Growing a character

Ivo was born at a writing retreat – the fifth such – in a cabin in Tennessee's Great Smoky Mountains. (Thanks to MH for the photo)

Seeded by a photo prompt; rooted more sturdily via a challenge to channel Hemingway, he pushed forth his first healthy shoots via an eleven-sentence exercise loosely based on Bob Thurber’s http://home.comcast.net/~bob-thurber/anatomy.html.

Next came an effortless and unexpected bloom:

'Ivo makes love like an alley cat. Skinny and slippy and quick. Ends with a grunt; an unsmiling appraisal of the woman beneath him who’s already forgiven him since she came at the moment he entered her; having feared that he’d leave her without.’

And rumour had it he teaches art ...

I've a place for Ivo. A barely-begun novel, the last of a trilogy, where I hope he'll bear much fruit, and
I’m waking earlier and earlier these days, needing to set down conversations.

Birmingham, Alabama

Arriving in the dark is black and orange.  Staccato red and punctured white.  Impossible to know what daylight looks like and not able even to imagine after nineteen hours of travel.

Soon a clichéd, howling mournful train, which I know cannot be as lonesome as the ones heard in Kansas a couple of years ago.  Then I slept, hearing, but not woken by, a dozen repetitions.

Morning grey and green.  Constant traffic noise explained by the elevated Interstate above an intersection, beside another crossroads whose surface is, like the tarmac car park down below, wet glistening.

Attached to this, with ugly childish tackings of telegraph pole and streetlight, are broccoli trees, the furthest mystified as to where the hills, only apparent later, have disappeared to.

And, just this minute, the sun appears; the Interstate turns silver, maybe all the way to Atlanta.