Writing Prompt: Write a list of five first and last names. Select one of the names and write about the character.
Hannah Black
Joseph McKenna
Isabella Fortune
Charlotte Franklin
Lincoln Montgomery
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My name is Isabella Fortune.
I was born on the night of a full moon; Halloween eve, twenty-two years ago. I've come to realize, over time, that it's because of this that I am the way that I am... but I'm getting ahead of myself.
I should start at the beginning.
When I was a young child, my mother would whisper to me each night as she kissed my forehead and pulled my covers up to my chin, tucking me into bed, "Magic chose you, my darling. Magic chose you the night you were born, and you are destined for great things. Just wait, Isabella. You'll see."
And I believed her. I spent the better part of the first ten years of my life firmly rooted in the belief that something amazing was going to happen to me, someday, and wondering when 'someday' would come. I daydreamed of dragons and castles, of kings and princes, and every afternoon, on the way home from school, riding in the back of my mother's station wagon, I would stick my head out the window to feel the wind rushing against my face, just so I would be prepared for the day that I learned that I could fly.
But things changed. I never discovered a hidden talent for flight; I never met any handsome princes or kings or angry dragons; and the closest thing I ever saw to a castle was the White Castle burger joint just up the road from my house. In short, I grew up, and I became the pessimistic realist to my mother's optimistic whims of fancy. Of course my mother saw magic in me; this was the woman who picked discarded bits of glass from the neighbor's recycling bins so she could tie them together and hang them in the window and bask in the explosion of color that would occur when the sun hit it, just so. My mother saw magic in everything, and in order to balance her out, I learned, over time, to ignore it completely.
I never knew my father - he left my mother before I was born - but I imagined myself to be a lot like him; sturdy, strong, logical and dependable, all the things my mother was not. But despite the fact that she could never seem to pay the electric bill - or any bill, for that matter - on time, my mother loved me. God, did she love me, so fiercely that even to this day, when I close my eyes, I can still feel that love surrounding me; an intangible emotion made tangible by her a ferocity that both suffocated and comforted; hurt and healed.
My mother died two months before my nineteenth birthday, in a car accident that could have been avoided if only The Rusty Nail Tavern down on Clark Street had checked the ID of the twenty-year-old boy they'd over-served. Up until then, despite my learned pessimism, there had always been a small corner of my heart that still believed what my mother had told all those years ago; that magic really had chosen me... that I really was destined for something wonderful. But as I stood there watching the last of the mourners leave, their sobs muffled by handfuls of tissues while my own traitorous eyes remained dry, I realized that that last bit of light inside of me had been buried with her.
And so, the next three years of my life passed in as uneventful of a manner as the previous few already had. I had plenty of money from my mother's life insurance policy, thanks to the fact that I'd taken over paying the bills a few years before she died, and the house had been paid off by my father before he left, a sort of "parting gift apology-slash-bribe"; my mother's words, not mine. I went to college, I got a degree in business, and I took as job as the manager of a local coffee shop. I went through the motions of life without feeling anything. It was almost as if someone had put my body on auto-pilot with me still stuck inside; I could see everything that was happening, but I couldn't feel any of it. I began to wonder if I was destined to go through life as a spectator rather than a participant, but I couldn't even muster enough energy to care about the answer.
And then, on the night of my twenty-second birthday, as I was nursing a bottle of my favorite Moscato and watching Trick-or-Treaters scurry from house to house while the full moon swam across the sky, that all changed.
It is there, on my doorstep that Halloween night, that the story of Isabella Fortune really begins.
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