long skirts of her cream dress. She didn’t move. She looked at the fish, at me, she looked at me, and she threw up her arms,
“Well what do you expect me to do, start frequenting the fishmonger’s? Don’t think that just because I’m dead I don’t get hungry”
What was I supposed to do? I stared. Her hair was a yellow shade of straw, matted into a bird’s nest on the top, and garnished with small twigs and bits of mud. As a child of twelve, I held a vivid and inaccurate idea of what a dead body would look like (although of course I had never seen one), despite the appalling smell, Monica certainly did not meet my precocious expectations.
“Liar!” I yelled down at Monica from the top of the bridge,
“You’re a liar! You’re dirty and you’ve got filth in your hair, and you don’t scare me!”
I ran home to an angry mother, cross-armed in the doorway, who gave me a sharp blow about the head and more than an earful of rebukes. A group of neighbour had visited the house to inform her that they had all watched me stand on the bridge, in broad daylight, and shout obscenities into thin air. She grabbed me by the crook of my arm, and pulled me into the house.
“I don’t know what you think you’re playing at but if you don’t start acting your age soon people will think there’s something wrong with you,” she hissed,
“For God’s sake grow up!”
