Trinkets

[Aardvark]

No sun overhead, nothing but a dark red sky, casting a crimson gloom over the landscape. No day or night in this place, frozen in eternal bloody twilight. Shadows cast in all directions from any object. Some from no object at all. Some cast from other shadows, over the cracked, dried earth. At the edge of the landscape, all around, the precipice leading to an eternal abyss of redness. Here and there could be seen a flower long wilted, or a lifeless husk of a tree, the only evidence that this hell had ever seen the cool caress of rainfall. The only sound of this lifeless place, a low howl as the wind flowed between rocky outcroppings and into numerous crevices.

One dusky day or hazy night in this forgotten corner of creation, a song would cut through the howl of the wind and the tumbling of the rocks. A joyful tune, humming over the sound of the wind, for the ears of an absent audience, from the lips of a small girl. Barely a whisp of a creature, with the whitest of hair, eyes of purest ebony and a dress the shade of the melancholy of a thousand lost souls. On one arm, a woven basket, rocking back and forth, containing a few loose stones. She would skip over the cracked earth, eyes closed, humming her tune, without a care.

Every so often, she would stop, the tune fading from her lips. She would sniff the air, shuffle the dirt beneath her feet and look around, before picking a new direction and skipping along, humming. She would sometimes stop to lean against the stump of an ancient tree, or sniff a wilted flower. More than once, she would reach down, clear the dirt away, and retrieving another strange rock.

Around the island, she would go, collecting these small trinkets. Some, she would examine, then with a frown, toss away, forgetting about it as it slowly sunk back into the earth. Others she would keep, dropping into her basket with the rest. She would pay no heed to the basket, as it swayed effortlessly on her arm, the weight of the stones nothing to her.

When she would find a certain specimen, she would hold it to her ears and listen to the sound of the stone. Sometimes, she would hear the anguished despair of the forlorn, others the desperate cries of the dispossessed. Once or twice, she would hear the agonized screams of the dying, as they hopelessly fought their inevitable fate. Each of these doomed echoes would bring a slight smile to her face, then into the basket they would go.

After a time, maybe hours, maybe months, she would fill her basket and be done with her chore. Her song complete, she would take one last look at this cracked and blasted landscape and bid it a fond farewell. A tear would shed from her ebony eye for the land forgotten and she would be gone, as if never there. Her tracks would vanish into the dust and her song would fade onto the wind, until only its mournful hum remained, as it poured through the branches of the dead trees and over the small mounds of earth. In time, those small items she took would be replaced with others.

Maybe she would return for them. Maybe she already had.

[TLDunn213]

OK

 

I'd keep reading this

Just to find out the who,what,where,why,ect.

 

More please ?

[Aardvark]

I set a challenge for myself, which I'm gonna do more often, as I'm sick of going for so long between writing. I picked three words using an online random word generator, then wrote a story using them as the theme.

 

And I can't write anymore, because I forgot the bloody words.

[TLDunn213]

 

So now I'll never know

Who/what the girl is

Where she is/ what that place is

What/(who ?) She was looking for

 

Why not challenge yourself to find the answer to those questions.

 

I have dreams that are like a movie preview

When I do I try to write them down

So I can go back later and try to write the rest of the story

 

Going to get back to working on some of the better ones

Once I've got my notes out of storage and somewhat sorted that is.

Edited January 11, 2016 by Zatar