Prompted....

A gentle press and the machine began whirring again, and the uneasiness in her soul melted into the rhythm of her work. The hum of a thousand machines sounded like wings all around her, and the fabric that slid under the foot feed was a cheerful yellow. She hadn’t even stopped to figure out what piece she was working on today. It wasn’t necessary. In fact, it got in the way of imagining the room full of grinning, well-fed little girls all dressed in yellow Easter dresses, making an entire room look like a spring morning, full of hope and joy. A breeze ambled through an open window, drifting through a stand of cedars. All the girls are giggling and looking at a woman preparing to take a picture, except for one pixie-faced lass with wavy, mousy brown hair, spindly browned legs and feet that all shoes are too big for. She desperately wants to be outside with the man she sees through the window, bent over a row of garden plants. She knows he is pulling up fat red radishes, and she would much rather be out in the real sunshine than pretending to be a ray of it in a room full of giggling girls who really don’t have a clue. But her dad wants her to learn to be a lady.

The machine jerks and the young woman refocuses. She can’t afford to draw any attention, have people start asking questions. If that happened, she’d have to leave all this—meager but comfortable—and start the search yet again. She wasn’t quite ready for that. At this point she wasn’t anxious to have someone try to return her to her last employer, let alone her parents. No one would believe that she had seen a thief steal off through the woods with a bag of valuables. All eyes would accuse her, whether she ran or not, so it had been time to move on.
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Oh well….Blathering again, but I’m trying to blather on a regular basis in hopes that even my muse will tire of it and start giving me something real to work with.

This came from Mode Room Press’ Writer’s Unblock tool. Unfortunately my iGoogle page refreshed before I could jot down the five clauses. Roughly however they are:

A runaway is working in a factory
[something about] girls in Easter dresses
[something about] cedar fire smoke
While a ? man digs radishes
And a thief steals through the forest.

Or something like that.