Theme 310: Hope
At
the table in the atrium, Penia contemplates her wedding plans. She pages
through a wedding invitation catalog and places sticky tabs on the pocket-fold designs
she prefers. She will have to ask Stanley, her fiancé, for his thoughts before
making a decision, though. She turns to the samples of bouquet arrangements and
centerpieces the florist gave her. She lingers over the burgundy zinnias and
peach peonies, even though she has already committed to white and silver as the
chromatic motifs best complimenting the Winter’s Tale theme of the wedding. She
pictures white benches adorned with silver streamers and white velveret ribbons, aligned in rows facing the shimmering
lake beyond the Wexford Manor garden, the location reserved for the ceremony.
This prompts Penia to open the folder with the seating chart so that
Stanley can review it as soon as he returns from his council meeting. She looks
up at the clock bolted high on the wall. Dissatisfied with the time, she impatiently
pushes her hair back in order to scratch the raised parabolic scar running across her left temple.
Beyond
the door to the atrium lies a long dim hallway with gentian blue porcelain
tiles. Embedded in the junction of the hallway is a nurses station, formed by
a low wall mounted with formica counters and affixed with a corner l-desk that
houses rows of patient charts and a terminal monitor. The nursing office can be
seen through a glass door behind the station. The newly hired nursing assistant,
a broad-shouldered man wearing crisp scrubs over his pullover, rests his elbows
on the counter and watches Penia through the atrium doorway. Stamped above his scrub-tee’s
breast pocket are the words Lakeview Psychiatric
Hospital.
“That
patient, Penia, she’s always in there with her wedding stuff—is she going to
get married soon?” the nursing assistant asks.
In
the swivel chair at the terminal next to him, his supervisor, a stocky woman
with frizzy red hair who has been working in this psychiatric ward for eleven
years, looks down the quiet, freshly mopped hallway and lets out a weary
sigh of resignation. At last she replies, “Well, that’s the thing with Penia.
She was all set to be married when she and her fiancé got in this horrible wreck.
She suffered a severe head injury. Her fiancé was killed. She
was brought here after she recovered, physically. At first they
thought it was just temporary traumatic stress, causing her to be mentally stuck in the time before the accident. But that was
eight years ago.”
The nursing assistant frowns
and leans further over the counter to view Penia sitting at the atrium table once
more. He sees her still holding the seating chart folder while gazing through the barred
window with a faraway smile, brought on by her imagined forthcoming marital
bliss.
Explanatory
Postscript: When I say “picked randomly,” I mean picked from a Master List that
I’ve compiled of 999 themes intended to serve as creative writing prompts (from
the following sources: 501
Writing Prompts; 25
Creative Writing Prompts; Examples
of Themes; List
of Themes; 365
Creative Writing Prompts; 100
Themes Challenge Writing Prompts; List
of Journal Ideas; and Top
10 Types of Story Themes). To pick a theme at random, I roll three
ten-sided dice (the first for the hundreds place digit, the second for the
tens, and the third for the singles) and find the theme under the number I have
rolled. If I hit a theme I have already written on, I roll again. If I ever
roll 000, I make up a theme. The Master List is a secret, so don’t ask for it.
No comments:
Post a Comment