By Leah Mendelsohn Lemon girls are only sweet when they’ve been dipped in sugar. Sour smiles are only appreciated if they’ve been drizzled in honey. Her acid words get drowned out in lemonade and it’s sugar sweat. Her juice stings and nobody likes to hear it sizzle. Nobody likes a kick to their palette. Not by legs that are supposed to be crossed, under her citrus yellow dress with beaded trees growing from the hem. You pucker your face at her tart taste for dresses. You call ‘too displaying, too declaring, too distracting’ You slice her open and squeeze her onto your ice. She lays like a crescent moon on the glass rim of your cup. Because she is only a lemon girl in a man’s world. Leah Mendelsohn is 15 years old and goes to the Amherst Regional High School. One thing she love about Woven word is the community of all ages and how their writing inspires her.. Eye of Avela (Excerpt)By Charlie Grace “I’m sorry about the dust,” Noah said. It was a ridiculous thing to be sorry for. Allvilor stood in the middle of the room and he breathed out heavily. The man was disproportionately large, his bulk made more apparent by the delicate nature of the artifice in the room. “No, I was too hard on you boy,” he said, “I’ll lock up.” Noah nodded and headed back around the counter, toward the gloomy stairs leading to the upper floors of the building. The stairs creaked with every step. Some of the boards seemed so brittle that Noah would not have been surprised if one day, they broke under his feet and he fell into whatever abyss lay below. The top of the stairs was a profusion of boxes. Heaped with materials for fixing up broken artifice. Old trinkets, a broken clock, a bench with flaking paint. Though it was possible the space had once been tidy and bright, all that had faded away. Noah’s room was at the top of the stairs, he hadn’t been there long, apprenticing with Allvilor, and he doubted he’d stay much longer. He had done this sort of work before, even occasionally thought this shop might be his future, but of course he was only fooling himself if he ever really imagined he’d stay. Noah was, if nothing else, a wayward boy with nowhere to go. He crossed the hall as quietly as he could and slipped a pair of slender lockpicks from his sleeves, inserting them into the lock on his door. Without a key, the picks were his next best option. It took hardly a few seconds for Noah to caress the lock open, despite the slices over the skin of his hands. Inside, the apartment was almost completely empty. The walls of the single room were dim and gray, the unwashed windowpane letting in only the smoggiest of light. A dresser with broken drawers sat in a lopsided way against one wall, a rickety bed frame pushed against the other. The ropes in the frame had frayed and broken enough that Noah simply put his bed mat on the floor between the posts and curled up to sleep in a strange sort of nest each night. The only thing in the room treated with any obvious care was the backpack. It was made of fine canvas, straps of leather, buckles of bronze. Noah always kept it packed, kept it ready at hand. He closed the door behind him and regarded the backpack where it sat in the center of the floor. “I’ve always wanted to settle down,” he said as he came to sit, cross legged on the floor in front of the backpack, “somehow… it’s never quite right, isn’t that so?” The backpack didn’t reply, but Noah ran one of the straps through his fingers and smiled. At least if he was to be wayward and wandering, he would be accompanied by only the best of the best. “Noah,” it was the gruff voice of Allvilor through the door. Noah could hear the man’s heavy footsteps on the stairs, “you've left this downstairs.” Noah hurried to his feet, expecting that he would find his carousel project in his master’s thick fingered hands. Yet when he opened the door he found himself face to face with something entirely unexpected for the second time that day. “That’s not mine,” Noah said, looking incredulously at the letter his master held in his hands. It was sealed with wax, written on fine paper, the script gilded in gold. Of course it wasn’t his. Noah had nobody to write to, nobody who knew where he lived. Certainly nobody who would purchase fancy paper for the occasion. “It’s got your name on it, hasn’t it,” Allvilor said. What might have come out of another man’s lips as a question or a protestation, rolled out of Allvilor’s mouth as a blunt statement. “I don’t…” Noah trailed off, taking the letter carefully. It looked too pretty to open. Like a cake that was more party decoration than food. “You’re an artificer, sonny,” Allvilor said, “surely you’ve seen stranger things than a bit of fancy paper.” Noah turned the letter over and traced his fingers over the name written there. Noah Briacar, it read in looping yet unmistakable script. “Thank you,” Noah said, the words a whisper over his lips. But Allvilor had already turned away, stumping down the stairs in his club-like boots. Noah wriggled his fingers under the lip of the envelope, carefully prying up wax and paper so as not to rip it. Finally it was open and Noah found himself with a small, embossed card in his hands. It was an address, a date, a time, and one word scrawled across the top. Invitation. Charlie Grace is a 17 year old author from Northampton Massachusetts. They have been writing and telling stories since they were young and so greatly appreciate the safe space that Woven Word cultivates for budding authors and poets to share astoundingly beautiful works. Comments are closed.
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