After much consideration, and feedback from others, I have decided not to include the prologue in my work in progress, THE GIRL MADE OF GOLD. I love this prologue, despite it being unnecessary for the story, and I’ve been having a hard time letting it go. So, I am posting it here, where it will live forever in the internet:
I was fourteen the first time he appeared in my room.
For a long time, I thought I was insane. It was the only way to explain what was happening. I’d read stories about madness, about people seeing things that weren’t there—visions, apparitions, ghosts, even alternate realities. Take one of my favorites, Don Quixote, for example. Take Hamlet, take Wuthering Heights. Perhaps I was just as mad as the characters in my books.
I was dusting those books on the night he first materialized. I hummed to myself, taking my time as I reached on my tip-toes and dusted the top of my bookshelf. I often did that—took my time—with everything I did. I didn’t have anywhere else to be, since I was trapped here, so the longer it took me to accomplish my tasks, the less time I had to spend wistfully daydreaming of the outside world.
In an instant, the air changed around me, and I stopped. I was used to the feel of the air in my tower, used to the way it felt when I was alone versus when Mother was here. And in that moment I sensed it, sensed an extra body behind me, breathing in my oxygen. But it wasn’t Mother. I knew what her presence felt like. This was something foreign.
Slowly, I lowered myself so my feet were flat on the ground again. Even more slowly, I turned, my heart reverberating inside my chest, and I attempted a raw swallow. When I saw him, my heart felt to stop altogether, and I froze in place. A handsome ghost, with incredibly green, wide-set eyes stared back at me, his mouth hanging open. He appeared almost as frightened as I was. A strange breeze entered the room, from where I don’t know, and not only made the candlelight dance but played with the ghost’s brown hair. His defined jaw clenched when he closed his mouth, and his Adam’s apple bounced up his neck as he swallowed.
A pounding on the shutters startled my eyes away from the boy and they shot to the window. The breeze turned into a wind, blowing out some of the candles, and I had never been more grateful for Mother’s presence at the window. But when I looked back in the place the boy had stood, it was empty. He was gone. The ghost had vanished.
Mother opened the shutters after her boisterous thud, and after one more large, mysterious gust, the wind vanished as well. When Mother climbed in through the window and stood before me, opening her arms wide for me, I found myself shaking.
“Rosemary,” she said, her arms falling. Her black eyes studied me quizzically. “Darling, are you all right? You’re pale!”
I ran to her, frightened as ever, and told her of my handsome ghost. My handsome ghost wearing the strangest clothing I’d never seen. Mother was angry, and she paced my room for a lengthy time. Eventually, she told me that if he ever came back, I was to fight. He was after me, she decided, just like the rest of the world.
Only, he never came back.
Not until two years later, when I did just as Mother commanded: knocked him unconscious.
Romanticizing Reality 