NaNo isn’t going great for me yet. I’m in stride when I actually DO write, but it’s SO easy for me to blow it off too. I need to be at 14,000 words right now and I’ve got 4,000. Last week I had an excuse, this week not so much. I’ve been excessively busy, but come on, I didn’t REALLY need to watch that movie last night did I?
Anyway, I keep telling myself if I can just clear my life a little. It’s not going to happen. So when all else fails? I think I’m going to blow off my life and write.
This post has a few purposes, I suppose. One, I can’t resist myself and thought you all might like a sneak peak at my NaNoWriMo novel, and it’s cover. Two, I thought I’d brag that I actually designed and made that myself. Three, I’m avoiding writing right now, distracting myself for twenty minutes before I do another five minute word sprint.
So, here’s the first chapter of 1 1 4 2 8 3. I’d love thoughts, comments, criticism, whatever you throw my way!
Ink Waves
Up and down. In. Out. Black webs stretching through her skin. Simple lines. Meaningless. Dooming her.
Resisting now was pointless. A waste of time and energy. Why bother anyway? Escape from this pit? Not happening. An impossible lie. There never was and never would be an escape from hell.
Two numbers. The beginning. Carelessly scrawled onto her skin. Similar. The same even. Different in their imperfections. One. Messy. A simple line, what was so hard about writing a stupid line? Another one. Straighter, too short. Too little time for the obvious mistakes to show.
Next, four. Scribbled. More confusion in more lines. Confusion stole the point. Amidst the red-blotched skin and black lines, there was nothing. No purpose, no meaning. Was this really how far she’d fallen? Even the simple numbers that now mean her meant nothing. They’d left her to this? What had she done to deserve being left behind anyway?
Two. Simple enough. Fit easily in the sequence. By this time she didn’t really want to think about it.
Eight. Curves. Measured swoops, turns and drops. Abnormally perfect in the sequence of scribbles.
Three. Last. A final strike to her helplessness. Three could have changed this. Three left her here.
One. One. Four. Two. Eight. Three.
Bria.
~ ~ ~
When they finished reshaping her identity, a guard marched her down a hallway. Left, down half the next hallway. Middle door on the right. Down to the end of the hall. Last cell on the right. Prompt. Businesslike. Done too quickly to process. Dark ink waves appearing on her arm one minute, freedom officially stolen the next. Too quick to understand how she’d gotten here. Just like everything else.
Dumbstruck and in shock, she found her way to the corner with a few shuffling steps and slid down the wall until she was sitting. Pulled her knees close to her and rested her chin on them. Corners made life simpler. Condense your whole world into one corner and most of the problems got shut out for pure lack of space to sit. The webs of shadows that surrounded pain would disappear or at least retreat to other areas of life. If they didn’t, well they got easier to control at least. Ha, control. She thought bitterly. Things like this don’t happen when you’re in control. If you were in control they wouldn’t have abandoned you to this place. Idiot.
Frustrated, she shoved her thoughts to the back of her mind. Issues weren’t supposed to follow people into corners. It was the rule of thumb that had to be followed, otherwise there was no handling her thoughts. There would be no handling her life without a working corner.
Hours could have passed in here and she wouldn’t know it. Everything seemed infinite, stretching onward into forever. The light changed and through her window the shadows shifted a little, but the hole was too small to catch any real light until the brief display of splendor that streamed in at sunset. Then, it was silence, and dark.
Scraping. Tin across rough rocks. Another, similar sound followed closely. What the heck?
Curiosity brought her to her feet and over to the door. Outside, prisoners all down the hall were shoving their dishes out of slots under their doors. A couple of guards walked down the hall and began filling each plate with some sort of food and the cups with what she assumed was water. The thin, streaming sound as it splashed into the tin cups sounded watery anyway.
Bria scanned her cell in a rush, realizing her chance was quickly disappearing if she wanted to eat tonight. There. In the corner, a plate and cup. She hurried over and snatched them up, then shoved them under the slot in her door. The plate was promptly filled and she drew it back under the door, reaching for her water next. Finding it wasn’t had but at the moment she grabbed it, one of the soldiers laughed and kicked her hand. Water sloshed across the back of her hand onto the floor and she yelped without thinking. This brought more laughter from the guards and she hurriedly pulled her hand in and bit her lip. Dammit that hurt. Worse, only a little water was still in her cup. Wonderful.
