"Pay attention to the world." -- Susan Sontag
 
Single Frame: Autumn Close Up #14

Single Frame: Autumn Close Up #14

From the short story “Before Autumn” in Just an Ordinary Day: Stories by Shirley Jackson:

“All that summer she had been increasingly aware of the growing turbulence among the trees, and in the grasses, and around the hills; in the vegetable garden each morning there had been vague markings of snails, and the trees were less certain of their birds, somehow, she thought, and more noisy in the wind. That the paints had something to do with it she was certain; before the sudden violence of green in the paint box the grass flattened and grew bladed and pale, and the hills plunged mistily ahead of a purple so carefully compounded of blue, and red, and white, and sometimes, in the late afternoons, yellow.”

3 Comments

    1. Dale

      It’s great, isn’t it? The short story is just a few pages long …. and by the end, you are wondering if the narrator is plotting her husband’s murder. Amazing what Shirley Jackson can do with just a few carefully crafted paragraphs!

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