Douglas

Johnka placed himself between the hole and her and continued the same quick pace he held in the sand. Tritti tried loosing her hand from his grip, but he didn’t relent. Looking behind his back as he pulled her down a stone stair, she could see the hole was deeper than it was wide. She looked down on green, recently leafed, spring trees.

“I hope you’ll like my home. We’ve come at the best time, I think. Yes?” Johnka asked. She realized they had stopped on a landing and that he was looking at her; she’d been trying to make out the words of a strange conversation she’d been hearing from below as they came down.

“Oh, sorry. Here. Here.” Johnka guided her with two hands on her waist to the edge of the landing and placed her at the wooden rail. “You can hear them speaking? You’ve got an ear for things, Tritti, my girl. I call them Norraleena and Sam.”

Johnka leaned out over the rail and cocked his head to aim his ear to the speakers below. His eager expression encouraged Tritti to do the same, so she did.

The voice she immediately attributted to Sam spoke near constantly in a throaty bulbous sort of way. At first she thought he must be full of himself—talking without pause—but even unable to make out his words as they sifted up the cliffside and became unintelligible Tritti realized he was trying to impress Norraleena. That his sometimes-near-laughter voice was a mixture of desperation and humor. Tritti wished he would stop talking for a moment and just listen to Norraleena.

Tritti found Norraleena’s voice droopy and thin. She alternated moments of light aggreement with interjections of her own comments. Sam ignored those. Listening longer though, Tritti realized Norraleena never stopped speaking either. What she initially thought were polite interuptions she realized were simply the louder phrases of her own unending flow of words.

Tritti shook her head. “Who…what are they?”

Johnka winked and headed down the stone stairs.

Tritti tried to listen some more, but her attention was now on the round man skipping down the stairs to the next landing. She leaned back over the rail to see how many more to the bottom: no more. Returning her attention to her host she saw a rope bridge a quarter way around the hole. Johnka was already halway down to it.

401 words on day 882

September 30, 2011

A Cool Blue Mage’s Cassock

This follows the Crainstock, LTD. stuff you’ll find somewhere else on 1000 Days…

The extended warmth of the traverse and the uncanny sensation of being piped like frosting onto a cake told Kera she’d stepped through a portal and not just a door. There was a déjà vu hiccup mid-trip she wondered about, but soon forgot as she was deposited onto the black sand of a broad flat beach. The sunglasses in Donna’s pocket made sense now.

Twenty-five mages circled a great metal band and hummed a low continuous monotone. Kera had expected a torus instead of a band. The band was…

Donna roughly twisted Kera around, placed her free hand in the center of Kera’s back and guided her without apology to a white tent. Kera got her hands up in time to part the flap as Donna pushed her through. Magic cooled the air inside and flattened and packed the sand to a black gloss. At the back—in a ring of padded folding chairs—Mr. Balasubramanyan sprawled across a pair of them with his head in his knees; he didn’t look up. Donna pushed Kera behind a tri-fold. “Get undressed. All the way. Earrings, contacts, patches. I’ll get you a cassock.”

Kera heeled off her sandles, shuffled out of her Levi’s, and quickly unbuttoned her blouse. She hesitated a moment before unclasping her favorite flower bra, but then continued and stacked that neatly on her growing pile of clothes. Donna returned and tossed a blue mage’s cassock over the top of the tri-fold.

“Tattoos too?”

“Don’t be flip, Miss Woods. All. All your ink was natural or you wouldn’t be in our employ in the first place.”

Donna’s repeated word struck just as Kera slid her panties past her knees; shame…

xxx words on day 879

September 20, 2011

Remember When I Used to Post Daily?

Today I’m gong to write against the clock for 90 seconds at a time. I’ve not done this particular exercise in some time and am a little worried I will suck at it. That’s not the point though, so I will press forward.

I changed it to 60 seconds because the 90 was a bit longer than I was used to and I kept expecting the alarm to go off each time I came to the end of a word. It was disconcerting and made it difficult to write fast.

Mist smothered the Texas Panhandle like a killer embraces his victim. You could imagine an overpass was approaching for many seconds before…

…you realized it was never arriving. Cars speeding past you disappeared like memories into the road ahead, and everything was either milk-grey or an unremarkable yellow.

The hawk snatched the fence post like it might some edible prey but instead landed. She ruffled her feathers to stay warm.

Martin stood on the plains; he was a crumb on a grassy smooth table top. The horizon clipped the sky like a ruler set on its edge.

Somewhere in the dark—if one looked carefully—a boney lank of dog or coyote hunched among the crispy beige weeds and sage.

I seem to have developed a theme here today. I guess that’s good considering I wasn’t even certain I’d responde well at all. I fear though that my them may make it hard for me to continue because I feel compelled to stick with that theme. So I’ve written this palate cleansing picece which

The gunship sunk to a roaring hover. Mini-guns sproted from the top and rotated into position to guard the ship…

Abandoned and hungry, Allawashon rose to begin another day of walking. She’d make it to the outpost fort by evening, but not before eating a mouse raw and killing her twin…

Yikes! I don’t know what my plan with the young lady above was/is, but I want to take a moment to apologize to her sister and potentiall to the mouse. I don’t know if either had it coming, but I hope so at least.

“Snow,” Eric said. “But not snow carpetting the field and smashing out all the features. Snow like a reminder that sometimes God likes to change the color of the earth.”

The grueling pace here is always a blessing and a curse. This stumbling blurb is all I could come up withfor this particular 60 seconds.

Ring. Click. Clear. Start. Write… Shit, that’s a pain some of the time. Like now when I thought that lead off would actually take me some where but it didn’t. Maybe my next blurb ought…

SHe was hiding. It felt like she was always hiding fr some reason or another. Hiding to stay out of the cold. Hiding to stay out of the light. Hiding to stay out of the road. Today she was hiding to stay alive, and so far it was working.

But it wouldn’t work for very much longer, because she’d spotted a reason to move. A reason so compelling that it made her scalp itch. SHould she stay alive one more minute or die trying to get the thing which compelled her?

I think I’l end this exercise here. I think it went well enough and I apologize once again fro not spending more time with this exercise when I can clearly be so prolific in a short time. Rather than dumping crap out on you when I can’t make myself compose a better story on those rushed days.

595 words on day 873