After muttering a few more dark curses under her breath, she inspected her hand. Even in the dark she could see that it was already bruising, although it still moved when she made it so she didn’t think anything was broken. Just swelling. At least something went her way.
The only plus in the stupid situation was having food. Even that, glancing over at it now, wasn’t necessarily a plus. The simple meal consisted of a chunk of hardtack, three pieces of jerky that looked more like saddle leather, and a hunk of moldy cheese. Barely edible. Briefly, she honestly considered the fact that they were trying to poison her. However that didn’t make sense on two accounts. First, why go to the bother of locking her up, only to poison her now? Second, if they wanted to kill her, there were far better ways to do it. Poison might be easy to blame on other, outside causes, but they could have been more efficient. They had no guarantee she’d eat this stuff.
Satisfied with her logic, she picked the mold off the cheese and set it aside on her plate. The jerky kind of tasted like saddle leather. Tough, stringy and miserably hard on her teeth. Still protein, she supposed. The hardtack wasn’t much better, except that the bread eventually softened for her. After a long time of persistent chewing.
She wanted nothing less than to just shove the food away. Tell people to screw off and let her die. She wouldn’t though. Because she was a survivor. Just to spite everyone who ever said she wouldn’t. Out of pure hatred for them she would endure this place.
Survival means everything when you’re everyone’s leftover.
Last Wednesday was this winter’s first snow. Over a foot of thick, heavy, beautifully clean snow. It was amazing, Tuesday night when the first flakes started falling, I watched Facebook explode in excitement. Statuses as simple as “Snow…<3” to exclamations of smiley faces paragraphs long. A couple of people weren’t so excited about it – mostly those that had to drive – but most were hoping for a snow day, excited and ready to welcome the new season, even if it’s a little early.
To me, it wasn’t a big deal. Snow is snow. It means my siblings – all six of them – will get up early and shovel people’s driveways. It means I’ll probably be forgotten and allowed to sleep in for once, but only until 8:30 or so when Mom remembers that I’m supposed to be up. It means zipping coats, helping with mittens, making cocoa, and praying that my siblings don’t drive me stir crazy before the snow melts.
Then it fades, a few days and the yard is showing patches of grass. There’s huge piles of leaves everywhere, shed instantly after the snow made sure to rid most of the trees of the extra weight. Along the sides of the road, you see piles and piles of branches, waiting to be picked up by the city. Some people went without power for two, three days while repairs were made after branches brought down power lines. Everything goes back to normal by Sunday.
On Monday, there’s only a little left. Tuesday night, it’s all gone. Then, Wednesday morning welcomes…..more snow. This time, I’m pretty excited. I’ve gotten used to the idea of winter, and now it’s pretty, the endless sea of white and the late morning are awesome. I’m okay with zipping coats, pulling on mittens and making cocoa. Maybe, I’ll even make a snow fort. The problem with this? My siblings are done with snow forts. They want to sled but we don’t have a good hill around so if we want to, we have to drive to a good place. We’re too busy for that. So I’ll stay inside, enjoy the warmth, and just expect to go crazy.
Hopefully it doesn’t take too long. I don’t like waiting.
I’m a blunt person in general. It’s always seemed to me that if you aren’t going to say what you mean you probably shouldn’t be saying anything at all. Most of the time, that works great for me. It’s not often that you find people that are so honest it’s painful. People appreciate that about me, for the most part. The problem is, the people that don’t appreciate it about me don’t know how to handle me. They tell me they like it because they don’t know how I’ll react if they tell me the truth. Kind of makes you laugh, doesn’t it? People are afraid to tell an honest person the truth.
Even worse, they usually aren’t just afraid to tell me the truth, a lot of them will lie to my face and say what they really think to someone else. Pointless really since it usually gets back to me anyway. Some people just need to learn to deal with the fact that not everyone is going to like you and your quirks and you aren’t going to like everyone and their quirks. Why else do we become close with some people and dislike others? The relationships that matter are important to us because we love the quirks. Even the annoying things, that’s what makes a person real.
If none of us had annoying little quirks, embarrassing habits, made mistakes and said too much, where would that leave us? Stranded in a world so perfect that there would be no purpose. We’d be stuck in the comfortable cage of life. Learning to get along with people and see past their quirks is part of life. Learning to do more than that and love someone’s quirks is relationship.
Speaking of quirks, I guess you’ve probably figured one of mine out by now. Maybe two? If you’re observant you’ve guessed at least that many. Shall I sum them up?
justafadingmemory 