Blog Post #3: The Lyre of Orpheus

Elwood decided to take a walk in the middle of the night. He loved the quiet that nightfall brought to the town, and he knew he wouldn’t see a soul out and about. Mr. Evan’s death was still causing people in the town to be too chatty or behave too strangely, and Elwood wanted to talk about anything except Mr. Evans.

Although he wasn’t headed in any particular direction, Elwood found himself at the broken fountain. Though it was broken no longer. Now, water flowed out of the mouths of marble winged angles holding lyres and harps. As he looked to the stars, Elwood spotted a constellation that resembled the lyre one of the angels held, and he became lost in his memories of the Breakfast in Bed Diner.

“It’s the constellation Lyra,” Lyra said referring to her tattoo.

“Your parents named you after a constellation?” Elwood asked.

 “Yep,” she said “Lyra represents the lyre of Orpheus. It was the first lyre ever made by the god Apollo and given to the prophet Orpheus. It’s said to have the power to charm any living thing with its beautiful music. Perhaps my mother hoped I would inherit her talent for singing and playing the piano. It really was a shame when she found out I was toned deaf with the voice of a monotonous frog.”

“I remember my mother telling me about Greek myths, she seemed to really like them,” he said.

“My mother did as well, perhaps it was something they bonded over,” she said.

Lyra had claimed their mothers had been friends once, and before Elwood and his family left the Foxberry, she and him had been playmates. She apparently still lived in the Foxberry and had lived there most of her life. Elwood thought it was nice enough to talk to her. To see an old friend before he died, even if he couldn’t remember knowing that friend to begin with.

And reader, if that had been all, Elwood wouldn’t be looking for Lyra Banks. But he was concerned about something she had said to him just before she left the diner.

“Elwood, would you mind doing a favor for an old friend?” she had said.

“Sure,” he said.

“If I happen to go missing, and someone comes looking for me, tell them Mr. Evans will know where to find me,” she had said.

Blog Post #2: Blueberry Pancakes

          Two nights after Halloween, Elwood sat at a table in the park, watching Dorothy Rose lose a game of chess to Mr.Jenkins. Dorothy chatted on about the mysterious murder of Mr. Evans, while he nodded along with the conversation. He tried to look interested in the game, but he wasn't. In fact, he wouldn't be watching the game at all if there weren't nosy policeman around asking questions about Mr. Evans. He would be looking for the person who disappeared the night Evans died.

           The morning of the death of Mr. Evans, Elwood was enjoying his blueberry pancakes at the Breakfast in Bed diner. You might think, reader, that at 4:30 in the morning, Elwood would be eating alone, but at 4:35 a young woman in a faded pink hoodie and jeans walked into the diner and ordered a coffee. She was quite unusual for a number of reasons. The first being that her hair was a bright bubblegum pink, wild and curly, and it was home to a garden’s worth of roses and honeysuckle flowers. The second being that she had a crimson stain on her jeans that looked as though it could be dried blood, hers or someone else’s Elwood wasn’t sure. The third, and arguably the strangest thing about her was that on her right hand there appeared to be a tattoo in stark white ink mostly covered by her hoodie. It was merely dots and lines on her dark brown skin which formed a constellation Elwood didn’t recognize. He’d never seen anything like it.

As the young woman received her coffee from the counter, she walked over to Elwood, and sat down across from him, at his own booth, as though they were old friends. Elwood froze mid-bite, concerned by her strange behavior. She took a sip of her coffee, set it down on the table, and smiled but only slightly.

            “Hey, you’re Elwood Clark, aren’t you?” she asked.

             Elwood reluctantly nodded.

            “Do you remember me? I’m Lyra Banks,” she said.

            Lyra. Elwood knew that name too well. It sat in the back of his brain, spoiled and soaked in regrets and horror. It was the one name that Elwood could never bring himself to say. It was the name of his one great failure. The name of the girl he couldn’t save.

            And it haunted him.

Blog Post #1- The day started with

The day started with anagrams. A well-mannered, deep-chested man in his 20’s laid on his bed staring up at a phrase etched into his ceiling. “I was here” the phrase read. He found it pointless to carve such a phrase into the ceiling without a signature. “George was here” or “Harry was here” would’ve been more appropriate. His brain anagrammed the words to “Where as I” and “I saw here”, and a couple other phrases which made no sense. How fitting, he thought, since nothing in his life made sense at the moment.

The man in question was Elwood Clark. He was a grocery bagger from Clayton, and you could say he was in Foxberry on vacation. His life was acutely unremarkable in every way, as was his personality. He was 21, and he would be 22 in December if he wasn’t going to die. But he was, and although you might think someone so close to death would be afraid, Elwood felt impartial towards living or dying. Just as he felt impartial to everything else in his life.

That particular morning, he had awoken at 4:00 am to the sound of loud rain pounding on the window of his new apartment. It hardly could’ve been called a new apartment considering its cracked ceilings, old brass doorknobs, and strange sounds coming in at odd hours in the night. His room was dark and empty, and his mattress was bare and old. It squeaked whenever he moved, even when he breathed. Between the bed creaking and the storm, Elwood decided sleep was a lost cause. He rose from his bed and found he suddenly had a strange craving for blueberry pancakes, so he set out for the Breakfast in Bed Diner.

Reader, there are many moments in time which alter the trajectory of our lives. Most of us do not recognize these moments as they happen, as that is the way of the unpredictability of life. Elwood Clark did not know that this was one of those moments. After all, his life up until this point had been drab and uneventful, why should the rest of it be any different?

Well, it took 21 years and 10 months, reader, but Elwood’s life was finally about to get interesting.