Ella Hansen writes: After a few days of illness, Susan is beginning to recover, but her animosity toward her brother Will’s old friend Qian Ang is unchanged, and her sister’s adoration of him has only made matters worse. Her grandmother Molly has noticed but has not yet pressed for explanation. / Prologue / Chapter I / Chapter II / Chapter IIIA / Chapter IIIB
~ * ~
Who’s there?
Nay, answer me; stand, and unfold yourself.
Long live the king!
Mark DenHoed and John Ahern write (or, rather, transcribe),
A Love Lost and Regained: Installment VI
Prologue / Chapter I / Chapter II / Chapter IIIA
Ella Hansen writes,
~ * ~
At the far end of the dining room, an ancient clock loudly ticked off the seconds. Across the table, an arm’s length away, Dr Overman dipped a piece of prata into the curry and tore off a bite with his teeth. ‘Aren’t you hungry, Mica?’
‘I’m thinking,’ Marie-Claire said slowly. ‘I was wondering—’ Her heart was hammering heat into her throat, and she paused to sip her icy water.
Victoria Blake writes,
I been standing here a while, now, jus’ looking at the water and thinking, pretty much. I meant to do it all along, an’ I still mean to. I’m jus’ thinking. I can hear them, little voices, saying something like Lookit what I found. An’ I wonder what it’ll be when they find it. Whoever these thems are.
I been thinking about how I first noticed that nobody looks direckly at me, maybe a little off to the left side a bit, even my own family sometimes, mostly Mae. View Full Post
A Love Lost and Regained: Installment V
At this point, we (John and Mark) came upon a manuscript in a different hand on a different type of stationary. It was, oddly, laminated. The paper inside was crinkled slightly, as if a tiny bit of water had dripped on it. It read as follows.
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Prologue / Chapter I / Chapter II
The second half of this chapter, delayed by summer travels, will follow later in the month.
~ * ~
Sometime later, Susan awoke in the dim shadows. A faint crack of light shone beneath the curtain in the window-well. She rolled over, kicking at the heavy quilts. Her throat burnt, and blood thundered in her head.
This is along the same lines as my last entry. It’s a little darker; James is most definitely a child. But you may consider this and the previous story a matching pair in experimental writing:
James was excited–had had his own helium balloon–he had always wanted one.
He had seen them in the shops, crowded in their cages up by the ceiling. He had always wondered who bought them– who liberated them from their fluorescent prisons, pushed up against lights, corralled together? When he had asked his mother what they were for, and why they never bought one, she had always told him that people who had more money than affection bought them to make up for the time they hadn’t spent with their families. James had just assumed that that was a fancy way of saying that she couldn’t afford to buy him one at the time. He had been right.
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~ * ~
Susan blinked, and the crimson in the snow vanished. She blinked again; it was still gone. She turned and looked down the road; half a metre from the tyre tracks, the man in the blue jacket stood behind Jenny, gripping her by the shoulder.
Here’s a story– if it has a moral or a plot, please enlighten me. It was an exercise in writing for me– and, yes, it is entirely fictional. It is probably only connected to Augustine because it involves pears. Enjoy.
Roger rubbed his hands together, and wiped them on his pants. He looked up at the tree. All of the pears looked good, but he knew that the ones at the top of the tree would taste the best. He grinned. He loved a challenge, and this was one he particularly relished– he knew the neighbor’s pear trees had been unattended for years, and if he was ever going to have one of those pears, this was the year, before that new guy moved into the house. He jumped and grabbed a low hanging branch, scrambling to pull himself up. View Full Post
~ * ~
‘Look, Susan, the clinic,’ Jenny called. ‘We’re here!’
Susan stumbled after her, and the long, low building appeared around the bend. From the open doors, its ill and injured queue extended far down the path; Jenny and Susan took their place behind a young pregnant woman in threadbare jeans. There were few civilians among the camouflage, and no other women.
‘Queue very long lah,’ the woman said in broken accent; ‘long time to wait.’
