Creative Writing: Hester Prynne

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”

She was always quiet.

A wisp of a girl with words that escaped her lips in scraps as thin as her. No one thought she’d be the school’s resident Hester Prynne, but suddenly, in a whirlwind of unexpected rumors that flew like mosquitos and spread their gossiping diseases, she was depicted as just that.

“She’s pregnant.” One girl said.

“What a whore.” Said the other.

“I always knew she’d end up like that.” Lied the next.

The wisp of a girl was wilting fast, her shoulders hunched with the weight of hurled insults and wide wet eyes turned toward the shifting ground beneath her. What little color that had graced her face was fading, the scraps of words dwindled to

Not for herself, but for the holes assailants had made in their homes to throw their thickened theories of immorality. For the queen with an adulterous prince, who spouted pious prejudice and hypocrisies. As she wept, her fingers spun a rope from her sickened soul and knotted it ‘round her neck. With a final scrap of speech she let herself unravel, collapsing into a pile of thread-bare ribbons. Thus, our wisp of a girl was no longer.

When the flowers had grown too big to be contained in her notebook, continuing to bloom and live past the end of their grower’s, found by our wisp of a girl’s mother, the flowers began to pop up in the lockers of the spectators of her peril. Their petals shedding into the kingdom of their high school. The kingdom was falling fast, glass houses shattering from the weight of stones thrown back. Apologies ran rampant, offered to ears that weren’t alive to hear them.

A scrap of paper under a pile of threadbare ribbons. A scrap that read a wisp of a girl’s last sentence; ‘Glass houses don’t like stones; But neither do bones and