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Sitting Here posted:Literally anyone can join up until Friday night or whenever the prompt post says (IDK I don't read prompts). Okay, fellas. I'll try this. I need to give myself something to do.
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Oct 16, 2013 22:25
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| # ¿ Sep 17, 2024 07:22 |
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This is my submission for the sad story prompt. Secrets of the cairn [650 words] I am on a mission of utmost secrecy. There is something big out here, deep in the forest behind my childhood home. My father spoke about it, and the words a man chooses to speak when words are few and final and come hard through sighing breaths are assuredly of great importance. I repeat the conversation in my head as I inhale the musk of the trees, searching for clues: “The woods, behind the house… you remember? Hiking. Our rock. The see-saw tree. All that?” “Yes.” Little was said before then, and little after this. So I conclude that there is something big out here. Something important, and something meant only for me. Not just the rock, the large boulder at the edge of the field we ate sandwiches on once, I passed that a while back, along with the fallen tree that lays over the stone wall and across the path. I made my inspection and did not find anything. There were no signs, no etchings, no X to mark a spot where lay buried a box of journals, notes, instructions. I recall detailing those landmarks on my printer-paper maps. I drew dozens of them, perfecting the cartography of these woods, even though I could walk them by memory alone. I had placed my own X’s on those maps, X’s where I had left Matchbox cars, GI Joes, or other pieces of some scheme I was constructing for myself. Those mysteries were solved long ago. But there remains one other waypoint, one more landmark among the trees here, and because the sun is sinking and the ferns are rising I bend low, counting the steps, but assuredly these paces account for two, maybe three of a child’s gait, so I am closer than I think-- And there it is. In shallow leaves on the gnarled and sprouting earth lies what remains of The Bridge Across the Brook. I recall helping build this simple crossing with him. I don’t remember why we did it, other than to have built a thing. It would only benefit me, though I imagined then there were perhaps other wayward travelers of these Uncertain Properties behind the neighborhood. So I watched as his axe made loud, smacking strikes against the bases of the choicest candidates, and then we dragged them to the brook, leaving our hands marred with pine-scars and pitch. Nine young pines, young back then anyway, laid down like candles, now snapped and peeling, gripped by mud and under weeds and hidden from most things. It seems like there should be more fanfare in this, so I wait. I stand quite a while, watching the decaying logs in silence. A plane drones overhead; the sound of cars on the nearby road gusts through the branches and the reeds. The mud and stones of the brook, its water no longer flowing, would take me only a few stretching steps to cross now. I listen harder, to the spaces in between the trees, and stare into the darkness of their gathering farther out, where the path dwindles and where I was never allowed to go. The sun is gone now, and the forest is a sort of blue. I close my eyes. I listen for something big. When I open my eyes again my throat is hard. I nod a few times, my acknowledgement to the unpresent, and turn back. I follow the barbed wire fence back to the old house, its windows glowing warm over the greying yard. Someday, when my paths in the forest have faded out, and all these woods are razed to make the properties more numerous and certain, someone, some construction worker will find that cairn of rot, I expect. They will be perplexed by this sudden arrangement in the dense chaos of the trees, and wonder when and why and by whom it was put there, of all places, for the use of no one, and only I will know, and, I promise, I will tell them nothing. It belongs to us.
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Oct 18, 2013 20:01
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Everyone knows the saddest thing is dogs, so what were we all supposed to do? I was tempted but I knew the scorn I'd receive. But I guess having an idea would have been better than none at all. seriously dogs are frickin sad as heck.
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Oct 21, 2013 04:41
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I'll have another serving.
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Oct 22, 2013 05:28
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My offering is complete Fearless 998 words https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TX6DMR8ih-P_RRoDdxzoxYeeVovmlzDi0wsA4newHxg/edit
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Oct 27, 2013 21:21
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To hell with waiting. Submitted!
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Oct 28, 2013 22:04
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I got a rejection from the last prompt, but based on the fact that the place we all submitted to is more on the side of genre/fantasy type fiction? That's not my jam, hence why I'm not in on this week either, but it was still fun and I like the way my story came out a lot.
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Nov 4, 2013 19:32
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I'll go for it.
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Nov 5, 2013 04:21
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| # ¿ Sep 17, 2024 07:22 |
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Yeah I don't have anything reasonable to submit this time either. I started three things and they all petered out. I liked this prompt though.
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Nov 11, 2013 04:37
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