it was mid-morning, the late summer sun had already come to crouch about the town of sweetwater like some hoarding beast, when mercy peters found most of a girl on the riverbank.
an independent original character. 21+ visual and written themes of body horror and dysfunctional family dynamics. by lea ♡
don't be a weirdo
I have written charlene on and off for several years now and tend to prioritize plotted interactions and threads with friends
my portrayal of the fictional town of sweetwater, florida, bears an in-name-only resemblance to the existing town of sweetwater, florida. I genuinely did not know one already existed when naming mine. whoops
By all accounts, Charlene’s mom was supposed to be the one to make it out somewhere big. And as much as she hated the weight of expectation, she knew it was because she was special; she was smarter than most, and pretty. The kind of pretty that stopped people and made them treat her differently. She didn’t have any particular talent but, as far as she was concerned, that didn’t matter, because she had that unnamable something that made her better. Remarkable. That all changed, of course, when that second pesky little line appeared on the strip.
They marched head-on into a shotgun wedding—she insisted—of moderate fanfare. She reigned over a modest house on the edge of town for the better part of a decade or so as Mrs. McKinnon, balancing this inauspicious call to maternity with scattered grasps at cultural relevance, before she finally called it quits. Motherhood, homemaking, Sweetwater, as it’d remained to her (too slow, too small) wasn’t for her, and Don McKinnon's girl, as Sweetwater had dubbed her, became simply that.
It wasn't perfect. Her dad struggled to keep a steady income and Char had taken to spending more and more time out of the house. And they fought. In the way that all fathers and daughters kind of did. So when Char married her high school sweetheart and disappeared the following year, most people pretended not to be surprised: she was her mother's daughter.
NAME. Charlene Marjorie Harrison. Maiden name Mckinnon. ↪Don Mckinnon's girl or, affectionately, "Pinkie" growing up. Charlene was shortened universally to "Char" [sh-ar] in her twenties. AGE. mid-to-late thirties. PLACE OF BIRTH. Sweetwater, Florida SPECIES. Werewolf [by transmision] PARENTS. Don (deceased) and Jean McKinnon SIBLING(S). Char has a half-sibling ten years younger named Holly that she has a somewhat strained relationship with. MARITAL STATUS. Widowed
The truth was, Char simply liked herself better when she wasn't home.
HEIGHT. 5'6" BUILD. Soft classic (kibbe): delicate featured and slender. Charlene is taller than most, but not extraordinarily so, with moderate muscle tone. HAIR. Naturally a strawberry blonde that tends toward a peachier hue beneath Sweetwater's relentless summer sun and deepens into a more muted copper in winter. It hangs a few inches past her shoulders in medium curls, often worn loose or in a haphazard ponytail. EYES. Dark blue, nearly black in certain lights. VOICE. Trained into the sterile qualities of the accent of television and Holywood, noncommittal to any one area, but the right ear could pick up the swampland twang of central Florida. NOTABLE MARKINGS. A faded scratcher of a what was supposed to be an orange blossom on her hip but more closely resembles a floral-adjacent blob a little larger than a quarter. She's always talked about having it lasered off but can't quite bring herself to make the appointment.
The Harrison family has owned and employed the bulk of Sweetwater for as long as anyone can remember. Originally making their fortune in bootlegging, Lyle Harrison opened the first of several distilleries that'd dot their way across the south, marketing off that special something in the purportedly healing waters of the Sweetwater River. And if its spare-apparent bringing home the white trash from across town shook the hornet's nest, then marrying her was a fist right through it.
When Char learned the truth—that just about every crazy little thing that had ever been said about them wasn't too far off. Just not in the way people expected—she was thirty-six years old and about to be a widow. Her father in law had died a month ago to the date. She'd always thought he was a smarmy son of a bitch with an open mouth where his heart was supposed to be, and anyone who knew him couldn't really argue the fact, but he was still family. And so the prodigal couple returned to Sweetwater.
— note. the harrison pack is a bit of a known secret in local communities of hunters as a self-maintained problem due to their proclivity for self-destruction, though a handful are paid through the distillery to look the other way.
