This is from a writing exercise I got here: www.meredithsuewillis.com/writi...urrent

The first sentence is taken from Zora Neal Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God." The rest is my weird brain.

She had found a jewel down inside herself and she had wanted to walk where people could see her and gleam it around. Instead she covered up. Layer upon layer, building herself up from the core, like an onion. She put on stockings, skirts, pants, blouses, coats, hats, goggles, until she was unrecognizable. Until not an inkling of the jewel or who she was before her discovery showed through. People stole jewels, after all. There was an exhibition right now in San Jose with a three-pound gem and an awful lot of armed guards. Alice didn't have any armed guards. And hers was small enough to hide. It didn't matter that people looked toward her with disdain as she stooped her form, made bulky by an excess of puffy jackets, to peer into the rubbish bin on the corner of Judah and La Playa. The garbage out here was cleaner than in the middle of the city. She could usually find a barely used paper cup for coffee and sometimes even a half-eaten lemon croissant wrapped in paper so that it wasn't touching any of the other trash. Those were good days, when the sun was out and she would cross the street to stand at the edge of the dunes, ignoring the beating sun and how it made her slippery with sweat beneath her mountain of clothes. She would stare down at the sea, that enormous expanse of salt water. This is were she would hide it. Someday. Someday when she was ready, she would shed all of her layers, piece by piece at the shore. She would ignore the cold as she strode into the salt, free at last to hide her gem and herself. Not yet. But someday.