Descriptive Prose
The edited version of this is dissimilar enough and not necessarily better enough that I’m going to leave both up, I think, you know…for kids. Interested to see which one people like more. The revised one is more purely description, so is a bit restricted in form.
Final:
A haphazard thigh high hedge stumbles along the sidewalk edge, changing from bright red to yellow speckled green and spotted with unintended gaps. In colour and shape it could be a last-minute Christmas decoration set by your unemployed uncle, clutching his stomach and reeling from too much eggnog and gin. As a purely physical boundary it is entirely ineffectual, but its ugliness at least keeps a passerby’s eyes from straying away from their path and into the front yard. The hedge breaks at a fenceless chain link gate, rusted the same brown as the exposed branches of the mostly hawthorn boundary.
The hedge is not the property’s only ambassador to the outside world. The patchy lawn is dominated by a pair of straight-standing firs, placed evenly on either side of the concrete path that leads from gate. These evergreens shoot straight up into the bright blue storm flecked sky, with little concern for the more subdued height of their nearby, now leafless, peers. Their only competitors in the struggle to be the most grandiose of neighbourhood trees are each other. So they stand together above the power lines, their majesty easily mistaken for domineering smugness.
All of that—the hedge, the firs, and a cluster of ragged cedar bushes at the end of the lawn—is just a diversion from what lies behind. The off-white stucco house is trimmed in faded black. The small, square front window can conceivably be viewed from the street, but only at specific angles. Such an angle reveals laced curtains closed behind weathered glass with ribbed shutters that we can only assume would be shut were they not screwed into the wall. Like the tacit classmate who barely speaks when rarely spoken to, it’s hard to know whether this withdrawal is set off by assured self-importance verging on the solipsistic… or simple shyness.
Draft:
A discarded side road curls around low rent housing and an overgrown vacant lot. An uneven thigh high hedge follows its sidewalk, breaking at a fenceless chain link gate, rusted the same brown as the branches of the sparse hawthorn boundary. The path beyond the gate leads briefly through a lawn much greener than its neighbours’, but dominated by two straight-standing firs placed evenly on either side. They shoot straight up into the bright blue storm flecked sky, with little concern for the more subdued height of their nearby peers, whose leaves have mostly already left to paper surrounding lawns and rooftops. Not content to limit their stake to the neighbourhood’s sky, the spiny branches of these two trees hang low to attend the grass like massive yet gentle combs.
The off-white stucco house is simply trimmed in faded black but reveals little of itself to the street, instead burying its face in those two thriving spires of fir and a cluster of cedar bushes directly at its front. Its two small, square front windows can conceivably be viewed, around the untamed wilderness before them, from the street—but only at specific angles. Such an angle reveals laced curtains closed behind weathered glass and ribbed shutters that would likely be shut were they not screwed into the exterior wall.
The gate, one of whose poles stands slightly askew, is occasionally seen to be opened. Mainly at half past four on Thursdays and Sundays, when a hunched octogenarian in a straight turquoise coat with impractically large buttons creeps slowly along the walkway with the help of a brown plastic cane. Though this pattern rarely continues into the winter months. Sometimes after sundown a window, more likely the right, is lit from within. Not tonight.